Linking interdisciplinary and multiscale approaches to improve healthspan—a new UK model for collaborative research networks in ageing biology and clinical translation

Improvements in health care, sanitation, diet, and education over the past century have markedly increased life expectancy, but this has not been paralleled by concomitant increases in healthy life expectancy. Increasing healthspan, which is the time spent free of major illness or disease, is therefore an important priority worldwide. The UK Government, for example, has pledged to increase the healthy life expectancy of the UK population by an extra 5 years by 2035 without increasing inequality.