ComputAgeBench: Epigenetic Aging Clocks Benchmark

Abstract

The success of clinical trials of longevity drugs relies heavily on identifying integrative health and aging biomarkers, such as biological age. Epigenetic aging clocks predict the biological age of an individual using their DNA methylation profiles, commonly retrieved from blood samples. However, there is no standardized methodology to validate and compare epigenetic clock models as yet. We propose ComputAgeBench, a unifying framework that comprises such a methodology and a dataset for comprehensive benchmarking of different clinically relevant aging clocks. Our methodology exploits the core idea that reliable aging clocks must be able to distinguish between healthy individuals and those with aging-accelerating conditions. Specifically, we collected and harmonized 66 public datasets of blood DNA methylation, covering 19 such conditions across different ages, and tested 13 published clock models. Additionally, we compiled 46 separate datasets to facilitate the training of new aging clocks. We believe our work will bring the fields of aging biology and machine learning closer together for the research on reliable biomarkers of health and aging.