Andrew Huberman· PhD
Now the concentration of these 11,000 proteins and there's large population based cohorts uh where people follow healthy people over two decades or even longer now and they collected blood and so we can profile this blood now and we can ask are proteins in that blood related to what diseases people develop or how they age. And the way how we make this what people call a clock for a specific organ is we look in your blood for proteins for example from the brain. So out of these thousands of proteins that we can measure in the blood. Some of them originate from your brain. Some originate from the lung, from the liver, from the heart. And we've always used that in clinical medicine, but we measure only a handful of proteins. It's usually a few liver proteins, a few heart proteins and we use them to assess injury or um uh loss of function. So if your liver is damaged, that's what we detect. But here we have now an opportunity to look in thousands of people at proteins that come for example from the liver and ask how do they change with age? And that allows us to then estimate the age of the liver in an individual. And what we find is that for most people, the age of your organs is pretty much in sync with your body. But for some individuals, you have more or less of a deviation. So your liver may age faster um than that of the rest of the population and the rest of your body. And what is really super exciting, we call this an age gap. So the difference between your actual age and the estimated age of your organ.