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April  23, 2015 – London, UK – Aging Kills Campaign, a global initiative announced the completion of the first techno DJ competition intended to attract the attention of programmers and high-technology enthusiasts to ageing research.

DJs from all over the world competed in a two-week long contest for the best track to popularize ageing research in the IT community, through a combination of a contest website (www.agingkills.org), social networks (tags #stopaging and #agingkills) and the music sharing platorm SoundCloud,

“Many of the top scientists engaged in ageing research as well as some of the donors supporting the field come from the information technology industry. These people have observed the world of technology change beyond recognition in under twenty years and they instinctively keep an open mind to what is yet to come. We would really like to engage more of these brilliant people in bioinformatics and ageing research and a DJ competition is just one of the ways to motivate them to do so”, said Avi Roy, president of the Biogerontology Research Foundation.

The availability of enormous amounts of biomedical knowledge in the form of research publications, “omics” data, imaging and video information and many other forms of data make it possible for experts in information technology to actively engage in and make significant contributions to ageing research. Many of these experts listen to techno music while writing code or designing complex systems and popular DJ tracks dedicated to ageing and longevity may help engage these talented people to contribute towards relevant research.

“To set an example for other DJs I collaborated with Nayour, a brilliant composing DJ from Hungary on a track called “Aging is a Terminal Disease” and we were very impressed with some of the submissions that followed. I know for fact that some of our colleagues are writing code while listening to these tracks and I hope that soon we will see some of these people working on bioinformatics of ageing projects. We presented the track (http://goo.gl/QqkJXT) at a large IT conference along with one of our project’s videos (http://goo.gl/u3J0CF) and it was well received”, said Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc.

DJs were asked to produce a techno track to motivate computer scientists to engage in aging research and competed for prizes provided by the contest organizers.

About the Aging Kills Campaign

We work on a premise that aging is a complex multifactorial disease with no single cause or treatment. Regardless of diet, exercise and other performance boosting routines one may pursue, it inevitably leads to gradual loss of function, age-related diseases, decline in all functions and eventually demise. More people die from aging in a single day than from any other cause.
Aging Kills campaign, like Smoking Kills slogans before it is intended to raise the awareness for aging in the general population and motivate general public, policy makers, scientists and investors to search for effective interventions to slow down and reverse aging and age-related loss of function. The campaign is managed via social networks #AgingKills and uses the tag #StopAging for the DJ competition.