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...