Ageing is associated with ill-health, diseases and disability. There is an ongoing demographic shift with populations ageing globally, and an urgent need for strategies to improve age-related health. Recent research into the mechanisms of ageing show that despite its complexity, ageing in a range of animal models is driven by common underlying biological processes, driving multiple age-related pathologies. The discovery that ageing can be ameliorated by dietary, genetic, and pharmacological interventions opens up the prospect of preventive medicine to promote healthy ageing and delay age-related functional decline.

A major discovery is that nutrition controls ageing. Dietary restriction is the most effective way to improve age-related health across species. The key signalling pathways affecting ageing involve nutrient sensing. Diet is a well-established determinant for long-life health.

Research shows the importance of timing of feeding, specific nutrients, the nature of the effector mechanisms, the longer-term (including trans-generational) consequences of diet, and key roles played by the gut microbiota. These new findings open the way to dietary and pharmacological interventions to recapture the benefits of dietary restriction, which are difficult to maintain voluntarily.

This conference will bring together researchers working on basic molecular and cellular processes of nutrition, its impact in metabolism, with researchers identifying interventions to improve age-related health. We will provide an interdisciplinary forum for discussion on how to translate fundamental scientific findings to clinical strategies that target age-related ill-health. The broad appeal of the conference will attract delegates from a range of disciplines including biochemistry, biology and medicine across the UK and beyond working within this rapidly expanding field of research.

Invited speakers include:

• Professor Brian Kennedy, Director of Centre for Healthy Ageing, National University of Singapore

• Professor Irene Miguel-Aliaga, Imperial College, UK

• Professor Keith Blackwell, Joslin Diabetes Centre, Harvard Medical School, USA

• Professor Jane Murphy, Bournemouth University, UK

• Dr Martin Denzel, Principal Investigator at Altos Labs, Cambridge UK

• Dr Celine Halioua, Loyal for Dogs, San Francisco, USA

• Dr Joris Deelen, Principal Investigator, Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, Cologne, Germany

• Dr Claire Steves, King's College London, UK

• Dr Tina Woods, Founder & CEO, Collider Health, UK

• Professor Paul Shiels, University of Glasgow, UK

• Dr Cassandra Coburn, Editor in Chief, The Lancet Healthy Longevity and author of 'Enough: How your food choices will save the planet', UK