Joris Deelen is an associate professor at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) in the Netherlands. Moreover, he is still actively running a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing (MPI-Age) in Cologne. His group at the LUMC is focussed on the identification and validation of biomarkers of ageing using epidemiological and clinical studies. The main emphasis is on biomarkers that have been identified in large-scale international collaborations of human studies using omics-based approaches, such as metabolomics. In addition, his group is performing in-depth analyses of lifestyle-based intervention studies to identify omics-based profiles indicative of a health-promoting response. Another main focus of his groups in the LUMC and MPI-Age is the identification and functional characterisation of genetic variants linked to human longevity. To this end, they make use of the CRISPR/Cas9 system to generate transgenic cell lines and mice harbouring the identified variants and subsequently measures their functional effects in vitro and in vivo.

Metabolomics-based biomarkers of ageing; how to implement epidemiological findings into clinically relevant settings