Highlights of Hope Spring/Summer 23

New cellular ‘clock’ offers fresh
way to measure age
Can parts of our bodies age faster
than others?
The answer is yes, and VAI scientists
have developed a new way to measure
exactly how.
Their findings, published in Nature
Communications, detail a new method for
pinpointing cellular age that evaluates the
number of times a cell has divided rather
than relying on chronological time. The
more cells replicate, the more likely they will
accumulate errors over time that contribute
to diseases such as cancer.
The research was led by Dr. Jamie Endicott,
a Van Andel Institute Graduate School
student who recently earned her Ph.D. in
the lab of VAI Professor Dr. Peter W. Laird.
Laird and Associate Professor Dr. Hui Shen
were the corresponding authors of the study.
“Cellular aging is a major risk factor for
many chronic diseases, but it can be tough
to measure. Our cellular ‘clock’ gives us
powerful new insights into biological aging,
how it differs between cells within a single
person, and how it may impact a person’s
likelihood of developing disease,” Endicott
said. “We have more work to do, but our
goal is to translate our method into a
test with broad uses, such as evaluating
the effect of chemotherapy on cells and
measuring whether immune cells become
‘exhausted’ and thus less effective when
fighting infection or cancer.”
Scientists have long sought an accurate
and simple way to measure biological age
to better understand its role in health and
disease. Although other methods exist,
Endicott’s is the first of its kind. It works by
measuring the progressive loss of special
chemical tags on DNA called methyl groups,
which regulate when genes are “on” or
“off.” The loss of these marks, which occur
throughout a person’s life and correlate
with cell divisions rather than chronological
age, foreshadow alterations found in cancer
cells. The new method builds on earlier
research by Laird, Shen and collaborators.
Here’s what this process looks like: Think
of a healthy 50-year-old person. Endicott’s
new cellular clock may reveal that person’s
cells are more akin to those in a 45-yearold
than a 50-year-old, meaning they are
aging more slowly than their chronological
age. The reverse is also true: someone who
smokes, for example, may have lung cells
that age faster than their chronological
age, which puts them at a higher risk for
developing diseases such as lung cancer.
“Jamie’s work is an important step
toward a larger goal: utilizing these
‘clocks’ to help patients,” Laird said. “We
will continue to refine and calibrate our
method in the hope that we will one day
be able to apply it to real-life situations,
such as risk assessment and clinical
decision-making.”
Research reported in this publication was supported by
Van Andel Institute and the National Institute on Aging
of the National Institutes of Health under award no.
R01AG066764 (Laird and Shen). The content is solely the
responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily
represent the official views of the National Institutes of
Health. Approximately 50% of the funding for this study
came from federal sources; approximately 50% came
from non-federal sources.
DR. JAMIE ENDICOTT
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