Vitality Oriented Innovation for the Lifecourse of the Ageing Society (VOILA)

Ageing is a personal process, vitality innovations require joint PP research

DuSRA-VOILA is the largest collaboration in the field of ageing research in the Netherlands. As of October 2019, nine institutions and eight private partners participate in a comprehensive 5-year research programme of solutions which can contribute to ageing healthily as well as improving personal vitality. DuSRA stands for Dutch Society for Research on Ageing, VOILA stands for Vitality Oriented Innovations for the Lifecourse of the Ageing Society.

A wide-ranging and multi-disciplinary team of experts of research into ageing will work together to execute a) integrated studies on molecular and health data, b) lifestyle, cell based and clinical interventions for older people that contribute to healthy ageing and increased vitality. The team aims to timely detect and attenuate functional decline in seniors to allow them to increase the number of healthy years. The life expectancy of the Dutch keeps increasing, but with this longer life comes the risk of a diversity of diseases of old age. Diseases that can often be delayed or even prevented by making life style changes in nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress and by repairing molecular or cellular damage. DUSRA-VOILA’s basis states that ageing is a personal process, driven by immune, metabolic, gut and muscle health and general interventions do not work equally well for everyone. We investigates the diversity in older adults as to their health, frailty and resilience to understand individual functional decline. We have created a unique platform for structural, multi-disciplinary cooperation in the area of ageing with vitality, aiming to identify combinations of biomarkers of early signs of functional decline in seniors, attenuate decline and restore body functions at the organismal and cellular level to allow seniors to increase the number of healthy years.