Moving toward ‘common’ use of the marmoset as a non-human primate aging model

Great leaps forward in our understanding of the basic biology of aging, including interventions that extend longevity, have come about from using common laboratory animal models. As we now strive to apply these findings for human benefit, a serious concern arises in how much of this research will directly translate to normal, largely healthy, and genetically varied populations of people. Laboratory animals, including rodents, are only distantly related to humans and have undergone different evolutionary pressures that likely have driven species-specific idiosyncrasies of aging. Due to our long lifespans, any outcomes of longevity interventions in human studies are unlikely to be discovered even during the research careers of current graduate students. There is then strong rationale for testing whether the interventions discovered that slow aging in laboratory rodents, such as dietary restriction, mTOR (mechanistic target of rapamycin)inhibition, or acarbose (1–3), will also extend the lifespan of species more closely related to humans. In this context, the calorie restriction studies utilizing non-human primates and performed by the University of Wisconsin and the National Institute on Aging are prime examples of this approach. However, the rhesus macaques used in these studies also have relatively long lifespans which required time commitment in the order of decades to accomplish the recently published final results (4–6)