Daphnia Labs

ADDRESSING THE ROOT CAUSES OF AGING

Age-related diseases like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s share common underlying causal mechanisms. As we age, basic cellular processes go awry throughout the body. These fundamental processes underlying aging are evolutionarily conserved across many species, and it’s been experimentally shown to be possible to slow or prevent the processes of aging, making animals live longer and avoid chronic disease.

We could save far more years of human life by developing drugs that prevent a wide spectrum of age-related diseases before they occur, than we ever could by developing treatments for individual diseases once they become symptomatic.

IN-VIVO PHENOTYPIC SCREENING
How can we discover drugs that modify a process as complex as aging? Traditional, top-down, target-based drug development won’t work here; there are too many potential targets.

Instead, we can take a bottom-up approach: testing a broad spectrum of drugs in living organisms to see which ones extend healthy lifespan. Using short-lived model organisms, an automated video monitoring platform, and machine learning algorithms, we can search for anti-aging drugs cost-effectively and at scale.

Phenotypic screening — this strategy of sifting through compounds to find the ones that work — is already how most drugs with novel mechanisms are discovered today. But it’s usually been limited to experiments on cell culture. Expanding phenotypic screening to living organisms allows us to see how compounds work in a more realistic whole-organism context, and observe clinically relevant phenotypes like motor function and lifespan.

DAPHNIA AS MODEL ORGANISMS

• Daphnia magna, commonly known as water fleas, are pond-dwelling zooplankton that are ideal for pharmacology screens. Daphnia are
• short-lived, making them suitable for lifespan studies
• cyclically parthenogenic, so strains are genetically identical
• highly sensitive to low concentrations of drugs
• standard model organisms for toxicology
• visible to the naked eye, and show clear morphological and behavioral changes as they age