The longevity market is gaining significant traction, with capital investment and deal count at a record high for 2025 and 2026. However, with biological aging far from recognised as an indication and relevant endpoints yet to be validated, biotech valuation will still be calculated based on a traditional disease-led market potential model.
In conjunction with market growth, academic interest in longevity and anti-aging has also intensified, with 35,399 publications mentioning these terms between 2016–2024, according to an article published in Biogerontology in 2025.
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Yet, the sector is somewhat murky, complicated by intersection with the burgeoning wellness sector and biohacker craze which have the embraced terminology of longevity. For this reason, the biopharma industry is adopting the label of gerotherapeutics to encompass regenerative medicine and drugs that target aging, explained Phil Newman, CEO of Longevity Technology, at the 2026 Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) Europe conference taking place in Cologne, Germany 9–11 November.
Regulators and investor play catch up with innovation
Existing drug approval frameworks do not support disease-agnostic drug development. So, regardless of longevity potential, venture capital (VC) firms still turn to disease-specific outcomes aligned with current regulatory requirements, said Clara Campàs, managing partner at Asabys Partners. As such, evaluation of an asset’s commercial potential remains reliant on a data package detailing patient population size across selected target markets and at a particular price, she added.
“The standard paradigm we have for drug discovery, it’s to try and identify a single drug for a single target for a single disease,” said Carina Kern, CEO of LinkGevity, a London, UK-headquartered biotech developing therapeutics that target necrosis.
Nonetheless, efforts to define age-related endpoint are underway, noted Nikolaj Kulahin Roed, global project leader at Novo Nordisk.
A US federally funded initiative named PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience (PROSPR) is currently working in collaboration with the US Food and drug Administration (FDA) to develop and validate clinical endpoint for measuring biological ageing and healthspan. According to Roed, this is an exciting but complex endeavour that is likely to take some time.
In the meantime, Roed emphasised that longevity-related biotechs can still focus on age-related diseases. Beyond this, Campàs argued that the next step is to target comorbidities and complications related to aging, such as sarcopenia and dementia.
However, Kern postulated that there may be a false distinction between aging and age-related diseases. While acknowledging there is unlikely to be one “silver bullet”, she advocates for pursuing development of a drug that can address as many diseases as possible.
Considered by some to have longevity increasing potential, glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor (GLP-1R) agonism may offer an early glimpse into how broad-application drugs can expand their regulatory indications. Kern described this drug class as harbinger of a potential “systems-level drug” that targets a key driver of damage across multiple diseases.
Quantitative evidence is also emerging to validate longevity claims, with a UK-based real-world cohort study published in March 2026 projecting an overall life expectancy gain of 1.9 years for semaglutide.
