Precision Nutrition and Aging Program

The Precision Nutrition and Aging Program at IMDEA Food investigates how nutrition impacts on the process of aging. The overarching goal of the groups that compose this Program is to understand the molecular mechanisms that connect nutrition and aging, and eventually design scientifi cally-based nutritional strategies for healthy aging. 

Our research cover a wide range of biological topics: from the discovery and development of new bioactive products active against aging-related pathologies, to the dissection of molecular mechanisms involved in degenerative pathologies.

The Program is composed by four Groups, all led by outstanding scientists with a brilliant international career in the fi eld of metabolism and aging-related diseases.

Nutritional Interventions Group
This Group applies the knowledge gained in model organisms to translate nutritional interventions to improve healthy aging. We utilize whole body physiological and tissue-specifi c molecular approaches to investigate effects of nutritional interventions on basic mechanisms of aging and age-related diseases. Initially, the focus will be on anti-infl ammatory compounds, such as disulfi ram and polyphenols.

Metabolic Syndrome Group
The main achievement of this Group has been the identifi cation of new bioactive products acting on key nutritional pathways. In particular, it has identifi ed natural products that protect from excessive insulin signalling, and that improve mitochondrial function. Another important focus of this Group is to study the benefi cial health effects of metabolic plasticity induced by changes in the nutritional sources, such as ketogenic diets, or transient fasting.

Hepatic Regenerative Medicine Group
This has been an exciting year setting up the foundations of the Group of Hepatic Regenerative Medicine. During these few months, the Group has started to work on liver physiology, liver regeneration and chronic liver diseases. In particular, the Group is focused on the regulation of caveolae in the plasma membrane, which has emerged as a key process for hepatic lipid accumulation.

Post-transcriptional Regulation of Metabolism Group
This Group will start in 2018 and its main focus will by the role of small non-coding RNAs (microRNAs) and RNA binding proteins (RBPs) in the regulation of metabolism, and their involvement in many pathological states. The goal is to discover and characterize novel molecular mechanisms that underlie dysregulation of lipid metabolism, glucose homeostasis, and infl ammation during pathologies such as Alzheimer´s disease, diabetes and atherosclerosis.