Monitoring how movement declines across large populations of C. elegans offers a powerful and efficient way to discover compounds that slow ageing. Our latest paper – now published – describes how WormGazer®, our scalable, automated imaging system, does just that.

Traditionally, detecting subtle changes in worm movement has required tedious manual observation under the microscope. But movement begins to decline within just a week—and our WormGazer platform is designed to detect that early, at scale. It uses a high-resolution camera array to simultaneously image dozens of petri dishes, allowing us to collect robust data across large worm populations.

This technology doesn’t just capture late-stage effects – it reveals early changes in movement too. For instance, the long-lived age-1 mutant shows reduced movement in early adulthood, despite being healthier for longer overall.

WormGazer significantly shortens timelines compared to traditional lifespan studies. In one example, we detected that sulfamethoxazole (SMX) slowed ageing within just 7 days. The lifespan assay, run in parallel, took 40 days to confirm the same effect.

The platform also enables rapid drug screening across multiple concentrations. For example, we found that alpha-ketoglutarate slows agein, but only within a narrow dose window. That kind of insight would be easy to miss using standard methods.

So, what’s next? The WormGazer was designed to scale, and it has. At Magnitude Biosciences, we’re now using it to test large numbers of compounds and concentrations in parallel, accelerating discovery in the search for new ageing interventions.

Read the full paper here: https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s11357-023-00998-w