From population science to the clinic? Limits of epigenetic clocks as personal biomarkers
clinical paper · 2025
LINK
SUMMARY
Peer-reviewed 2025 analysis in Epigenomics concluding that epigenetic ('DNA methylation') clocks, the surrogate-marker technology underlying Blueprint's central biological-age claims, 'fail to meet common standards for clinical utility compared with established biomarkers,' that the CpG sites driving their predictions 'may be correlated with aging rather than causally involved in it,' and that applying them to individual-level decision-making 'can be uninformative and potentially harmful.' DOI confirmed via doi.org resolver (redirects to tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17501911.2025.2603880); PMID confirmed directly on PubMed (title, authors, journal, year, volume/issue/pages, and DOI all match). Peer-reviewed tier source under the sourced-critique standard.
NOTES
This paper is the case’s central peer-reviewed source for the vague/surrogate-mechanism stage: it is not written about Bryan Johnson specifically, but it is a direct, recent, peer-reviewed assessment of the exact class of biomarker (epigenetic clocks) that Blueprint’s marketing uses as its evidentiary anchor, concluding that clocks are population-level research tools not validated for the individual-level anti-aging claims Blueprint makes.