Jan Vijg

Impact

Jan Vijg chairs the Department of Genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where his group studies genome and epigenome instability as a possible cause of aging and genome maintenance as a longevity assurance system. His laboratory developed transgenic mutational reporter systems in mice and fruit flies to measure tissue-specific frequencies of point mutations, deletions and translocations with age, and later moved to single-cell whole-genome sequencing to quantify somatic mutation frequencies and spectra in human tissues, including B lymphocytes, liver and bronchial epithelium. His group also reported increased cell-to-cell variation in gene expression in the aging mouse heart (Nature, 2006) and, with Dong and Milholland, published a demographic analysis arguing for a limit to human lifespan (Nature, 2016). Comparative work with Gorbunova, Seluanov and Gladyshev examined genome sequence integrity in long- and short-lived rodent species. For the longevity field, he is a principal proponent of somatic mutation and genome mosaicism as mechanisms of aging, set out in reviews such as 'Pathogenic Mechanisms of Somatic Mutation and Genome Mosaicism in Aging' (Cell, 2020).

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Research funding

44 NIH awards · USD 32M total NIH RePORTER ↗

• Genetic variant-based drug discovery targeting conserved pathways of aging National Institute on Aging · 2023 · USD 3M
• Genetic variant-based drug discovery targeting conserved pathways of aging National Institute on Aging · 2026 · USD 3M
• Genetic variant-based drug discovery targeting conserved pathways of aging National Institute on Aging · 2024 · USD 3M
• Genetic variant-based drug discovery targeting conserved pathways of aging National Institute on Aging · 2025 · USD 3M
• DNA Repair, Mutations and Cellular Aging National Institute on Aging · 2021 · USD 2M

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