A new Nature npj Aging paper is in press and exciting for anyone serious about clinically backed approaches to extending healthspan and longevity:
Herzog, C.M., Poganik, J.R., Boekstein, N. et al. Recommendations for biomarker data collection in clinical trials by longevity biotechnology companies.npj Aging (2025).
Instead of proposing yet another aging clock, it tackles the bottleneck that has been quietly holding the whole field back: how we standardize what we collect in human trials so biomarkers can actually be validated, compared, and eventually accepted as clinical endpoints.
Exciting: wearables as aging biomarkers
One of the most forward-looking aspects of the paper is that digital biomarkers from wearables are elevated to first-class citizens alongside molecular biomarkers:
✅ Activity and step count
✅ Heart rate variability
✅ Sleep duration and sleep regularity
✅ Raw accelerometer streams where possible
It also opens a door where nutritional interventions (botanicals/supplements) may be paired with longitudinal wearable data and multi-omic blood profiling, allowing you to ask whether a botanical:
➡️ Slows a pace-of-aging epigenetic clock (e.g., DunedinPACE)?
➡️ Shifts metabolic age derived from NMR metabolomics?
➡️ Improves sleep regularity, HRV, and activity patterns in ways that correlate with better aging trajectories?
Check out some of the highlights this paper proposes as shared infrastructure for assessing a geroprotective (drug, botanical, or nutraceutical) in a clinical aging context (click here to see the PDF post on LinkedIn):