Aging Institute Welcomes Bridgeside Community at Open House Showcase

At the start of the new school year, the University of Pittsburgh’s Aging Institute welcomed students and trainees from both Technology Drive and main campus to discover what’s new at the facility, learn about training opportunities, and even get a tour of the space. 

Hosted by Dr. Toren Finkel, Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the Aging Institute, the Open House Showcase brought together over 40 community members to connect with their classmates and educators. Attendees gathered on the fifth floor to network and also view the current research of several professors. 

For one, Dr. Aditi Gurkar has a lab that aims to identify fundamental mechanisms of aging that can potentially lead to novel strategies to delay the rate of “biological” aging. Another, Jay Tan, Assistant Professor of Cell Biology, studies cellular principles of aging with the goal of developing more effective therapeutics for age-related diseases.

Dr. Finkel then led the group on a tour of the fourth and fifth floor labs, highlighting the high throughput screening (HTS) platform equipment: 

“We have four independent platforms, each of which does slightly different things. The platforms are fully automated, so once set up, we don’t need to do anything but wait. Currently, we can screen roughly 25,000 compounds/drugs per day. We have an in-house chemical library of nearly 300,000 potential drugs and access to a larger library of over 1,000,000 compounds. Using these chemical libraries and this HTS platform, we are currently working on novel drugs to treat multiple age-related diseases.”

Another thing that is so special about the HTS platform equipment is that it was pieced together from items bought off of eBay and other similar sites and cannot be re-created – it's a one-of-a-kind piece of equipment!

Concluding the lab and facility tours, members stuck around to continue chatting with each other while enjoying a complimentary charcuterie and wine happy hour.