Our Funding is Diverse, Just Like Our Pack! (An Update)

We want to thank you, our loyal participants, for supporting the Dog Aging Project as we have focused our efforts heavily on our new funding frontier this year. We are happy to share that we have resubmitted our grant proposal with the National Institute of Aging and have high expectations as we look ahead to hearing back with results in the spring of 2025.

Working through the process of seeking another governmental grant has allowed our team to think more broadly about funding sources and the importance of ensuring the future of the Dog Aging Project. As many of you might know, our Dog Aging Project founders have created a separate non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, The Dog Aging Institute, to support the scientific initiatives of the Dog Aging Project and other research studies focused on companion canine health.

To ensure that our funding continues to be robust and long-term, we pursue diverse funding sources, including additional grants from the NIH, as well as individual, philanthropic, non-profit foundation, and corporate support. So in the future, you may see acknowledgments made on behalf of the Dog Aging Project to corporate entities or philanthropic groups for funding to help support our science.

Federally funded research is often just the first step on the path of scientific discoveries that improve lives. From there, corporations will often use those findings to develop new products—food, vaccines, diagnostic tests, medicine, etc.—that humans and their companions can benefit from in the real world. While the Dog Aging Project might receive corporate support for our basic research, rest assured that the corporation will not control the findings of our research or how we publish those findings, nor will participant-specific private data be shared outside of the Dog Aging Project team.

The same rules apply to philanthropic groups. These groups will not determine how we perform our research, nor will they have access to a participant’s private data. Our commitment to protecting our participants’ private, personal information will always remain a top priority for the Dog Aging Project.

Our research data privacy commitment is summarized below. Our full privacy policy can be found at https://dogagingproject.org/privacy-policy/

• The personally identifying information of our participants, such as name and contact information, is encrypted and stored in a secure database.
• The Dog Aging Project will never sell or share participant contact information.
• Canine health data are stored in our secure database under a unique identification number. This number does not include your actual name, address, or personally identifying information.
• Only select Dog Aging Project staff have access to the link between a dog owner’s personally identifying information and their dog’s health data.
• When we share canine health data with our trusted research partners, these data do not include personally identifying information.
• The Dog Aging Project will make all reasonable efforts within the law to maintain the privacy and confidentiality of participant data.
• We will inform participants promptly in the unlikely case of a security breach.

The Dog Aging Project team believes in keeping our participants up to speed on the progress and growth we are experiencing together. After all, you and your companion are the heart of this mission. In the future, you may see acknowledgments made on behalf of the Dog Aging Project to corporate entities or philanthropic groups for funding to help support our science. Rest assured that we will make decisions about which sources of financial support to accept with the highest ethics and responsibility.

We would like to share the National Institutes of Health’s mission statement as the Dog Aging Project is very much aligned with this philosophy: The NIH’s mission is to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and the application of that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.