A newly approved research institute at Queen’s aims to bring together scholars studying aging and healthy longevity across multiple faculties.
The Aging & Geroscience Excellence for Well-being (AGEWISE) Institute, recently approved by Senate and the Board of Trustees, will focus on healthy aging and geroscience, an emerging field that examines the biology of aging and whether it can be altered to improve health later in life.
In an interview with The Journal, John Muscedere, professor and research director within the Critical Care Program at Queen’s and KGH, said that while the institute has now been approved, it’s still in its early stages. He said AGEWISE is expected to be operationalized over the next sixth months to a year, with the hope that everything will be up and running by the end of 2026.
The work isn’t about extending how long people live but improving the time they spend in good health, he said.
The institute will bring together researchers from across the University who are already studying aging-related topics, creating a more formal structure for collaboration and research projects. AGEWISE is expected to operate across multiple disciplines and will initially be housed at Kingston Health Sciences Centre, where Muscedere’s office is, as it develops.
“There’s a lot of research that’s being done at Queen’s that pertains to this,” he said, pointing to work already underway in Engineering, Kinesiology, Arts and Science, and ethics-related research as fields that could contribute to the institute’s growth.
The proposal describes AGEWISE as a “tier two” institute, meaning it’s based within a faculty rather than operating as a university-wide institute.
“This institute’s going to be based in the Faculty of Health Sciences,” he said. “Although it will collaborate widely with all the other faculties across the campus.”
Initial funding will come from the Canadian Frailty Network, which Muscedere has led as scientific director. He said that funding will help support the institute’s first hires and activities.
AGEWISE also has support through a Public Health Agency of Canada grant focused on implementing healthy aging interventions in rural and disadvantaged communities in the Kingston area. Over time, Muscedere said AGEWISE will apply for larger peer-reviewed grants to expand its work.
As the institute grows, there are plans to hire staff to manage it, Muscedere said there will be opportunities for PhD students to get involved, as well as existing researchers at Queen’s working in aging-related fields.
What makes AGEWISE notable, he said, is that the science it will study is still relatively new.
“Fifteen years ago, it would’ve been heresy to say that we could actually test an intervention that would alter the biology of aging, but we are here now,” Muscedere said, adding that the work will become increasingly important as Canada’s population continues to age.
“We’re going to be classified as a super aging society in the next few years where over 25 per cent of Canadians are over the age of 65,” he said.
For Muscedere, that urgency is also personal. As a critical care physician, he said he has spent years seeing older patients arrive in hospital with multiple chronic illnesses and reduced quality of life, prompting him to think more about how aging-related decline might be addressed earlier.
Tags
AGEWISE, aging, Board of Trustees, geroscience
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