Jay Sarkar

Dr. Jay Sarkar is a Co-Founder for Turn Biotechnologies, a Stanford-born biotechnology company focused on multifaceted age-reversal via epigenetic reprogramming.  He completed his Ph.D. at Stanford University and has an Applied Physics and Electrical Engineering background that helps him focus on studying aging and biology from an information science and dynamical systems perspective. His scientific work has shown that while aging is generally associated with tissue and organ dysfunction, these can be considered the emergent consequences of fundamental transitions in the cellular state of cellular physiology. These transitions have multiple manifestations at different levels of cellular architecture and function, but the central regulator of these transitions is the epigenome, the most upstream dynamic regulator of gene expression. Reproduction is the only general phenomenon in nature where the age of (parental) cells is truly reset – to produce an embryo and ultimately an age zero offspring. Here we present a technology that captures part of this age reset mechanism but uses transient reprogramming to drive more youthful phenotypes without the full reset back to an embryo. This reprogramming technology is distinct from previous anti-aging/pro-longevity interventions, as instead of just modulating a few identified aging pathways, reprogramming engages a global and balanced state transition in the case of reproduction, or state of perturbation in our transient approach, which he shows leads to a multifaceted age-reversal effect at the DNA, metabolic, whole cell, and local environment levels.