Pioneering New Approaches in Regenerative Medicine

Research Spotlight

A research team led by Samuel Beck, Ph.D. has identified disruption of chromatin architecture as the mechanism underlying inflammaging, a chronic, low-grade inflammatory response that has been linked to the chronic diseases of old age, including Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, macular degeneration and more, as well as to a shortened lifespan.

While science has long connected a chronic, progressive increase in inflammation with aging, the mechanism by which inflammation leads to aging has been unclear. In a recent paper, Beck demonstrated that this chronic inflammatory status, which has been dubbed “inflammaging,” is caused by disruption of the three-dimensional architecture of the chromatin, which is the part of the cell nucleus containing the chromosomes that carry genetic information in the form of genes.

The majority of Beck’s research was carried out through the large-scale computational analysis of publicly available genomic datasets, a technique that Beck, a computational biologist, calls “extracting knowledge from community wisdom.”