Collin Ewald

Assistant Professor at ETH Zurich, Founder of Swiss Society for Aging Research

I have a longstanding interest in understanding the aging process and how to alter this process to slow age-related functional decline, damage accumulation and age-dependent diseases. Everybody ages, but not at the same rate. Some live a healthy and youthful life. My interest is to determine the molecular components that enable a youthful life by using the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. There are several interventions (dietary restriction, altering hormonal signaling, or altering growth pathways) that increase youthfulness and lifespan in a conserved spectrum of organisms including C. elegans. By comparing long-lived animals to normal lived animals, we found that essentially all longevity interventions invest in enhancing the extracellular matrix (ECM), which is the scaffolding framework that surrounds and supports cells, tissues, organs, and bones. Damage to the ECM during aging could lead to structural defects impairing organ integrity and stem cell function, ultimately leading to organ failure and death. Longevity interventions prevent weakening of the ECM by replenishing the ECM with new components, such as collagens. We demonstrated that impairing this ECM replenishing of collagens prevented longevity of all otherwise long-lived animals, suggesting that ECM remodeling is a fundamental process to stay youthful. These findings will open up a whole new and exciting avenue of research investigation in the field of aging research.

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Details last updated 24-Apr-2021

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