A Medical Device Daily

The National Institute on Aging (NIA), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH; both Bethesda, Maryland), has renewed its cooperative agreement with the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) to continue the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), the nation's leading resource for data on the combined health and economic conditions of Americans over age 50.

The HRS, now in its 14th year, follows more than 20,000 people at two-year intervals, providing data from pre-retirement to advanced age. A major goal of the study is to help address the scientific and policy challenges posed by the nation's aging population.

The renewal will provide about $70 million in funding over the next six years to continue the study. The U.S. Social Security Administration also will provide funding for such activities as collecting and developing data on pensions and consumption.

“Since it began in 1992, the Health and Retirement Study has provided a vast amount of information about the health, economic and psychosocial status of the aging U.S. population,” says Richard Hodes, MD, director of the NIA. “It has also served as a template for similar studies now being conducted in other countries, making the study even more valuable in helping us to look at aging globally.”

The HRS paints a detailed portrait over time of older Americans' physical and mental health, insurance coverage, financial well-being, labor market status, retirement planning, support systems, intergenerational transfers of time and money, and living arrangements.

“The aging and retirement of the baby boom is one of the most powerful demographic and economic forces at work in our country,” says NIA Director of Behavioral and Social Research Richard Suzman, PhD, who was instrumental in conceptualizing and starting the study. “The HRS has become a major national resource for addressing these issues and has acted as a powerful catalyst in combining economic, psychological and biological research perspectives to provide new understandings of retirement and aging.”

HRS Co-Directors Robert Willis, PhD, and David Weir, PhD, professors at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, note that the study's continuous success and unusually high response rate depend on the ongoing contributions of the study participants.

In other grants/contracts news, Reaction Biology (Malvern, Pennsylvania), which provides high-throughput screening services to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries, reported that it has been awarded an SBIR grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI; Bethesda, Maryland) to create a new kinase profiling and high-throughput screening method using radioisotopes and microarrays.

The $940,000 grant will be used to migrate the current well-plate radioisotope methods onto RBC's DiscoveryDot nanoliter screening platform.

Protein kinase dysfunction is a key factor in cancer, inflammation and diabetes. Screening and profiling kinase inhibitors has been a major research and development effort in the pharmaceutical industry. While screening kinase activity with radioisotope detection is considered by many in the drug-discovery industry to be the “gold standard” of kinase assays, use of the format is limited by expense and the difficulty of radioactive disposal. The DiscoveryDot platform uses only a fraction of the reagents compared to well plate methods.

“Due to our nano-scale format, the amount of radioisotope used in the process should be minimal,” said RBC Chief Technology Officer Haiching Ma, PhD. “This should lead to far fewer disposal and handling problems, and reduced cost overall.”