NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Insilico Medicine announced today that it has partnered with Singapore-based molecular diagnostics firm Asia Genomics to develop biomarkers of aging and longevity for Asian populations.
Under the terms of the deal, the companies will identify personalized aging-related biomarkers based on individuals' age-annotated genomic and transcriptomic data. They also aim to develop an age-predicting algorithm that will be incorporated into multiple deep neural networks trained and tested on Asian blood chemistry samples.
Additional terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
"Asia Genomics is one of the leading molecular diagnostics and genomics companies in Asia with state-of-the-art equipment and highly qualified staff educated in top international universities," Insilico CEO Alex Zhavoronkov said in a statement. "We are honored to be selected as one of the providers of high-technology solutions for personalized longevity research."
The company originally opened its doors in March 2014 with a product called Geroscope, a computational platform for screening and predicting the effectiveness of drugs that suppress aging-related processes. At the time, Zhavoronkov told GenomeWeb that the platform "could take gene expression data from the 'young cell' and look at the signaling pathway activation profile that is characteristic to that tissue and to that specific age of the patient" and then compare it to the same sort of data collected from cells in older individuals.