Longevity Economy 2026: Altos Labs, AI Drugs, Japan's iPSC

Altos Labs launched in 2022 with $3 billion to try to make old cells young again. In the same period global life expectancy, which stood at 47 years in 1950, reached 73. A growing number of scientists, investors and policymakers expect the figure to approach 100 by mid-century, and some of them say the first people to reach 120 in good health have already been born.

Investors call the field the longevity economy. Much of the relevant science, and the oldest population of any major economy, is in Japan.

The Science

For most of medical history aging was the background against which disease happened, not a condition in itself. Several lines of research now treat it as one.

Senescent “zombie” cells build up with age and drive chronic inflammation. Senolytic drugs clear them. Unity Biotechnology is in Phase 2 trials against age-related eye diseases, and other senolytic compounds are being tested against conditions from osteoarthritis to pulmonary fibrosis. The idea is to remove the cellular dysfunction behind the diseases of aging instead of treating them one at a time.

Altos Labs, whose backers include Yuri Milner and Jeff Bezos, is working on cellular rejuvenation: using Yamanaka factors to return aged cells to a younger state without making them cancerous. Rejuvenate Bio is applying similar techniques in animals and has reported measurable reversal of age-related biomarkers. Both companies are trying to reverse aging at the cellular level rather than slow it, and both are at an early stage.

Nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+), a coenzyme cells need to produce energy, falls by roughly 50% between the ages of 40 and 60. Elysium Health and ChromaDex sell NAD+ precursors, and clinical trials are testing whether restoring NAD+ levels improves cardiovascular function, cognition and metabolic health.

Insilico Medicine used its AI platform to find a new target for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and take a candidate into Phase 2 trials in under 30 months, against the six to ten years the process usually takes. Isomorphic Labs, a DeepMind spinout, is applying AlphaFold’s protein structure predictions to aging-related targets.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute have shown that transplanted lab-grown tissue can integrate with the host. Japanese institutions, building on Shinya Yamanaka’s Nobel Prize-winning work on induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), are running clinical applications in retinal regeneration, cardiac tissue repair and Parkinson’s disease. The long-term goal is replacement organs grown from a patient’s own cells.

Japan

Japan’s life expectancy is 84.6 years, the highest among major economies, and the country has more than 95,000 centenarians. More than 29% of citizens were over 65 in 2025; the projection for 2040 is 35%.

RIKEN’s Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research works on organoids and regenerative medicine. The University of Tokyo’s Institute for the Biology of Aging studies the molecular mechanisms that let some populations, Okinawans among them, keep their physical and cognitive function into their nineties. Keio University’s Center for Supercentenarian Research holds one of the largest datasets in the world on people who live past 110, and uses it to separate the genetics and environment of extreme longevity from those of ordinary survival.

The 2014 Act on the Safety of Regenerative Medicine created a fast-track approval route that gets promising cell therapies to patients years earlier than in the United States or Europe. Other regulators now study the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA) as a model for balancing speed with patient safety.

Japan’s healthcare spending passed JPY 46 trillion ($310 billion) in 2025, with age-related conditions driving most of the growth. The pension system’s ratio of working-age contributors to retirees keeps narrowing. Each added year of healthy life, as opposed to life alone, means lower medical costs and more people still working.

The Longevity Economy

AARP and Oxford Economics estimate that people over 50 already contribute $44 trillion a year to the global economy, and the figure rises as populations age in every major market. The global longevity and anti-aging market was worth about $65 billion in 2025 and is expected to pass $120 billion by 2030 as biotech, digital health and consumer wellness overlap.

The products already on sale are the wearables. Oura, Whoop and Japanese companies such as Omron Healthcare sell rings, bands and monitors to consumers who want continuous health data, and AI in healthcare alone is projected to reach $45 billion by 2030.

BioAge Labs, with $300 million in funding, is targeting muscle and metabolic aging, and belongs to the group of companies whose therapies could reach approval between 2028 and 2035, along with gene therapies for age-related diseases, bioprinted tissue for transplant and biomarker-based health assessments in place of the annual physical.

Calico, Alphabet’s longevity research company, is funding basic research into the biology of lifespan on a horizon past 2035, where whole-organ regeneration and AI that predicts disease years before symptoms sit.

Access, Work and Regulation

If life-extension therapies cost millions, the wealthy could live decades longer than everyone else. Medical costs usually fall over time, but not quickly enough for the generation that arrives first.

Retirement is the next problem. Stopping work at 65 and living another 35 years does not add up financially, and many people would not want it anyway. In Japan 40% of people aged 65-69 still work, the highest rate in the G7, and even that leaves careers, education and the shape of a working life to be redrawn for a hundred-year span.

Demographers, climate scientists and resource economists have barely started modelling what 10 billion people living to 100 would consume. Longer-lived, better-educated populations tend to have fewer children and higher productivity; whether that holds at this scale is unknown.

The FDA does not classify aging as a disease, so drug approval has no category for a treatment aimed at it. The TAME trial (Targeting Aging with Metformin) is the first FDA-approved clinical trial to test a drug for aging itself and may change that.

Where This Meets the Summit

Longevity-focused start-ups raised over $5.2 billion in 2025, four times the 2020 figure. Drug discovery is being run on AI platforms. Health-data ownership and clinical-trial coordination are being tried on blockchains. Japan has the patients, the research institutes and a regulator with a fast-track route.

Who gets access, and at what price, is still being argued over.

Join the Conversation

On April 26, 2026, the Tech for Impact Summit brings senior executives, policymakers and technologists to Tokyo Garden Terrace Kioi Conference. The theme is “Beyond Boundaries: Building 2050 Together”, and longevity is one of the boundaries on the agenda.

Confirmed speakers include Yoshito Hori (GLOBIS), Kathy Matsui (MPower Partners), Taro Kono (former Minister of Digital Affairs), Charles Hoskinson (Cardano), Ken Suzuki (SmartNews), Jesper Koll (Monex Group) and Hiroshi Aoi (Marui Group).

Leaders of healthcare enterprises, biotech funds and technology companies whose products will shape how the next generation ages are invited to take part.

Explore partnership and membership opportunities →

Watch highlights from previous summits: youtu.be/ujy7ZXflrt4

The Tech for Impact Summit is an invitation-only executive gathering taking place April 26, 2026, in Tokyo as a partner event of SusHi Tech Tokyo. Learn more at tech4impactsummit.com.