Longevity science and healthspan: the biology of ageing, therapeutics, diagnostics and the companies commercialising them.
A Nature Aging analysis groups diseases by their life-cycle burden and finds that aging-related diseases uniquely reward further progress. Unlike infant, early-adult and late-adult disease clusters, pushing harder against aging diseases yields accelerating welfare gains.
A new unsupervised method called PathStAR reveals that tissues age on distinct, nonlinear schedules rather than in sync. Applied to 25,306 post-mortem biopsies from 40 tissues across 970 donors, the model discovered three aging programs—early vascular, late reproductive, and biphasic digestive—without ever being trained to predict age itself.
Researchers combined dichloroacetate, metformin, and low-dose navitoclax into a cocktail that kills senescent and cancer cells by starving them of ATP. The combination extended lifespan in old mice without the tumor risk associated with earlier senolytics, and retained 70% of normal platelet counts—a key safety advantage over full-dose navitoclax.
Enveda announced Phase 1 results for ENV-308, a drug designed to mimic exercise by imitating the hormone Lac-Phe. The trial showed good tolerability in 88 healthy volunteers and reduced circulating leptin, but did not measure muscle preservation or weight regain prevention in humans—the outcomes the drug is meant to address.
A single AAV injection carrying the FGF21 gene raised median lifespan by 20% in aged mice and preserved function across five organ systems. The 27-month study, led by Professor Fátima Bosch, treated mice after age-related decline had already begun—a design closer to clinical reality than most longevity research.
AI systems accurately detect fatty liver disease on imaging (91% sensitivity, 92% specificity), but research shows a critical gap: there's no proven benefit to early detection for most patients, and stratification models that would identify who needs treatment barely exist.
A Cancer Research paper reports that sildenafil traps cholesterol in lysosomes by binding NPC1, choking a supply line metastasising cells depend on. A parallel analysis of 40,000 Israeli men found better survival among prior users. In 2021, the same drug showed a 69% Alzheimer's benefit that later vanished.
