Eleven developments from the United States, Japan and China, each with its sources and its catch. Status is as of September 2026. This field moves quickly, so check the links before you quote anything.
For most of medical history, the only strategy against ageing was to manage the decline: a pill for the blood pressure, a new hip, a longer stay in hospital. What changed recently is that regulators have started approving and trialling things that repair, replace or reset the parts instead.
None of what follows proves a human will live to 120. No intervention has yet extended the maximum human lifespan. But every item is a real decision by a regulator, a peer-reviewed result, or money committed at a scale that assumes the science will work.
In January 2026 the FDA cleared Life Biosciences to test ER-100, the first therapy based on partial epigenetic reprogramming to reach human trials. The first patient was dosed in June. It uses three of the four Yamanaka factors to reset age-related markers in retinal cells, without changing the DNA itself, and it can be switched off by stopping an antibiotic.
This is the technique Altos Labs, NewLimit and Retro Biosciences are all betting on. It has now left the mouse and entered a human eye.
The catch: it is a Phase 1 safety study in two eye diseases. Early results are expected late 2026 to early 2027. It says nothing yet about whole-body ageing.
In March 2026 Japan approved Amchepry, a Parkinson's treatment in which reprogrammed stem cells are turned into dopamine-producing cells and implanted in the brain. On the same day it approved ReHeart, heart muscle sheets for severe heart failure. They are the world's first commercially approved products made from iPS cells, and Amchepry was added to public insurance from 20 May 2026.
Twenty years ago the iPS cell was a lab discovery. It now has a price and an insurance code.
The catch: approval is conditional and time-limited, based on a Kyoto trial of seven patients, four of whom improved. The company must still prove efficacy after launch.
Vertex's zimislecel is made of stem-cell-derived islet cells infused into the liver. In results published in the New England Journal of Medicine in June 2025, all twelve patients who received a full dose hit the recommended blood-sugar targets, and ten of the twelve no longer needed insulin after a year.
A chronic disease managed daily for life, replaced by a single infusion, in most of a small group.
The catch: patients need lifelong immunosuppression, and in January 2026 Vertex temporarily postponed the pivotal study while it ran an internal manufacturing analysis. Breakthroughs stall. This one is worth watching for exactly that reason.
A baby known as KJ was born with a severe metabolic disorder that kills around half of infants with the worst form. Doctors at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn designed, manufactured and got regulatory clearance for a base-editing therapy aimed at his specific mutation within six months. He received the first dose in February 2025 and is growing well.
Medicine built for one person, in the time it takes to renovate a kitchen.
The catch: one patient, and long-term follow-up is still needed. Scaling bespoke therapies is a manufacturing and regulatory problem nobody has solved yet.
The first formal clinical trial of gene-edited pig kidneys began at NYU Langone in late 2025. The kidneys carry ten gene edits to reduce rejection. The trial starts with six patients and could expand to fifty. Before it, a patient at Massachusetts General lived with a pig kidney for 271 days.
More than 100,000 Americans are on the transplant list. An organ you can breed changes that arithmetic entirely.
The catch: earlier pig kidneys have eventually failed, and patients returned to dialysis. The National Kidney Foundation's experts put approval five to ten years away.
Loyal's LOY-002 is a daily pill meant to extend the healthy lifespan of senior dogs by targeting metabolic drivers of ageing. The FDA has accepted both its effectiveness section and its safety section, two of the three needed for conditional approval. Its pivotal trial has enrolled more than a thousand dogs.
If it clears the last step, it will be the first drug approved for extending lifespan in any species. The regulator will have accepted, in writing, that ageing is something you can treat.
The catch: dogs are not people, and conditional approval is not proof it works. The full efficacy trial is still running.
Altos Labs launched in 2022 with around US$3 billion, backed by Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner. Sam Altman put up Retro Biosciences' entire US$180 million seed round, and Retro set out to raise a further US$1 billion with a stated goal of adding ten years to healthy human lifespan.
Nobody commits sums like that to a field they expect to stay theoretical.
The catch: capital is a signal about belief, not evidence of results. Plenty of well-funded longevity companies have failed.
Most English-language coverage of longevity is about American companies. Some of the most striking recent results have come out of Chinese labs and hospitals, often through investigator-led trials that move faster and start smaller. That speed is the story, and it is also the caveat: several of these are single patients.
Hongkui Deng's team at Peking University took fat cells from a 25-year-old woman who had lived with unstable type 1 diabetes for eleven years, chemically reprogrammed them into stem cells, and grew them into islets. After transplantation she stopped needing insulin from day 75, and at one year her blood sugar was in range more than 98% of the time. The work was published in Cell.
Unlike the Vertex approach, the cells were her own and were made with chemicals rather than inserted genes, which sidesteps two of the biggest problems in cell therapy.
The catch: one patient so far, and she was already on immunosuppressants from an earlier liver transplant. The trial has three patients and at least two years of follow-up still to report.
Guang-Hui Liu's group engineered human stem cells with a strengthened version of FOXO3, a gene linked to long life, so the cells themselves resist ageing. Given intravenously to aged macaques over 44 weeks, they improved cognition, bone strength and reproductive health, and reduced ageing on epigenetic clocks. Published in Cell.
Whole-body rejuvenation effects across several organ systems, in the closest animal model to humans, is rare. Most anti-ageing results stop at mice.
The catch: monkeys, not people, and the cells are genetically engineered from embryonic stem cells. There is no human trial yet.
Surgeons at the First Affiliated Hospital of Anhui Medical University transplanted a gene-edited pig liver into a 71-year-old man with cirrhosis and liver cancer, working alongside his own liver. It produced bile and clotting factors for about a month without acute rejection. Published in the Journal of Hepatology.
The liver was long considered too complex to replace with a pig organ. This showed it can do the job in a human, at least for weeks.
The catch: the graft was removed on day 38 after complications, and the patient died on day 171 from recurrent bleeding. The lead surgeon described it as showing both the potential and the obstacles.
By the end of 2025, China had more than 323 million people aged 60 or over, about 23% of the population. Major public hospitals including Xiangya, Zhongshan and the PLA General Hospital have opened longevity or geriatric medicine clinics, and the Hainan Boao Lecheng pilot zone lets selected overseas-approved drugs and devices reach patients through special access.
Longevity research goes fastest where the ageing problem is largest and the state has decided to treat it as a priority.
The catch: demand also attracts hype. Some viral "live to 150" headlines about Chinese compounds rest on mouse studies or company-funded trials. Check whether a result is in people, peer-reviewed, and independently replicated before sharing it.
It doesn't prove anyone alive today reaches 120. The oldest verified human, Jeanne Calment, died at 122 in 1997, and no one has come close since.
What it does show is that the tools have changed category. Cells can be reset, replaced, edited or grown, including from a patient's own fat. Old primates can be made measurably younger. Organs can come from a new supply. And a regulator is close to treating ageing as a condition with a drug. Each of those removes one of the ways the later years go wrong, which is where most of a longer life would be lived.
That's why the plan on the main page treats 120 and 150 as positions to prepare for rather than predictions to believe. The preparation is the same either way: protect your health, keep compounding your skills and relationships, and stay close enough to the frontier to benefit if it arrives.