About this event

  • Date and time Mon 14 Jun 2021 from 1:55pm to 5:30pm
  • Location Online
  • Organised by Medical Genetics

This webinar brings together an international lineup of expert speakers to cover the latest on epigenetic clocks and how they affect aging in health and disease. The meeting will also introduce the concepts of accelerated and decelerated epigenetic aging, how they affect men and women differently, and how epigenetics may be used to reverse aging-associated diseases. This will be the first meeting to present work showing the power of epigenetic plasticity in reversing age-associated diseases.

During this webinar you will:

  • Understand the impact of epigenetics on aging as well as instances of epigenetic age acceleration and deceleration
  • Appreciate the epigenetic mechanisms of sex-specific aging
  • Ascertain how lifestyles and other factors determine healthy and unhealthy aging

This webinar will be an exciting chance to hear from specialists in the field of biology, genetics, epigenetics, biomathematics, and psychiatry. This webinar is CPD accredited.

We would like to thank our sponsor Active Motif S.A. for their support of this webinar. Please note that the scientific programme and content has not been influenced in any way by the sponsor.

A CPD certificate with 1 CPD credit will be issued to those joining each webinar live and will be automatically issued after 7 days to those who watched the webinar live in its entirety. Those who watch the webinar on-demand will receive a CPD certificate 30 days after the webinar has gone live. 

Join in the conversation online using #HealthyAging
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Registration for this webinar will close 2 hours prior to the start time. You will receive the webinar link 2 hours before the meeting. Late registrations will not be accepted. 

Key speakers

Professor Claudio Franceschi

Editor-in-Chief of the journal Ageing Research Reviews, Professor Emeritus at University of Bologna and IRCCS Institute of Neurological Sciences, Bologna, Italy, Director, Laboratory of System Medicine for Healthy Ageing, Institute of Information Technologies, Mathematics, Mechanics, Lobachevsky University, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia 

Speaker's biography

Professor Franceschi is the former Director of the Italian National Research Center for Aging. He is also the founding Director of the Luigi Galvani Center for Integrated Studies of Bioinformatics, Biophysics and Biocomplexity at the University of Bologna. He was the first to uncover inflammaging/immunosenescence, an aging-associated chronic inflammation condition. His work on the mechanisms of aging has been cited nearly 70,000 times. 

Professor Steve Horvath

Professor of Human Genetics & Biostatistics, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Los Angeles, USA 

Speaker's biography

Professor Horvath is a mathematician who has made seminal contributions to genomic biomarkers of aging and systems biology of age-related diseases. His research is at the intersection of several fields including genetics, epidemiology, and epigenetics with an emphasis on how lifestyle decisions impact epigenetic age. He's also the discoverer of the Horvath clock, one of the first epigenetic age clocks and most utilized lifespan predictors. Professor Horvath is one of the most-cited scientists in the field of epigenetic clocks with more than 65,000 citations to date. 

Professor Cathal McCrory

Associate Professor of Life Course Development and Ageing, The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing, Department of Medical Gerontology, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland 

Speaker's biography

Prof. McCrory, a lifepath scholar and formerly a visiting scientist at Harvard University, is a psychologist who leads the Behavioural and Social Sciences group within The Irish longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA). He is particularly interested in how social stressors impact health over a person's lifespan. His research utilizes population-level data to uncover modifiable risk and resilience factors that impact disease propensity and ultimately mortality.

Professor David A. Sinclair

Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Aging, Professor at the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, Co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard University, Boston, USA 

Speaker's biography

Professor Sinclair is a leading figure in the field of aging recognized by Time Magazine as "one of the 100 most influential people in the world" and honored as an Officer of the Order of Australia. He appeared in various news outlets including 60 Minutes, The Charlie Rose Show, The Economist, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, to cite a few. He was first to discover SIRT1/SIRT2 role in aging while in the lab of Len Guarente at MIT, and is the co-founder of several Biotech companies that aim at developing therapeutics to slow or reverse aging. His work has been cited over 70,000 times. 

Agenda

View the programme here

Welcome and introduction

Professor I M Bennani-Baiti, President and CEO, Cancer Epigenetics Society, Vienna, Austria

SESSION 1: Epigenetic clocks and age acceleration or deceleration

Chair: Professor Lauren Pecorino, Faculty of Engineering and Science, University of Greenwich, England

GrimAge epigenetic clock in biological age prediction

Professor Cathal McCrory, Associate Professor, Life Course Development and Ageing, Department of Medical Gerontology, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

Genome-wide association studies of epigenetic age acceleration

Dr Riccardo Marioni, Senior Research Fellow and Group Leader, Centre for Genomic and Experimental Medicine, University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Understanding epigenetic age acceleration and deceleration: Lessons from simulated space travel

Dr Jamaji C Nwanaji-Enwerem, Emergency Medicine Resident Physician and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Environmental Health, Emory University School of Medicine and Emory Rollins School of Public Health, USA

Panel discussion

SESSION 2: Sex-specific epigenetic aging

Chair: Dr Jonathan Temple, King's College Hospital, NHS Foundation Trust

Sex-specific age-related DNA methylation

Professor Claudio Franceschi, Professor Emeritus of Immunology, University of Bologna, Italy

Epigenetics of women with diminished ovarian reserve

Dr Kristina Wendelboe Olsen, Postdoctoral Researcher, Fertility Clinic, Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen University Hospital, Denmark

Feminization of androgen-regulated loci and epigenetic aging delay after castration

Professor Steve Horvath, Professor of Human Genetics and Biostatistics, University of California Los Angeles, USA

Panel discussion
Comfort break and Sponsor Presentation by Active Motif

Developing tools to study the epigenetics of aging
Live presentation sponsored by Active Motif SA and given by Dr Sarantis Chlamydas, PhD, Epigenetics Expert at Active Motif

SESSION 3: Epigenetic aging in health and disease

Chair: Professor I M Bennani-Baiti

Epigenetic modifiers BAZ2B and EHMT1 role in healthy aging

Dr Shiqing Cai, Institute of Neuroscience, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Seeing is believing - rewinding the biological clock to make the blind see again

Professor David Sinclair, Professor of Genetics, Department of Genetics, Harvard Medical School, and Co-Director, Paul F Glenn Center for Biological Mechanisms of Aging Research, Harvard University, USA

Panel discussion
Roundtable: Lifestyles, epigenetics, and healthy aging

- Professor I M Bennani-Baiti
- Dr Shiqing Cai
- Professor Claudio Franceschi
- Dr Riccardo Marioni
- Professor Cathal McCrory
- Dr Jamaji C  Nwanaji-Enwerem
- Dr Kristina Wendelboe Olsen
- Professor Lauren Pecorino
- Professor David Sinclair,
- Dr Jonathan Temple

Closing remarks and close of meeting

Professor I M Bennani-Baiti

Sponsors

Active motif

Location

Online

Registration for this webinar will close 2 hours prior to the start time. You will receive the webinar link 2 hours before the meeting. Late registrations will not be accepted. 

Special rates for difficult times 
The RSM wishes to offer healthcare professionals continued learning opportunities during the coronavirus pandemic. The RSM’s weekly COVID-19 Series webinars remain free of charge, while there will be small charges to register for other online education. These fees will enable the RSM to continue its programme of activities and will apply during the course of the pandemic.

Webinar recordings will be available for registered delegates up to 30 days after the live webinar, via Zoom. The link will be sent 24 hours after the webinar takes place. 

This webinar will be recorded and stored by the Royal Society of Medicine and may be distributed in future on various internet channels.  

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