DNA Could Explain Why Italian Island Has So Many 100-Year-Olds, Tiziana Life Sciences Plc Reveals

About one in every 2,000 people in Ogliastra, a province in eastern Sardinia, live to be 100, the Financial Times reports. According to Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, that's five times the normal rate in the developed world and nearly 50 times greater than the rate in the US. To figure out what makes the residents of this mountainous region in the middle of the Mediterranean so long-lived—and hopefully use that knowledge to develop drugs and treatments to help out the rest of us—biotech company Tiziana Life Sciences just paid more than $280,000 for a "biobank" of DNA samples from nearly 13,000 Ogliastra residents, the Guardian reports. It's one of the "largest and oldest" collections of DNA samples in the world.

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