Enhancing the international cooperation for healthy longevity research, development and education
Cooperation with Israel
Goal: Enhancing international cooperation to promote research, development and education for healthy longevity and preventing aging-related diseases for all people, in cooperation with Israel
Background:
Due to the rapid aging of the global population and the derivative increase in aging-related non-communicable diseases and their economic and humanitarian burden, there is a growing understanding of the urgent need to promote biomedical research, development and education on aging as an underlying factor of aging-related diseases and apply this knowledge to create therapeutic and preventive solutions, in order to improve healthy and productive longevity for the people. There is also an increasing understanding that the aging challenge cannot be handled by any individual country alone, but only in cooperation.
There is an urgent need to strengthen a successful world-leading cooperation, to address the urgent aging challenges. For this cooperation, Israel can offer its long and strong tradition of cooperative scientific and technological achievements and innovation, the strong supportive infrastructure. This cooperation would utilize the highly skilled and creative scientific and medical human capital, including diverse branches of biomedical research, development and education on aging and aging-related diseases. Such a cooperation can create synergies with unprecedented capabilities to advance healthy longevity in the particular cooperating countries and globally. It should be emphasized that strengthening the cooperation with Israel in the longevity field can be seen as a part of creating a broader international cooperation in the Middle East. The common humanitarian pursuit of healthy longevity can be an important component of enhancing peace in the Middle East.
There are precedents for such cooperation. Thus, in order to jointly address the aging challenge by enhancing biomedical research, there was established the Britain Israel Research and Academic Exchange Partnership on Ageing – BIRAX Ageing in 2018, supported by both the UK and Israeli governments, and co-sponsored by philanthropies. This is arguably one of the first times in the world that a government and philanthropically sponsored R&D program is entirely “Geroscience-oriented” – that is to say, it presupposes that the aging process is the underlying cause of age-related diseases, and seeks diagnostics and therapeutic interventions into the aging process as the effective way to prevent or mitigate multiple aging-related diseases (multi-morbidities and frailties) and extend healthy life. Furthermore, there was a plan to create a collaborative aging R&D support program between the US and Israel, in the framework of the United States-Israel Cooperation Enhancement and Regional Security bill of 2019 (that passed the US House of Representatives in 2019). Moreover, the subject of “Enhancing research, development and education for the promotion of healthy longevity and prevention of aging-related diseases” was included into the Israel National Masterplan on Aging published by Knesset in 2019, including a call for international cooperation.
We advocate for building on this tradition of excellence and cooperation, and establishing a massive collaborative support program for biomedical aging and longevity research, development and education, involving Israel, with an aim to benefit the entire global aging population.
Objectives:
Specifically, as a case for international cooperation, we propose to advance cooperation with Israel in selecting and recruiting binational and international support, including exchange programs, funding and incentives, for the promising and effective diagnostic and therapeutic R&D approaches to aging and aging-related diseases that could be jointly advanced. The collaborative support can range from specific R&D and educational projects to establishing binational or international R&D and educational framework programs, funding, training and knowledge exchange frameworks, including competitive tender-based as well as goal-oriented programs, cooperative hubs and centers of excellence. From the earlier experience, the creation of goal-oriented programs as well as competitive calls for research proposals can be a convenient and effective way to massively increase involvement in research, development and education on the subject, provided sufficient funding.
Specific objectives:
- Holding top-level international conferences on aging and healthy longevity research, development and education, and accompanying meetings, workshops and exchanges.
- Establishing and managing joined calls for research proposals on aging and healthy longevity between institutional researchers in Israel and the cooperating countries.
- Creating a distributed knowledge center/research institute or think tank dedicated to connecting key stakeholders, performing data analysis, creating and promoting educational programs and policy recommendations, for the advancement of healthy longevity research, development and education in Israel and the cooperating countries, whose activities can expand globally.
- Creating a research, development and commercialization facility on healthy longevity in Israel (such as biotechnological incubator or accelerator), to leverage unique cooperative medical and technological capabilities and investments to advance the healthy longevity industry ecosystem in Israel and in the Middle East.
Selected references
https://www.longevityisrael.org/us-israel-collaboration-on-aging-related-rd-is-planned/
https://www.longevityisrael.org/the-subject-of-aging-is-removed-from-the-us-israel-assistance-bill/