Reading age from your lipids
Max Unfried is a longevity researcher who works on one of the most important, least glamorous problems in the whole field: how do you actually measure how old someone is on the inside? Chronological age is easy; biological age is the number that matters — and you can only improve what you can measure.
We first met Max very early on the quest, at the Longevity Summit in Dublin in 2023, while he was completing his doctoral research in Brian Kennedy’s lab in Singapore. His particular angle is unusual and, he argues, badly overlooked: lipids.
Most people hear “lipids” and think fats. But the class is much larger — steroids, cannabinoids and more — and lipids do an enormous amount of work in the body: signalling, energy storage, and the structural stability of every cell membrane. As Max points out, your brain is mostly lipids — and yet, as a window into ageing, they are barely studied compared with the DNA-based epigenetic clocks that get all the attention.
His work is to change that: to build lipid-based measures of biological age as a new modality — sitting alongside epigenetic age, proteomic age and the frailty indexes — and then to use them not just to read ageing but to modulate it, pointing toward new therapies. It is a quietly foundational contribution: better clocks are what let everyone else prove whether an intervention actually works.
