An age for each organ is read from the proteins in a person's blood
A single number for a person's biological age hides that their heart may be old and their liver young. In 2023 a Stanford group measured thousands of proteins in the blood of over five thousand people, assigned each protein to the organ that makes it, and read an age for eleven organs per person. About one person in five had at least one organ ageing fast, and a fast-ageing heart predicted heart failure, a fast-ageing brain predicted dementia, over the following fifteen years. It is the kind of reading a trial of a repair treatment would want: not whether the person is younger, but whether the organ the treatment aimed at is. It is a research tool, not a test anyone can order from a doctor.
What would count
A panel of blood proteins read as an age for each of several organs predicts disease of that organ better than calendar age, in two or more independent groups of at least a thousand people followed for years, in peer-reviewed reports. For the clinic rung: a regulator clears such a panel as a medical test, or a named health system uses it in routine care and publishes that practice.
Who settles it: Peer-reviewed validation reports; the regulator's clearance record, or a named health system's published practice, for the clinic rung.
Where it stands
First human. Reached 6 December 2023, on the record of doi.org. Next rung within 5 to 20 years.
When it reaches the clinic: the project's estimate
This is the one thing on this page that is a judgment rather than a record. The project's estimate of the year it reaches the clinic is 2036, no earlier than 2029 and no later than 2070; the model draws from that range every run, with the likely year the most probable draw. Set 16 October 2026, a first pass awaiting an outside review.
| Rung | No earlier than | Most likely | No later than | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| In clinical use | 2029 | 2036 | 2070 | feeds the year at the top |
Why. The protein-measuring platforms are expensive and the panels are two years old; the likely year assumes a health system publishes routine use of an organ-age panel around 2036, after a few years of cheaper assays; the earliest assumes a specialist clinic's published practice counts sooner; the latest allows for the panels staying a research tool.
Changes to this record
None since it was written on 16 October 2026. Every change to the stage or the estimate lands here with its date, the old value, the new one and the reason, and a change to the estimate never happens because a number looked wrong: it needs a dated reason and a source.
The last readings
- 17 October 2026 Quiet
Nothing dated in the window 2026-10-10 to 2026-10-17 bears on the test. The searches returned the 2023 Nature paper the leaf rests on, the 2025 Nature Medicine UK Biobank follow-up the verify list already names, a Nature Communications paper on the genetics of organ ageing in 51,936 UK Biobank people, and a paper titled 'Patterns of organ-specific proteomic aging in relation to lifestyle, diseases, and mortality' (PMC12686593, date, cohort and authors not seen) that may be a further independent group for the verify list's question and should be opened in a session that can reach PubMed Central. A Time profile of Tony Wyss-Coray from about 2026-08-20 says the company he co-founded, Vero Bioscience, is running clinical studies of the organ-age tests, which is neither a clearance nor a published routine practice. A third search for this leaf was not run because the shared search budget ran out.source 1, source 2, source 3
What the story so far says about it
No promise, self-experiment or logged paper names this one yet.
Notes
The protein approach and the DNA-mark clocks (the companion leaf) are the two main families of ageing marker; this one is newer and has the organ-by-organ reading the other lacks. Neither is a medical test yet. The regulator-acceptance leaf is where either would have to go to count for a trial.
Not yet verified
These facts in the record were written from memory or from a secondary source and have not yet been checked against the paper, the regulator's record or the registry. Nothing here is presented as settled until it is cleared, by checking it and either deleting the line or correcting the record.
- The 2025 follow-up (Oh, Wyss-Coray and colleagues, Nature Medicine, online 2025-07-09; 44,498 people in the UK Biobank) is from the same group and so is not the second independent group; an independent group (Goeminne, Gladyshev and colleagues, Cell Metabolism, online 2024-11-01) reported organ-specific protein ages predicting organ-specific disease in over 50,000 people. Whether the test's 'two or more independent groups' is met, and from when, has not been ruled.