Age-related diseases as a testbed for anti-aging therapeutics: the case of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis

While aging-related diseases are often used as proxies for the general aging process in research, they largely differ in terms of how integral their development is to organismal aging. Hallmarks of aging offer a convenient conceptual framework to assess the relevance of a disease to the anti-aging narrative. In this review, we propose hallmark decomposition as a method of measuring the potential of a therapy to translate from a disease-specific treatment to a general geroprotector. To help other researchers adopt and improve this methodology, we are releasing a disease scoring system and report the hallmark alignment of 13 aging-related diseases, among which IPF is the disease most aligned with aging.