Leveraging Caenorhabditis elegans as an in vivo model offers a powerful approach to studying biofilm formation and pathogenic infections to counteract anti-microbial resistance, a global health problem

In this study, we show how C. elegans can efficiently model multi-drug resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections, enabling real-time visualisation of infection progression and its effects on host survival and healthspan.

This scalable model offers both whole-organism phenotypic readouts and mechanistic insights into bacterial virulence, making it a valuable alternative to traditional in vitro approaches for rapid antimicrobial screening.

C. elegans also serves as a high-throughput platform for identifying new antimicrobial compounds, accelerating efforts to combat resistant bacterial and biofilm-related infections

Read the full paper: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11683784/

Slowing Age-Dependant Mobility Decline with Timut Pepper

In our new peer-reviewed paper conducted in collaboration with Mibelle Biochemistry, explore the potential life and healthspan-extending effects of the Timut pepper, shown with our WormGazer™ technology. Read the paper here.

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

Magnitude Biosciences CEO David Weinkove and PhD researcher Giulia Zavagno have just had a new article published in Frontiers in Aging on how C. elegans is transforming industrial drug discovery for developing anti-ageing drugs.

To view the online publication, please click here: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fragi.2021.740582/

This article is an open access publication accessible to readers anywhere in the world. 

For practical tips on how to overcome the challenges of developing anti-ageing drugs, please download our eBook written to help biotechs and pharma investing in anti-ageing research.