The Dormant Blueprint: Suppressed Regeneration as a Unifying Framework for Aging

This paper proposes the Unified Suppression Framework — a complementary organizing model for biological aging built on the established Hallmarks of Aging framework (López-Otín et al., 2013, 2023). It argues that a meaningful fraction of aging and regenerative failure reflects the active suppression of dormant biological programs rather than irreversible loss, and proposes that systematically asking "where is the suppressor?" should become a standard first-line research strategy in regenerative medicine before assuming capacity must be engineered from scratch. Two clean Type A proof-of-concept cases anchor the framework: USAG-1 suppression of the third tooth set (Phase 1 human trials underway, Kyoto University Hospital) and mTOR Complex 1 suppression of autophagy and beneficial stress response programs (reversed by rapamycin, with lifespan extension replicated across multiple species). The framework proposes a multiscale regulatory architecture connecting four organizational levels: systemic coordinator, tissue environment (including SASP broadcast, ECM informational architecture, bioelectric field coherence, and immune microenvironment), local suppressors, and dormant programs. An explicit Type A/B/C/Damage-Primary classification system determines when the suppressor-first heuristic applies. Seven experiments are proposed, a Hardware Integrity Index concept is introduced, and falsification criteria are defined throughout. Version 7 incorporates extensive adversarial peer review from multiple AI systems across seven drafts.