Tony Wyss-Coray Is Measuring Biological Age One Organ at a Time
Vero Bioscience, a company Wyss-Coray cofounded, is running clinical studies to see how accurate these tests are in the real world. “These tests could tell you how your organs are holding up, and that would extend your health span because you would be able to optimize your health based on this real data that is personalized to you,” Wyss-Coray says. They could be used in clinical trials for longevity drugs and other interventions, he says.
Wyss-Coray also studies the aging brain. His PhD in immunology led him to study the role of the immune system in the brain and in neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. It was during that training that Wyss-Coray homed in on an idea that has come to define his research approach: That the brain and other organs are interconnected with the rest of the body, and that only by unraveling and identifying those connections can aging and disease be understood and possibly halted.
“The immune system can go anywhere in the body, and so it seemed obvious to me that if the immune system can talk to the brain, then somehow the brain may also communicate back, and we may be able to find molecules from the brain in the circulation,” Wyss-Coray says.
In 2007, he and a group of collaborators published a paper that tested this idea for the first time. They looked at blood samples from people with Alzheimer’s disease to see if their levels of certain proteins were different from those of healthy people, and if those differences could then be used to detect the disease. “And indeed that worked,” Wyss-Coray says.
Since then, Wyss-Coray has embarked on projects that have expanded our understanding of just how profoundly the brain and other organs are influenced by proteins, immune signals, and other factors circulating in the blood, particularly related to aging and disease. His lab famously showed how infusing older mice with blood plasma from younger mice improved their cognitive function (and conversely, blood plasma from old mice accelerated the aging of younger animals). Another company he cofounded, Alkahest, is now exploring how human blood plasma could be used to treat diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
