Would you rather be biologically or chronologically young? As life expectancy continues to increase, on average, worldwide, attention is increasingly focussing on biological age, which has been shown to be better predictor of mortality than chronological age. An ongoing challenge to researchers is the identification of robust, universal predictors of the biological clock.
A new study published in Nature Medicine points to plasma-derived proteins as being promising biomarkers. The researchers from Stanford University used UK Biobank data to identify sets of proteins whose abundance in blood plasma correlates with the phenotypic age of various organs, including the brain, heart, lung and immune tissue. The sets of proteins were found to be good predictors of the future onset of a range of diseases such as heart failure, type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer's.
As patent attorneys, it is interesting to consider the types of patentable innovations that may emerge from this type of research. Whilst the scientific discovery of the sets of proteins is not eligible for patentability, a diagnostic method based on the detection of those proteins in blood plasma could be. For example, a method to predict biological age, or a disease risk, based on the levels of certain proteins could in principle be patentable. Since the proteins would be analysed from blood plasma, the diagnostic process would not be performed on the human body, and therefore it escapes the patentability exclusion in Europe for diagnostic methods performed on the human body.
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