PITTSBURGH — A group of researchers has set up a foundation based in Pittsburgh to study the members of a rare and exclusive club: people who live to be older than 110.

The Supercentenarian Research Foundation hopes to identify why these people live so long, develop strategies to help combat the effects of aging and improve the quality of life of the very old.

"The longer we wait, the more they're going to die and we will lose that information," said Dr. Stephen Coles, the foundation's treasurer and a researcher who has studied the elderly as part of the Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group.

It's estimated that there are about 300 people worldwide who are 110 years old or older, yet not all of those people have had their ages verified through public documents. As of Wednesday, the foundation reported that there were 76 people in the world — 66 women and 10 men — who were verified to be 110 or older.

When someone reaches the age of 110, there is a 50 percent chance that they will not reach the age of 111, said Dr. Doros Platika, the foundation's chairman and CEO. Platika is stepping down later this year from his job as head of the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, a public-private partnership that supports the growth of regional life sciences companies, to devote his time to raising money to fund the Supercentenarian Research Foundation.

Coles said demographers have shown that the number of people reaching 100 years old is growing exponentially, while few people live to be older than 110. Researchers are turning to science to try to explain why that is.

The oldest person ever whose age was authenticated was Jeanne Louise Calment, who lived to 122 years and 164 days, the foundation said. She was born on Feb. 21, 1875, and died at a nursing home in Arles in southern France on Aug. 4, 1997.

Stanley Primmer, the foundation's president, said there have only been seven autopsies of supercentenarians that the group knows of. He said the foundation is in the process of gathering tissues from the very elderly so they can look for clues to longevity.

"We want to know why it is they're able to live longer than the rest of us, and what is the limit to our life span," Primmer said.

The foundation began after several experts on aging met at an anti-aging conference in Las Vegas in 2004, and decided that so-called "supercentenarians" needed to be studied. The group was registered as a nonprofit corporation in May, and its first meeting was held in June in Boston.

This week, the group announced it would be based in Pittsburgh. Platika said having the group here is appropriate since Allegheny County has a large number of elderly residents.

He said the foundation used about $200,000 in private donations to get started and is hoping to raise several millions more over the next few years for research.

He emphasized that just having a long life is not the point.

"Having a high quality of life and having a healthy and independent life is the point," he said.