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Ageing: Biomarkers get physical

Nature Biomedical Engineering volume 1, Article number: 0102 (2017) Cite this article

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Cellular biophysical features are identified as predictive biomarkers of ageing.

Ageing, the root cause of chronic disease, is the main cause of death, at least in the developed world. It has thus slowly begun to dawn on policy makers that the most logical way to tackle the great health challenge of caring for an ever-increasing fraction of the population with debilitating diseases would be to therapeutically target the ageing process. A path towards regulatory approval and commercialization of anti-ageing drugs has been recently charted1, yet a major challenge is how to test for beneficial effects without the need to carry out extremely long lifetime studies. The answer to that resides in measures of healthy ageing that can be used as surrogate outcomes in intervention studies that aim to delay, halt or revert the ageing processes. Such biomarkers also have value for epidemiological studies of ageing and for better understanding the mechanisms underlying the age-related increase in chronic diseases such as cancer and cardiovascular disease.

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Figure 1: Biophysical parameters better correlate with chronological age, as indicated by the Pearson correlation coefficients for 208 parameters, grouped according to various biomolecular and biophysical features.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Genetics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, 1301 Morris Park Avenue, Bronx, 10461, New York, USA

    Xiao Dong & Jan Vijg

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  1. Xiao Dong
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  2. Jan Vijg
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Correspondence to Jan Vijg.

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Competing interests

X.D. and J.V. are co-founders of SingulOmics Corp.

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Dong, X., Vijg, J. Ageing: Biomarkers get physical. Nat Biomed Eng 1, 0102 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-017-0102

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-017-0102

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