Research Perspective|Volume 17, Issue 8|pp 1911—1928

Age-related diseases as a testbed for anti-aging therapeutics: the case of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

Alex Zhavoronkov^1,^2,^3,⁴, Dominika Wilczok⁵, Feng Ren^1,^2,^3,⁶, Fedor Galkin¹

¹Insilico Medicine AI Limited, Abu Dhabi, UAE
²Insilico Medicine US, Inc., Boston, MA 02138, USA
³Insilico Medicine Hong Kong Ltd., Hong Kong Science and Technology Park, Hong Kong SAR, China
⁴Buck Institute for Research on Aging, Novato, CA 94945, USA
⁵Duke University, Durham, NC 27708, USA
⁶Insilico Medicine Shanghai Ltd., Shanghai, China

Received: March 17, 2025Accepted: July 22, 2025Published: August 16, 2025

https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.206301

Copyright: © 2025 Zhavoronkov et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

While aging-related diseases are often used as proxies for the general aging process in research, they largely differ in terms of how integral their development is to organismal aging. Hallmarks of aging offer a convenient conceptual framework to assess the relevance of a disease to the anti-aging narrative. In this review, we propose hallmark decomposition as a method of measuring the potential of a therapy to translate from a disease-specific treatment to a general geroprotector. To help other researchers adopt and improve this methodology, we are releasing a disease scoring system and report the hallmark alignment of 13 aging-related diseases, among which IPF is the disease most aligned with aging.