Key invention on chronic inflammation may unlock secret to long life

Bengaluru: Chronic inflammation plays a crucial role in diseases throughout a person’s lifespan, not just in the elderly.

Since chronic inflammation has no specific markers, researchers have developed the Inflammatory Aging Clock as part of the 1000 Immunomes Project to study it in detail, said David Furman from the Buck Institute for Research.

Furman said this while delivering a talk on ‘Future Predictive Analytics of Ageing: If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Change It’ on the second day of the Longevity India Conference 2025 at IISc in Bengaluru.

“Using proteomics (the study of proteins) data and AI, we developed the inflammatory age index,” Furman explained. “We can predict an individual’s frailty based on their inflammatory age. Immune function also declines in individuals with a high inflammatory age. We know that those who achieve exceptional longevity — people aged 100 and older — tend to have a lower inflammatory age on average, and we can even predict mortality based on this data.”

A panel discussion on 'Longevity for Billions', featuring industry leaders such as Vandana Lal from Lal Path Labs, was moderated by Gaurav Agarwal, CTO of Tata 1mg. The panel also included Prabhdeep Kaur from Longevity India, Hanno Steen from Harvard Medical College, and Furman. The panellists discussed the democratisation of diagnostic technology to make it accessible to the masses.

Lal said diagnostic tests cannot remain prohibitively expensive if they are to reach the 90 crore citizens living in rural India. She also stressed the need to raise health awareness at the grassroots level.

Kaur called for greater collaboration between industry, academia, and the government to facilitate the rapid exchange of ideas and increase research and development (R&D )funding.