Clara Correia-Melo
Ageing biologist who showed with João Passos in Newcastle that rapamycin can improve healthspan in mice without lowering inflammation, and later studied metabolite sharing between cells in Markus Ralser's lab
Leibniz Institute on Aging, Fritz Lipmann Institute, Jena (paper 2025) · Molecular Biology of Metabolism Laboratory, The Francis Crick Institute, London (Markus Ralser lab, papers 2019–2023) · PhD, Newcastle University Institute for Ageing and GABBA Program, University of Porto (papers 2016–2018)
Rapamycin extends life in mice, and a popular explanation is that it calms inflammaging, the low-grade inflammation that builds up with age. Clara Correia-Melo's 2018 paper in Aging Cell (COR2018), from João Passos' group at Newcastle University, tested this in mice lacking the gene nfkb1. These mice have overactive NF-kB, a master switch of inflammation, and they age early. Rapamycin did not lengthen their lives and did not lower their inflammation. It did make them less frail, improved long-term memory, coordination and the structure of several tissues, and lowered markers of senescent cells, which are cells that have stopped dividing and send out harmful signals.
The result separates two effects of rapamycin that are usually assumed to go together: in these mice the healthspan benefit happened without any drop in inflammation. The outcome was mixed, with positive healthspan results and null results for lifespan and inflammaging.
Correia-Melo did doctoral research at the Newcastle University Institute for Ageing through the GABBA graduate program of the University of Porto. As first author of a 2016 EMBO Journal paper with Passos, Correia-Melo showed that mitochondria are needed for many pro-ageing features of senescent cells. Postdoctoral work followed in Markus Ralser's Molecular Biology of Metabolism Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute in London, where Correia-Melo was first author of a 2023 Cell paper showing that yeast cells that share metabolites with each other create a pro-survival environment that extends lifespan, and contributed to proteomic studies of COVID-19. In 2025 Correia-Melo was listed at the Leibniz Institute on Aging in Jena on a Science paper about protein translation in the ageing killifish brain.
Milestones in the Atlas
A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | A | Rapamycin improves healthspan but not inflammaging in nfκb1(-/-) mice. COR2018 First author: showed that rapamycin improved healthspan in nfkb1 knockout mice without extending lifespan or reducing inflammaging. |
Co-authors in the Atlas 3
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Clara Correia-Melo.
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- João F. Passos Studies how senescent cells, mitochondria and telomeres contribute to ageing and age-related disease.
- Satomi Miwa Mitochondrial biologist who contributed to Newcastle studies on rapamycin in NF-κB-driven ageing mice and on basal mitophagy as a brake on cellular senescence.
- Viktor I. Korolchuk Showed that where lysosomes sit inside the cell tunes mTORC1 activity to nutrient supply. His Newcastle lab found that senescent cells can no longer switch mTORC1 off when nutrients or growth factors are withdrawn, and studies how autophagy and mitophagy decline with age
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