Revolutionizing Precision Health Among Older Adults
Researchers at Technion, Weizmann and U-M are combining their joint strengths in data science, immunology and infectious diseases to increase understanding in two major areas related to the health of older adults:
- Common, recurring infections — including urinary tract infections, respiratory viral infections and pneumonia — which decrease quality and quantity of life and, because of increasing drug resistance, are challenging to treat.
- The aging trajectories of the immune system.
RESEARCH TEAM
Betsy Foxman, Lona Mody and Jenna Wiens
University of Michigan
Roy Kishony, Shai Sshen -Orr and Naama Geva-Zatorsky
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Amos Tanay, Ido Amit, Roi Avraham and Liran Shlush
Weizmann Institute of Science
PROJECT GOALS
- Explore novel technologies for collecting new types of data in older adults, focusing
specifically on the blood, the microbiome and the genomes of infecting pathogens. - Follow a cohort of elderly individuals in a nursing facility and use novel technologies to
identify factors associated with the acquisition of upper respiratory infections. - Develop novel machine learning tools for modeling immune and microbiome trajectories of healthy aging.
- Create a large, de-identified, comprehensive, longitudinal dataset pertaining to older adults that can be securely shared across institutions for studying aging populations (a combination of retrospective and prospective data).
