Accelerating the Path Forward with Genetic Clues to Reversing Cellular Aging

One of the biggest bottlenecks in aging research is deciding which genetic pathways to test. Another is making sense of the massive amounts of data these experiments produce. Biologists Omar Abudayyeh and Jonathan Gootenberg are using Co-Scientist to tackle both challenges at once.

Their lab runs large-scale genetic screens, turning thousands of genes on or off and then observing how cells respond. The goal is to identify factors that can push cells away from senescence — a damaged state associated with aging — and toward a younger state in tissues such as skin, hair, and muscle.

Co-Scientist is helping in two ways. First, it can generate research leads. When the team asked it to identify potential factors that might reverse aging from the scientific literature, it scanned tens of thousands of papers, weighed numerous hypotheses, and ultimately proposed more than 20 new, plausible gene factors to test. Lab validation confirmed some of Co-Scientist’s hypotheses: the factors it recommended successfully pushed cells toward a younger state and improved overall function.

Second, Co-Scientist speeds up downstream analysis. After completing a round of large-scale screening, the team needs to understand what the enormous data set might mean and which directions are worth pursuing next. This kind of analysis — connecting test results with years of scattered scientific literature — can take one researcher up to six months. By using Co-Scientist to analyze screening data together with the literature, that work was compressed to just a few days.

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Using Co-Scientist feels like having a 50-person team available at all times, getting all the work done in a single day — something our lab could never do.

Omar Abudayyeh, Principal Investigator

The Abudayyeh–Gootenberg Lab

There are so many unanswered questions in biology. We’re looking for things that can change the paradigm — landmark discoveries — and I think Co-Scientist will help us get there.

Jonathan Gootenberg, Principal Investigator

The Abudayyeh–Gootenberg Lab