Carolina Oliveira developed a molecular clock that measures skin age at the cellular level. Unlike general aging clocks, this one tracks skin-specific changes, giving researchers a precise tool to test anti-aging treatments and see if they actually work.
I want to talk about how you're measuring skin age because you developed a whole new clock for that. Talk about mole clock and how you actually know the age of skin. How does that work and how did you discover it?
Yeah, so the concept of molecular clocks was first introduced by Horvath and other researchers. And basically the idea is that we would measure the chains in a molecular marker. In this case, we are measuring methylation and epigenetic marker and basically measure, we are measuring how those patterns in methylations are changing with the chronological age. So when Harvard built the first clock, he used methylation data from different tissues of our body. And when we are using Horvath to measure the age of the skin, we saw that the accuracy to measure skin age was not very high. So we decided to build a clock that was built only using skin samples. So now we got a higher accuracy in terms of predicting the skin biological age because we were training an algorithm only with skin samples. We also published a paper on the mole clock and how it predicts the age of the skin better than the other clocks available. So basically, when we grow, when we have a skin in the lab, we can measure the age of that skin. Let's say the skin is 45 years old. Then we can test our peptide, we can test a final product, and we isolate again the DNA and we sequence that methylation profile and we can quantify the age reversal effect. That's how we found that our peptide could reverse the age of the skin in 2.5 years. And, and that's how we are also measuring that in humans. We are reversing the age of the skin by measuring the methylation profile. So it's a very interesting way because it's quantitative, it's not biased, and it's the most accurate tool that we have available today to quantify the age reversal effect.
You talked about something really important in there. You talked about the Horvath clock. I was fortunate to spend a couple days with Steve Horvath, who created the clock. And we've done a couple episodes on the human upgrade about longevity as measured by the true age score, which is a DNA methylation score. And what's neat is once you do that, you can run your data on your DNA methylation through different, we'll call it different lenses. And the Horvath clock is the most established, we'll say gold standard. But there are other clocks you can use, which is basically, how do I look at all this data? So you found a way to look at the data specific for skin to Say, oh, let's compare the DNA methylation of skin aging versus, say blood aging or all the other markers in a human body. So that is a contribution to the field of aging in general. So now someone else who says, I have my knockoff, you know, whatever thing I came up with, and they would have to run it against a gold standard clock and go, oh, look, it doesn't work. So then they probably wouldn't run the test in the first place. Or maybe they'll have something that works really well. And I'm open to it. But guys, if you're going to do something in skincare, maybe you should be making your anti aging claims based on a standard measure. And this is a very, very good one. Or come up with one that's better. I'm open to that too. Like, we'll do a podcast.
I think that next. Yeah, the next step would be to have one method that would be non invasive, that we can collect enough biological sample that we can measure the biological age without needing a biopsy, which we are not there yet, but I think that would be ideal so more people could actually get their skin age measured.
You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey.
