James Kirkland

James L. Kirkland, M.D., Ph.D., is Professor and Director of the Center for Advanced Gerotherapeutics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles and Emeritus Professor of Medicine at Mayo Clinic. Dr. Kirkland’s research is on the contribution of aging processes, particularly cellular senescence, to multiple disorders and diseases across the lifespan and development of gerotherapeutics: agents and strategies for targeting these aging mechanisms to delay, prevent, alleviate, or treat the conditions that cause the bulk of disability, mortality, and health expenditures across the developed and developing world. Dr. Kirkland discovered senolytic drugs, agents that selectively eliminate senescent cells. Dr. Kirkland and then others demonstrated that senolytic agents enhance healthspan and treat multiple diseases in animal models, human cells, and tissue explants. He published the first composite biomarker gerodiagnostic score of senescent cell burden that is sensitive to drug interventions in humans and the first clinical trials of senolytic drugs. He is preparing or conducting clinical studies of senolytics, including for infections, frailty, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes/obesity/metabolic syndrome, hepatic fibrosis, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, pre-eclampsia, osteoporosis, cancer survivors, glioblastoma, complications of space travel, agricultural applications, restoring function of organs from old donors to enable their use for transplantation, and others. He has more than 360 publications (H index: 120) and holds 24 patents. Dr. Kirkland is Principal Investigator of the National Institutes of Health Translational Geroscience Network (R33 AG061456), which brings together academic institutions across the US to translate healthspan interventions, including senolytics and other drugs that target fundamental aging processes, from bench to bedside, and is currently involved in over 120 interventional and observational clinical trials. He is immediate past President of the American Federation for Aging Research, a past member of the National Advisory Council on Aging of the National Institutes of Health, past chair of the Biological Sciences Section of the Gerontological Society of America, and past member of the Clinical Trials Advisory Panel of the National Institute on Aging. He is a board-certified specialist in internal medicine, geriatrics, and endocrinology and metabolism. Dr. Kirkland is the 2020 recipient of the Irving S. Wright Award of Distinction from the American Federation for Aging Research.