Care to know when you’re going to get old? iAge may have the answer.
Developed by researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, iAge is an AI-driven tool that aims to predict “how strong your immune system is, how soon you’ll become frail, or whether you have—as yet unseen—cardiovascular problems that could in the future become clinically relevant.”
According to an article at Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, the researchers have identified a chemokine, or signaling protein, which they believe can facilitate early detection of age-related pathology and, by extension, potential intervention.
“Standard immune metrics which can be used to identify individuals most at risk for developing single or even multiple chronic diseases of aging have been sorely lacking,” said David Furman, PhD, Buck Institute associate professor and director of the Artificial Intelligence Platform and senior author of the team’s related study, which is published in Nature Aging. “Bringing biology to our completely unbiased approach allowed us to identify a number of metrics, including a small immune protein which is involved in age-related systemic chronic inflammation and cardiac aging. We now have means of detecting dysfunction and a pathway to intervention before full-blown pathology occurs.”
The key to remember is that while time may wait for no one, not everyone “ages” at the same rate.
“You see this in the clinic,” Furman observed. “Some older people are extremely disease-prone, while others are the picture of health.”
The difference, he said, is largely related to variations in the rate at which individual immune systems decline. In addition, the study’s authors noted, it has only been in the last few decades “that it has become apparent that inflammatory components of the immune system are often chronically elevated in aged individuals and associated with an increased incidence of cancer, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and others.”
And these observations have led to the concept that inflammation plays a critical role in regulating physiological aging.
According to Furman, there have not previously been “metrics for accurately assessing individuals’ inflammatory status in a way that could predict future clinical problems and point to ways of addressing them or staving them off.” But the new study, he said, has produced a single-number quantitative measure that may do just that.
As the study’s authors put it, “… by applying artificial intelligence methods to deep immune monitoring of human blood we generate an inflammatory clock of aging, which can be used as a companion diagnostic to inform physicians about patient’s inflammatory burden and overall health status, especially in those with chronic diseases … Our immune metric for human health can identify within healthy older adults with no clinical or laboratory evidence of cardiovascular disease, those at risk for early cardiovascular aging.”
Said Furman, “Using iAge it’s possible to predict seven years in advance who is going to become frail. That leaves us lots of room for interventions.”
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