Tamar Tchkonia

Dr. Tchkonia is a Co-Director for the Center for Advanced Gerotherapeutics, and a Professor of Medicine in the division of Endocrinology, Department of Medicine at the Cedars-Sinai Health Sciences University. She also is one of the four Principal Investigators on the Translational Geroscience Network (TGN) and the director of Facility for Geroscience Analyses (FGA). The TGN is a consortium of eight leading Aging Centers in the United States. The major goal of TGN is to build an infrastructure to support clinical trials to test interventions which target fundamental aging processes and the development of tests and standard operation procedures to measure biomarkers of aging in tissues and body fluids obtained across clinical trials. Dr. Tamar Tchkonia received her master’s degree from Tbilisi State University and her Ph.D. degree in molecular biology from the Institute of Molecular Biology, Moscow Russia. She was a Docent at Tbilisi State University and invited lecturer at Tbilisi State Medical University. After two years of postdoctoral training at the Boston University Medical Center, Dr. Tchkonia joined the faculty at the Evans Biomedical Research Center at Boston University. Dr. Tchkonia had been a Senior Research Scientist at the Kogod Center on Aging and an Associate Professor at the department of Physiology and Biomedical Engineering at Mayo Clinic.

Her research focuses on interventions that target senescent cells and the effects of these interventions on cellular senescence-related disorders which include delaying, preventing, or alleviating age-related dysfunction, loss of physical resilience, as well as age-related chronic diseases in animal models and humans. In collaboration with Dr. Kirkland, they were the first to discover senolytic drugs effective in eliminating senescent cells both in vitro and in vivo, demonstrating that pharmacological targeting of these cells can alleviate age-related frailty and symptoms of multiple diseases. These drugs are in clinical trials for a variety of indications at different centers in various centers both in the United States and worldwide. Dr. Tchkonia is one of the four co-inventors of a mouse model where senescent cells can be removed selectively, and she is also a named inventor on multiple patent applications related to therapeutic approaches for targeting senescent cells.