Examining Predictive Markers and Biological Aging

In a recent interview with the Institute for Functional Medicine, Dr. Nathan Price, PhD, spoke about his new research on predictive markers for microbiome diversity and the relationship between the microbiome and aging. Dr. Price is professor and associate director of the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington, where he co-directs the Hood-Price Integrated Lab for Systems Biomedicine.

Dr. Price’s findings on predictive markers, recently published in Nature Biotechnology, show that a person’s level of microbiome diversity could be predicted by measuring metabolites in blood. The findings open the door to an inexpensive and reliable blood test to identify individuals with low gut diversity, a breakthrough in diagnostics for gut microbiome health.

Dr. Price has also been researching the relationship between the metabolome, defined by the number of metabolites in an organism, and the microbiome, as it relates to biological age. Biological age is the age your body calculates it to be after factoring in lifestyle choices and environmental exposures, as opposed to chronological age, which is the age the calendar says you are. Research has shown that an individual’s biological age may serve as a good predictor of overall health and can help clinicians understand a person’s risk for disease. We can manipulate our environment to change the metabolome, which in turn changes our biological age; research has shown that diseases cause biological age to increase while healthy behaviors cause biological age to decrease.

Looking further at the metabolome and microbiome, Dr. Price has been researching additional predictive markers using a “polygenic score.” Single genetic variants tend to be too statistically small to study reliably, but when summing data from multiple genetic variants into a polygenic score, you can predict the effect of a variety of therapeutic interventions with high accuracy. Adding a genetic component to existing clinical blood tests, such as LDL and HDL cholesterol, may translate to personalized therapies for a number of complex diseases.