The proportion of people aged 65 and older will comprise over a third of the European population by 2040. SWAN combines molecular mechanistic, medical and population data expertise to generate an interdisciplinary team of excellence, aiming to reorient from managing chronic diseases to promoting “chronic health” and enhance healthy years in the population.
SWAN shifts medicine from treating symptoms toward early detection and prevention of degenerative diseases, tailored to each person, to extend healthy years of life. It builds knowledge of molecular metabolism and combines it with biomedical and genetic data to identify individual disease risks, develops biomarkers and intervention targets, and links these to clinical use and societal impact.
Mechanistic and genetic discoveries become useful only when they can be acted on. This theme selects the intervention targets with the strongest preclinical support and evaluates them first in model systems and, where the evidence warrants, in early-stage clinical pilots. In parallel, researchers develop molecular biomarkers that report on incipient disease and on sustained health, providing an objective basis for intervening before conditions become established.
Mechanistic and genetic discoveries become useful only when they can be acted on. This theme selects the intervention targets with the strongest preclinical support and evaluates them first in model systems and, where the evidence warrants, in early-stage clinical pilots. In parallel, researchers develop molecular biomarkers that report on incipient disease and on sustained health, providing an objective basis for intervening before conditions become established.
Prevention is most effective when it is matched to a person’s own biology rather than to population averages. This theme uses the Finnish founder population and the Nordic health registries to identify the genetic determinants of aging-related disease, together with the variants that confer protection. Through FinnGen, the nationwide biobank initiative coordinated by the University of Helsinki, roughly a tenth of the Finnish population has been genotyped and linked to health records. SWAN draws on this resource to recall individuals according to their risk and protective profiles for deeper molecular and clinical characterization, turning population-scale genetics into personalized prevention.
Health is shaped as much by social circumstances as by molecular ones. This theme examines how people in different social groups interpret and respond to personalized molecular information, and whether pairing that information with established behavior-change methods extends healthy years. Using longitudinal register data that follow entire populations, researchers analyze how social environments amplify or dampen inherited disease risk across the life course. They also quantify the burden of disease, describing how lifetime risk, age at onset, and survival together determine the years people live with and without major chronic illness