After a 15-month-long COVID-19 stoppage, a National Institutes of Health effort to detail the exact molecular mechanisms that explain exercise’s health and anti-aging benefits is again underway.
“We’re very excited to reopen this study. The discoveries we make through this extraordinary collaboration may one day allow doctors to prescribe a personalized exercise routine for each individual patient. It may even be possible that scientists use the data we gather to create medications that produce some of the same benefits as physical activity,” said Eric Ravussin, PhD, associate executive director for clinical science at Pennington Biomedical Research Center and one of the clinical principal investigators of the study.
The Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC) will collect blood, fat, and muscle samples before, during and after exercise from around 2,600 volunteers at 11 clinical sites across the country. Pennington Biomedical is enrolling approximately 350 of those volunteers. Researchers will use a complex array of molecular assays to generate data on exercise-responsive biomolecules like genes, indicators of gene activity, proteins, molecules involved in metabolism, and molecular signals in cell-to-cell communication.
Researchers are looking for healthy, sedentary people 18 and older. Participants will be randomly assigned into endurance, resistance (weight training), or control groups. The control group members will maintain their normal daily routines. Volunteers in the endurance and resistance training groups will receive 12 weeks of supervised workouts with an exercise trainer and may receive up to $1,500 for completing the study.
One of the major goals of MoTrPAC is to generate a molecular map of exercise. Scientists will examine the impact of endurance and resistance (weight-training) exercise on volunteers who are either sedentary or highly active. The participants’ ages will range from 10 to over 60. The study’s size will account for variations from person to person while revealing differences based on participant demographics like age, race, and gender.
The data generated by MoTrPAC will be huge and complex, too large for the consortium scientists to analyze alone. Making the data available to the biomedical research community will generate more new ideas, perspectives, and questions about the health benefits of exercise than MoTrPAC researchers could by themselves.
“Each day at Pennington Biomedical, our scientists and staff strive to uncover the triggers of chronic diseases through innovative research projects like MoTrPAC,” said Pennington Biomedical Executive John Kirwan, PhD. “Our goal is to improve people’s health. The data MoTrPAC gathers could help achieve that by laying the foundation for a new era of Precision Exercise Medicine.”
Pennington Biomedical had enrolled 51 participants before the pandemic-enforced pause. The research center has resumed recruiting and plans to recruit an additional 300 volunteers.
For more information on MoTrPAC, and how you can participate, call (225) 763-3000.
Pennington Biomedical’s MoTrPAC research is supported by the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases of the National Institutes of Health through award U01AR071160.