Oxford scientists are collaborating with artificial Intelligence company Insilico Medicine to prevent unnecessary animal sacrifice and derive more data from experiments in age related research.

The MouseAge.org initiative is being managed by UK charity; Biogerontology Research Foundation and will also include researchers from Harvard and Youth Laboratories in the development of tools for cross­species analysis and novel biomarkers of ageing and various diseases in mice.

Insilico Medicine which provides advanced machine learning services to skin care companies, is using the field of ‘omics’ to introduce a broad range of deep­learned biomarkers of ageing and age­related diseases.

Highly accurate biomarkers

Meanwhile, Youth Laboratories is developing highly accurate biomarkers of ageing and health status using pictures and video that primarily focus on human skin.

While there are many experiments conducted around the world that examine the lifespan in mice, this artificially intelligent MouseAge system is set to help determine which interventions make mice look younger – providing correlations between health and appearance.

“The plan is to develop an accurate predictor of mouse biological age based on images of mice and then apply transfer learning techniques to other datasets and data types,” said Vadim Gladyshev, professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School.

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