A team of researchers, led by André Rendeiro—Group Leader at our institute and Principal Investigator at CeMM—has developed an innovative AI-based method to estimate biological age using tissue images and blood samples.

In a breakthrough study published in Nature Medicine, the team—comprising international collaborators and group members, including shared first authors Iva Buljan, Ernesto Abila, and Yimin Zheng—established tissue-specific “biological clocks” capable of measuring the physiological age of individual organs.

By analyzing over 25,000 images, the study reveals distinct organ-specific aging patterns across eight diseases, bridging the gap between molecular changes and systemic aging. Ultimately, this approach promises to enable the monitoring of multi-organ aging through a simple blood test, offering a powerful new tool to assess health decline and manage age-associated diseases.

Read the full Open Access paper: Nature Medicine Study