For decades, the word “longevity” has been one that serious drugmakers shun. It conjures up images of supplement gurus, Silicon Valley biohackers, and anti-aging hucksters—not legitimate medicines backed by clinical trials.
That changed last weekend.
The most important longevity conference of the year, the 2026 Aging Research and Drug Discovery (ARDD) Conference, has landed in the United States. After more than ten years in Europe, it was held this year in Boston, the center of the U.S. biotech industry.
U.S. regulators, Big Pharma executives and longevity upstarts have gathered for three days to discuss how to combat age-related decline with drugs sooner rather than later. Executives from major drugmakers including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca, Novartis and Eli Lilly enthusiastically discussed their approaches to longevity medicine.
“We think this is an important area because that’s where the patients are,” Thomas Marron, vice president of healthy aging at Eli Lilly and Co., said at the 13th annual conference, held for the first time this year, where leaders from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration also participated in the conversation.
There’s a breathless tone in the air, coming from longevity researchers who have spent their lives studying how we age but have had trouble developing actual treatments. Can their dream of a longevity medicine come true in the future?
ARDD attendees include pharmaceutical manufacturers, scientists, physicians, founders and investors. The medical team continues to grow. ARDD by Donis Perkins
A few years ago, scientists were still debating whether aging was a disease and lamenting that the FDA had no path to approval for them.
Now, they’re starting to build a framework and discuss the data the FDA needs to review to evaluate whether their longevity drug is effective. This was the topic everyone was talking about.
People are panicking about aging population
Rich countries are going gray. Governments around the world, including the United States, are panicking.
“The basic idea is to get medicine to stop asking, ‘What disease does this person have?'” the federal government’s $144 million healthy aging and longevity drug trial program, launching in 2024, is called Proactive Solutions for Prolonged Resilience (PROSPR), said project manager Andrew Brack.
Pharmaceutical companies realize that they need to adapt their strategies to address the needs of older patients, who increasingly require preventive treatments to keep them agile, capable and sharp for years to come.
Why seek treatment for a disease that develops over decades when you can spend all those years staying healthy and functional?
New blood test now measures aging (sort of) instantly
New blood test aims to measure aging of the body and assess the health of internal organs. Stefania Perfini Ravazia/Getty Images
Until recently, we didn’t have a good way to instantly measure whether a drug actually slowed aging. A new blood test – often called biological age or organ “clock” – gives researchers a way to estimate whether someone’s blood vessels, skin, heart or entire body are aging slower or faster than expected.
There are also new genetic screening tools that can identify our unique vulnerabilities to diseases like Alzheimer’s and sensitivities to different foods or drugs.
All this new blood work is pushing regulators and drugmakers to develop potential action plans for aging, as prevention becomes the go-to approach in health care and wearables become routine for tracking steps, heart rate and sleep scores.
In a historic move, the FDA took the stage on the first day of the meeting and pledged to release new clinical trial guidance next year.
“We are referees, not coaches,” FDA clinical pharmacologist Justin Penzenstadler said on the conference stage, encouraging longevity drugmakers to come together and agree on how to design trials and present data. “Write down the recipe.”
Ozone craze changes the game
Can GLP-1 slow down aging? Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are testing the idea. Victoria Skrikova/Getty Images
Finally, there are signs that new drugs could help slow aging in humans, not just mice or dogs. Chief among them are blockbuster GLP-1 drugs from Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.
Two drug companies presented data at ARDD this year on how their injectable weight-loss drugs could use blood test data to slow aging.
Eli Lilly found that tezepatide (sold as Zepbound and Mounjaro) slowed the aging of many internal organs, particularly the heart, brain, liver and kidneys.
Novo’s numbers are even more impressive. The company analyzed blood samples from more than 10,000 patients in its semaglutide trials (Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus) over several years. Compared with people who didn’t take the drug, people who took semaglutide had a 2 to 4-year decline in heart age and an additional 1 to 4-year decline in the age of their kidneys, brain, lungs, and pancreas.
ARDD attendees shared a lunch that included chicken, salmon, and tofu, all served with whole grains and vegetables. ARDD by Donis Perkins
Regulators will need to see more than this early data to approve new anti-aging drugs.
The big question remains: Can these GLP-1s benefit people who don’t have diabetes or obesity? A new PROSPR longevity trial funded earlier this year aims to answer this question by prescribing semaglutide to healthy older adults and seeing what happens.
Ultimately, the researchers want to know whether these drugs can functionally improve a person’s overall health as they age.
Financial opportunities are huge
The payoffs to increasing human lifespan range from large to huge, depending on how you define the category.
Bankers at TD Securities estimate the current longevity market, which includes fitness, activity, nutrition, lifestyle and screening tests, to be more than $250 billion, a figure that does not take into account the more than $560 billion market for traditional age-related disease care, including heart disease, cancer and neurodegenerative health.
HSBC Private Bank has bigger ideas, imagining that healthcare advances such as new drugs, coupled with healthier years of labor force participation, could lead to “global GDP growth of $12.5 trillion” driven by longevity by 2050.
Regardless, the opportunities are huge and growing.
That’s why it was so remarkable to me that I got to chat with Kevin Duffin, Eli Lilly’s vice president of aging research, at the conference—a few hours later, when we managed to find a quiet place to sit, away from a crowd of researchers and startup founders hoping to meet face-to-face with the world’s most valuable pharmaceutical company.
The question now is not whether these companies should develop longevity drugs, but whether they can prove that their drugs actually work.