How old are you, really? Biological aging tech from Duke inventors spotlighted on TV
Duke inventors Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, both professors in Psychology & Neuroscience (Trinity College of Arts and Sciences), were recently spotlighted on Predict My Future, a docuseries produced by Razor Films and airing on the New Zealand-based TVNZ network.
Moffitt and Caspi have been leaders of an international effort to track the health and wellness of 1,000 New Zealanders born in 1972-1973, known as the Dunedin Study.
“It’s a study of life,” Caspi says in the show. “Because we’ve been able to track people over time and monitor changes across multiple different organ systems, we actually have a way to document this kind of coordinated decline of the body over time.”
The impact of the work has been widespread, generating over 1,300 peer-review publications and sparking public policy changes like making juvenile justice systems less punitive across the world.
“From a small country that is even often left off the world map to now it’s at the point where you can’t really talk about aging in a scientific venue, you can’t talk about mental health, without mentioning the findings from the Dunedin Study,” Moffitt says in the show.
One innovation along this journey has been the development of DunedinPACE, software to measure biological aging based on 19 biomarkers from various organ systems. These markers are epigenetic, or focused on the factors that turn genes on and off, so tests can be run on a DNA sample – in this case, a bit of blood.
DunedinPACE is freely available to researchers through GitHub, but the Kentucky-based company TruDiagnostic licensed the DunedinPACE technology through Duke’s Office for Translation & Commercialization in 2021 to develop a commercial product.
Called the TruAge Test, the product has appeared in publications like Bloomberg and on TV shows like The Kardashians.
Moffitt has learned to embrace the publicity. “At first, I was a little mortified by that kind of attention,” she said, “but then I thought: This is probably the best public education about epigenetics.”
Moffitt says she and Caspi never dreamed this project would take off commercially like it has and hopes it will continue to provide more healthcare insights as it grows.
“Once we get past the cute party trick stage, I hope it will be used as an outcome measure in clinical trials of any kind of treatment that’s supposed to improve health or slow aging,” Moffit said, citing wide-ranging applications for tackling health issues from Alzheimer’s to sleep apnea.
For other Duke researchers who are getting media interest, Moffitt encourages getting media training from the University Marketing and Communications team and being cognizant of journalists’ timelines.
“Their time frame is really different from the scientific and academic time frame. They often are given an assignment on Friday and they have got to have it ready for the Sunday newspaper,” she said. “We’ve got to get in there with them, empathize with the situation that they’re in, and not drag our feet when we’re communicating with them.”
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