Physical Activity and Nutrition INfluences In ageing – the PANINI network

A €3m. European Commission Horizon 2020 funded Marie-Curie Innovative Training Network 

Life expectancy is increasing in the developed world, but the period of good health enjoyed by most is not keeping pace, with implications for health, social care, and pensions resulting in estimated costs more than doubling by 2050. Thus, understanding the many factors that contribute to healthy ageing versus frailty, and validating interventions, technologies and influencing policy to promote healthy ageing is a cross-cutting research priority in Europe. 

There is a surprising lack of multi-disciplinary research examining the influence of physical activity and nutrition on age-related changes from gene to societal level

Given the considerable impact of lifestyle factors on healthy ageing and disease, there is a surprising lack of multi-disciplinary research examining the influence of physical activity and nutrition on age-related changes from gene to societal level. PANINI will address this gap by coordinating research laboratories across Europe to focus on cutting-edge ageing and health research through training 11 Early Stage Researchers across scientific disciplines to create a holistic approach to the challenge of ageing in the 21st Century.

PANINI is a European Training Network with 8 world-leading beneficiaries working on Healthy Ageing and 10 non-academic partners carefully selected for quality and range of sectors. These vary in size including 1 large nutrition company, 5 SMEs, 2 charities, 1 healthcare partnership and 1 EU Joint Research Centre. PANINI’s vision is to implement multidisciplinary cross-sectoral research and training of a new cohort of researchers taking a radically new approach to overcome the challenge of unhealthy ageing. 

What are the outcomes of this research?

The main goals of PANINI are to:

  • integrate expertise from basic biomedical science and technology to applied clinical practice;
  • standardise measurements across the network to create a toolkit and shared dataset;
  • provide training secondments to expose ESRs to healthcare and industry research settings and other laboratories;
  • widely disseminate shared and individual project findings;
  • and use these to develop a policy document to promote healthy ageing in Europe.  

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