Episode Details

The science to advance our understanding of the aging process—and to potentially slow it down—has made important strides. One of the leading scientists responsible for this work is Professor Tony Wyss-Coray, whose work has particularly focused on brain aging but has implications for all organs. I believe his December 2023 Nature paper on blood proteins that can track aging for 11 of our organs is one of the most important aging reports yet.

Here is the audio and transcript of our conversation, recorded 20 December 2023, with a few relevant external links.

This is the last Ground Truths post for 2023 and I hope you’ll find it informative. I look forward to sharing many more exciting, cutting-edge biomedical advances with you in 2024!

00:10.38

Eric Topol

Hello this is Eric Topol and for this edition of Ground Truths. I'm so delighted to have with me Professor Tony Wyss-Coray of Stanford, a Distinguished Professor at Stanford and who directs the Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience. So welcome Tony.

00:30.19

Tony Wyss-Coray

Thank you, thank you for having me, Eric.

00:32.84

Eric Topol

Well, I've been following your career and your work for decades I have to say and what you just published a couple weeks ago in Nature. The cover paper about internal organ clocks. It blew me away. I mean it's a built on a foundation of extraordinary work. I thought we could start with that because to me that's really a breakthrough in that when we think of aging and how to gauge a person aging with things like the Horvath clock of methylation markers or telomeres or —not at all specific to any part of the body, just overall, l but you published an extraordinary work about plasma proteins for 11 organs that predicted the outcomes things like heart failure and Alzheimer's so maybe you could tell us about this.  Seems to be a big deal to me.

01:28.41

Tony Wyss-Coray

Thank you so much I'm honored. Really, you know I think if you work on this stuff, especially for several years it feels sort of obvious to do it? But I think you know it is in a way. It is. Pretty simple. So what we argued is that the thousands of proteins that you know are present in our blood. They must originate from somewhere now a lot of proteins are you know, produced by cells throughout the body. But some proteins are very specifically produced. For example, only in the brain or only in the liver or only in the heart because they have specialized functions and we have you know being taking advantage of that in clinical medicine where you measure. Often you know one of these proteins to sort of diagnose pathology in a tissue, but we took this It's just a level further and said, well, let's just find out of thousands of proteins that we can measure assign them to specific organs and tissues. And then see whether they change with age and many of them turn out to change. We found you know about 1500 proteins or so in the study that we did although that number can grow dramatically if we you know keep.

03:01.11

Tony Wyss-Coray

Improving our technologies or techniques to measure them and many of them come from the brain or from other tissues and because they change with age. They tell us something about the aging of that organ. And as others have shown in the field including Steve Horvath is that that prediction of the age if it doesn't really match exactly your actual age contains information about the state the physiological state or the risk to develop. Organ-specific disease.

03:37.75

Eric Topol

Right. And you found that about 1 in 5 people had evidence of accelerated aging of 1 organ which of course is really starting to nail down ability to detect aging you know to localize it and um