Dr. Patrick: So I wanted to talk a little bit about the ageotypes, and how you've used all this data, you know, a variety of, you know, metabolites, and the proteome, and the genome, and just other biomarkers as well, to, kind of, look at how people are aging. And what their predisposition is to, you know, a disease of the brain versus a disease of the heart versus a disease of the liver, for example.

Dr. Snyder: Well, I mentioned before that we take tons of measurements on people including their microbiome and all kinds of molecules. And for the most part, your molecules don't change. There are interesting time...believe it or not, there are seasonal changes. And we argue there's two seasons in California. So you'll see changes in some molecules with seasons. But the other is by following people over time, we can see how they're aging. And it's the first time it's been done in this kind of detail. And so normally, when they study aging, they look at difference between old people and young people and say, oh, old people have this and young people have that.

And therefore, like, hemoglobin A1C, marker of diabetes, old people have, you know, more and young people don't, therefore, it changes over time. And what we discovered...and I don't think it's a surprise, but it's nice to show is that people are aging differently. So I'm a metabolic kidney, liver ager, but my immune system is not aging so much. Another person, he's a cardio ager, his cardiac pathways are changing the most rapidly over time. We think you only need about five measurements within two years, we can tell how you're aging, and again, everybody is aging differently. So we think of it, like, a car where, you know, you have a car, the whole thing does get older, but some parts wear out first. And so we think that's what's going on.

And you know, the cardio ager, the heart, we later learned that person was stage two hypertensive, which kind of fits with the idea that cardiovascular system was going off. And so in the end, we had 43 people with enough data, we can group them into these classifications, ageotypes, we like to call them, what's your ageotype? And it was kidney, and liver, immune, and metabolic aging. Now, I know there's more than that, there's a cardio ager, but we only had one of those, so we didn't have...there'll be many categories of ageotypes. And we're about to analyze more people soon so we'll see just how many categories we can come up with.

But everybody ages differently. And so you might say, so what? And by the way, we can see some people will go up...there's clinical markers associated with these. And the metabolic ageotype, you'll see people's hemoglobin A1C and other things going up. But what's kind of cool is some people have theirs going down. So what did they do to make theirs go down? Well, you can go back and look at the data and some people did, exercise is an easy one. They exercised, they lost weight, and that makes a lot of sense.

But there's other things we didn't realize, like, there's a molecule called creatine which is a marker of kidney function, and we discovered that's known to go up over time. But we discovered we had a whole bunch of individuals who were going down for the creatinines, like, what's going on there? Well, 8 out of 10 of them were on statins. So our hypothesis is that the statins might be helping. It could relate to muscle mass, but we didn't detect any changes in muscle mass based on some of the measurements we're doing. So it may be that statins improve kidney function, nobody really realized it, that's possible. It's something we're going to follow up on.

So by correlating, you know, how people are changing, we can see what's going on. I think we can do more than that. I think if you're a kidney ager, maybe you drink more water. If you're a liver ager, maybe you shouldn't drink so much alcohol. You know, we think, again, it's actionable information. If you're an immuno-ager, maybe you want to take, you know, turmeric or curcumin. Some garlic things that should, you know, help with your immune system, give you a little immune burst. So we think the information does have value and now we can run trials on the stuff.

Here's another interesting way to look at it. In today's world, if you walk into a drugstore, you'll see a whole aisle on supplements, you know, a lot of them purporting to, you know, give you longevity. And you'd have no way of knowing if that's working. Almost anything that's put out there that tells, you know, this works for increasing your lifespan, how do you know? There's no way of measuring. So we think by measuring these people's ageotypes, if you will, it's in a timeframe that's actionable, you can see how people are aging, you try an intervention and see if you can reverse it or at least slow it down.