Malene Hansen
Showed in worms, alongside a 2007 report from Beth Levine's laboratory, that autophagy is required for dietary restriction to extend lifespan
Chief Scientific Officer and Professor, Buck Institute for Research on Aging (since 2021) · own laboratory, Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, La Jolla (from 2007) · postdoctoral research with Cynthia Kenyon, University of California San Francisco (from 2001)
Hansen Lab, Buck Institute for Research on Aging (Novato, California, USA) ↗
Portrait: Buck Institute for Research on Aging
By 2008 two things were established separately: dietary restriction extends lifespan partly by lowering TOR, and lowering TOR releases autophagy. Whether the second explained the first had only begun to be tested: in 2007 Jia and Levine reported that autophagy genes are needed for the long life of eat-2 dietary-restriction mutants. Hansen tested it directly in C. elegans by knocking down the genes autophagy needs, and found that both dietary restriction and TOR inhibition stopped extending lifespan when autophagy was blocked.
The same paper is unusually careful about the opposite claim. Long-lived daf-2 insulin/IGF-1 receptor mutants need both autophagy and the transcription factor DAF-16/FOXO, yet autophagy still runs in animals lacking DAF-16 — and those animals are not long-lived. So autophagy is necessary and not sufficient: it supplies the raw material, and something else has to decide what the cell builds from it.
Her laboratory at the Buck works on the same question at a finer grain: how autophagy is regulated in specific tissues, how it changes with age, and what the standard readouts do and do not measure. She has been Chief Scientific Officer there since 2021.
Milestones in the Atlas
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2008 | A | A role for autophagy in the extension of lifespan by dietary restriction in C. elegans HAN2008 First author: blocking autophagy genes abolishes the lifespan extension produced by dietary restriction and by TOR inhibition, but autophagy alone is not sufficient. |
Co-authors in the Atlas
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Malene Hansen.
- Cynthia Kenyon Showed in 1993 that a single-gene change doubles the lifespan of the worm C. elegans, which opened the study of nutrient-sensing pathways as ageing pathways
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On the programme
Meetings in the Atlas calendar where Malene Hansen is listed among the speakers or organisers.
- past CSHL: Protein Homeostasis in Health and Disease 2026 (17th) ↗ 21–25 Apr 2026 · Cold Spring Harbor, NY, USA · ★