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Accelerating activity in the longevity biopharmaceutical sector

Nature Aging (2025)Cite this article

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Aging is a critical risk factor for more than 200 diseases1 that together account for the majority of the global burden of disease2. Despite being a critical risk factor for so many diseases, age itself has not historically been considered an intervention point for modification of disease incidence, morbidity or mortality. The implicit assumption is that age cannot be manipulated to achieve such an outcome. But there is now emerging evidence that the rate of biological aging can be decoupled from the rate of chronological aging3. If this is true, then manipulation of the rate of biological aging becomes perhaps the single most important intervention point that can affect lifespan and healthspan, and would provide tremendous medical4, social5 and economic6 benefit.

As a result, there is accelerating activity (academic research, public and private funding, company formation, as well as media attention) in interventions that work via these pathways to modulate human disease incidence and severity. Here we seek to quantify the recent acceleration in this activity. Although medicines in widespread use may be the ultimate goal, we hypothesize that this relies on company formation, which relies on private investment; this investment relies on ideas generated by academic research, which relies on public funding, which in turn relies on public interest and support. We develop parameters to quantify each of these, and measure them against the background rate of biomedical activity to gauge the relative increase in longevity biopharmaceutical activity (see Supplementary Discussion for full methodology). There is also a definitional question of what constitutes a longevity biopharmaceutical company. Simply working on a medication that addresses disease and thereby extends life is too broad a definition, which includes a large number of all biopharmaceutical companies; conversely, working on a medication to extend lifespan for currently healthy individuals is too narrow a definition, and few companies qualify. Instead, we define longevity biopharmaceutical companies as those pursuing targets that are known to extend lifespan in other species for therapeutic benefit of any kind in humans. Other definitions are possible, and we provide some analysis of these in the Supplementary Discussion.

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Fig. 1: Longevity biopharmaceutical activity.

References

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge analytical support provided by W. Backler, F. Colagrande, Y. Gai and A. Russo.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Life Biosciences, Boston, MA, USA

    Michael S. Ringel

  2. Boston Consulting Group Inc, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Yue Zhang

  3. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Wen Kin Lim

  4. Babraham Institute, Cambridge, UK

    Wen Kin Lim

Authors
  1. Michael S. Ringel
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  2. Yue Zhang
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  3. Wen Kin Lim
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Contributions

M.S.R. conceived the analysis and designed the approach, Y.Z. and W.K.L. conducted the analysis, M.S.R. wrote the manuscript, and all authors reviewed the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael S. Ringel.

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Competing interests

Y.Z. is a current employee and M.S.R. and W.K.L. are former employees of Boston Consulting Group. M.S.R. is currently employed by Life Biosciences and on the boards of Hevolution Foundation, US and the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR). He is also on the advisory boards of Sheba Longevity Clinic and Applied Longevity Intelligence Services.

Peer review

Peer review information

Nature Aging thanks Alexander Fleming and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information Supplementary Discussion and Supplementary Tables 1-4

Supplementary Table 5 Table of media articles by year

Supplementary Table 6 Table of public funding by year

Supplementary Table 7 Table of academic publications by year

Supplementary Table 8 Table of longevity biotech counts by year, based on Citeline

Supplementary Table 9 Table of longevity biotech counts by year, based on Quid

Supplementary Table 10 Table of longevity biotech investment by year, based on Citeline

Supplementary Table 11 Table of longevity biotech investment by year, based on Quid

Supplementary Table 12 Table estimating company attrition, based on Biocentury

Supplementary Table 13 Table of details on companies included in Citeline analysis

Supplementary Table 14 Table of details on companies included in Quid analysis

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Ringel, M.S., Zhang, Y. & Lim, W.K. Accelerating activity in the longevity biopharmaceutical sector. Nat Aging (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-025-00983-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43587-025-00983-2

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