A Popular Science Overview of the State of Development for Epigenetic Clocks

The development of rejuvenation therapies is haphazard and inefficient in part because measuring rejuvenation is costly, uncertain, and slow. On the one hand, rigorous and convincing data is needed to persuade conservative, risk-averse regulators and sources of funding to support work on rejuvenation at all. Further, cost-effective early guidance on whether one approach is better or worse than another is needed in to order to avoid a great deal of effort directed towards programs that cannot produce sizable outcomes for health. With this in mind, the research community is in search of a way to rapidly assess biological age before and after potential therapies. Epigenetic clocks are one possible path towards this capability, but as today's popular science article notes, there are sizable hurdles yet to overcome. It is now straightforward to generate clocks that reflect age and disease risk from near any sizable set of biological data. Many characteristic changes take place with age in the epigenome, proteome, transcriptome, and so forth. Modern machine learning makes it practical to identify such changes in large datasets. The problem is that researchers don't yet know how these changes connect to the underlying processes of aging. Thus no-one knows whether any given clock will accurately reflect the results of adjusting just one or a few of those processes. So it is simple enough to run clocks on blood samples and produce numbers - but can those numbers b...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Medicine, Biotech, Research Source Type: blogs