Episode Details

Steve Horvath made the seminal discovery of the—Horvath Clock— an epigenetic clock based on DNA methylation, which is now being used extensively in medical research and offered commercially for individuals (←we talk about that!). He was on the faculty at UCLA from 2000-2022 as a Professor of Human Genetics and Biostatistics, and now works on anti-aging research at Altos Labs.

A perspective on the importance of epigenetic clocks this week’s Nature”This insight is crucial for deriving reliable biological markers of ageing in tissues or blood. Such a feat has been accomplished through the ingenious identification of epigenetic clocks in our genome. But these insights are even more important for revealing targets that enable intervention in the ageing process.”

A video snippet on vegetable intake and epigenetic clocks. Full videos of all Ground Truths podcasts can be seen on YouTube here. The audios are also available on Apple and Spotify.

Transcript with links to Audio and External Links

Eric Topol (00:06):

Hello, it's Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I've got a terrific guest with me today, Steve Horvath. He's a geneticist, a statistician, a mathematician. He's got a lot of background that has led to what is a landmark finding in biomedicine, the Horvath clock. So Steve, welcome.

Steve Horvath (00:30):

Thank you for having me.

Eric Topol (00:33):

Well, it's really fascinating. I followed your work for well over a decade since you introduced the pan-tissue clock in 2013, and it's fascinating to go back a bit on that finding, which initially, I guess was in saliva a couple of years prior, and then you found it everywhere you looked, wherever cells had a nucleus and tissues. And what gave you the sense that these markers of methylation on the DNA would give us some clues about the aging process? How did you even come about to make this discovery?

Serendipity

Steve Horvath (01:17):

It was an accidental discovery because before the methylation clock, I had worked very hard on a gene expression clock, a transcriptomic biomarker. I mean, I was at the height of my energy levels. I worked really on weekends, really eight hour days during the week. But all the weekends I had collected a large set of gene expression data and I dredged the data. And for two years and I couldn't get anywhere, there was nothing I could do. But nowadays, of course, you see various publications where people built transcriptomic clocks. But back in the day when we had these arrays, I just couldn't see a signal. And then at some point I got roped into a study of homosexuality where my collaborator at UCLA wanted to see whether there's an epigenetic correlate of sexual orientation in saliva. And so yeah, being a bios