The way we get around the bias for (supposedly) hypothesis-driven work is to get a lot of our funding on collaborative and center grants. We can augment our local aging research work by providing them with context and pretty figures for their papers and grants, and they are happy to send a few $100K our way in exchange. We got a Shock Center award a year or two ago which has accelerated things a lot. A lot of it has been catalyzed by Arlan Richardson and Holly van Remmen, who came here from UT San Antonio.
When it comes to "bridging the gap", yes, it is hard. The key I guess is to be flexible and understand what they want. A lot of them are not looking for grand, informatics-driven hypotheses, but they are ecstatic about extra figures or data they can put into their papers to spice them up. Sometimes I slum it a little and do routine statistical analyses on their experiments just to keep the connections live.
In general, I think it is sensible to try to design systems in such a way they bridge multiple species from C elegans to rodents to humans. If you do one, it's not that hard to do them all, and they all have their place, as C elegans is good for quick testing of lifespan stuff but may or may not generalize, so it is considered helpful if you can use data to give tips about what may or may not translate.
The best brief advice I can give is to figure out what the wet lab people want, and give it to them in a way that maximizes the overlap between what you are doing and what they are doing.