Beyond Life

Introduction The Beyond Life project initially uses a Boolean network to simulate and represent key hallmarks of somatic cell aging. Each node can be ON or OFF and represents either an environmental signal (e.g. nutrients, growth factors, DNA damage, oxidative stress) or an intracellular pathway (e.g. PI3K/AKT/mTOR, AMPK/FOXO/sirtuin, ROS/DDR/p53). Cell‑fate outcomes—proliferation, senescence, apoptosis and SASP—arise from the logical interplay of these nodes. To explore the

A Boolean network for proliferation, apoptosis, and senescence Why we built this model Aging doesn’t happen in one organelle or one pathway. It emerges from how nutrient sensing, stress responses, DNA damage, and inflammatory signals talk to each other over time. To even start asking serious “what if?” questions (CR, rapamycin, NAD⁺, anti-inflammatories, etc.), we need a generalizable somatic cell model, not tied to a specific tissue or disease. The model presented here is ou

Aging is often described in metaphors: a clock, a slow fire, a gradual loss of order. But if we want to intervene in aging in a systematic way, metaphors aren’t enough. At Systems Beyond, we’re starting the aging project by doing something very concrete: We are building a “digital cell” – a computational model of a somatic human cell that we can expose to different conditions and see how it ages, adapts, or breaks. Why start with a virtual cell? Aging is a systems problem. It