Albert Higgins-Chen, MD, PhD (Yale) || Special Seminar

Albert Higgins-Chen, MD, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Yale School of Medicine

“A Shared Language for Aging Biology: from model organisms to human trials”

Epigenetic clocks have become the most widely used biomarkers of aging across species, yet the field still lacks consensus on how to best measure aging from DNA methylation and translate results across these systems. Our vision is to build that shared language—next-generation epigenetic clocks and multi-omic biomarkers, assembled from large, harmonized methylation datasets and refined with AI—so that findings at the bench can be translated into signals that hold up in human clinical trials, and I’ll describe the progress and challenges along the way. I’ll highlight the tools and resources we are developing toward this goal (including methylCIPHER, TranslAGE, CpG Atlas, CpG Library, HarmonyAgent – all components of our POLARIS ecosystem) and how the epigenetics community can help shape and use them to test interventions, compare clocks, and design trials.

This event is being hosted by Lucie Guo, MD, PhD.