Niche Science & Technology are playing a key role in the Frailomic project awarded a Euro 15.5M grant to investigate the utility of omic-based biomarkers in characterizing older individuals at risk for frailty, its progression to disability and general consequences to health and well-being. FRAILOMIC is a well-balanced consortium with a strong participation of SMEs spread across Europe each performing individual tasks.

The global population of older people is increasing rapidly. From 2013 to 2060 the proportion of the population aged ≥65 years is projected to increase from 18% to 28% and the proportion of those aged ≥80 years from 5% to 12%. An aging population raises social and economic challenges and as the number of older people increases, so too will the number of people with age-related disability and dependence.

Frailty is a preventable and reversable condition that marks the transition from robust health and function to age-related disability.  Once established, disability is hard to reverse. This is one of the main reasons that make prevention the core factor in the fight against disability in older adults, with the identification of conditions preceding the development of disability being an essential requisite to achieve this goal in an effective manner. Frailty is the most important risk factor for the development of non-catastrophic disability. Thus, the identification of risk factors for frailty, the improvement in the accuracy of the diagnosis of frailty and the best knowledge of factors predicting the evolution from frailty to disability are necessary steps to be covered. Currently, assessment of frailty relies primarily on measuring functional parameters such as weight loss, gait speed and grip strength. However, it is now becoming increasingly recognised that the clinical utility of such parameters in terms of risk prediction, diagnosis and prognosis of frailty is limited.

The Frailomic Initiative adheres to the following basic definition of frailty: ‘an age-associated syndrome characterised by a decrease of biological reserve and resistance to stressors due to functional decline of several physiological systems and placing the individual at enhanced risk of disability, hospitalisation and death’. Additionally, in keeping with the definitions released by the International Classification of Impairments, Disabilities and Handicaps, FRAILOMIC defines disability as ‘any restriction or lack (resulting from an impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being’. However, because the participating cohorts have originally operationalized this definition in different ways, for the purposes of this study, incident disability has been defined as the appearance of a new dependency for basic activities of daily living.

The main objective of FRAILOMIC is to develop clinical instruments (composed by clinical BM, omics-based laboratory BM and classical laboratory BM):

1. To predict the risk of frailty.
2. To improve the diagnostic accuracy of frailty in day-to-day practice.
3. To assess the prognosis of frailty in terms of disability and other adverse outcomes.

In addition, the project has also three secondary objectives:

1. To assess the interactions between –omic based BM and nutrition and physical exercise (useful to know the potential response to treatments) on the natural history of frailty.
2. To test whether the above stated instruments are also useful for special populations: people with diabetes, obesity and people with cardiovascular disease.
3. To test the differential validity of Fried´s criteria as compared with those described in the Toledo Study of Healthy Aging (TSHA) and Three-City-Bordeaux studies.

To this end, FRAILOMIC expects to sample biospecimens from a pool of over 75,000 participants from nine established population-based cohorts participating in the study. Nested case-control samples from 4261 participants contrasting frail individuals to prefrail and robust controls were sampled and analysed in 10 highly specialized European laboratories. In total, 35312 candidate biomarkers will be used to capture the major known biological processes associated with ageing such as metabolics (muscle function, insulin, IGF1 signalling pathway, and stress response), cardiovascular homeostasis, inflammation, regulation of cell proliferation, and regulation of gene expression.

The Frailomic project comprises four phases (Exploratory, validation, best fitted model and dissemination/exploitation phase). Dissemination and exploitation will be the key role played by Niche, including scientific communications and non-scientific public presentations. In addition, it includes the exploitations of potentially patentable results and the provision of algorithms in forms of analysis toolkits. Do you like the logo we developed for the project?