An open contest to find better aging clocks
We already know that biological age differs from chronological age. But how do you measure it reliably? Scientists disagree. Now Nature Aging is opening the field up to a public comparison.
Aging clocks are measurement tools that use biological signals to estimate how fast someone is ageing. The best-known are epigenetic clocks, which track chemical modifications on DNA that shift with age. But there are also clocks based on blood proteins, metabolites, cell characteristics and other biomarkers. The field is growing quickly, but there is no standardised way to assess which clock actually works best.
A new initiative aims to change that. The researchers launch an open competition for aging biomarkers in Nature Aging. The goal is a transparent, public platform where different clocks are tested and compared on the same datasets.
Standardisation as a scientific problem
The lack of standardisation is a real issue. A clock that performs well on one dataset may not do so on another. And the criteria for ‘performing well’ vary: does the clock predict mortality? Disease? Physical decline? Does it respond to an intervention? A competition format forces researchers to answer the same questions on the same data, making comparison possible.
The initiative is still in its early stages and full details of the competition protocol are not available in the source text. But the direction is clear: the field wants to move away from every research group promoting its own clock on its own data.
Why this matters for longevity research
For longevity research, reliable measurement of biological age is a central challenge. Without good clocks, it is hard to determine whether any intervention, diet, supplement or drug, actually slows ageing. Better, standardised biomarkers would make clinical trials in this area considerably more credible.