NEW YORK − Food and animal safety firm Neogen and Foxo Technologies, a firm that plans to use epigenetic biomarkers for life insurance, said on Friday that they have been jointly investigating the association between epigenetic aging and environmental risk factors, as well as morbidity and mortality outcomes.
The collaboration taps decades worth of blood samples and data collected by the Physicians' Health Study, a large-scale trial initiated by Brigham and Women's Hospital in 1982, to conduct comprehensive epigenetic profiling.
As part of the project, Neogen's genomics team processed more than 11,000 blood samples in its recently CLIA-certified laboratory, extracting DNA for analysis on Illumina Epic Methylation arrays, the company said. The data was then sent to Foxo for high-throughput bioinformatic processing and epigenetic analysis.
"This research project has been a very exciting undertaking for both Foxo and Neogen," Foxo CSO Brian Chen said in a statement. The project "allows us to dramatically expand the frontiers of epigenetics and human health."