Elysium Health said today it has launched Index by Elysium Health, an at-home test designed to enable customers to measure their cumulative rate of aging and their biological age. The company has also named a head of bioinformatics to shepherd development of the test using the latest generation of an…

Researchers at Brown University have discovered age- and health-related differences in cell-free DNA (cfDNA)—differences that could someday be used to determine biological age. The researchers extracted cfDNA from blood samples of people in their 20s, people in their 70s, and healthy and unhealthy centenarians. The four groups of people, the…

Patients show substantial cognitive decline 12–18 months after hospitalization for COVID-19, a new year-long study of over 350 patients finds. The rate of decline, the researchers report, is comparable to 20 years of aging. Further, MRI scans and blood tests showed these patients had brain injury markers and reduced brain…

Research in human cells and in mice by scientists at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center suggests that age-related changes in fibroblasts contribute to the development of aggressive, treatment-resistant melanoma in males. The researchers, co-led by Ashani Weeraratna, PhD, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, E.V. McCollum Professor, and chair of the…

While working as a principal scientist at Celgene in the mid-2010s, Tomas Babak, PhD, found himself deeply frustrated with consistently failing at translational development—taking knowledge of a disease target to develop a human-compatible drug. “I got a chance to work on drugs that were going straight into phase one clinical…

Investigators at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital (St. Jude) and the Children’s Oncology Group (COG), have shown that non-coding DNA is responsible for as much 60% of the genetic changes that drive T-lineage acute lymphoblastic leukemia (T-ALL), an aggressive and high-risk form of the…

The link between the gut microbiome and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is strongly supported and expanded on by a new metagenomics study, published in Nature Microbiology from a Chinese team. Their analysis includes not just bacteria native to the digestive tract, but also fungi, archaea, and viruses too. Their work…

Helix is providing Recursion Pharmaceuticals access to its vast clinico-genomic data to drive drug discovery innovation. Recursion will use de-identified data from Helix’s extensive network of health systems, such as comprehensive longitudinal clinical records combined with genomic data, to address multiple germline therapeutic areas. Using this data, Recursion intends to…

Researchers based at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. have confirmed that accounting for biological sex when assessing patients for heart failure improves accuracy of diagnosis. The team behind the work, published in the European Heart Journal Open, fine-tuned a method for diagnosing the condition using magnetic resonance…

A major bottleneck in early detection is the molecular heterogeneity between ovarian cancer (OC) patients, which limits the likelihood of identifying individual biomarkers that are shared among patients. In a new study “A personalized probabilistic approach to ovarian cancer diagnostics,” published in Gynecologic Oncology, researchers from Georgia Institute of Technology…

Biological robots created from a patient’s own cells can move around to heal and regenerate damaged tissue, a study suggests. Tiny multicellular “Anthrobots” created from epithelial cells in the trachea could be stimulated to move and heal “wounds” created in nerve cells cultured in a laboratory. Cilia on the cells,…

A partnership between researchers in Scotland and Sweden examining the effects of chronic kidney disease has yielded the development of a new epigenetic test that provides the most accurate measure of a patient’s biological aging to date. Reporting their findings in the Journal of Internal Medicine, the team comprising of…

Algorithms represent an entirely new paradigm for assessing aging and neurodegeneration in human samples and can easily be deployed at scale in clinical and translational research laboratories. Now, researchers at Mount Sinai say they have developed an algorithm using artificial intelligence called “HistoAge” which predicts age at death based on…

The gut microbiome long has been linked to health as well as the incidence and mortality of a range of diseases. It is also one of the systems in the body most able to be influenced by environmental and social exposures. Now, a multisite research effort from investigators at Washington…

New research published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute shows that women treated for breast cancer exhibit faster biological aging than those who remain breast cancer free. “Breast cancer survivors have higher rates of various age-related diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, and experience faster physical and cognitive decline…