| The Charles Foix Hospital located at Ivry sur Seine is the foremost teaching hospital for geriatrics in the Ile de France, being the first to develop the speciality in which it has established its expertise in the care of aged patients. As a consequence, Charles Foix was chosen as the location of a multi-disciplinary enterprise, the Pôle Allongement de la Vie Charles Foix (the Pole), which aims to respond to the challenge of ageing and promote “living well, longer”. The Pole brings together scientists, health care professionals, business and local authorities to address the problem of ageing through 4 complementary approaches, which enrich one another by cross-fertilisation: (1) research, represented by the ‘Institut de la Longévité Charles Foix’; (2) teaching/training, (3) economic development/innovation through the Soliage group and (4) social concerns.
The Institut de la Longevité is included in the UMR B2A project as it provides a state-of-the-art resource for our projects and aids research training for young residents and geriatricians at the hospital. It comprises two components which are financed (to a total of 18M €) through two successive CPER (Contrat Projet Etat Région) obtained by J.Mariani and UPMC. The first part, the CRD (“Centre de Recherche et de Développement” surface: 1800 m2 “), is coordinated by Pr R Sherrard and Pr J Mariani and is involved in a project on cerebral ageing and repair, including in AD models. It comprises laboratories for rodent surgery, behavioural analysis including equipment for electrophysiology in freely moving animals (local field potentials and optrodes unitary recordings) and tissue sampling. These laboratories are supported by a state-of-art animal house (capacity 40 000 normal and/or genetically modified and aging rodents) allowing long term housing in optimal conditions (pathogen-free or conventional), which was specifically created to facilitate research on ageing animals. It is currently undergoing AAALAC accreditation and includes the facilities for high throughput genotyping and decontaminating transgenic lines through embryo re-derivation and cryo-preservation.
The second component is the Centre for Translational Research in Ageing (CTRA) coordinated by Dr. C Neri. It will consist of an integrated platform (to be installed; 1200 m2) for the production and functional profiling of human induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, C. elegans laboratories for molecule/drug profiling, and preclinical bioinformatics for network-based cross-species data integration and dissemination. The project will comprise accessing tissue from patients who have been clinically well characterised, inducing iPS cells to obtain insights into the molecular/genetic features that later in life may predispose individuals to develop age-related diseases especially comorbidities. This task will be performed with the help of ISTEM (Head: Marc Peschanski) the reference institute in the field.
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