Research Perspective Advance Articles
Age-related diseases as a testbed for anti-aging therapeutics: the case of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis
- 1 Insilico Medicine AI Limited, Abu Dhabi, UAE
- 2 Insilico Medicine US, Inc., Boston, MA 02138, USA
- 3 Insilico Medicine Hong Kong Ltd., Hong Kong Science and Technology Park, Hong Kong SAR, China
- 4 Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Novato, CA 94945, USA
- 5 Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA
- 6 Insilico Medicine Shanghai Ltd., Shanghai, China
Received: March 17, 2025 Accepted: July 22, 2025 Published: August 16, 2025
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.206301How to Cite
Copyright: © 2025 Zhavoronkov et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
While aging-related diseases are often used as proxies for the general aging process in research, they largely differ in terms of how integral their development is to organismal aging. Hallmarks of aging offer a convenient conceptual framework to assess the relevance of a disease to the anti-aging narrative. In this review, we propose hallmark decomposition as a method of measuring the potential of a therapy to translate from a disease-specific treatment to a general geroprotector. To help other researchers adopt and improve this methodology, we are releasing a disease scoring system and report the hallmark alignment of 13 aging-related diseases, among which IPF is the disease most aligned with aging.
Abbreviations
ARD: Aging-related disease; AAV: Adeno-associated virus; ECM: Extracellular matrix; GOBP: Gene Ontology Biological Processes ontology; HDAC: Histone deacetylase; IPF: Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis; MMP: Matrix metalloproteinase; NAFLD: Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease; NCBI: National Center for Biotechnology Information; TERT: Telomerase reverse transcriptase; TGF-β: Transforming growth factor β; TNIK: TRAF2 and NCK interacting kinase; TNF-α: Tumor necrosis factor α.