Deep Longevity, Inc, a leading provider of deep biomarkers of ageing and longevity, announced the use of saliva samples for their blood epigenetic ageing clock without sacrificing its performance.
Endurance RP Limited’s wholly-owned subsidiary Deep Longevity, Inc, a leading provider of deep biomarkers of ageing and longevity is pleased to announce the publication of its Frontiers in Aging article “Adapting blood DNAm aging clocks for use in saliva samples with cell-type deconvolution.”
Blood is the most popular human tissue used for clinical analysis. It is a liquid tissue that permeates all other organs and thus reflects the state of the whole organism. Blood is also preferred by most biogerontologists, who study the ageing process and its footprints.
In the meantime, drawing blood is a painful procedure that requires an appointment with a clinic — something many consumers are unwilling to do. Saliva is a much easier tissue to collect, for example, with home kits.
Last year, Deep Longevity released the most accurate epigenetic ageing clock — DeepMAge. It uses the information about DNA modification to estimate one’s pace of ageing, which has been shown to be associated with cancer, dementia, and irritable bowel disease. However, DeepMAge could only be used with blood samples, which limited the range of its use-cases.
The Frontiers publication demonstrates how the same blood-trained model can be repurposed for saliva samples with practically no drop in performance. Originally, DeepMAge could predict human age with 20.9 years of error when used on saliva, but the new adjustment restored its accuracy to 4.7 years. The adjustment makes use of the inherent heterogeneity of saliva samples that consist of variable proportions of epithelial and immune cells. These cell types age at a different speed, and when they are mixed, the organismal pace of ageing is blurred. Cell-type deconvolution method EpiDISH allows obtaining the composition of a saliva sample with no additional information needed. Combining this method with a blood ageing clock salvages its performance.
Now, DeepMAge and other blood-trained ageing clocks can be easily applied to saliva, which enables a variety of consumer-friendly applications of the biogerontological models. [APBN]
Source: Endurance RP Limited