A new study by Insilico Medicine illustrates what adding aging clocks to clinical trials could reveal
There is a missed opportunity in clinical trials already under way. Most drug trials draw blood from participants at several visits and measure whether a treatment helped the disease it was designed for. Very few check whether the drug also changed how fast participants are aging. If aging clocks were measured in every trial, we could identify drugs that act across several diseases by slowing aging itself, using studies that are already happening. Two recent studies show what this could look like. Both reanalyzed stored blood samples from completed trials. The trials tested semaglutide in people with HIV and an experimental lung fibrosis drug from Insilico Medicine called rentosertib.
What an aging clock measures. Aging clocks estimate biological age from a blood sample using patterns that change with age. Aging clocks include epigenetic clocks, which read age-related marks on DNA, transcriptomic clocks, and proteomic clocks, which read the levels of thousands of blood proteins. Clocks differ in what they are trained to predict, which can be chronological age, disease states, mortality risk, or the current pace of aging. I have written about what biological age means and about which clocks respond to interventions in earlier articles.
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