Biological Age: A New Way to Measure Health and Longevity

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In a recent TIME article, titled “The Race to Measure How We Age,” reporter Dominique Mosbergen reports on a fast-growing scientific effort to build reliable biological age tests, sometimes called aging “clocks.” Unlike chronological age, which is fixed by your birthday, biological age is meant to reflect how well your cells, tissues, and organs are functioning, and it can change over time.

The piece notes that people are flocking to longevity clinics and buying tests online to learn their biological age, while the U.S. government and research labs around the world race to figure out which clocks are accurate enough to be genuinely useful in medicine.

Below are key highlights from the Mosbergen’s TIME article:

  • A new way to think about age. Tony Wyss-Coray, a Stanford neuroscientist who studies aging, told TIME that biological age is one way to gauge a person’s “intrinsic capacity,” meaning how well the cells and tissues in the body are functioning compared to expectations for someone’s calendar age. Eric Verdin, president of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, told TIME that biological age is the shiny object on the hill everyone wants to measure, with new clocks being developed almost every day.
  • Many types of clocks exist. Some clocks are blood or saliva tests based on chemical changes to DNA. Others analyze protein patterns, wearable device data, or routine electronic health records. A few are based on retinal images, facial photos, voice recordings, or grip strength. Wyss-Coray’s lab has created a blood test that estimates the age of specific organs by measuring proteins unique to them, and his company Vero Bioscience is now testing this clock with private clinics on a small scale.
  • The science is still maturing. Martin Borch Jensen, founder of the Norn Group think tank and chief scientific officer of Gordian Biotechnology, cautioned that no commercial clock is currently accurate or interpretable enough to give individuals truly actionable information. He compared what is needed to a lipid panel, where doctors clearly understand how cholesterol relates to heart health. By contrast, today’s consumer clocks, he said, amount to a kind of “consumer longevitainment.”
  • Why a good clock matters for medicine. Without a reliable way to measure aging in people, clinical trials of anti-aging treatments are very hard to run, since people age slowly and standard drug patents only last 20 years. A widely accepted clock would let companies test whether a treatment actually slows aging within a realistic timeframe. Until then, Verdin says, “we are all flying blind.”
  • A government push for gold-standard clocks. The Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) launched a longevity initiative called PROSPR in December, led by molecular biologist Andrew Brack. The program plans to test promising clocks for predicting future health and to evaluate the geroprotective potential of common drugs, with GLP-1 medications, rapamycin, and SGLT2 inhibitors named as possible candidates. The Buck Institute, working with the nonprofit Phenome Health, is also running a trial that tracks more than 100,000 biological variables and uses AI to find which markers reliably predict aging and disease.
  • Friendly competition is shaping the field. The Biomarkers of Aging Consortium launched a contest in 2024 that pits clocks against one another. Vadim Gladyshev, a Harvard professor on the steering committee, told TIME that everyone claims to have the best clock, yet without standard datasets and harmonization, there is no fair comparison. He is especially excited about next-generation clocks that could read multiple biological processes at once, including organ-specific aging.

Summing up, Mosbergen highlights that biological age tests are opening a new window into how we age, with the promise of catching health risks earlier and guiding personal choices. Yet as TIME makes clear, the science is still finding its footing, and Verdin advises taking any current result with a grain of salt. He predicts that within roughly five years, we will have tools that can meaningfully measure biological age, a development that could reshape both clinical research and everyday primary care.

Acknowledgement: This summary was generated using AI writing tools as part of my experimental learning process. For more information, please refer to the original article listed below.

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