# Multi-omic and biological factors associated with lifespan and healthspan across NHP clades

> **NIH NIH R01** · WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES · 2024 · $418,364

## Abstract

There is a critical need to generate age- and sex-specific survival curves to characterize chronological aging and
develop new biochemical and omic methods to describe biological age consistently across NHPs used in
biomedical research. Without accurate measures of chronological and biological aging, it is impossible to make
inferences into genetic, demographic, or physiological variables driving differences in NHP lifespan. The
Nonhuman Primate Lifespan Project (NPLP) now includes data on >110,000 individual NHPs from 59 species
across 15 research institutions that will be leveraged to identify demographic, clinical, and molecular biomarkers
of aging and lifespan. The first aim of this proposal will generate the most accurate and comprehensive
characterization of sex-specific lifespan and age-at-death distributions to date for 11 biomedically-relevant
species, including chimpanzees, baboons, vervets, four species of macaques, marmosets, tamarins, titi
monkeys, and squirrel monkeys. It will test the influence of energetic trade-offs including body size, age at
reproductive maturity, and number of offspring (in females) on lifespan across species. Aim 2 will identify shared
and species-specific patterns of biological aging across 15,000 NHP lifespans based on a deficit accumulation
index (DAI) generated from clinical blood chemistries collected annually to test if longer lifespans within and
between species are associated with increased physiological disruption later in life and a slower pace of
biological aging as characterized by a lower trajectory of deficit accumulation. This aim will focus on the most
used species for translational human aging studies: baboons, vervets, rhesus macaques, and marmosets. With
the lifespan and healthspan data generated in the first two aims, animals will be selected showing contrasting
patterns of pace of biological aging and lifespan. Aim 3 will identify omic biomarkers that differentiate
exceptionally long-lived animals to characterize pathways mediating health and lifespan differences within and
between species. This will leverage existing sequence data in 2700 pedigreed NHPs to identify rare and common
genetic variants associated with lifespan, healthspan, and pace of aging within species. Evolutionary
conservation of the implicated genes across 77 primate species, including humans, will identify genes selected
for longevity in each clade. Finally, longitudinal untargeted plasma proteomic data will be generated in 48 animals
with extreme or median longevity from each of the four species (a total of 576 plasma proteomes). This data will
be used to identify the underlying biology driving differences in longevity within and between species including
pace of aging as characterized in Aim 2. It is hypothesized that while individual genomic and proteomic variants
driving longevity may be specific to one species or clade, when taken together, the variants will coalesce to
highlight a limited number of biological pat...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10936738
- **Project number:** 1R01AG087957-01
- **Recipient organization:** WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
- **Principal Investigator:** Ellen Elizabeth Quillen
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $418,364
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2024-07-22 → 2029-06-30

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10936738

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10936738, Multi-omic and biological factors associated with lifespan and healthspan across NHP clades (1R01AG087957-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-28 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10936738. Licensed CC0.

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