From overlooked sugar molecules to early disease detection, glycans are emerging as a powerful lens on biological age and personalized health.
What if aging isn’t just written in your DNA, but in how your body responds to everything you’ve been through? Stress. Diet. Relationships. Even the way your immune system learns over time.
This week’s Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED episode, hosted by Phil Newman and Dr Nina Patrick, turns to a part of biology most people have never heard of, but may shape all of it: glycans. These are sugar molecules that attach to proteins and lipids, thereby influencing their behavior. Subtle, microscopic and, according to a growing body of research, deeply revealing.
“These are overlooked sugar molecules… and they could be the missing link measuring inflammation, biological age, and real longevity potential,” says Patrick. It’s bold, but the deeper the conversation goes, the harder it is to dismiss.
For years, longevity science has focused on genes and, more recently, epigenetics – the idea that your environment can switch genes on or off. Glycans sit somewhere else entirely: not fixed like DNA, not just regulatory like epigenetics, but constantly adapting.
That’s exactly what drew podcast guest Nikolina Lauc, CEO of GlycanAge, into the field. “We didn’t have the tools to look at them at scale… and we really neglect them in terms of importance in biology,” she explains. And yet, their role is anything but minor. “If we didn’t have glycans, we would still be a single cell.”
The science behind it is surprisingly intuitive. Proteins, often described as the body’s machinery, don’t fully work on their own. They need glycans attached to function properly. Without that layer, biology doesn’t just slow down; it fundamentally changes.
If genes are the blueprint and proteins are the workers, glycans are the conditions that determine how well the job actually gets done.
Where glycans become especially interesting is in how they reflect change. Unlike genetic risk, which is largely fixed, glycan patterns shift with your environment and behavior. They respond to inflammation, stress, hormones and lifestyle – sometimes long before symptoms appear.
“With diabetes, we see changes up to 10 years prior to insulin resistance,” says Lauc. That kind of signal reframes what prevention could look like. Instead of catching disease early, the goal becomes spotting the trajectory before disease begins.
From theory to practice
While the science of glycans offers a revolutionary lens on aging, the next hurdle is moving these insights out of the lab and into the exam room. For practitioners, the challenge isn’t just understanding that “inflammaging” exists, but knowing how to measure and mitigate it for patients in real-time.
To bridge this gap, GlycanAge is hosting Inflammaging in Clinical Practice, a one-day intensive designed for clinicians and longevity experts. The event focuses on providing practical frameworks for assessing immune aging and integrating preventive care into standard practice.
- Date: 20 June 2026
- Location: Hotel Dubrovnik Palace, Croatia
- Registration: Join the event here
Constant negotiation
Unlike many traditional markers, this isn’t just about risk; it’s about something you can act on. Exercise, medication, hormonal shifts, even psychological interventions can move these patterns. Which leads to an uncomfortable but necessary realization: aging isn’t just happening to you. It’s something your body is constantly negotiating.
However, knowing isn’t always helpful…at least not in the way we expect. Biological age testing has become a popular entry point into longevity science, but Lauc points out that the results can land harder than intended.
“If they tell you you are 10 years older… it’s bad news. You’re not going to – it takes you time to digest,” she says. Data, in other words, doesn’t automatically lead to better decisions. Sometimes it creates anxiety, or worse, paralysis.
That’s why her team is starting to reframe the conversation around their resilience, not around how fast someone is aging. Instead of asking, “How bad is it?” the question becomes, “How much capacity do you have to recover, adapt and improve?” In a field often driven by fear (of decline, of disease, of time running out), that change in questioning feels overdue.
If glycans are as responsive as they seem, then they don’t just validate good habits; they complicate them. Take exercise – widely considered one of the most reliable ways to improve health, it turns out not to be universally beneficial in the same way.
In one study discussed in the episode, people who went from sedentary lifestyles to intense gym routines initially saw their biological age increase. Over time, things improved but the short-term response was surprising.
The takeaway isn’t that exercise is harmful. It’s that the body interprets stress (physical or otherwise) in nuanced ways. More isn’t always better. Timing, intensity and individual context matter.
Then there’s the factor most longevity conversations still struggle to quantify: psychology. “We’ve seen clients who age decades going through divorce… and others who decrease their age by decades after divorce,” Lauc shares.
It’s the kind of observation that feels almost too human for data, but it keeps appearing. Major depression, PTSD, chronic stress – these aren’t just mental health concerns. They show up biologically, accelerating the same chronic diseases associated with aging. In that sense, glycans reflect lived experience.
For all the promise of glycan science, one thing becomes clear in this conversation: there is no single path to longevity. “There will never be a one-size-fits-all,” Lauc says. Even widely discussed interventions don’t work equally well for all individuals. A drug like metformin might reduce inflammation in some people and do very little for others. The same goes for diet, exercise and even emerging therapies.
Variability isn’t a flaw, but it’s the point. If glycans are capturing how your body integrates genetics, environment and real-time conditions, then personalization is a requirement. Perhaps this field is moving toward a system that helps each person understand their own biology more clearly.
What makes glycans compelling isn’t just that they’re new. It’s that they fill in a gap. Modern medicine has become very good at measuring parts of the body in isolation – genes, proteins, specific biomarkers – but aging doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s cumulative, systemic and deeply influenced by how we live.
Glycans offer a way to see that accumulation. Not perfectly. Not completely. But perhaps more holistically than most tools we have today. We are moving from a model of aging as fixed and inevitable to something more fluid, shaped moment by moment by the life we’re living.
New episodes of Longevity.Technology UNLOCKED drop every Monday, featuring the researchers, founders and thinkers working to make sense of that complexity. A weekly news roundup follows each Friday. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube.
