Director: Steven N. Austad, PhD

The San Antonio Comparative Biology of Aging Center (SACBAC) is a multi-institutional research center established to promote and facilitate basic aging research. It employs nontraditional, exceptionally informative, animal species to investigate cellular and molecular mechanisms that modulate the rate of aging. Participating institutions are the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio (UTHSCSA), the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), and the Texas Biomedical Research Institute  (TBRI).

Director: Randy Strong, PhD
Co-director: James Nelson, PhD

The Aging Interventions Testing Program (ITP) at San Antonio is funded by the Biology of Aging Program of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) to evaluate treatment strategies likely to prevent or delay adverse age-dependent changes in cells and tissues, and to diminish the burden of disease in old age. Interventions considered for the program include, but are not limited to pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals, dietary supplements, plant extracts, hormones, chelators, and redox agents.

Director:  Merry L. Lindsey, PhD

The Cardiovascular Proteomics Center at San Antonio is funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute to develop novel proteomic technologies to identify predictive markers of adverse remodeling of the left ventricle following myocardial infarction with a focus on extracellular matrix fragment generation as a key initiating event. Click here for link to video

Director: Suzette D. Tardif, PhD

The Marmoset Aging Center has established a specific-pathogen free, barrier-maintained colony of marmosets -- a unique primate model for the study of aging and age-related disease. The Center is the only facility in the world that maintains marmosets under barrier conditions, to promote excellent health and produce large numbers of aged animals for research.

Director: Rochelle Buffenstein, PhD

The Naked Mole-Rat Center seeks to gain a better understanding of the cellular and molecular mechanisms that the longest-lived rodent, the naked mole-rat (NMR) uses to thwart the aging process and maintain cancer-free good health well into their third decade of life. In particular, the Center is currently using genomic and metabolomics approaches to address the underlying mechanisms that facilitate the maintenance of protein stability and genomic integrity in rodents of disparate longevity.

Dr. Buffenstein's colony of NMRs is not only the largest in the United States, but also contains the longest-lived of these animals, ages reaching older than 32 years.

Attention scientists:  Click here should you have an interest in obtaining NMR tissue for your research project.