The Sugar Language of Ageing - Glycans, Inflammation, and Your Immune Age with Nikolina Lauc

In this episode of Beyond Longevity, Daphna speaks with Nikolina Lauc, CEO and co-founder of GlycanAge, about glycobiology, immune ageing, and the role of chronic inflammation in ageing.Nikolina explains why glycans, the complex sugar structures attached to our antibodies, may offer one of the clearest windows into the state of the immune system. The conversation explores “inflammaging”, the idea that chronic, low-grade inflammation may not simply be a consequence of ageing, but one of the forces actively driving it.They discuss why antibody glycans may capture biological risk earlier than routine markers such as CRP, including research suggesting that glycan-based changes can appear years before standard blood tests show anything is wrong. Nikolina also explains how glycan testing may help predict disease risk and mortality and why repeat testing can reveal whether lifestyle changes are having a measurable biological effect.Daphna and Nikolina also explore biological-age clocks, stress, high-performance lifestyles, exercise, pregnancy, menopause, and the strong influence of sex hormones, including HRT. The episode looks at why glycan testing is not yet part of routine clinical practice, the technical barriers involved, and the bigger question at the heart of preventive health: what should we do when we can see risk before disease appears?GlycanAge showed very high reproducibility both in the blinded sample experiment run by Jamie Haywood at Alden Scientific, and independently in collaboration with Mike Snyder’s group at Stanford [Stanford paper reference]. Epigenetic clocks showed significant day-to-day oscillations in epigenetic age measurements [daily oscillation paper reference], which becomes important when trying to measure relatively small intervention effects over time.We recently completed a UK Biobank study showing that the glycan markers we measure were more predictive of all-cause mortality than routine blood biochemistry alone; combining both further improved prediction performance (sharing the pre-print here).We also published a large study across 42 cohorts and ~20,000 individuals showing that GlycanAge predicts all-cause mortality independently of traditional risk factors including BMI, CRP, hypertension, smoking, LDL, diabetes, cardiovascular disease history, and kidney markers. Across cohorts, every additional GlycanAge year was associated with roughly a 5-10% increase in all-cause mortality risk (sharing the pre-print here).Another recent preprint evaluating epigenetic age clocks showed they do not substantially improve prediction of morbidity and mortality beyond information already captured through routine clinical blood biomarkers and standard risk factors [epigenetic clock preprint reference].Background and key references are below:GlycanAge introGlycanAge is a clinically validated biomarker platform originating from the work of Professor Gordan Lauc. Over the past five years, we've translated his research into a scalable clinical biomarker.Today, GlycanAge is used in more than 2,000 private clinics worldwide and collaborates with leading academic and clinical partners including Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School, Northwestern Medicine, Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Clinique La Prairie and many others, supporting both immune age tracking and disease-focused applications, particularly in cardiovascular and metabolic health.Key references below:Scientific Founder & OriginsProfessor Gordan Lauc is one of the pioneers of human glycomics and co-founded the Human Glycome Project (with Harvard’s Richard Cummings). He discovered GlycanAge as one of the first systemic measures of biological aging based on immune glycosylation.Founder, Genos Research InstituteProfessor of Biochemistry, University of ZagrebHonorary Professor, King’s College LondonJohns Hopkins Scholar800+ publications • 20,000+ citations • H-index 77A New Class of Biological ClockGlycanAge is the first inflammaging clock, measuring chronic low-grade inflammation through IgG glycosylation, independent of acute events.First published in The Journal of Gerontology 2013Validated in 350+ peer-reviewed papers across >300,000 human samplesHighest precision in the field: <1% analytical variationIndependently confirmed by Stanford (GeroScience 2024)Prediction of Morbidity & MortalityGlycan signatures predict multiple future clinical outcomes; I'm sharing a review (Biotechnology Advances 2023) linking IgG glycans to 72+ disease indications, where we see specific glycan shifts up to 10 years before symptoms onset or clinical diagnosis.Cardiovascular diseaseHarvard-led studies showed up to 2× increased ASCVD risk, independent of LDL, CRP, BMI (Circulation Research 2024, Journal of Clinical Lipidology 2025)In a Middle Eastern replication cohort, IgG N-glycans predicted a ~2× higher risk of premature myocardial infarction, independent of traditional risk factors (European Heart Journal 2025).First biomarker demonstrating female-specific cardiovascular risk patterns (Diabetes Care 2022)Diabetes Glycan changes predict transition from normoglycemia → pre-diabetes → T2D years in advance with AUC 0.895 (Cardiovascular Diabetology 2025)In children with new-onset Type 1 diabetes, distinct IgG and plasma N-glycan changes enabled strong discrimination between cases and controls AUC ≈ 0.915 (Diabetologia 2022).Cross-Population ValidationBeyond European cohorts: in a study of 27 populations across 14 countries, IgG glycosylation patterns tracked with age/sex and correlated with life expectancy and national health indices (HDI, SDG, MDG), demonstrating validity across genetically and environmentally diverse populations (Aging 2020).Interventions GlycanAge Responds To: Caloric restriction & fasting (Nature Aging 2025, Frontiers 2022 + pre-publication on fasting)Exercise (Glycoconjugate journal 2024)Menopausal HRT & testosterone therapy (Aging 2020, GeroScience 2025, JCI Insight 2017)Weight loss & GLP-1 therapy (Journal of Obesity 2021 + pre-publication on GLP-1 )Therapeutic plasma exchange (Aging Cell 2025)00:00 Welcome to Beyond Longevity00:41 Meet Nicolina Loud02:33 Glycans Explained Simply05:02 Glycans Everywhere in Biology06:46 Inflammaging and Ageing Theory08:37 Why Glycans Beat Standard Markers12:10 From Lab Discovery to Company15:51 What Glycan Age...