The quest for immortality has become serious business

The article splits the longevity boom into a lightly regulated consumer industry and a slower biotech-and-pharma track. On the consumer side, London clinic hum2n charges £3,000 ($4,025) for a five-session package of treatments such as cryotherapy, hyperbaric oxygen, NAD+ drips and ozone blood therapy; Prenuvo charges around $4,000 for a full-body MRI; some estimates put the number of “longevity clinics” at about 800 in America alone, a label Andrea Maier of the National University of Singapore calls unregulated and vague. Neko Health, a Swedish provider backed by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, raised $700m in July ahead of its US launch. The American College of Radiology says there is “no documented evidence” that full-body screening is cost-effective or prolongs life, and that such scans can lead to over-diagnosis; studies of NAD+ supplements have been inconclusive or shown limited effect, and injectable “peptides” are often labelled “for research use only” to dodge regulators. On the drug side, the FDA does not treat ageing as a disease, so would-be longevity medicines must first win approval for a specific condition. GLP-1s are the template: first approved for diabetes and obesity, they have since been shown to help with heart disease, sleep apnoea and kidney problems. At a conference last month Novo found the biological age of patients’ hearts on its GLP-1s to be up to four years younger than those on a placebo, though all were overweight or diabetic, and Lilly called its own ageing-clock results preliminary. Rather than develop treatments themselves, pharma giants mostly buy options on biotechs: Lilly’s deal with Insilico Medicine is worth up to $2.75bn and Novartis’s with BioAge Labs up to $550m. Longevity biotechs raised $18.4bn last year, more than in the previous ten years combined. Sam Altman has put more than $180m into Retro Biosciences, which aims to add ten healthy years; NewLimit, co-founded by Brian Armstrong, announced $435m in fresh funding in June, and its first human trial of an epigenetic-reprogramming liver treatment may begin next year. Insilico’s rentosertib, aimed at idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, entered a late-stage trial in July; in an earlier 42-patient trial, ageing clocks suggested those on the drug were biologically younger than those on placebo by around three years on some measures, though all were already ill. The paper’s caveats include a history of failures: GSK shut Sirtris five years after buying it in 2008; Google’s Calico, launched in 2013, “has achieved little”; and Unity Biotechnology laid off its entire staff in May 2025 after disappointing trials. New founders argue AI will make this time different. Dario Amodei has suggested AI could raise human lifespan to 150 years; the article treats that as a hope, not an established outcome.