Kejun Ying

On 20–21 September 2025, the 6th TimePie Longevity Forum convened approximately 2,500 participants from 16 countries in Shanghai. Attendees spanned aging biology, biomarker development and clinical geroscience. The forum’s aim was to bridge mechanistic discoveries with translational applications, with a particular emphasis on biomarker frameworks capable of guiding intervention testing in humans.

Abstract Drugs for aging-related diseases may modulate aging itself, but standard clinical trial designs cannot detect such effects. Aging clocks could close this gap, but epigenetic models often yield inconsistent, hard-to-interpret results. In contrast, proteomic clocks, by tracking the immediate effectors of biological change, may excel in providing aging biomarkers or mechanistic insight.

Chronological age alone cannot capture the heterogeneity in how individuals age1. Robust biomarkers are needed both to evaluate interventions that target the aging process and to stratify individuals by disease risk. Over the past decade, epigenetic clocks have provided quantitative tools for measuring biological age2,3, and mortality-predictive models such as GrimAge4 and PhenoAge5 have extended their clinical relevance.