From a single blood sample, new proteomic tools can now measure thousands of proteins at once. Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray’s lab is using that flood of data, together with machine learning, to build a much higher-resolution picture of what’s happening throughout the body and where someone’s health may be headed.
The early signals are striking. In one analysis of people who appeared healthy by conventional measures, every additional 4.1 years of estimated heart age was associated with nearly 2.5 times the risk of heart failure over the following 15 years. Wyss-Coray sees this kind of measurement eventually becoming a “health compass”: something that could show which parts of the body are changing fastest, then help track whether an intervention is actually moving them in the right direction.
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What We Cover:
- How a drop of blood can now reveal information from thousands of proteins
- Why aging appears to happen in waves rather than at a steady rate
- Why one part of the body may age faster than the rest
- What young-blood experiments in mice taught Wyss-Coray about proteins and brain aging
- How the work is moving from whole organs down to individual cell types
- Why the field’s biggest constraint may now be data collection rather than better AI
🎙️ About the Guest:
Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray is the D.H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University and director of the Phil and Penny Knight Initiative for Brain Resilience.
📍What Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray & Mike Haney discussed:
- 04:03 Proteins 101: the building blocks hiding information about your health
- 05:09 How one blood sample can measure thousands of proteins
- 09:07 Using machine learning to find patterns in the proteome
- 12:17 Can blood reveal what’s happening inside the brain?
- 13:11 What happened when young blood was given to old mice
- 19:45 Why aging may happen in waves rather than at a steady rate
- 29:24 How stable are protein measurements over time?
- 32:37 Can proteins predict disease years before it appears?
- 40:35 Why one part of your body may age faster than the rest
- 46:31 The missing test: does an intervention actually change the measurement?
- 51:04 Going from whole organs to individual cell types
- 54:10 Why more data, not better AI, is the current bottleneck
- 57:18 A future “health compass” for the body
🔗 Helpful Links:
- Organ aging signatures in the plasma proteome track health and disease (Nature, 2023)Paper
The foundational organ-aging work discussed in the episode, using plasma proteins to estimate aging across 11 organs. - Plasma proteomic signatures of cellular aging predict human disease (Nature Medicine, 2026)Paper
The newer study extending the approach to more than 40 cell types using over 7,000 plasma proteins. - Undulating changes in human plasma proteome profiles across the lifespan (Nature Medicine, 2019)Paper
- Young blood reverses age-related impairments in cognitive function and synaptic plasticity in mice (Nature Medicine, 2014)Paper
- UK Biobank Research resource
The large longitudinal cohort used for much of the disease-prediction work discussed in the episode.
Watch the conversation: https://youtu.be/1dfMBAZiP8o
Find us on YouTube: https://youtube.com/levelshealth?sub_confirmation=1
📲 Connect:
Connect with Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray at Stanford
👋 Who we are:
Levels helps you understand your metabolic health with personalized data, expert guidance, and tools that connect your daily choices to measurable changes in your body. Our goal is to help you make better decisions about food, exercise, sleep, and long-term health.
Look for new shows every month on A Whole New Level, where we have in-depth conversations with thought leaders about metabolic health.
