In late 2019, scientists began looking for 10,000 Americans willing to enroll their pets in an ambitious new study of canine health and longevity. The researchers planned to follow the dogs throughout their lives, collecting detailed information about their bodies, lifestyles and home environments. Over time, scientists hoped to identify the biological and environmental factors that kept some dogs healthy in their golden years—and uncover insights about aging that could help both dogs and humans live longer and healthier life.
Today, the Dog Aging Project has enrolled 47,000 canines and counting, and the data is starting to roll in. Scientists say they’re just getting started.
“We think of the Dog Aging Project as a forever project, so recruitment is ongoing,” said Daniel Promislow, a biogerontologist at the University of Washington and co-director of the project. “There will always be new questions. We always want dogs of all ages to participate.”
But Dr. Promislow and his colleagues now face the prospect that the Dog Aging Project might take on a life of its own. About 90 percent of the study’s funding came from the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, which has provided more than $28 million since 2018. But that money will run out in June, and the institute doesn’t seem likely to approves the researchers’ recent application for a five-year grant renewal, scientists say.
“We’ve been told informally that the grant is not going to be funded,” said Matt Kaeberlein, the other director of the Dog Aging Project and a former biogerontology researcher at the University of Washington. (Dr. Kaeberlein is now the CEO of Optispan, a health technology company.)
A spokeswoman for the National Institute on Aging said the NIH does not comment on the decision-making process for individual grant applications.
The NIA could still choose to provide more funding for the Dog Aging Project at some point, but if the researchers don’t come up with more money in the coming months, they will have to stop or stop the study.
“It’s almost an emergency,” said Stephanie Lederman, the executive director of the nonprofit American Federation for Research on Aging. “It’s one of the most important projects in the field right now.”
ONE request that requests Continued support from the National Institutes of Health has garnered more than 10,000 signatures, said Dr. Kaeberlein, who organized the effort.
But researchers aren’t counting on the agency to bail them out, and have learned how difficult it is to conduct large, long-term studies — which could take years to pay off — when grants are typically awarded on a short-term basis.
So the three founders of the Dog Aging Project—Dr. Promislow, Dr. Kaeberlein and Dr. Kate Creevy, a veterinarian at Texas A&M University — have now created the non-profit Canine Aging Institute to raise money for research. They hope to use the organization both to keep their own study alive and to fund other scientists interested in exploring similar topics.
“The data is coming fast and furious,” said Dr. Promiselow. “If anything, we had to slow it down because of these funding challenges. And it’s the worst possible time to slow things down, because now is when the really exciting things are just starting to happen.”
The Dog Aging Project was born out of two observations. First, people would give almost anything to spend more good years with their dogs. Second, companion dogs could be useful models of human aging. Dogs are prone to many of the same aging-related conditions that humans face, including cancer and dementia, and are exposed to many of the same environmental stressors, such as air pollution and noise. But because dogs age faster, canine aging studies can yield results in shorter time frames.
That was the case the founders of the Dog Aging Project made when they asked the National Institute on Aging to fund a large, long-term study of pet dogs. In 2018, the institute awarded the researchers a five-year grant, which was subsequently extended by one year.
The study is extensive. Owners of all registered dogs are asked to complete an annual 10-part health and life experience survey, are encouraged to share the animals’ medical records, and are invited to participate in a number of other surveys and activities. The researchers also aim to sequence the genomes of more than 10,000 dogs. 1,000 of these animals will also provide a range of biological samples – including blood, urine, feces and hair – each year. They are also enrolling hundreds of dogs in a randomized, placebo-controlled trial rapamycin testa drug that has been shown to prolong the lives of laboratory animals.
The researchers estimated in their 2018 grant application that it would take at least three months to build the physical, digital and human infrastructure for the study. The process ended up being three years. “I don’t think anyone estimated how difficult it would be,” said Dr. Promislow. (The pandemic, which has closed or strained veterinary clinics, hasn’t helped, he added.)
But the project is in operation. The research team, which includes more than 100 people from more than 20 institutions, has sequenced the genomes of more than 7,000 dogs and deposited 14,000 samples in the project’s biobank. Scientists have added more than 36.5 million data points to them open access database and began publishing some early findings. They found, for example, that a condition called canine cognitive impairment, also known as canine dementia, is more common in sedentary dogs than in active ones, and that dogs that are they are fed once a day they are less likely to have various health problems than those who eat more frequently. More papers are in the works.
But when the researchers sought a five-year grant renewal last year, their application didn’t score well enough in the first round of peer review to move on to the next stage of the funding process. “Critics were asking how much we had accomplished in five years,” said Dr. Promiselow. “Given the size of the project, I think the judges were wondering where the most important publications are.”
Steven Austad, a biogerontologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who is not part of the research team, said he was surprised that the researchers’ grant might not be renewed. “The importance of the things they publish and the depth of detail will increase over time, but I thought they got off to a really good start,” he said. “A large study like this really deserves a chance to mature.”
The tiny dachshund of Dr. Austad, Emmylou, is registered with the Dog Aging Project. But at 2 years old, he noted, Emmylou “isn’t going to teach them much about aging for a long time.”
The project’s innovative approach could work against it, added Dr. Austad. Reviewers accustomed to evaluating short-term research in laboratory mice and long-term human studies may not have known what to make of a large epidemiological study of companion dogs.
Whatever the reason, refusing to commit to more funding is “wrong,” said Dr. Kaeberlein. “It’s really, really hard to justify that decision if you look at the productivity and the impact of the project.”
That impact extends beyond the findings themselves, he added. “This work has employed nearly 50,000 Americans in biomedical scientific research.”
For the past several years, Shelley Carpenter, of Gulfport, Miss., has provided researchers with regular updates and medical records for her Pembroke Welsh corgi, Murfee. (She’s also collecting a cheek swab for genomic sequencing.) Ms. Carpenter, whose previous corgi died of a neurodegenerative disease similar to ALS, hoped the project could produce new medical knowledge that could help both dogs as well as people.
If NIH suspends funding, years of research will be “thrown away,” said Ms. Carpenter, who signed the petition. “Why did they start it if they’re not going to follow through?”
The researchers plan to apply for more NIA grants, said Dr. Promislow, but have realized that they will need to develop additional funding sources to secure the future of the project. Although the Canine Institute on Aging is still in its infancy, researchers eventually hope to raise $40 million to $50 million for an endowment that could be used to fund a variety of research into canine health and longevity, including the project aging dogs.
The institute’s immediate priority is to raise enough money to sustain the Dog Aging Project. About $7 million would be needed to conduct the research the team had planned to do next year, but $2 million would be enough to “keep the lights on,” said Dr. Promislow. The institute is still awaiting its official tax-exempt status, but is already seeking donations. ““We have yet to find a dog-loving billionaire interested in supporting aging research,” said Dr. Promiselow. “But we will certainly try.”