Diagnosis of ageing

Cancer is age related disease. We know that ageing is an inevitable process. Perhaps, someday it will  be officially included as disease in upcoming ICD-11 going to get updated in 2018.

And perhaps someday we will have better answers one the most sought after question: Is it possible to have long life? Or in other words Can we attain longevity? Although, there are important clues from nature about the long life For e.g. Hydra, Nake Mole Rat and others. We have examples like a Jeanne Louise Calment. She was the longest living human on earth. May be sometime in near future we will have answer to question of living longer life.
Jeanne Louise Calment 
122 year old lady

But to face this problem of ageing we must know how to diagnose it. We need reliable methods by which we can carry out diagnosis of ageing.

Crazy thought...It is ironic that if ageing is never been classified as disease then why do we need to diagnosis it? 

Moving towards an important idea of diagnosis of human ageing. A recent paper published by group of scientists in Genome Biology Journal developed a unique transcriptomic method for diagnosis of human ageing. The published article is open access please click here.

Paper claims to find a new method using statistically robust multi-tissue RNA signature from peripheral blood samples of human subject's healthy ageing that can be use for diagnosis of future health.


"Figure: 1 Development, validation and clinical application of ageing diagnostic. Overview of the selection process and use of RNA probe-sets for the development and validation of the healthy physiological age classifier. We identified useful probe-sets from a possible starting number of ~54,000 during step one [e.g. probe-sets with leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) performance ≥ 90 %]. We then evaluated the performance of the top-ranked 150 probe-sets in a number of independent muscle, brain, and skin samples, demonstrating that the signature was diagnostic for age. We then applied the 150-probe-set healthy ageing signature to several clinical studies, as illustrated at the end of the workflow. Key features included discarding the training data set immediately after selecting the 150 probe-sets and relying on LOOCV and full external validation processes"


There is no commercial method available for diagnosis of human ageing. But may be this paper will provide an important step in the field of diagnosis of human ageing.

Insilico Medicine SuperPharman Challenge: Looking for Superheroes to Fight Aging and Transform the Pharmaceutical Industry

Insilico Medicine is Searching for Super Heroes to Fight Aging



Aging fighters at Insilico Medicine are looking for relentless doers who dream big, but are not afraid to get their hands dirty with basic tasks. Doers, who have trouble sleeping at night, because they know that millions of people are suffering and dying of cancer and age-related diseases and their own clock is ticking as well. Doers with both programming and database management skills and knowledge of biology. You will need to know or quickly learn how to use huge multi-omics data to find alternative uses of currently available drugs and distribute many micro tasks to the crowd, freelancers or colleagues, while keeping the big picture in mind. 


We know that we are looking for a needle in the haystack, but this is how our team has come to be and you will be in great company. We have relentless super heroes in the US, UK, Switzerland, Poland, Israel, Russia and China. If you know someone amazing, who fits that profile amazing, ask him. Maybe he or she is already working for us. He goes through the day doing a boring academic job, but at night he is hacking away.

Our first frontier is transforming the pharmaceutical industry, repurposing known drugs and finding the new ones. When we launch, the world will become a better place. And if you are that super hero with bold ideas and hands on experience, ready to unleash maniacal energy to hack aging, send us a signal and we will respond right away or start watching you to see if you fit.

Here is a link to what Insilico Medicine is doing: 


In partnerships they can also do in vitro and in vivo validation, humouse clinical trials and even organ-on-a-chip and body-on-a-chip validation. 
They are looking for someone with similar skill set and energy as Alex Zhavoronkov (www.linkedin.com/in/zhavoronkov) to work together with him, gradually replace him and then find someone to replace yourself as the company grows or you decide to start a subsidiary. 

Minimum requirements:
  • Python, MySQL, Hadoop, AWS Services, IBM Watson
  • Experience working with multi-omics data and/or clinical trials/biomedical text data
  • SVM and deep learning algorithms
  • Basic knowledge of signaling and metabolic pathways
  • Experience working with GEO, ArrayExpress, KEGG, TCGA, LINCS, Connectivity Map, Drugbank, Clinical Trials, WHO databases, etc.
  • Personal network of contacts in academia and large pharmaceutical companies
  • Excellent writing skills
  • Ability to give public talks and generate publicity is a plus
  • Knowledge of Russian, Chinese or Hebrew is a plus




Major policy conference on the future of aging and longevity

Please consider attending this notable conference in London in February


In addition to academic and government luminaries in the field you will be able to meet representatives of the Biogerontology Research Foundation