Patenting The Biological Clock

Would you rather be biologically or chronologically young? As life expectancy continues to increase, on average, worldwide, attention is increasingly focussing on biological age, which has been shown to be better predictor of mortality than chronological age. An ongoing challenge to researchers is the identification of robust, universal predictors of the biological clock.

A new study published in Nature Medicine points to plasma-derived proteins as being promising biomarkers. The researchers from Stanford University used UK Biobank data to identify sets of proteins whose abundance in blood plasma correlates with the phenotypic age of various organs, including the brain, heart, lung and immune tissue. The sets of proteins were found to be good predictors of the future onset of a range of diseases such as heart failure, type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's.