Calling all centenarians: BU researchers want your genes

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff

Do you happen to know anyone in Massachusetts who’s over 100? Or perhaps you’ve hit the century mark yourself? If so, consider entering a contest to see whether you or your loved one’s genome will be selected for future research. Researchers at the New England Centenarian Project at Boston University Medical Center are trying to locate 100 centenarians -- there are approximately 1,520 in the state -- to encourage them to donate a blood sample to science.

They’ve partnered with the X Prize Foundation, which has offered a $10 million award to whoever can develop a technique to sequence 100 genomes (the full code contained in our DNA) in less than 30 days, at a cost of less than $1,000 per genome. Such a technology, if developed, would enable companies to do widespread genome testing, something that’s currently prohibitively expensive.

(Medco and Archon Genomics are funding the prize but the winners get to keep all intellectual property rights.)

Why centenarians? “We can do wonderful genome sequencing studies on them to see how they were able to avoid Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, and other killers or markedly delay them by 30 years,” said Dr. Thomas Perls, who heads the New England Centenarian Project. The data from their genome sequences will be stored anonymously on a government sponsored database that researchers can use to identify patterns in gene mutations that might prove to be life-extending.

(Perls and his colleagues recently retracted a paper published in Science that purported to identify genetic markers for extreme longevity.)

Anyone 100 years old or older, who is free of any serious disease, can be nominated to participate in the contest. While they won’t share in the $10 million award for sharing their DNA, they’ll have “the opportunity to play a pioneering role in the science of genetics,” said Perls. And, if they wish, they can have a video biography posted on the X Prize website. Centenarian nominations can be submitted online at www.genomics.xprize.org/medco-100-over-100/nominate.