HOOKE London, a pioneering, preventative healthcare service, is proud to announce the establishment of the HOOKE Research Fund at the Belsky Lab, which is housed in the Robert N. Butler Columbia Ageing Center at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.
 
HOOKE delivers personalised, integrated care to optimise health and well-being, focusing on early diagnosis and prevention. HOOKE’s clients benefit from the latest developments in longevity science, guided by its Scientific Advisory Board. All testing and health optimisation programmes are developed with the goal of extending healthy years of life (Healthspan).
 
The Fund is dedicated to advancing research that develops, refines, and validates the composite biomarkers of ageing, using de-identified data from half a million UK Biobank participants.
 
The lab, headed by Dan Belsky, Associate Professor of Epidemiology at the Robert N. Butler Columbia University Ageing Center, Columbia Mailman School and a HOOKE Scientific Advisory Board member, is at the forefront of research into practical metrics that quantify human ageing and anti-ageing interventions.

The Fund is initiating a research project with the following goals:

1. Validation of a biomarker score developed by HOOKE London.

The HOOKE Bioscore is a practical tool for assessing an individual’s health in comparison to others of the same age and sex. It evaluates a range of markers in four key areas to create a detailed health profile, helping identify  points for improvement or maintenance:

1. Physical Fitness: Cardiovascular capacity, strength, and endurance.

2. Physiology: The health of key age-dependent physiological pathways.

3. Cognitive Function: Cognitive abilities most sensitive to ageing.

4. Emotional Fitness: Stress resilience and emotional well-being.

 Combining data from these different biological systems may provide a more accurate measure of a person’s “biological age”, overcoming the limitations of DNA methylation clocks, which are the current gold standard in the field.
 
Findings from the Belsky Lab will enable HOOKE to validate this score, ensuring it is scientifically robust and can guide personalised longevity strategie

2. Integration of wearables data into the biomarker score.

This wearables project will follow the validation of the BioScore. The scientific premise of the wearables work is that ageing erodes the integrity of cells, tissues, and organs in ways that may be detectable in wearables data. For example, alterations to balance and gait, or exercise and recovery capacity. However, algorithms that extract relevant parameters from wearables data do not yet exist.
 
The goal is to use wearables data to track the pace and progress of ageing, and predict risks for age-related health conditions.
 
Developing such algorithms could enable individuals to monitor their ageing and track their response to lifestyle changes. In parallel, such algorithms could offer clinical trials new ways to measure the impact of interventions aimed at slowing ageing, preserving function and extending healthspan.
 
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Find out more about the evolution of integrative healthcare here.