Meet Prof Gordan Lauc: The Scientist Who Discovered Glycans as a Marker of Aging

Prof. Gordan Lauc is Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Zagreb and Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of GlycanAge — the scientist whose three decades of glycobiology research established IgG glycosylation as the most actionable biomarker of biological age and chronic inflammation available today.

His discovery that glycans (complex sugars attached to proteins) on Immunoglobulin G (IgG), which is the body's most abundant antibody, actively regulate whether the immune system promotes or suppresses inflammation transformed a neglected corner of molecular biology into the foundation of a new category of preventive health testing. For anyone serious about measuring whether their health interventions are actually working, Lauc's research points to a conclusion no epigenetic clock, DNA test, or standard blood panel can deliver: a real-time, modifiable signal of how fast your immune system is aging.

For a deeper look at what glycans are and why they matter, see Glycans: The Sugars That Reveal Your Biological Age and Immune Health.

What exactly are glycans, and why did Prof. Lauc spend 30 years studying them?

Glycans are carbohydrate-based polymers that exist on virtually every cell surface in the body, attached to proteins and determining how those proteins function. Lauc describes them as exponentially more complex than either DNA or proteins. This level of complexity makes them scientifically significant but technically forbidding, and explains why most researchers choose to work on simpler molecules instead.

Throughout his research, Lauc found glycans implicated in virtually every biological process he examined, yet the field remained largely ignored precisely because of that difficulty. His persistence over nearly 30 years, driven by the conviction that this complexity contained essential biological information, produced the large-scale glycomics infrastructure that now underpins GlycanAge's laboratory, which processes approximately 85% of glycan samples for high-throughput glycomic studies globally.

The payoff is that glycans sit at the interface of genetics, epigenetics, and environment. They encode both inherited risk and the cumulative effect of everything you have done to your body, diet, stress, illness, hormones, exercise, in a single measurable signal.

How did Prof. Lauc discover that glycans could measure biological age?

Lauc grounds the concept of biological age in a straightforward observation: some people are functionally old in their 50s while others remain healthy and energetic well into their 70s. This difference has nothing to do with the calendar and everything to do with what is happening at the molecular level.

The discovery itself did not begin as a search for an aging biomarker. Lauc's lab was running large-scale studies on IgG glycosylation to understand disease at the molecular level, and a consistent pattern emerged: as people age, the glycans on IgG shift in a way that makes the antibody progressively more pro-inflammatory. Specifically, shorter glycans (those lacking galactose and sialic acid) produce a pro-inflammatory IgG, while longer, sialylated glycans produce an anti-inflammatory response. The precision of this switching is striking, altering a single sugar unit on an IgG glycan is sufficient to flip the antibody's entire functional character from pro-inflammatory to anti-inflammatory.

The ratio of these two glycan populations changes predictably with age across multiple independent cohorts, giving rise to what became the glycan aging clock, first published in 2013. Lauc's published research establishes that glycans on IgG are not merely passive indicators, but functional effectors that actively contribute to the progression of low-grade chronic inflammation. Critically, IgG glycan changes are detectable up to a decade before disease diagnosis, placing them among the earliest known molecular signals of disease progression, long before tissue damage or clinical symptoms appear.

This is the mechanism that makes GlycanAge more than a number: it measures the biology that is actively driving age-related disease, not a proxy for it.

What makes GlycanAge different from other biological age tests?

GlycanAge measures active, current chronic inflammation through 29 IgG glycan structures. This signal responds to lifestyle and medical interventions within 3–6 months and remains stable in the absence of real biological change.

Lauc frames the distinction between GlycanAge and other biomarkers in terms of timescale and modifiability. Standard blood biomarkers track metabolites and enzymes that shift daily, capturing noise as much as signal. Genetic data sits at the opposite extreme. It is fixed at birth, measuring inherited risk rather than current biology. Glycans occupy the middle ground, encoding both the risk you were born with and the cumulative effect of how you have lived, in a readout that is stable enough to trust and responsive enough to act on.

"Glycans will become the most important prognostic biomarkers — they will tell us how far on the path from disease to health we have already passed."

— Prof. Gordan Lauc, Chief Scientific Officer, GlycanAge; Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Zagreb

For practitioners, this means GlycanAge captures what standard blood panels miss. Where conventional markers like CRP reflect acute inflammation, GlycanAge measures the chronic, low-grade shifts that drive biological aging. GlycanAge also outperforms epigenetic clocks on measurement stability, whose repeat readings in the same individual can vary by up to 10 years in the absence of any intervention or significant health event.

Can GlycanAge actually track whether a health intervention is working?

Yes, and Lauc considers this the test's most clinically valuable property. Where conventional monitoring leaves practitioners waiting for symptoms or pathology results, GlycanAge enables a direct feedback loop: run an intervention, retest at 3–6 months, and read whether the biology moved.

Lauc has applied this logic to himself for nearly a decade. When his lifestyle improves, his GlycanAge falls; when he goes through a difficult period, such as one including elevated stress, disrupted diet, reduced sleep, it accelerates. He estimates that a sustained difficult period could add ten biological years within a single calendar year, while a consistent improvement can reverse that trajectory. The test integrates stress, diet, and exercise into a single molecular number — one that responds to real biological change rather than daily fluctuation.

Across repeat testers who followed GlycanAge's guidance programme, the average biological age reduction is 6 years. For functional medicine practitioners, this responsiveness is what makes GlycanAge a clinical instrument rather than a one-time snapshot: baseline before an intervention, retest at 3–6 months for active monitoring, and the result tells you whether the biology moved.

"Our normal early warning is a heart attack, a stroke, or a diabetes diagnosis. When we get a disease, we start thinking about what we are doing — but usually that is beyond the point of no return. Once you have a diagnosis of a chronic disease, it is very hard to completely eradicate it. But if you catch it early, when only biomarkers are moving in that direction, there is still no tissue damage — everything is still more or less fine, and you fix it."

— Prof. Gordan Lauc, Chief Scientific Officer, GlycanAge; Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Zagreb

Is GlycanAge a diagnostic test?

GlycanAge is not a diagnostic tool. It is a lifestyle and clinical biomarker for tracking immune aging, monitoring chronic inflammation, and validating the biological effect of interventions.

Lauc is explicit on this point: glycans are not yet diagnostic biomarkers, and considerable scientific and regulatory work remains before they can serve that role. What GlycanAge provides today is a validated, quantitative signal of where you sit on the spectrum between healthy aging and accelerated immune aging. This information helps clinicians act on years before disease symptoms appear. One specific glycan structure has been identified as the best available predictor of cardiovascular events, including heart attack and stroke. Lauc tracks this structure in his own results as a personal early-warning signal:

"When this one goes up, I say it's better to change something now."

— Prof. Gordan Lauc, Chief Scientific Officer, GlycanAge; Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Zagreb

Lauc has also observed a consistent pattern in how people respond to their results: initial disbelief or frustration at a poor score, followed by genuine behavioral change, and ultimately satisfaction when a subsequent test confirms the biology has shifted. The result becomes its own motivation.

Where is glycan science headed, and what does Prof. Lauc see as its future role in medicine?

Lauc anticipates glycan measurement becoming a routine preventive health test within roughly a decade, once laboratory technology scales sufficiently. This is something people can check the way they now check glucose or blood pressure, to monitor inflammatory risk before it becomes disease.

The deeper vision is precision medicine. Central to Lauc's thinking is the recognition that individual biology varies too much for population-level guidelines to serve everyone well. This reality makes personalised, biomarker-guided care not just preferable but necessary. Glycans, by encoding both inherited susceptibility and modifiable lifestyle biology, offer the intermediate phenotype that connects static genetic data to dynamic health outcomes. GlycanAge, built on research conducted with King's College London, the University of Cambridge, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, and the University of Oxford, is the commercial expression of that vision, available now, not in a decade.

If you want to measure your own biological age using the biomarker Prof. Lauc spent 30 years developing, the GlycanAge at-home test ships to 65+ countries and includes a 1:1 Result Interpretation Call with a longevity specialist. Functional medicine practitioners looking to integrate GlycanAge into clinical workflows — for baselining, intervention monitoring, or HRT titration — can explore the Healthcare Providers page.

Order your GlycanAge test → Shop Now

External Sources

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24325898/ — Krištić J, Vučković F, Menni C, et al. Glycans are a novel biomarker of chronological and biological ages. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2014;69(7):779–789.

• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513460/ — Patel P, Jamal Z, Ramphul K. Immunoglobulins. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2026 Jan–. PMID: 30571054.

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24833586/ — Franceschi C, Campisi J. Chronic inflammation (inflammaging) and its potential contribution to age-associated diseases. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2014;69 Suppl 1:S4–S9. doi: 10.1093/gerona/glu057. PMID: 24833586.