OMICmAge
OMICmAge is a biological-age clock read from your DNA methylation. The clever part: it is trained to also reflect your proteins, metabolites, and routine lab values, without measuring those directly at test time. It was developed by Chen, Dwaraka, Carreras-Gallo, Higgins-Chen, Lasky-Su and colleagues, and published in Nature Aging (2026) after a 2023 preprint. Here is how it is built. First, the team made EMRAge, a death-risk score from 19 clinical lab values across about 31,000 Mass General Brigham Biobank records. Then a method called elastic-net regression modeled EMRAge from a pool of 396 methylation-based stand-ins (EBPs). Those stand-ins cover 266 metabolites, 109 proteins, and 21 clinical measures. The final clock keeps 40 of them (16 protein, 14 metabolite, 10 clinical), plus 990 CpG methylation sites. So it packs multi-omic information into something you read from DNA methylation alone. It was tested in two independent groups: TruDiagnostic (n=14,213) and Generation Scotland (n=18,672). A faster OMICmAge went with type 2 diabetes, stroke, heart disease, COPD, depression, and cancer. Its 5- and 10-year death-prediction scores (AUC about 0.89 and 0.87) beat PCGrimAge and plain age by a few points. It is still a research tool. No regulator has cleared it as a diagnostic, and its link to aging itself stays associational.
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Sources
- Chen Q, Dwaraka VB, Carreras-Gallo N, Armstrong JF, Sehgal R, Argentieri MA, et al.. (2026). OMICmAge quantifies biological age by integrating multi-omics with electronic medical records. *Nature Aging*doi:10.1038/s43587-026-01073-7
- Chen Q, Dwaraka VB, Carreras-Gallo N, Mendez K, Chen Y, Begum S, et al.. (2023). OMICmAge: An integrative multi-omics approach to quantify biological age with electronic medical records. *bioRxiv*doi:10.1101/2023.10.16.562114