Younger Contest Puts Aging Clocks Head-to-Head in a Six-Month Public Trial

Aging clocks have proliferated rapidly — there are now hundreds measuring biological age from epigenetics, blood proteins, face photographs, cognitive performance, and functional tests like grip strength and VO2 max. Clinical trials have begun using them as endpoints, yet the field still lacks consensus on what each clock measures and how they relate to one another. Younger, a public six-month competition, is designed to generate exactly that comparative data at scale while simultaneously helping participants lower their own biological age.

The standard entry panel includes epigenetic clocks and eleven organ-system ages from a dried blood spot, a 30-minute smartphone cognitive test, a face photo scored by Harvard's FaceAge algorithm, and home-based functional tests covering VO2 max, grip strength, and sit-to-stand performance. An ultra tier adds two brain MRIs with volumetric analysis, a proteomic organ-age panel from Vero Bioscience, pre-release methylation clocks from Dr. Raghav Sehgal's Harvard lab, NeuroAge's RNA blood test of brain aging, and a DEXA scan. Some of these tests — particularly the Vero proteomic clock — are not yet commercially available, making the contest the only current access point.

The project lands at an important moment. A recent Nature Biotechnology reanalysis of a Phase IIa trial of Insilico Medicine's lung fibrosis drug rentosertib found that treated patients tested 2.7–3.5 years younger on six proteomic clocks, though researchers noted they cannot yet separate genuine aging slowdown from a treated lung. A 2024 Nature Medicine consensus paper from Dr. Mahdi Moqri, Dr. Luigi Ferrucci, Dr. Steve Horvath, and colleagues began mapping relationships among clocks — work that large datasets from competitions like Younger could accelerate.

The public-health framing is explicit. Researchers such as Dr. Andrew Scott and Dr. David Sinclair have valued even one additional healthy year of US life expectancy at roughly $38 trillion. Delaying dementia onset by five years could reduce its prevalence by approximately 41 percent. Helping a large cohort measurably lower biological age — and making the methods transparent — is positioned as a direct contribution toward squaring the health curve.

Participants receive personalized recommendations, community access, and monthly webinars. Reporters, longevity founders, and scientists compete alongside the public, many sharing results publicly, which creates an informal observational layer on top of the formal measurements.