The gist
- The National Institute on Aging renewed the Long Life Family Study for another five years at $80 million (grant 2U19AG063893-06), run out of Washington University in St. Louis.
- The money buys a switch to long-read whole-genome sequencing, which can finally read the repetitive, tangled stretches of DNA that older short-read machines skipped over.
- The aim is the causal variants that shield these families from heart disease, diabetes and dementia, plus a wider, more diverse set of families so the answers hold beyond one population.
Some families just make centenarians
A handful of families turn out people who reach 100 the way other families all end up with the same nose. Not one lucky relative, but several, generation after generation. The Long Life Family Study (LLFS) was built in 2004 to figure out why, and in early 2026 the National Institute on Aging signed on for another five years and $80 million.
The odd part is that these long-lived people are not obviously living right. Many carry the same body weight and the same risk factors as everyone else, and the diseases that usually follow just don’t arrive. WashU Medicine put out its announcement on February 18, 2026, with Michael Province, PhD, a genetics professor at the medical school, as contact investigator. “Something is protecting them from diseases associated with obesity, and we’d love to find out what that is,” Province said. Finding that something is the entire project.
Who is in it, and what they’re measured against
The cohort now runs to about 5,400 people across roughly 539 families, each spanning three generations, split between the United States and Denmark. When the oldest generation enrolled around 2006, their average age was 90, and some pushed past 110.
That generational spread is doing real analytical work. In a single family you get the very old, their children now in their 80s, and grandchildren in their 50s and 60s, so the team can watch a longevity-linked trait travel downward and tell a genuinely protective variant apart from a stretch of DNA that merely tagged along. To know what counts as unusual in the first place, the families are held up against the Framingham Heart Study, the Massachusetts cohort that has tracked ordinary aging since 1948. Wherever the long-lived families pull ahead of Framingham, the interesting genetics are probably hiding in the gap.
What the families have already given up
Years of tracking have produced a pattern, and it points at broad, whole-body protection rather than one golden gene:
- Their blood pressure sits tighter and diabetes is far rarer than in Framingham at the same body weight, the “obesity paradox” Province keeps circling back to.
- One variant tracks with lower hemoglobin A1c, the running average of blood sugar, which lines up with the scarcity of diabetes.
- Strengths cluster differently by family line: sharp cognition in some, strong lung capacity or grip in others.
- The team also flagged a gene tied to late-onset Alzheimer’s, handy for catching risk early.
- And it is not all upside. One longevity-linked variant nudges up the odds of head and neck cancer, a reminder that the same piece of DNA can guard and imperil at once.
Why the sequencing upgrade is the real news
Short-read sequencing is cheap and quick, but it trips over repetitive or structurally messy regions, the parts people sometimes call the genome’s dark matter. Long-read machines take in much longer runs of DNA at a stretch, so those blind spots open up.
This grant moves the entire cohort onto PacBio’s Revio system with HiFi long-read sequencing, done through WashU’s McDonnell Genome Institute. The plan reaches up to 7,800 genomes and epigenomes, with a first batch of roughly 5,500 samples already moving. Every current participant gets re-read this way. Beyond the missed variants, the longer reads also pick up methylation patterns, the chemical marks that decide which genes are switched on, that older scans passed right over.
The two things riding on the renewal
Two priorities sit above the rest. One is diversity. The study wants more families with exceptionally old members from under-represented backgrounds, and it names recruitment of families of African ancestry specifically, because a broader dataset is what separates a universally protective variant from one that only appears in a single group.
The other is causation. Bigger and cleaner data is what lets the team move from “this variant is associated with long life” to “this variant is doing the work.” That is the only honest starting line for any talk of copying the effect with a drug, and it remains years off.
The renewal also keeps a sprawling consortium funded, Boston University, Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Minnesota, Duke, Johns Hopkins, the University of Maryland, Tufts, Georgia State, and the University of Southern Denmark, with PacBio as the sequencing partner.
Sources:
- Washington University School of Medicine, “$80 million supports research into exceptional longevity”
- PacBio, “Long Life Family Study Taps PacBio HiFi Sequencing”
- GenomeWeb, “Family Longevity Study Wins $80M in NIH Funding”
Disclaimer: This article is for general information only and does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider about any medical condition or before making health decisions.