A person with glaucoma recently got an injection in one eye somewhere in Boston. In ophthalmology, eye injections are common, so that fact alone makes it sound normal. That being said, this shot was different. It carried a gene therapy that was meant to do more than just treat illness; it was also meant to slow down or stop the aging process in cells that received it. Based on what happens over the next six months, it could be one of the most important events in recent medical history.
Life Biosciences, the company behind it, is one of many new biotech companies that have quietly built a strong scientific case for something that might have seemed like science fiction not long ago: that aging can be slowed down, reversed, or at least significantly changed. These ideas have been around for a long time in academic literature. What’s new are the tools, money, and talent that are now behind them.
PitchBook data shows that since 2021, about $4.8 billion has gone into biotechs that work on making people live longer. Jeff Bezos has given Altos Labs money. Sam Altman has spent money in the area. Janssen and Eli Lilly are giving money to new businesses. It’s still not clear if all this money will lead to therapies that people can actually use, but the fact that so many institutions believe in this is interesting. These bets are no longer on the edge.
Altos Labs, which is probably the most well-known name in the field, started out in early 2022 with $3 billion in funding, which seems like a lot of money for a biotech that hadn’t even come up with a single drug candidate yet. The California company is working on cellular reprogramming and is using a lot of the work of Shinya Yamanaka, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist whose work on stem cells showed that mature cells could be brought back to a biological state that was more like that of a young cell. Altos wants to know if that walkback can be done safely, partially, and over and over again in living people—without causing tumors, which is still a real risk that has been shown to happen in animal models.
There is a tension between promise and risk in a lot of what is going on in this field. BioAge Labs went public on Nasdaq in 2024 and raised $238 million. However, its shares dropped almost 80% after it dropped a drug candidate for obesity because of safety concerns related to the liver in a mid-stage trial. It serves as a reminder that, despite all the excitement, longevity science is still just drug development, and drug development often fails, even when smart people and high-tech tools are used.
In addition to being well-funded, some of these companies are actually interesting because of how they do things. The CEO of Utah-based Halia Therapeutics is going after what the company calls “inflammaging”—the long-term, low-grade inflammation that seems to cause a lot of the things we associate with getting older. Their main drug is already in Phase II trials for a blood disorder, and results should be available soon. Insilico Medicine, on the other hand, runs its whole business on generative AI. It has gotten more than ten drug candidates to the point where they can get FDA investigational clearance, which would not have been possible even five years ago.
As I watch this happen, I get the feeling that the field is at a really interesting turning point. Mice were used in the first tests. Then in monkeys. Now there’s a test on people with an eye, gene therapy, and six months to wait. That’s not nothing. Depending on what the data shows in the end, it’s quite a bit.
It might not make much of a difference if these companies together stop aging or just make it better to treat diseases that come with getting older. Most people don’t need cells that look and act twenty years younger. They only want their body parts—their eyes, joints, and memories. If the tech companies that are trying to slow down or stop aging can do even a small part of that, without the tumors and liver damage, it will have been worth all the money.
It’s hard to understand the science. It’s a long way. But it’s hard not to notice that people who usually have a good idea of where things are going have bet a lot of money on this one.
