Insilico Introduces Virtual Aging Cell, a Model Designed to Account for a Cell’s Biological Age
Insilico Introduces Virtual Aging Cell, a Model Designed to Account for a Cell’s Biological Age
On August 14, Insilico Medicine launched the Virtual Aging Cell webpage, which offers a preview of a project under development. The page includes a demonstration interface populated with artificially generated data. The proposed model takes the organism species, tissue, biological age, and compound as inputs.
A virtual cell is a computational model that predicts a molecular response under specified conditions. Biological age is estimated from data describing the state of a cell and may differ from the organism’s chronological age. In its description of Virtual Aging Cell, Insilico proposes specifying the organism species, tissue, biological age, and compound to compare the predicted response to the same intervention across different biological ages.
In an analysis of context in virtual cell models, the same genetic intervention produced different changes in gene activity depending on the cell state, donor, and observation timepoint. In Insilico’s description, age is one of the specified conditions, alongside tissue and compound.
The company states that the future model will generate three types of profiles: gene activity, protein composition, and DNA methylation, which consists of chemical marks on DNA. Insilico expects these calculations to help researchers compare the predicted effect of a compound on a tissue at different biological ages and select a hypothesis for the next laboratory experiment.
The idea has precedents. In 2023, the Precious1GPT model estimated biological age from gene activity and DNA methylation. A year later, the Precious2GPT model generated synthetic gene activity and DNA methylation profiles for a specified organism species, tissue, and age.
Virtual Aging Cell extends this approach to a new question: how a selected tissue at a specified biological age will respond to a compound. The resulting hypothesis would then be tested in a laboratory experiment.