Overview
- University of São Paulo researchers assembled a nationwide longitudinal group exceeding 160 centenarians with 20 validated supercentenarians drawn from multiple Brazilian regions.
- Genomic surveys in older Brazilians uncovered more than 8 million undescribed variants, including thousands of mobile element insertions and over 140 HLA alleles absent from global databases.
- Cell and molecular analyses report maintained proteasomal activity and autophagy in supercentenarians along with an expanded population of cytotoxic CD4+ T cells.
- Three participants older than 110 survived COVID‑19 in 2020 before vaccines and produced robust IgG and neutralizing antibodies with innate‑immunity–related plasma signals.
- The project is moving beyond sequencing to derive cellular lineages and launch functional multi‑omics assays, with recruitment ongoing and plans for broader scientific collaboration.