Welcome to Lifespan.
This is a magazine created for you, the reader. Thank you for subscribing. Together, we are going to do amazing things.
If you love life and want it to last as long as possible.
If you want to stay healthy, sharp, and capable for decades to come.
If you want to live fully without becoming a burden on the people you love.
Or if you simply want to perform at your highest level for as long as possible, then this magazine is for you.
Over the years, I’ve listened carefully to you, my audience, people who are curious, optimistic, and determined to take control of their health and their future. Lifespan is my answer to those conversations.
Some of you may have read Lifespan, a book I co-wrote in 2019. Others may have listened to the Lifespan show. Today we’re launching a new endeavor, Lifespan Magazine. Across all these efforts, my goal is the same: I want to create opportunities for learning where the science is checked, the claims are sourced, and the advice is judged by whether it is credible, useful, and grounded in real data. However we reach you, we’re glad you’re here. And if you want to stay up-to-date with all our resources, it’s my hope that you’ll consider joining the Lifespan Community. By doing so you’ll be directly supporting medical research.
My promise is simple:
1. Provide only evidence-based information on science and health
2. Give practical information that helps you live a longer, healthier life
3. Support medical research
4. Build the largest global longevity community that can rebuild healthcare from the ground up
This isn’t another wellness publication chasing trends. It is part of an ecosystem built for members around science, transparency, and action.
And the timing could not be better.
Lifespan Magazine is launching at a moment when longevity, prevention, and healthy aging have moved from the margins of science into the mainstream. What was once a niche academic field is now one of the most exciting frontiers in medicine, biotechnology, and human potential.
The next decades will transform how we think about aging and disease.
This magazine exists to help you understand that transformation, and to help you benefit from it.
Welcome to Lifespan.
Why launch now?
Too much of the public conversation about health is now filtered through an influencer wellness industry that is often uncredentialed, poorly sourced, conflicted, and detached from evidence.
Recent research describes a digital environment in which health and nutrition content is heavily shaped by marketing and influencers. Research has found that 44.8% of nutrition information posted by popular Instagram accounts contained inaccuracies.1 Consumers want better answers about what to take, how to exercise, what to eat, and how to live their longest, best, healthiest lives. What is missing is a publication that treats the reader with respect.
There is a section of society that is tired of all the clickbait from newspapers and TV. They want:
1. Real facts, not fads
2. Well-researched articles, written by scientists
3. Evidence-based recommendations, not slogans
4. More medical research, not more billionaires with racecars
5. Making medical innovations accessible to everyone
If any of this resonates with you, then we hope you’ll join us. We’re creating a place where curious people can learn together, ask hard questions, and act on the best available evidence.
A field moving from fringe to mainstream
The global wellness economy reached $6.8 trillion in 2024 and is projected to reach $9.8 trillion by 2029.2 At the same time, scientific and commercial interest in aging biology has accelerated, from standalone companies to broader activity across pharma, artificial intelligence, genomics, and precision health.
One clear sign of that shift is the emergence of well-funded companies built around aging biology. Altos Labs has focused on cellular rejuvenation and restoration, while Retro Biosciences has positioned itself around extending healthy lifespan and preventing or reversing age-related disease. This is no longer a fringe conversation. It is now part of the core strategy of a growing set of serious research organizations and investors.
The future is consumer biotech. GLP-1 drugs changed the psychology of medicine and of consumers. These drugs began in diabetes, expanded into obesity, then showed broader relevance across cardiovascular and metabolic disease, and, more recently, aging. A 2025 editorial in Nature Biotechnology explored the question of whether GLP-1s might be the first longevity drugs.3 It’s clear that they work across multiple systems, even having a beneficial impact in substance use disorders.4
Whether or not GLP-1s ultimately prove to be longevity therapeutics, they have already accomplished something consequential: they have made the notion of interventions that slow aspects of aging both credible and imaginable to a broad public. This may well foreshadow the path by which the first true longevity therapies reach the mainstream.
The convergence that is changing medicine
Aging remains the single greatest risk factor for most chronic diseases. There are others, of course. Smoking is dangerous and rightly carries that reputation. But scale matters. Smoking increases the risk of many cancers by roughly 2 to 3 times. Aging, between about 40 and 75, increases cancer risk by approximately 30 to 40 times. If medicine is serious about reducing the burden of disease, it must ultimately confront the biology of aging.
This is not only a scientific problem. It is an economic one. In 2021, Dr. Andrew Scott, Dr. Martin Ellison, and I published The Economic Value of Targeting Aging in the scientific journal Nature Aging.5 We estimated that slowing aging enough to extend life expectancy by just one year would generate approximately $38 trillion in societal value. Extending healthy lifespan by ten years would yield about $367 trillion. These figures help explain why longevity is no longer a niche conversation. It is emerging as a central priority for public health, biotechnology, and the global economy.
What we are now seeing is the convergence of molecular biology, genomics, AI, and biotechnology. This convergence is not theoretical. It is already reshaping how disease is measured, how therapies are developed, and how health is monitored.
On the drug discovery side, a clear example is AlphaFold,6 which transformed structural biology by making protein prediction dramatically faster and scalable. In my own laboratory, AI is now used to search vast chemical spaces for molecules that may slow or reverse aspects of aging. It can analyze microscopy images and estimate the biological age of cells in seconds. Increasingly, AI is beginning to function as what might be called an agentic scientist: a system that amplifies the reach of good scientists. As Dr. Nicholas Galakatos, Global Head of Blackstone Life Sciences, has noted, drug development is hard and expensive. That is precisely why better tools for choosing targets, screening molecules, and interpreting results matter so much.
The same logic is reshaping personalized medicine. The clinical frontier is no longer just the genome. It is the genome, the epigenome, blood biomarkers, sleep, glucose dynamics, activity, medications, environment, and how these change over time. Wearables, blood tests, and home diagnostics are important because they transform health from an occasional snapshot into something closer to continuous sensing. AI makes that stream interpretable. Increasingly, these data can help forecast disease risk and identify interventions before symptoms begin.7,8 That was an argument I made in the Lifespan book: biology would become measurable, trackable, and ultimately predictable.
This is the convergent environment in which we now find ourselves. It sets us up for an era of extraordinary medical progress, if we can guide it with evidence and judgment.
The new tools driving longevity science
Genomics is undergoing a parallel transformation. The first human genome cost billions of dollars to complete. The field is now pushing toward the $100 genome. Once sequencing gets that cheap, the bottleneck changes. The expensive part is no longer producing the sequence. It is organizing, integrating, and interpreting biological data at scale.9
Oxford Nanopore is a company which has been foundational in making genetic sequencing portable and real-time. The field it helped build is now moving toward commoditized sequencing hardware and much greater strategic value in unique datasets and interpretation. That shift echoes what Larry Ellison has argued from the AI side: the durable value may not be the machine generating the data, or even the model processing it, but the high-value private data itself. In biology, that principle may be even more important than in software because the next major advances are likely to come from datasets that are longitudinal, clinically rich, and hard to replicate.10
More detailed and specific sequencing techniques are now providing more data than ever before. Single-cell sequencing allows scientists to track changes in individual cells rather than averaging across many cells, revealing which cell states are driving disease and where resistance or vulnerability sit. In practical terms, single-cell genomics is changing how we detect disease, validate targets, stratify patients, and design medicines.11,12
Together, these developments show that the tools for doing science are improving faster than ever, and that the central challenge is no longer access to data, but knowing how to use it wisely.
Longevity medicines come of age
Taken together, these trends point in the same direction. Aging itself is becoming a direct target for medicine. It’s no secret that my own work has focused on aging, but therapies developed with aging in mind can also be used to treat specific diseases. We are now entering an era in which age-focused interventions are moving from theory into human trials.
One example is ER-100, a gene therapy developed by Life Biosciences, a company I founded and chair. ER-100 is designed to restore a more youthful epigenome to diseased cells in the eye, with the aim of helping them regain lost function. ER-100 has been approved by the FDA to move to clinical trials for people with certain optic nerve disorders.13 If you’re interested in the details, an article later in this issue takes a deeper dive. Here, I mention it for a simpler reason: it illustrates how quickly the field is moving from understanding aging to attempting to reverse aspects of it in people.
Lifespan Magazine
A serious publication in this field should do more than track papers, companies, and policy. It should help build a public that can distinguish evidence from exaggeration, understand what is actionable today, and support the scientific work that remains to be done. This is the goal of Lifespan Magazine.
The field has moved beyond the point where it can be dismissed as fringe, but it has not yet reached the point where confidence should outrun evidence. Longevity is emerging as a legitimate scientific, medical, and economic domain. The tools are improving. The data is improving. Investment is increasing. Measurement is becoming more precise.
But progress brings a new obligation: standards. Readers need a source that can clearly explain what is credible, what is speculative, what is practical now, and what is worth supporting.
That is precisely why a publication like this should exist.
Thank you for joining us.
Be well,
References
1. Denniss, E., Lindberg, R., Marchese, L.E. et al. #Fail: the quality and accuracy of nutrition-related information by influential Australian Instagram accounts. Int J Behav Nutr Phys Act 21, 16 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-024-01565-y
2. 2025 Global Wellness Economy Monitor, <https://globalwellnessinstitute.org/industry-research/2025-global-wellness-economy-monitor/> (2025).
3. Are GLP-1s the first longevity drugs? Nat Biotechnol 43, 1741-1742, doi:10.1038/s41587-025-02932-1 (2025).
4. Cai M, Choi T, Xie Y, Al-Aly Z. Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists and risk of substance use disorders among US veterans with type 2 diabetes: cohort study BMJ 2026; 392 :e086886 doi:10.1136/bmj-2025-086886
5. Scott, A. J., Ellison, M. & Sinclair, D. A. The economic value of targeting aging. Nat Aging 1, 616-623, doi:10.1038/s43587-021-00080-0 (2021).
6. Abramson, J. et al. Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3. Nature 630, 493-500, doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07487-w (2024).
7. Khan, S. N., Danishuddin, Khan, M. W. A., Guarnera, L. & Akhtar, S. M. F. Multi-modal AI in precision medicine: integrating genomics, imaging, and EHR data for clinical insights. Front Artif Intell 8, 1743921, doi:10.3389/frai.2025.1743921 (2025).
8. Mendez, K. M. et al. A roadmap to precision medicine through post-genomic electronic medical records. Nat Commun 16, 1700, doi:10.1038/s41467-025-56442-4 (2025).
9. Singh, S. The hundred-dollar genome: a health care cart before the genomic horse. CMAJ 190, E514, doi:10.1503/cmaj.69259 (2018).
10. Evans, B. Larry Ellison’s 2026 Target: Largest and Fastest-Growing Markets in History, <https://cloudwars.com/innovation-leadership/larry-ellisons-2026-target-largest-and-fastest-growing-markets-in-history/> (2026).
11. Wyatt, A., Hoffer-Hawlik, K., Giglio, R. M., Azizi, E. & McFaline-Figueroa, J. L. An expanded role for single-cell chemical genomics profiling in drug discovery. Biochem J 483, 211-228, doi:10.1042/BCJ20253273 (2026).
12. Elshiekh, D. et al. Single-cell sequencing in molecular diagnostics: Transformative yet untapped potential. Front Genet 16, 1621081, doi:10.3389/fgene.2025.1621081 (2025).
13. FDA go-ahead to test cellular rejuvenation therapy in humans. Nat Biotechnol 44, 164, doi:10.1038/s41587-026-03037-z (2026).
Lifespan Magazine is proud to support medical research and the Lifespan Foundation
Last Updated: Aug 7, 2026 · 11 minute
