Forget 'biological age' tests — longevity experts are using an $800 under-the-radar blood test to measure aging in real-time

Business Insider

a day ago

Doctors and scientists are using a blood plasma test to study longevity.
The test measures proteins and can tell you about your organ health.
This field of proteomics could one day help detect diseases like cancer before they start.
Should you have that second cup of coffee? How about a little wine with dinner? And, is yogurt really your superfood?
Scientists are getting closer to offering consumers a blood test that could help people make daily decisions about how to eat, drink, and sleep that are more perfectly tailored to their unique biology.
The forthcoming tests could also help shape what are arguably far more important health decisions, assessing whether your brain is aging too fast, if your kidneys are OK, or if that supplement or drug you're taking is actually doing any good.
It's called an organ age test, more officially (and scientifically) known as "proteomics" — and it's the next hot " biological age" marker that researchers are arguing could be better than all the rest.
"If I could just get one clock right now, I'd want to get that clock, and I'd like to see it clinically available in older adults," cardiologist Eric Topol, author of the recent bestseller "Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity," told Business Insider. Topol said armed with organ age test results, people could become more proactive stewards of their own health, before it's too late.
"When we have all these layers of data, it's a whole new day for preventing the disease," Topol said. "You see the relationship with women's hormones. You see the relationship with food and alcohol. You don't ever get that with genes."
A test like this isn't available to consumers just yet, but it's already being used by researchers at elite universities and high-end longevity clinics. They hope it can become a tool any doctor could use to assess patient health in the next few years.
A startup called Vero, which was spun out of some foundational proteomics research at Stanford University, is hoping to beta test a proteomics product for consumers this year.
"Knowing your oldest organ isn't the point; changing the trajectory is," Vero co-founder and CEO Paul Coletta told a crowd gathered at the Near Future Summit in Malibu, California, last month.
Coletta told Business Insider Vero's not interested in doing "wealthcare." The company plans to make its test available to consumers for around $200 a pop, at scale. Their draw only requires one vial of blood.
Why measuring proteins could be the key to better personalized medicine
The big promise of proteomics is that it could be a more precise real-time tool for tracking important but subtle changes that emerge inside each of us as we age.
Genetic testing can measure how our bodies are built, spotting vulnerabilities in a person's DNA that might predispose them to health issues. Standard clinical measurements like a person's weight, blood pressure, or cholesterol readings are a useful proxy for potential health issues.
Then there are the increasingly popular "biological age" tests available to consumers at home. Most of those look at "epigenetic changes" — how environmental factors affect our gene expression.
Proteomics does something different and new. It measures the product that our bodies make based on all those genetic and environmental inputs: proteins. It offers a live assessment of how your body is running, not just how it's programmed.
If validated in the next few years, these tests could become key in early disease detection and prevention. They could help influence all kinds of medical decisions, from big ones like "What drugs should I take?" to little ones like "How does my body respond to caffeine or alcohol?"
Elite longevity clinics already use proteomics
Some high-end longevity clinics are already forging ahead using proteomics to guide clinical recommendations, albeit cautiously.
Dr. Evelyne Bischof, a longevity physician who treats patients worldwide, said she uses proteomic information to guide some of the lifestyle interventions she recommends to her patients.
She may suggest a more polyphenol-rich diet to someone who seems to have high inflammation and neuroinflammation based on proteomic test results, or may even suggest they do a little more cognitive training, based on what proteomics says about how their brain is aging.
Dr. Andrea Maier, a professor of medicine and functional aging at the National University of Singapore, told BI she uses this measurement all the time in her longevity clinics. For her, it's just a research tool, but if the results of her ongoing studies are decent, she hopes to be able to use it clinically in a few years' time.
"We want to know what kind of 'ageotype' a person is, so what type of aging personality are you, not from a mental perspective, but from a physical perspective," Maier said. "It's really discovery at this moment in time, and at the edge of being clinically meaningful."
"Once we have that validated tool, we will just add it to our routine testing and we can just tick the box and say, 'I also want to know if this person is a cardiac ager, or a brain ager, or a muscle ager' because now we have a sensitive parameter — protein — which can be added," Maier said.
The two big-name proteomics tests are Olink and SOMAscan. For now, their high-end screening costs around $400-$800 per patient.
"I'm losing lots of money at the moment because of proteomics for clinical research!" Maier said.
Proteomics could soon help predict who's most likely to get certain cancers, fast-tracking both prevention and treatment
Top aging researchers at Stanford and Harvard are pushing the field forward, racing to publish more novel insights about the human proteome.
The latest findings from Harvard aging researcher Vadim Gladyshev's lab, published earlier this year, suggest that as we age, each person may even stand to benefit from a slightly different antiaging grocery list.
To research this idea, Gladyshev looked at proteins in the blood of more than 50,000 people in the UK, all participants in the UK Biobank who are being regularly tested and studied to learn more about their long-term health. He tracked their daily habits and self-reported routines like diet, occupation, and prescriptions, comparing those details to how each patient's organs were aging.
He discovered some surprising connections. Yogurt eating, generally speaking, tended to be associated with better intestinal aging but had relatively no benefit to the arteries. White wine drinking, on the other hand, seemed to potentially confer some small benefit to the arteries while wreaking havoc on the gut.
​​"The main point is that people age in different ways in different organs, and therefore we need to find personalized interventions that would fit that particular person," Gladyshev told BI. "Through measuring proteins, you assess the age of different organs and you say, 'OK, this person is old in this artery.'"
For now, there's too much noise in the data to do more. Dr. Pal Pacher, a senior investigator at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism who studies organ aging and injuries, told BI that proteomics is simply not ready for clinical use yet. There's just too much noise in the data.
But he imagines a future where a more sophisticated protein clock could help link up which people may be most vulnerable to diseases like early cancer, kidney disease, and more. (A California-based proteomics company called Seer announced last weekend that it is partnering with Korea University to study whether proteomics can help more quickly diagnose cancer in young people in their 20s and 30s.)
"How beautiful could it be in the future?" Maier said. "Instead of three hours of clinical investigation, I would have a tool which guides me much, much better, with more validity towards interventions."