After half an hour in hot water, a nematode worm either curls into a ring or lies stretched out like a wet thread. This difference in posture is not just a detail; it is a whole test of survivability. Previously, to determine whether a drug slows aging, scientists waited weeks for the worms to die naturally and manually counted the survivors. Now a neural network looks at an image and, in seconds, says who is alive and who is not.
Imagine an interpreter who is distracted by every rustle in the room, and an hour-long meeting stretches into two. Manual counting is like that: slow, error-prone, and tiring. The neural network, however, has been trained on thousands of images. It finds the worm, outlines its silhouette, and assesses how curved it is. A curved posture means alive; a straight one means dead. The average probability per well gives an estimate of survival.
Of 2782 drugs already approved for humans, 130 passed the initial screen, and 31 were confirmed in a repeat test. 18 of them extended the worms' lifespan, and 14 had not previously been known as geroprotectors. The six strongest drugs increased lifespan by more than 30%. Three of them, isradipine, clemizole, and piperacillin, reduced the number of senescent cells in cultures of human endothelial cells.
This method can be transferred to other stress tests and disease models. The bottleneck is the size of the incubator and the number of copper blocks. With a small investment, thousands of compounds can be tested per week. The neural network can be retrained to recognize other postures, such as paralysis, to search for drugs against neurodegenerative diseases. A transition to fully automated cultivation and imaging systems is possible.
A worm's posture reveals its age. Previously, we waited for the worm to grow old and die. Now we make it endure a brief stress and watch how it moves. The same feature, body curvature, has become a fast and reliable indicator of viability. And this is just the beginning: if posture speaks to survival, then perhaps other postures will speak to other diseases. A worm that cannot curl up might point the way to a drug for paralysis.
The copper blocks clamping the plate eliminate the "edge effect," the difference in heating between the outer and central wells. Without them, survival in the outer wells would be lower simply because of uneven heat.
Not published on arXiv. Here are its page, the PDF and the formalization: you can check it yourself, not only read our account.