Friday, August 27, 2021 -- Maria Carolina Florian, Ph.D., will present the latest research on the topic Aging of the hematopoietic stem cell niche at the worlds' largest annual Aging Research and Drug Discovery conference (8th ARDD). Dr. Maria Carolina Florian is the Group Leader for the Program for Regenerative Medicine, IDIBELL, Barcelona, Spain.
Dr. M. Carolina Florian holds a PhD from the University of Milano. She pursued postdoctoral training at the Institute of Molecular Medicine in Ulm University from 2009 to 2015. In 2016, she was awarded an Emmy Noether Grant from the German Research Foundation dedicated to outstanding early-career researchers. This grant supported the establishment of her independent research team on Epigenetics of Stem Cell Aging. In 2018, she was appointed as group leader at CMRB (Spain).
Her research in the past 5 years strongly challenged the concept that aging is an irreversible process and showed that it is possible to pharmacologically target the aged-dependent alteration of stem cell epigenetic polarity and functionally rejuvenate aged HSCs in vivo. Somatic stem cells are central for tissue homeostasis and regeneration. Their age-dependent functional decline constitutes a hallmark of tissue attrition upon aging, eventually limiting health-span and lifespan. Dr. Florian's work is committed to further grow the understanding of alterations affecting aged somatic stem cells and she is investigating changes of the epigenetic architecture that drive stem cell aging, to improve tissue attrition with age or even to prevent aging-associated diseases.
The conference proceedings of the ARDD are commonly published in peer-reviewed journals with the talks openly available at www.agingpharma.org. Please review the conference proceedings for 2019 and 2020.
"Aging is emerging as a druggable condition with multiple pharmaceuticals able to alter the pace of aging in model organisms. The ARDD brings together all levels of the field to discuss the most pressing obstacles in our attempt to find efficacious interventions and molecules to target aging. The 2021 conference is the best yet with top level speakers from around the globe. I'm extremely excited to be able to meet them in person at the University of Copenhagen in late summer.", said Morten Scheibye-Knudsen, MD, Ph.D., University of Copenhagen.
"Aging research is growing faster than ever on both academia and industry fronts. The ARDD meeting unites experts from different fields and backgrounds, sharing with us their latest groundbreaking research and developments. Our last ARDD meeting took place online and was a great success. This year's event will be a hybrid meeting with virtual and in-person attendees. I am particularly excited that being part of the ARDD 2021 meeting will provide an amazing opportunity for young scientists presenting their own work as well as meeting the experts in the field." said Daniela Bakula, Ph.D., University of Copenhagen
"Aging research is gaining traction in the biopharmaceutical industry. To my knowledge, 6 out of the top 30 pharmaceutical companies in the world prioritized aging research for early-stage discovery or therapeutic pipeline development and several companies employ artificial intelligence for this purpose. We organize the annual ARDD conference for eight years in a row and the level of interest in aging biomarkers and noticed exponential growth in registrations over the past two years", said Alex Zhavoronkov, Ph.D., co-founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine, and the founder of Deep Longevity.
Building on the success of the ARDD conferences, the organizers developed the "Longevity Medicine" course series with some of the courses offered free of charge at Longevity.Degree covered in the recent Lanced Healthy Longevity paper titled Longevity medicine: upskilling the physicians of tomorrow.
