Learning from Bats: New Strategies to Extend Healthspan and Improve Disease Resistance

ongoing

The medical, financial, and emotional costs imposed by ageing and infectious diseases are major challenges for our societies. Strikingly, while past research has not provided solutions for extending human healthspan and preventing the harmful consequences of infections, nature has solved both problems in the only flying mammals – the bats. Among mammals, bats exhibit an exceptional longevity with little signs of age-related diseases. Despite being reservoirs for numerous deadly viruses, viral infections in bats are mostly asymptomatic due to unique immune system adaptations. The overarching goal of BATPROTECT is to achieve breakthroughs in our understanding of the molecular basis of bats’ extended healthspan and disease resistance to ultimately discover new directions to improve human healthspan and disease outcome. BATPROTECT integrates a team of world-leading experts in bat biology, genomics, immunology and gerontology to synergistically: (i) elucidate the molecular mechanisms that bats use to slow down expected ageing; (ii) identify the driving molecular mechanisms behind bats’ viral tolerance and limited age-related inflammation; (iii) uncover the genomic basis and evolution of extended healthspan and disease tolerance in bats; and, (iv) develop transgenic animal models to functionally validate the uncovered bat adaptations. We will generate 150 reference quality bat genomes, the novel immunological, bioinformatic, cellular and molecular tools required to take an integrative multi-omics approach and uncover the age and immune changes that occur in wild and captive bats across the ageing spectrum. We will identify the top regulators of longevity and immunity, using deep neural networks analyses, to functionally validate in our cellular systems and novel transgenic animal models- BatWorms and BatMice. Ultimately, we will provide a deeper understanding of extended healthspan and disease resistance and will pave the way for future therapeutics.