Recently we published an article in one of the leading scientific journals Aging to present to the academic community the details of the organization and strategy of Vaika’s multidisciplinary research program.
What is it about?
The article describes our concept of aging, the idea of the Vaika undertaking, its advantages vis-à-vis other dog aging projects, and our approaches to treating aging-related pathologies. This is the first exposure of our program to a broad expert community in order to put it in the context of other parallel developments on a similar front and advertise its potential outcomes to be expected within a few years of ongoing research.
Why now?
We believe that it is the right time for this publication because Vaika’s program has gone through the first three years of its development and has proven itself to be an effective run project that keeps generating unique information on progressing age-related conditions and a biobank of samples for in-depth analysis from >100 retired sled dogs collected from multiple kennels of Northern US.
What is our focus?
Since our aging paradigm is based on the role of genetically and epigenetically modified cells in aging tissues accompanied by immune system decline, we have been primarily focusing on studying these components. For three years already we have been gathering information on how genetic alteration and immune system malfunction are translated into physical fitness, a decline in cognitive functions, development of inflammation-related diseases such as cancer, arthritis, etc.
We have described in our paper the organization and function of the research facility we built to effectively fulfill these tasks along with the type of experimental assays performed and their scheduling.
We expect to start sharing the results obtained within this data-generating tool in the very near future and hope that the outcome of this effort will help extend the healthy life of our pets.
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