A Selection of Recent Research into Biomarkers of Aging

If the research community had a reliable, low-cost method of quickly assessing biological age, the burden of damage and dysfunction, a measure that is distinct from chronological age, then progress towards rejuvenation therapies might be accomplished more rapidly. At present the only reliable way to determine whether or not a given therapy produces a slowing of aging or rejuvenation is to run expensive, slow life span studies in mice. Even when taking the approach of starting the study with old mice, this is still quite a lengthy undertaking. Being able to apply a putative rejuvenation therapy to mice (or dogs, or non-human primates, or people) and then a few weeks later run a brief test to see how well it did would revolutionize the pace of progress. Based on the past decade of work on biomarkers of aging, it seems plausible that a diverse weighted combination of measures will eventually prove to be good enough to greatly improve the economics of development for rejuvenation therapies. That good enough combination has yet to be established robustly, however. The various epigenetic clocks are promising, but not yet actionable, as researchers cannot say how exactly these clocks relate to the specific forms of molecular damage that cause aging. If the aggregate measure is higher or lower or unchanged following a given treatment, what does that mean? There is as yet no good answer to that question, and the answers will no doubt differ by class of therapy. Different biomar...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs