I think there's a fundamental disconnect here: the article says that you should be focusing on strategies that, for the most part, make aging more dignified. The goal shouldn't be even curing cancer. And maybe that's right.
But the reason billions of dollars are poured by SFBA VCs into aging research is probably just that they're getting older, they don't want to die, and they figure that they can put some of their money into anti-aging moonshots. It's not really different from rich people getting cryogenically frozen. If you have more money than you can possibly use, why wouldn't you try?
And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design.
Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?
It would be interesting if one of those anti-aging moonshots succeeds but the treatment to stop aging only works if you had a pre-treatment that has to occur before puberty.
The headline is confusing. This is not about a company that's becoming older. It's about a building a biotech company that treats the symptoms and causes of aging.
Strange because in a way we've already had these for a long time for the visual signs of aging, moisturizers , wrinkle creams etc.
And we've been trying to treat all the symptoms of aging for a long time too. Alzheimers, heart disease , arthritis etc. They just haven't been explicitly "anti-aging"
I wonder how much the prohibition of stem cell research set back anti-aging.
I just don't see how you can get humans to live super-long without replacement of parts. It's how every complex thing in the world lasts a long time. Stem cells are literally how we built the parts in the first place so it seems to me to be the first place to look on how to build them a second time.
Creating stem cells from blood samples is a well-established industry practice now. I don’t think limiting embryonic stem cells research is significantly hindering stem cells research, is it?
To my knowledge stem cell research is clicking along just fine, and I can guarantee you that certain other countries (looking at you here China) don't give Shit One about the ethical/religious hangups around it in the West.
From what I've read (and I'd love to be corrected here because I really don't know deeply about this), the progress on actually creating replacement organs and so forth is the case simply because it's really hard to achieve so far. There's too much we just don't know or at least don't know how to make work in applied practice.
"A successful aging treatment would be something that:
prevents diseases of aging, ideally more than one;
preserves a healthy function that normally declines with age (like fertility, immune function, cognitive function, resilience, or physical fitness); or
reverses the course of at least one age-related disease."
I think a lot of the anti-aging companies out there would say that the real answer is a combination of the second and third - reversing the course of age-related decline.
Also, I think it's sort of contradictory to have two of these points focus on diseases of aging but in a subsequent section say that oncology isn't anti-aging. Cancer is in many ways a disease of aging (it's very clear from the numbers that increasing in age causes increases in likelihood of developing cancer, generally more than any other single factor). Curing cancer obviously isn't going to get you a general-purpose anti-aging treatment, but that's why it seems odd to say that reversing the course of an age-related disease is a successful aging treatment.
From an anti aging perspective, cancer is the most visible symptom of DNA gradually becoming more and more damaged.
The anti aging solution that happens to solve cancer as a side effect is then to figure out how to repair DNA damage, and/or replace cells with damaged DNA with cells with intact DNA.
As a co-founder of Ginkgo Health[1], this is a refreshing discussion to see.
The "Is this aging?" article perfectly articulates the philosophy that drove us to start the company. We saw a huge disconnect between the longevity industry's focus on hype and moonshots, and what the science actually shows is effective for improving healthspan. The article's point about focusing on frailty and sarcopenia is spot-on ; functional health is one of the most powerful and evidence-based levers we have to improve quality of life as we age.
That's precisely why we built Ginkgo Active. We wanted to create a genuine "geroprotector" that was accessible to everyone, not just a theoretical treatment for the wealthy.
When we responded[2] to the recent CMS RFI[3] on the Health Technology Ecosystem, we outlined this exact approach. Our goal is to provide a practical solution to functional decline and chronic disease, which are massive burdens on the healthcare system.
Here’s how our thinking aligns with the article's main points:
Focus on Function, Not Just Biomarkers: Instead of chasing clocks, we focus on delivering personalized exercise prescriptions designed to improve strength, balance, and cardiovascular health. Our AI platform uses over 170,000 rules from authoritative sources like the American College of Sports Medicine to create these plans.
Prevention and Healthspan: Our platform is built to help people before they get sick, preventing or delaying the onset of 18 different chronic condition risk factors. This is about adding healthy years to life, which is the core of a real aging intervention.
Accessibility and Equity: We believe this kind of preventative care should be a right, not a privilege. We intentionally designed our platform so that it doesn't require expensive wearables or equipment. Our goal is to provide the same expert-level care to everyone, regardless of their income or where they live.
We believe the first real, scalable product of the longevity industry will be one that improves healthspan for the many. That's the problem we're dedicated to solving.
But is it the medication, or reduction in oxidative stress and glycation?
Medications almost always come with some form of negative side effects for a portion of those prescribed to. I think part of it needs to come from awareness of what we're putting into our bodies in the first place. I think a large part of it all comes from what we're taking in that wouldn't be considered food by most reasonable people knowing what goes into processed "food".
"Food is medicine," also means food is poison. Not all are created equal. This isn't to completely decry all advancements in food production, or even all processed foods... but there's definitely more that needs to be looked into.
Unpopular opinion: Any medical intervention that delays or defeats the aging process will disproportionately benefit the wealthy, and is therefore unethical. The last thing a healthy democracy needs is millennium-old acolytes of Peter Thiel pulling the strings from the shadows.
Virtually every single advancement in science, engineering, and technology disproportionately benefits the wealthy, because they already own everything. That's a great reason to fight against the massive imbalance of wealth distribution, but a terrible reason to halt all human progress.
That sounds similar the prevailing criticism of biotech companies: their primary concern is to develop treatments for the rich or, at a very minimum, common (and often trivial) conditions in first world nations. In other words, for people who can afford to pay. The only real difference in the latter case is that wealthy nations are pulling the strings.
Not to mention everyone would be better off if the money invested in these VCs was invested in clean energy, public transportation and whatnot. Many of us just have to live with the knowledge that we are handicapping our life expectancies just by living in a heavily polluted major city. Living in São Paulo I'm reminded by national news every year how many cigarettes I am "smoking" daily just by existing in this place
Aside from being an unpopular opinion, it's also a rather stupid one. I can think of no better way to say it. Virtually every technology currently used by the majority of human beings in the world to make their lives better in some way started as a privilege of the wealthy, but the tendency of a timespan between it going from that to something widely and affordably affordable has historically not only held ground but shortened.
To deny the possibility of breakthrough medical therapies that possibly save millions of families from the tragedy of prematurely losing loved ones just out of some half baked spite against the rich is grossly short-sighted at best. If anything is unethical, it's such a worldview itself.
This isn't an unpopular opinion. I would argue this is the mainstream argument.
I think all medical advances benefit the wealthy first and then becomes more affordable over time.
The term "aging" seems to trigger a lot of people and lead to philosophizing over the importance and morality of death. They are important topics to discuss, but I also think it is worthwhile to also hear out the optimist perspectives rather than the endless dystopic cynicism we hear on the daily basis.
The distance between a scientific revolution being accessible to the ultra-wealthy and the average consumer is measured in years, and shrinking rapidly.
I would rather billionaires get anti-aging technology 10yrs before I do than never get it at all.
You’re not wrong, but still most people would want to live healthily longer regardless, and it’s kind of unavoidable that the progress that can be made will be made.
Also: The Future is not really looking very bright for anyone besides the already-wealthy. I don't know why you'd want to live in the future. If you're an average middle-class American, the peak best time to live ever (stretching out into the past and predicting into the future) is probably the 1990s or so. My standard of living is slightly worse than my (Boomer) parents', and my kid's standard of living is very likely going to be worse than my own, and I would bet that her future kid's standard of living will be further worse.
Aging well requires a both biological and lifestyle interventions. One company called Nuraxi [1] is geared precisely to support that, They aim at studying the super-agers in the Sardinia "blue zone", and build digital twins (for the rest of us) on which simulate all-round interventions based on the insights from super-agers. Sounds like a promising way to get personalised longevity recipes.
I was under the impression that the majority of recent analysis pointed to the interpretation that most of the claimed blue zones were primarily marked as such due to poor record keeping rather than true super ager status.
> build digital twins (for the rest of us) on which simulate all-round interventions based
Digital twins, what a freaking crock. Imagine claiming to simulate the biochemical pathways of a trillion cells and 3 billion basepairs and a gorillion chemicals and sequestration zones. Least they could do is take a little tissue and screw around with a patient-derived organoid. If someone made a digital twin that worked proper they'd be making a killing in pharma trials and drug development
hinterlands|7 months ago
But the reason billions of dollars are poured by SFBA VCs into aging research is probably just that they're getting older, they don't want to die, and they figure that they can put some of their money into anti-aging moonshots. It's not really different from rich people getting cryogenically frozen. If you have more money than you can possibly use, why wouldn't you try?
spandrew|7 months ago
And researchers on planet earth aren't a monolith. Even "longevity" research can take vastly different shapes across the labs driving towards it. The mess of research towards a goal is kinda the point; nobody knows where the universe hid the nuggets of world-bending discoveries. It's not quite pray and spray; but the shapes are diverse and irregular by design.
Cancer, alzheimers, cell senescence — all of it's fair game. Why are we pretending like anybody knows how to police this thought work?
tzs|7 months ago
tylerflick|7 months ago
Maultasche|7 months ago
izzydata|7 months ago
lawlessone|7 months ago
And we've been trying to treat all the symptoms of aging for a long time too. Alzheimers, heart disease , arthritis etc. They just haven't been explicitly "anti-aging"
layer8|7 months ago
lesuorac|7 months ago
I just don't see how you can get humans to live super-long without replacement of parts. It's how every complex thing in the world lasts a long time. Stem cells are literally how we built the parts in the first place so it seems to me to be the first place to look on how to build them a second time.
peterlk|7 months ago
southernplaces7|7 months ago
From what I've read (and I'd love to be corrected here because I really don't know deeply about this), the progress on actually creating replacement organs and so forth is the case simply because it's really hard to achieve so far. There's too much we just don't know or at least don't know how to make work in applied practice.
idopmstuff|7 months ago
prevents diseases of aging, ideally more than one;
preserves a healthy function that normally declines with age (like fertility, immune function, cognitive function, resilience, or physical fitness); or
reverses the course of at least one age-related disease."
I think a lot of the anti-aging companies out there would say that the real answer is a combination of the second and third - reversing the course of age-related decline.
Also, I think it's sort of contradictory to have two of these points focus on diseases of aging but in a subsequent section say that oncology isn't anti-aging. Cancer is in many ways a disease of aging (it's very clear from the numbers that increasing in age causes increases in likelihood of developing cancer, generally more than any other single factor). Curing cancer obviously isn't going to get you a general-purpose anti-aging treatment, but that's why it seems odd to say that reversing the course of an age-related disease is a successful aging treatment.
hyghjiyhu|7 months ago
The anti aging solution that happens to solve cancer as a side effect is then to figure out how to repair DNA damage, and/or replace cells with damaged DNA with cells with intact DNA.
Bluestein|7 months ago
iceboundrock|7 months ago
The "Is this aging?" article perfectly articulates the philosophy that drove us to start the company. We saw a huge disconnect between the longevity industry's focus on hype and moonshots, and what the science actually shows is effective for improving healthspan. The article's point about focusing on frailty and sarcopenia is spot-on ; functional health is one of the most powerful and evidence-based levers we have to improve quality of life as we age.
That's precisely why we built Ginkgo Active. We wanted to create a genuine "geroprotector" that was accessible to everyone, not just a theoretical treatment for the wealthy.
When we responded[2] to the recent CMS RFI[3] on the Health Technology Ecosystem, we outlined this exact approach. Our goal is to provide a practical solution to functional decline and chronic disease, which are massive burdens on the healthcare system.
Here’s how our thinking aligns with the article's main points:
Focus on Function, Not Just Biomarkers: Instead of chasing clocks, we focus on delivering personalized exercise prescriptions designed to improve strength, balance, and cardiovascular health. Our AI platform uses over 170,000 rules from authoritative sources like the American College of Sports Medicine to create these plans. Prevention and Healthspan: Our platform is built to help people before they get sick, preventing or delaying the onset of 18 different chronic condition risk factors. This is about adding healthy years to life, which is the core of a real aging intervention. Accessibility and Equity: We believe this kind of preventative care should be a right, not a privilege. We intentionally designed our platform so that it doesn't require expensive wearables or equipment. Our goal is to provide the same expert-level care to everyone, regardless of their income or where they live.
We believe the first real, scalable product of the longevity industry will be one that improves healthspan for the many. That's the problem we're dedicated to solving.
[1] https://ginkgo.health
[2] https://www.regulations.gov/comment/CMS-2025-0050-0264
[3] https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/05/16/2025-08...
nashashmi|7 months ago
tracker1|7 months ago
Medications almost always come with some form of negative side effects for a portion of those prescribed to. I think part of it needs to come from awareness of what we're putting into our bodies in the first place. I think a large part of it all comes from what we're taking in that wouldn't be considered food by most reasonable people knowing what goes into processed "food".
"Food is medicine," also means food is poison. Not all are created equal. This isn't to completely decry all advancements in food production, or even all processed foods... but there's definitely more that needs to be looked into.
rhet0rica|7 months ago
feoren|7 months ago
II2II|7 months ago
mvieira38|7 months ago
southernplaces7|7 months ago
To deny the possibility of breakthrough medical therapies that possibly save millions of families from the tragedy of prematurely losing loved ones just out of some half baked spite against the rich is grossly short-sighted at best. If anything is unethical, it's such a worldview itself.
daemonk|7 months ago
I think all medical advances benefit the wealthy first and then becomes more affordable over time.
The term "aging" seems to trigger a lot of people and lead to philosophizing over the importance and morality of death. They are important topics to discuss, but I also think it is worthwhile to also hear out the optimist perspectives rather than the endless dystopic cynicism we hear on the daily basis.
DelaneyM|7 months ago
I would rather billionaires get anti-aging technology 10yrs before I do than never get it at all.
layer8|7 months ago
jjk166|7 months ago
ryandrake|7 months ago
rippeltippel|7 months ago
[1] https://www.nuraxi.ai
morleytj|7 months ago
Is Sardinia an exception to this?
amy_petrik|7 months ago
Digital twins, what a freaking crock. Imagine claiming to simulate the biochemical pathways of a trillion cells and 3 billion basepairs and a gorillion chemicals and sequestration zones. Least they could do is take a little tissue and screw around with a patient-derived organoid. If someone made a digital twin that worked proper they'd be making a killing in pharma trials and drug development