Epigenetics: a New Frontier In Health
Dr. Daniel Herranz
PhD thesis: On the epigenetic ageing clock in humans
University of Cambridge / EMBL-EBI
During my PhD, I focused on expanding our understanding of the epigenetic clock in humans, the most accurate biomarker of the ageing process. More especifically, I discovered that mutations in the H3K36 methyltransferase NSD1, which cause Sotos syndrome, accelerate epigenetic ageing. I also developed a computational method, cuRRBS, which solves the problem of enriching for a set of genomic sites using restriction enzymes, therefore reducing associated sequencing costs.
Chronomics is an AI driven platform unlocking the power of epigenetics for personalized healthcare. We aim to drive the burgeoning data driven wellness and personalized healthcare genomics industries by revealing epigenetic factors affecting welfare and chronic disease. Our platform will leverage our expertise in DNA methylation analysis to give customers unprecedented insight into their changing state of health and welfare, and provide them with a powerful tool for better living.
We need to move from the reactive treatment of one specific disease to the proactive prevention of multiple diseases at the same time.
Summary
- Focus on extending healthspan rather than just lifespan by shifting from reactive treatment of individual diseases to proactive prevention of multiple conditions through lifestyle interventions. - Epigenetics, specifically DNA methylation, acts as a molecular control system for gene expression, serving as a hub for aging hallmarks and a key indicator of long-term disease risk. - DNA methylation patterns reflect how fixed genetic backgrounds interact with lifestyle and environmental factors like diet, exercise, and toxic exposures over months and years. - Biological age measured through epigenetic clocks offers a superior metric for health risk compared to chronological age and provides a way to monitor the reversal of cellular aging. - Utilizing next-generation sequencing and machine learning, repeatable epigenetic tests empower individuals to quantify and optimize the impact of interventions on their underlying health status.
Article
Epigenetics And DNA Methylation Opened A New Front In Preventive Health
At Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki, Dr. Daniel Herranz Argued That The Most Powerful Medical Test Of The Future May Not Predict Fate, But Help Rewrite It
Medicine, for most of modern history, had excelled at rescue. It had become adept at identifying disease once it arrived, naming it, classifying it, and, where possible, containing it. But on Friday, 1 November 2019, at **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki** in **Helsinki, Finland**, **Dr. Daniel Herranz**, CSO and co-founder of Chronomics, offered a more radical proposition in his presentation, **“Epigenetics: a New Frontier In Health”**: the future of healthcare might lie not in reacting to illness, but in reading the body’s quieter warnings long before symptoms begin.
His case rested on a molecular language most people never hear about until science forces it into the spotlight. “**Epigenetics is the next big frontier in health**,” Herranz said. “**It is essentially the molecular information that controls how our DNA code and genetics are being read.**”
That distinction mattered. Genetics, in the popular imagination, had often been treated as destiny. Epigenetics suggested something more dynamic, and more unsettlingly intimate: that the body kept a running record of how life had been lived.
From Lifespan To Healthspan
The first truth Herranz laid out was deceptively simple. Human beings were living longer. Yet many were also living sicker.
The great achievements of the past two centuries, cleaner water, safer food, antibiotics, and better access to healthcare, had helped drive a dramatic expansion in lifespan. But the rise of non-communicable diseases such as cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and neurodegenerative disorders had revealed the limits of longevity as a goal in itself.
“**The scientific community is moving from trying to extend our lifespan to actually trying to extend the health span, or the time that we are free of disease,**” Herranz said.
It was a subtle but profound shift. A longer life, stripped by illness of energy, cognition, and independence, was no longer enough. The challenge was to preserve function, not merely delay death.
That, in turn, required medicine to look beyond the treatment of one disease at a time. Herranz argued for a model that focused on underlying risk factors shared by many conditions, factors that could be monitored, modified, and, perhaps, meaningfully reduced through lifestyle intervention.
Aging Became The Common Risk Factor Hiding In Plain Sight
Among those risks, aging occupied a special place. Not simply because it was universal, but because it was entangled with almost every major chronic illness.
“**Aging is probably one of the most fascinating and most complex topics that biologists are trying to hack in the twenty-first century,**” Herranz said.
In scientific terms, aging had come to be understood as a layered process, marked by genomic instability, telomere shortening, mitochondrial dysfunction, stem cell exhaustion, misfolded proteins, and the breakdown of nutrient sensing pathways. Yet Herranz directed attention to one layer in particular: the epigenetic one.
If the genome was the script, epigenetics was the stage direction. It governed which genes were active, which were silent, and when. It explained how a neuron and a skin cell could carry the same DNA yet perform utterly different functions. And among the several forms of epigenetic regulation, Herranz focused on one that had become central to the new science of aging: **DNA methylation**.
DNA Methylation Offered A Biological Diary Of Life Lived
DNA is built from four letters: A, C, T, and G. DNA methylation occurs when enzymes known as DNA methyltransferases attach a small chemical tag, a methyl group, to cytosine, the C in that sequence. The genetic code itself does not change, but the way it is read does.
That may sound technical, but its implications were immense. DNA methylation patterns appeared to capture the interaction between inherited biology and lived experience. Diet, exercise, smoking, pollution, alcohol exposure, and other environmental pressures could all leave signatures on the epigenome.
“**DNA methylation is the ultimate biomarker for health,**” Herranz said. “**By quantifying these patterns, we can see how different types of diet, exercise, and lifestyle change your underlying signatures.**”
Unlike many short-term biomarkers, methylation also possessed what Herranz called memory. It did not fluctuate only from one hour to the next. It could reflect exposures accumulated over months and years. That made it particularly useful not merely for measuring what the body was doing now, but for assessing medium and long-term risk.
This was where the science grew especially powerful. Herranz described how bisulfite sequencing and next-generation DNA sequencing allowed researchers to assess the methylation status of more than **20 million cytosines** from a single saliva sample. Machine learning could then sift through gigabytes of data to identify patterns too complex for conventional analysis.
The result, he suggested, was not just information but a new class of biomarker: repeatable, quantifiable, and increasingly actionable.
Biological Age Began To Rival Chronological Age
One of the most compelling applications of epigenetic science had been the development of **epigenetic clocks**. These DNA methylation-based models estimate **biological age**, a measure that may track disease risk more accurately than the number of years since birth.
The distinction was critical. Chronological age is fixed and universal. Biological age is uneven, shaped by stress, behaviour, environment, and physiology. Two people born on the same day may not be aging at the same rate.
Herranz’s own academic background gave weight to the claim. His PhD research at the **University of Cambridge** and **EMBL-EBI** focused on the **epigenetic ageing clock in humans**, including the finding that mutations in the **H3K36 methyltransferase NSD1**, responsible for **Sotos syndrome**, accelerated epigenetic ageing. He also developed **cuRRBS**, a computational method designed to enrich genomic sites using restriction enzymes and reduce sequencing costs.
At Cambridge, Herranz and his colleagues also helped develop the **first multi-tissue epigenetic clock in mouse**, a breakthrough that allowed biological age prediction across multiple organs in a model organism. That work helped move aging research from speculation towards measurement, a necessary step if anti-aging interventions were ever to be tested seriously.
He pointed, too, to a then-recent 2019 study suggesting that biological age might, under certain conditions, be nudged backwards. The sample was small, the evidence preliminary, but the symbolism mattered. For a field long constrained by the difficulty of measurement, epigenetic clocks had begun to offer a yardstick.
Chronomics Promised The First Repeatable DNA Test
At **Chronomics**, Herranz said, the ambition was not limited to aging alone. The company was building DNA methylation-based biomarkers aimed at broader risk factors tied to non-communicable disease.
These included **biological age**, **metabolic status**, cumulative exposure to **tobacco smoke and air pollution**, and long-term **alcohol exposure**. In effect, Chronomics was trying to build a molecular dashboard of risk, one designed not for diagnosis after the fact, but for intervention before the body crossed into disease.
This was the crucial selling point. Because methylation patterns change over time, the test could be repeated. A person could alter diet, exercise routine, sleep, or exposure habits, then measure whether the biology beneath those habits had shifted.
That possibility distinguished epigenetics from more static forms of DNA testing. Rather than delivering a fixed inheritance that might feel immutable, epigenetic testing offered a moving picture.
“**The risk information we share is actionable,**” Herranz said during the question-and-answer session. “**It is not a death sentence; it is just telling you where you are now, and it is always something that you can improve.**”
The Promise Was Personal, But The Questions Were Public
The audience’s skepticism was not absent. One questioner, a journalist, raised a concern that felt larger than the room: were people afraid to know too much about themselves?
Herranz acknowledged the anxiety as natural. New health technologies often arrived carrying both promise and dread. Yet he argued that epigenetics differed in one morally important respect. Its findings were not final verdicts. They were snapshots of current status and future risk, open to revision through action.
That language, “actionable,” has become one of the most overused words in health technology. But in Helsinki, it carried a more grounded meaning. If an epigenetic marker reflected cumulative smoking exposure, metabolic strain, or accelerated biological aging, it did not merely label a problem. It created a metric against which change could be judged.
Herranz even suggested that such tracking could, in principle, begin early in life. He spoke of the value of building cohorts that began at age zero, not as an act of surveillance, but as a way to understand health trajectories from the beginning and intervene sooner.
Here the future he described became both exciting and faintly disquieting. The epigenome, after all, is not just a medical object. It is a record of inequality, environment, habit, and history written into tissue. To read it well may help people live better. To read it poorly, or deploy it carelessly, could invite new forms of anxiety, overreach, and commercial distortion.
A New Frontier, With Old Human Stakes
What Dr. Daniel Herranz presented at **Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki** was not merely a new testing platform or a clever diagnostic category. It was a reframing of what health might mean in the age of molecular measurement.
The old model waited for disease to become visible. The new one sought to detect the drift towards disease while it was still reversible. Epigenetics, and especially DNA methylation, offered a way to observe how genes, environment, and behaviour converged over time in the body’s tissues.
The promise was immense: a repeatable test from saliva, machine learning drawn across millions of methylation sites, and biomarkers that could monitor whether lifestyle changes were genuinely altering long-term risk. In Herranz’s telling, this was not about fear. It was about leverage.
The body, it turned out, had been keeping notes all along.
And science had just begun to learn how to read them.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2019 Helsinki