The Aging Research Portfolio website, from the International Aging Research Portfolio, is a core resource for researchers looking for grants, but it includes news articles, announcements of aging and biotechnology events and videos for training and it provides directories for funding centres and research laboratories. Information is extracted from the National Institutes of Health (USA), European Commission, Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Medical Research Council (UK). Also included are MEDLINE publication abstracts under a license from the National Library of Medicine. Project searches uses controlled-vocabulary subject headings – from Ageing-Clock Theory to Zinc Metabolism. The total funding for one example, theories of aging, is US$1,170,367,735 and includes about 9,000 projects. The first one listed is a study of ginkgo biloba extract, goldenseal extract and green tea extract in laboratory animals funded by the National Institutes of Health. Clicking on the project, it is easy to read about the project itself, its history, the relations between the funders and agencies doing the work and see the resulting publications. Searching for gingko, makes it is easy to create a chart that shows trends in funding for studies of this plant, with funded projects spiking in 2012.
Users could also start with the International Aging Research Portfolio Reporter for more general information. Three tabs here take the user to news, publications or events. News in mid-June included an article about Ayurveda (a contested health-care programme), a peer-reviewed journal article about mitochondrial dysfunction and aging from researchers in Rome and an article about muscle stem cells from a blog. The publications are abstracts from PubMed with convenient linked contact forms. There were no events from this link, but going back to the homepage, it was easy to find many conferences by clicking on that tab and limited to topics that included public health, biotechnology, surgery and more (although not all the conference seemed directly to be of interest to researchers in the area of aging). Some of the conferences included those on aging and society, the socioeconomics of aging, healthcare without borders, etc. From the website’s homepage, clicking on news retrieved about 200 articles from 2017 alone. These included pieces from blogs, articles from journals such as Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News. The intended audiences for these articles are everyone from popular readers to highly technical experts, as well as grant seekers. Information about projects and ideas that will be or have been funded are here.
Most researchers will turn to this resource for grants. A grant matcher allows the user to search by keyword: a vast array of topical categories, and an assortment of types of grants (from training to research centres, intramural research and even research construction programmes), country and funding year. A search with the keyword “gender” finds grants on late-life depression and hormone-related cancers amongst the hundreds of grants displayed. Clicking on the grants, descriptions of the investigator, the project, results and links too many similar projects are provided. All easily navigable! Whether the geriatrics researcher is an old hand or a newcomer, this database of grants is very valuable. Also included here are directories of funding agencies and research centres. Clicking on the agency allows the user to access the projects. For example, Mayo Clinic has hundreds of projects in process, including ones on aging bones, Alzheimer’s and much more.
The training database archives hundreds of videos of lectures, conferences and intentional training videos. While most of these are not at all related to aging, some would be of interest to researchers in general (virtual clinical trials), but most of these would be only of interest to medical providers. Limiting the search to gerontology, only 12 videos from 2001 are found.
Besides being of utmost interest to researchers studying aging, this resource also serves researchers studying pattern recognition in aging research by looking at the grants dedicated to specific problems, such as this article in Cell Cycle: Moskalev, AA, Aliper AM, Smit-McBride Z, Buzdin A, and Zhavoronkov A. “Genetics and epigenetics of aging and longevity”, Cell Cycle. 2014, vol. 13, no. 7, pp 1,063-1077.
Any libraries supporting gerontology, geriatrics or aging programmes where faculty and graduate students are conducting sponsored research need to make this resource available to their patrons.
