How Sage Bionetworks is building infrastructure to accelerate healthspan and lifespan research by Milan Vu and Solly Sieberts
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Milan Vu, Solly Sieberts |
Most health research focuses on causes and treatments for disease. It focuses on what goes wrong during the aging process, like which genes increase Alzheimer's disease risk, or which biomarkers predict cardiovascular decline. Ultimately, the goal is to understand how to treat diseases once they happen.
Those questions are important. However, there's another question that doesn't get asked as often: what factors contribute to a long, healthy life? What are the biological, genetic, and molecular mechanisms that allow some people to reach their 80s, 90s, and even 100s in good health — with their cognition, function, and quality of life largely intact?
This is the question at the heart of healthspan and lifespan research. Studying resilience, not just pathology, has a lot to teach the broader field of aging science.
At Sage Bionetworks, we've been building the infrastructure to make that research possible.
The problem with studying aging
Given the long aging process, studying it rigorously requires tracking people longitudinally, over decades; it requires the collection of rich molecular, clinical, and behavioral data– an expensive and time-consuming effort. The data exists has been collected painstakingly by research teams over years and sometimes generations of scientific work.
In order to make the best use of these valuable scientific resources, they need to be responsibly shared with the scientific community. But, finding and accessing these resources has historically been difficult. Datasets were housed in disconnected systems, and often inaccessible to researchers outside the immediate teams that generated them. While this situation isn’t uncommon across the research landscape, the identifiability of exceptionally long-lived individuals requires extra considerations to ensure that data are shared ethically and responsibly. Luckily, at Sage Bionetworks we excel in this space. We are committed to open science – especially responsible practices for sensitive data – enabling the scientific community while protecting study participants.
Founded on FAIR data principles, the Exceptional Longevity Translational Resources (ELITE) Portal is designed to enable researchers to access important data and resources for the study of longevity and healthy aging. It provides a central repository for researchers to find, access, and reuse data, tools, and resources generated by some of the most important long-running aging studies in the world in one place, available to the global research community.
A platform for the biology of aging, not just longevity
The ELITE Portal contains data that researchers–spanning evolutionary biology, gerontology, genomics, and beyond–can use to understand the biology of aging and discover potential targets for therapeutic intervention. The offerings span human cohorts of long-lived individuals, cross-species comparative biology references including multi-omic and multi-tissue profiling, and cellular and model organism intervention studies–designed for the study of aging and longevity:
Molecular signatures of exceptional survival. What enables some people to survive to 100 and beyond — and to do so in good health? The Long Life Family Study (LLFS) has followed almost 5,000 individuals across 539 families in the US and Denmark for 20 years, spanning multiple generations. Because longevity clusters in families, these pedigrees are uniquely positioned to reveal how inherited genetic variants — interacting with lifetime exposures — protect against age-related disease across cognitive, cardiovascular, metabolic, and other domains.
Cognitive resilience and resistance to Alzheimer's disease. A separate but closely related set of questions concerns the brain. The New England Centenarian Study (NECS) — the largest and most comprehensive study of centenarians and their families in the world, enrolling participants since 1995 — has documented a striking pattern: most centenarians remain independently functioning well into their early-to-mid nineties, despite having just as many disease-associated genetic variants as the average population. Their advantage appears to come not from the absence of risk, but from protective variants that slow aging and counteract it. For Alzheimer's disease researchers in particular, NECS data offers something rare — a window into people who delay or escape cognitive decline at extreme age, providing a resilience baseline that is genuinely difficult to find elsewhere.
Age-related health trajectories in the general population. The ELITE Portal has expanded well beyond centenarian cohorts. Through Longevity Consortium, it also hosts harmonized data from large community-recruited older adult studies that capture what aging looks like across the population, not just among exceptional survivors. The broader Longevity Consortium brings together researchers working across five interconnected projects spanning human longevity associations, cross-species biology, extreme longevity and Alzheimer's disease, drug development, and cell biology — with the shared goal of discovering the molecular pathways of aging and identifying targets for therapeutic intervention. This is where the field moves from characterizing outliers to asking what healthy aging trajectories look like for all of us.
The Arivale-Providence Feasibility Study of Scientific Wellness was a large, longitudinal precision health initiative designed to determine the impact of a “scientific wellness” intervention on health, wellness, quality of life, employee productivity, and healthcare costs. Conducted among Providence Health & Services employees, the study integrated diverse data types—including genomics, metabolomics, proteomics, clinical laboratory tests, microbiome profiles, and lifestyle data—collected from thousands of generally healthy participants over time. Participants also received personalized coaching based on their data, enabling researchers to examine how tailored interventions influence biological markers and health trajectories. The study has contributed to a growing understanding of early disease risk detection, dynamic health monitoring, and the potential of data-driven, preventive approaches to improve human healthspan.
This breadth matters, as data generated for one endpoint can often yield answers for another. Centenarian cohorts can offer researchers an exceptional "positive control" — evidence of what extreme, lifelong resilience or resistance looks like.
The ELITE Portal is a platform for the biology of aging across the lifespan — with an ever-expanding set of offerings it is a valuable resource for the scientific community.
Introducing the Frontiers in Exceptional Longevity Research Lecture Series
To promote the importance of studying longevity and aging and encourage interest in the ELITE Portal, Sage Bionetworks and the Longevity Consortium are launching the Frontiers in Exceptional Longevity Research Lecture Series.
This is a quarterly series featuring prominent researchers and thinkers at the forefront of healthspan and lifespan science. Each session is designed to be broadly accessible to scientists and clinicians, and includes a semi-technical keynote followed by Q&A. The series is aimed at scientists and anyone curious about where the science of healthy aging is heading.
The series is intentionally expansive. Rather than showcasing only researchers within our immediate network, the series features visionary voices who are shaping the public discourse around healthy aging science and who bring perspectives from adjacent organizations and research groups.
The inaugural session takes place on May 1, 2026, featuring Dr. Jamie Justice of the XPRIZE Foundation. Dr. Justice will discuss Prizing Healthy Aging: New Ideas in the Science & Support of Healthspan — including XPRIZE Healthspan, one of the largest incentive competitions ever launched in the life sciences, and what prize-based models can offer a field that has historically relied on traditional grant mechanisms.
Looking ahead, the series will feature Steve Austad (University of Alabama / AFAR) on animal models for anti-aging discovery in September, Steve Horvath (Epigenetic Clocks Consortium) on the translation of epigenetic clocks from molecular mechanisms to clinical practice in November, and Rusty Gage (Salk Institute) on cellular models of neural aging in February 2027.
Whether you are a biologist looking to test a new hypothesis about aging, a data scientist searching for well-characterized cohorts, or someone who simply wants to understand what the science says about living well longer — this is an invitation to step into the field.
Link: Register for the Frontiers in Exceptional Longevity Research Lecture Series →
Link: Explore the ELITE Portal →
The ELITE Portal and the Frontiers in Exceptional Longevity Research Lecture Series are supported by the National Institute on Aging (NIA) Division of Geriatrics and Clinical Gerontology (GCG).