Duane and Susan Hoff

Duane and Susan Hoff traveled to Rome in 2018 for the fourth International Vatican Conference, eager to hear leading decision-makers in medicine, business, media, advocacy, and faith discuss ways to improve human health, prevent disease, and protect the environment. They left Italy inspired, particularly by the scientists who described their efforts to extend health span—the healthy years of a person’s life—rather than just life span.

“Longevity and regenerative medicine are bold new fields,” says Duane Hoff. “The faster we can understand how certain genes affect aging and can be manipulated to sustain better health, the sooner we can hope for treatments for all of our loved ones.”

To help speed up that process, the Hoffs, proprietors of Fantesca Estate & Winery in St. Helena, California, have established the Duane and Susan Hoff Fund for Longevity Research at Harvard Medical School. Their $1.5 million gift supports David Sinclair, PhD, professor of genetics in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at HMS. Sinclair says the Hoffs’ generosity will allow his lab to explore new ways to rejuvenate tissues to treat and cure age-related diseases.

“We have discovered that cells have a reset switch that can be used to reverse the age of cells and tissues— to reverse blindness in old mice, for example,” Sinclair says. “Our goal is to understand where the reset information resides in the cell and find novel ways to rejuvenate tissues that are old or diseased.”

The Hoffs say that Sinclair was an obvious target for their philanthropy due to his painstaking and prolonged efforts to advance the field of regenerative medicine. In May, Sinclair spoke at the fifth International Vatican Conference, held virtually, to share some of the insights he’s gleaned from his 25 years as a longevity researcher. While answering questions during a session titled “Living Healthily to 120 and Beyond,” he emphasized the need for more people to invest in research on the biology of aging.

“The public has woken up, and a lot of people have realized that addressing aging is the biggest impact we can have on human health by far,” Sinclair said. “If you smoke, your chances of lung cancer go up fivefold. But aging from 20 to 70 increases your chances over a hundredfold. Aging is the major factor of not just cancer but of most suffering on the planet.”