"Restoring the recovery capacity of the elderly is the starting point of reverse-aging research. We plan to pursue full-cycle aging research that extends beyond the cellular level to clinical studies at the human level."
Oh Doo-byong, director of the Aging Research Institute at the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology (KRIBB), said this in an interview with Seoul Economic Daily on the 12th, adding, "Aging research is exactly what government-funded research institutes with long-term infrastructure should be doing." Oh explained, "Private companies pursuing short-term profits or individual university laboratories tend to stop at cellular or tissue-level research. Full-cycle aging research that connects to clinical studies on living humans must be conducted by government-funded institutes with long-term infrastructure to yield meaningful results."
The Aging Research Institute opened in September last year with the goal of scientifically addressing the medical and welfare crisis in Korea, which has entered a super-aged society. The institute has already produced a range of results. Its flagship achievement for 2025 is the CLCF1 research led by Yang Yong-yeol and Kwon Gi-sun of the aging convergence research team. Yang's team demonstrated that CLCF1, a protein secreted by muscles during exercise, suppresses the aging of muscles and bones, with the findings published in the leading journal Nature Communications. In young people, the protein increases markedly with just a single workout, but in the elderly, it only rises again after at least 12 weeks of consistent exercise. The research has already been expanded into a technology for developing candidate drugs that target sarcopenia and osteoporosis simultaneously, with patents filed and technology transfer underway. Oh said of the research, "Many elderly people never get out of a hospital bed and pass away after a single fall and a hip fracture. This candidate drug can produce exercise-like effects even in those who have difficulty moving."
Kim Cheon-a's team developed 'FiNi-Seq,' a technology that analyzes the liver fibrosis microenvironment at the single-cell level, and published the results in Nature Aging, a specialized journal in the Nature family. The platform technology detects early local lesions where aging first begins within liver tissue and can be used to set therapeutic targets before progression to cirrhosis or liver cancer.
The Aging Research Institute's diverse research directions can be summed up in one phrase: "disease-free longevity." Oh emphasized, "The goal is to extend healthy lifespan, not life expectancy." The gap between Koreans' life expectancy and healthy lifespan currently stands at about 18 years, meaning people spend that much longer living with disease as they live longer. To address this social problem, KRIBB is planning the "K-Reverse Aging Total Solution Development" with a target launch in 2027. The core concept is restoring "BioResilience." Oh said, "Young people recover quickly even after contracting COVID-19 or undergoing surgery, but the elderly have difficulty recovering. The vision is to restore diminished recovery capacity so that the elderly can get back on their feet in good health." The project will integrate the three axes of immunity, metabolism, and exercise into a single concept and utilize artificial intelligence (AI)-based lightweight specialized models as research tools.
The initiative also includes the development of a bioresilience indicator called the K-BRI (Korean BioResilience Index). The K-BRI is closer to a "body recovery report card." Rather than chronological age on a resident registration, it is an indicator that numerically shows, based on Korean data, how quickly the body can recover after infection, surgery, or a fall. Through this, KRIBB aims to detect declines in recovery capacity in the elderly early and establish a reverse-aging strategy that applies customized exercise, nutrition, immunity, and metabolism treatments.
The development of such aging solutions can fundamentally benefit national finances as well. Oh said, "If controlling aging extends healthy lifespan, it will not only improve individual quality of life but also produce economic effects such as maintaining labor productivity and reducing social care costs," noting that reverse-aging research will serve as a solution to ease the national fiscal crisis beyond individual health.
