Aging begins early in life, and human behavior and lifestyle affects health and life course. The CHALLENGE platform research project is hosted by Center for Healthy Aging at University of Copenhagen, a research center that studies on how more people can have a healthy life and healthy aging. The approach to research is interdisciplinary and the center studies the aging processes from cell to society.
The research will provide knowledge which can form the basis for new approaches to prevention and health promotion for the benefit of the individual and the society. Most of the center’s network of research units is under the Faculty for Health and Medical Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. The other research units are based at the Faculties of Humanities and Social Sciences as well as a number of hospitals.
Statistics Denmark is the central authority on Danish registers and since its inception in 1850 has gained more than 150 years of experience in handling data. Currently, it maintains more than 250 high-quality registers across many aspects of life, producing fine-grained statistics on changes in social, economic, and biomedical conditions over time and geographical location.
In 1968 the Central Population Register established a unique identifier for everyone in the population, making it possible to systematically trace individuals over time, generating population statistics in ways unavailable elsewhere in the world.
The institution plays a national and international role in using administrative data as a base for compiling official statistics and it also provides the legal framework for the storage and analysis of records. This is particularly important in the era of big data, where high frequency, geocoded, and time-stamped data are increasingly used for official statistics.
Scanning techniques of tissue specimens have become mature and there is a broad consensus that standardized digitization and computational analysis of histological images is expected to bring the objectivity, accuracy, and speed of diagnoses to a next level beyond what is possible by specialist human observation only.
The Department of Pathology at Zealand University Hospital is the second largest clinical pathology laboratory in Denmark. They have deeply invested in these innovations and have shown that machine learning reduces inter-observational bias and outperforms humans at recognizing various pathological changes.
The Centre for Integrated Systems Biology of Ageing and Nutrition (CISBAN) at Newcastle University, United Kingdom is an interdisciplinary research centre that strives to gain comprehensive understanding of complex inter-relationships between different molecular mechanisms and cellular responses that collectively make up the aging process.
It is the front runner on computer-aided mathematical modeling of biological systems and houses talented computational systems biologists, statisticians, mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers. Therefore they are capable of mapping out the ageing process with a highly dynamic interaction between theoretical and experimental biology.
