About
Varun Dwaraka, PhD is TruDiagnostic's Director of Bioinformatics and Principal Investigator, the founding bioinformatician behind its methylation production pipelines. He trained in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at UC Santa Cruz and earned a biology PhD at the University of Kentucky, where his work focused on salamander limb regeneration. At TruDiagnostic, he moved that computational biology background into epigenetic aging, co-authoring papers across Nature Aging, Genome Medicine, BMC Medicine, Aging Cell, and the company's OMICmAge work.
What to Know
Signature approach
Dwaraka leads the machine-learning and bioinformatics layer that turns dried-blood-spot methylation data into TruDiagnostic outputs: biological age, organ-system age, pace of aging, immune-cell estimates, and related biomarkers. His work is research-first but product-critical, because the same production pipelines support consumer TruAge reports and the company's academic publications.
What sets them apart
- Original pipeline builder. LinkedIn describes him as the founding bioinformatician who designed and implemented TruDiagnostic's first production pipelines.
- Peer-reviewed output. His Scholar profile shows an h-index of 17 with papers in Nature Aging, Genome Medicine, BMC Medicine, Aging Cell, and Epigenetics Communications.
- Regeneration-to-aging path. His PhD work was comparative salamander limb regeneration, an unusual developmental-biology route into epigenetic clock science.
Affiliations
Head of Research
Thought Leadership
Publications
- Quantifying the stochastic component of epigenetic aging · Nature Aging, 2024
- Unveiling the epigenetic impact of vegan vs. omnivorous diets on aging: insights from the Twins Nutrition Study (TwiNS) · BMC Medicine, 2024
- OMICmAge: an integrative multi-omics approach to quantify biological age with electronic medical records · bioRxiv (Nature Aging, 2026), 2023
- A meta-analysis of immune-cell fractions at high resolution reveals novel associations with common phenotypes and health outcomes · Genome Medicine, 2023
- Comprehensive evaluation of the Infinium human MethylationEPIC v2 BeadChip · Epigenetics Communications, 2023
- Exploring the effects of Dasatinib, Quercetin, and Fisetin on DNA methylation clocks: a longitudinal study on senolytic interventions · Aging (Albany NY), 2024
- Retro-age: A unique epigenetic biomarker of aging captured by DNA methylation states of retroelements · Aging Cell, 2024
- Comparative transcriptomics of limb regeneration: Identification of conserved expression changes among three species of Ambystoma · Genomics, 2019
Media Appearances
- You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment (TwiNS study research featured) · Netflix
- The Curious Case of Natalia Grace (research featured) · HBO
Notable Collaborators
- Jessica Lasky-Su, PhD · OMICmAge multi-omics clock — Brigham and Women's Hospital / Harvard
- Andrew Teschendorff, PhD · Cell-type deconvolution and methylation analysis — Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health
- Ryan Smith · TruDiagnostic co-founder, co-author on the company's epigenetic-clock and intervention studies
- S. Randal Voss, PhD · PhD advisor — comparative salamander limb regeneration, University of Kentucky
Other specialists at TruDiagnostic
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