TIME's Longevity Leaders 2026 collection features Teal Rise co-founder Tony Wyss-Coray, profiling how organ-level biological clocks built from blood proteins could extend health span and reshape clinical trials for longevity interventions.
TIME has featured Teal Rise co-founder Tony Wyss-Coray alongside 11 other individuals shaping the future of longevity in its Longevity Leaders 2026 collection. His profile, titled "Tony Wyss-Coray Is Measuring Biological Age One Organ at a Time," traces how his Stanford lab turned the idea of biological aging into a measurable, organ-by-organ readout from a single blood draw.
At the center of the profile are the organ aging clocks Wyss-Coray has helped develop. Rather than relying on chronological age, these tests measure protein levels in plasma that reflect how specific organs — especially the brain and immune system — are actually aging. The higher a given organ's biological age, the research shows, the higher the risk of disease tied to that organ. And when multiple organs look older than expected, overall mortality risk rises.
The piece also highlights Vero Bioscience, a company Wyss-Coray co-founded, which is now running clinical studies to test how these organ-clock assays perform in the real world. In the article, Wyss-Coray describes the practical value of the tests: they could tell people how their organs are holding up and let them optimize their health based on personalized data, while also serving as endpoints in clinical trials for longevity drugs and other interventions.
TIME situates this work within Wyss-Coray's broader scientific arc. His PhD training in immunology led him to study how the brain and other organs communicate through the blood, an idea first tested in a 2007 Alzheimer's plasma-protein study and later explored through the lab's well-known parabiosis experiments showing that young blood plasma could improve cognition in older mice. Another company he co-founded, Alkahest, is separately exploring whether human plasma components could treat neurodegenerative diseases.
The profile captures a key shift in how aging is being studied: from a single chronological number to a set of organ- and system-level measurements that can flag risk years, or even decades, before symptoms appear. For Teal Rise, that shift is central to what we are building — biological clocks that are robust, interpretable, and connected to real clinical endpoints.
Read the full profile on TIME.
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