James Kirkland, M.D., Ph.D., will be the guest speaker for the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s Denham Harman, M.D., Ph.D., Lectureship in Biomedical Gerontology on Friday, March 20, at noon in the Durham Research Center Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the UNMC Department of Internal Medicine, the lecture honors the late Dr. Harman, who spent his career studying the aging process and researching ways to extend the healthy life span of humans. Dr. Harman passed away on Nov. 25, 2014 at the age of 98.
The focus of Dr. Kirkland’s research is on the impact of cellular aging, also called senescence, on age-related chronic disease such as dementia, atherosclerosis, cancer, diabetes and arthritis.
The goal of his work is to find a way to remove these cells to delay, prevent, alleviate or partially reverse age-related chronic diseases.
Dr. Kirkland’s lecture, titled, “Aging, Cellular Senescence and Clinical Translation: Opportunities and Challenges,” will explore the role senescent cells play in contributing to chronic age-related diseases and potential new drug therapies his research has uncovered.
Senescent cells originally evolved as a mechanism to defend against cancer and are often seen around cancer tumors. These cells don’t divide, are resistant to dying and produce a toxin that does damage to any cell around them. They also are found in the plaque that causes Alzheimer’s and in the fat tissue that accumulates around the pancreas in patients with diabetes.
Through research Dr. Kirkland has discovered a drug therapy that effectively shuts down the pathway that keeps senescent cells from dying and destroys them.
“Our goal is to remove these cells to delay, prevent, alleviate or partially reverse age-related chronic diseases as a group and extend the health span of people,” Dr. Kirkland said.
Dr. Kirkland currently serves as the Noaber Foundation Professor of Aging Research, and director of the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
Currently, Dr. Kirkland serves as chair of the biological sciences section of the Gerontological Society of America. He also is a member of the National Institutes of Health National Institute on Aging Committee.
The Harman Lectureship was established in 2002 by the University of Nebraska Foundation in honor of Dr. Harman, Emeritus Millard Professor of Medicine at UNMC, who is known internationally as the father of the Free Radical Theory of Aging. He proposed the theory in 1954 and discovered the role of antioxidants (vitamins C, E and beta-carotene) in fighting heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
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