A new Perspective published in Nature Medicine tackles a problem central to the Human Immunome Project’s mission: there is still no agreed-upon way to measure how the immune system ages. The paper, “Immune Aging Biomarkers for Clinical Trials,” brings together a multidisciplinary group of immunologists, clinical trialists, and geroscientists to propose five evaluation criteria—immune relevance, temporal association, internal validity, predictive value, and responsiveness—for assessing candidate biomarkers, and applies them within the real-world context of the XPRIZE Healthspan competition.
HIP Co-Chief Scientific Officers Shai Shen-Orr and John Tsang are among the paper’s co-authors, joining researchers from Stanford, Yale, UConn, University College London, the National Institute on Aging, and other leading institutions. The framework identifies two nonredundant biomarkers—iAge and IMM-AGE—as the field’s most promising candidates today, while calling for longitudinal, multimodal cohorts and scalable functional assays to close the remaining gaps.
The paper underscores a challenge HIP was built to address: understanding immune diversity and function requires population-scale, longitudinal data that no single lab or trial can generate alone.
Read the full paper in Nature Medicine.
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