Aging Research & Drug Discovery Meeting

At #ARDD2026, Nikolaj Kulahin Roed, Global Project Leader at Novo Nordisk, shared how semaglutide data maps onto hallmarks of aging: heart outcomes, infections, frailty, and day-to-day quality of life. Scientific exchange only, not unapproved use. Key takeaways from the talk: -In a UK cohort applying SELECT criteria, lifelong semaglutide was estimated to add roughly ~2 years of life -Reduced risk of infection-related outcomes, including COVID; cancer effects appear type-dependent -In SELECT, benefits were consistent across frailty levels, and the frailest reported the largest quality-of-life gains (not proposed as a frailty treatment) -Proteomic clocks showed 2–3 years lower biological age, with onset at 13–20 weeks Unmet needs he flagged: muscle health (frailty, sarcopenia, malnutrition) and women's health, with a study underway comparing hormone therapy, semaglutide, and both combined -Whether GLP-1 counts as a “longevity” therapy remains open to debate At ARDD, that is the goal we keep coming back to: more healthy years for more people. Watch the talk: https://lnkd.in/gYQ3pZvq #ARDD2026 #GLP1 #HealthyAgeing #Semaglutide #Longevity #Healthspan

Evelyne Bischof, MD, PhD at #ARDD2026 on how healthspan trials can actually work in the clinic. From the Sheba Longevity Department, she shared their XPRIZE Healthspan pilot: 31 people, 8 weeks, daily digital phenotyping, and two polytherapy arms (metformin + GLP-1, or metformin + an SGLT2 inhibitor, plus supplements and prebiotics). The bigger idea wasn't just "does the cocktail work?" It was whether doctors can follow each person closely enough, every day, to adapt treatment in real time instead of waiting months for the next visit. Full results are still coming in. Early signals she described: better cognition and muscle function for many participants, shifts in immune markers and microbiome diversity, and movement across several aging clocks, with really strong day-to-day compliance. Watch here: https://lnkd.in/gtZrfVu2 #ARDD2026 #Healthspan #XPRIZEHealthspan #ClinicalTrials #Longevity

Now on our channel: Andrew Brack, Program Manager, Proactive Health at Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), at #ARDD2026. In "Clinical trials for aging: How ARPA-H PROSPR is building the train tracks to support a future industry," he lays out the central bottleneck for longevity medicine: without a clear regulatory path and endpoints the FDA can evaluate, promising aging science often stays in the lab. PROSPR is ARPA-H's answer: a 5-year program with up to $144 million to advance novel clinical endpoints for aging and test therapeutics that target the aging process to extend healthspan. Key points from the talk: 🔹 Build a health score from functional measures, grounded in intrinsic capacity (Prosper IC), by harmonizing large longitudinal datasets (15 already integrated) 🔹 Pursue FDA Clinical Outcome Assessment (COA) qualification for function in aging before seeking surrogate-endpoint status, so any sponsor can use the tool once qualified 🔹 Test whether that score is intervenable in a drug-repurposing healthspan trial (non-diseased adults 60–75), and use it as an endpoint in early novel-drug studies Watch the full talk: https://lnkd.in/gw5y6hFr #ARDD2026 #ARPAH #PROSPR #Healthspan #ClinicalTrials #Geroscience #Longevity

What if the biggest obstacle to validating aging clocks isnt the science, but the incentives of clinical drug development? At ARDD 2026 at Harvard, Steve Horvath, pioneer of epigenetic aging clocks and professor at UCLA, highlighted a fundamental conflict between the interests of pharmaceutical companies and the scientific progress needed to make aging clocks useful for regulatory approval. “The more you measure in a clinical trial, the riskier it is for the company. If one indicator goes the wrong way, this may derail the entire approval process. And so there’s a conflict of interest. You don’t want to measure everything under the sun. However, to arrive at qualified surrogate endpoints for aging, we do need to take the risk and measure these data in ideally hundreds of clinical trials.” For me, it represents a fascinating paradox. For aging clocks to become qualified surrogate endpoints, we need extensive longitudinal data demonstrating that changes in biological age reliably predict meaningful clinical benefits. That means measuring multiple aging biomarkers across hundreds of clinical trials, different therapeutic interventions, patient populations, and disease areas. But pharmaceutical companies have incentives to keep their clinical development programs focused. Every additional exploratory measurement potentially introduces an unfavorable result that could complicate interpretation, raise questions, or create additional regulatory scrutiny. What is scientifically valuable for the entire longevity field may not be commercially attractive to an individual drug developer. This raises an important question: Who should bear the cost and risk of generating the evidence needed to validate aging clocks? Should it be individual pharmaceutical companies, publicly funded initiatives such as ARPA-Hs PROSPR program, or precompetitive consortia that allow companies to share biomarker data without compromising their competitive positions? The FDAs growing engagement with longevity science makes this question especially timely. We have increasingly sophisticated biological aging clocks. What we still lack is sufficient interventional evidence to establish which of them can reliably predict clinical benefit. The next breakthrough in aging clocks may not be a new algorithm, but the infrastructure and incentives that allow us to validate the ones we already have.#ARDD2026 #Longevity #AgingClocks #Geroscience #ClinicalTrials #Biotechnology #FDA Aging Research & Drug Discovery Meeting

"In less than ten years, hopefully, we could be seeing drugs that have actually come out of this causal biology, at the interface of aging and existing diseases." — Fiona H. Marshall, President of Biomedical Research at Novartis, in her keynote at the 2026 Aging Research & Drug Discovery Meeting, covered in Longevity.Technology. The piece also highlights BioAge’s collaboration with Novartis, which pairs our longitudinal, multi-omic human data with Novartis' exercise biology expertise. The goal: to find novel targets that decline with aging and are increased by exercise, which Fiona calls "profoundly beneficial as an antiaging mechanism."  A few ideas from the article that stand out: • Aging is "probably the most important cause" of disease, and large human datasets have made that link mainstream science. • Not everyone ages the same way. Some people's aging may be driven more by inflammation, others' by metabolism or declining DNA repair. Stratifying people by "aging endotypes" could match them to the right therapies. • Regenerative drugs may be cheaper to develop than drugs that slow decline: "It's easier to measure an improvement than a reduction in a decline." • A clear regulatory roadmap would bring pharma in, but it has to be achievable. 100,000-person trials with survival endpoints aren't practical; composite endpoints that combine validated biomarkers with AI-enabled imaging of muscle, bone, heart, and brain could be. Read the full piece: https://lnkd.in/gsrK7NuZ Thanks to Phil Newman for the thoughtful reporting.

In "Could GLP-1 drugs be anti-aging medications?", Brenda Goodman from CNN covers new data presented at the Aging Research and Drug Discovery meeting in Boston: 🔹 Eli Lilly's Dr. Kevin Duffin shared Surmount V data on epigenetic clocks. In participants over 50 taking tirzepatide, the clocks advanced more slowly than calendar time, and some of them actually went backward. 🔹 Novo Nordisk's Dr. Alejandro Aguayo Orozco, PhD presented preprint data showing that semaglutide lowered the heart's biological age by 2 to 4 years compared with placebo. The bigger question he asked on stage is exactly what ARDD is about: "If we're touching so many diseases, are we actually also touching something that is systemic across these diseases? Is it aging?" The researchers were careful to say it's still early, and that's how science moves forward. Thank you to every speaker and attendee who made ARDD 2026 the place where conversations like this happen. 📰 Read the full story: https://lnkd.in/gHuAPRZT #ARDD2026 #Longevity #Aging #GLP1 #DrugDiscovery #Geroscience

Is longevity research becoming a victim of its own hype? At ARDD 2026 at Harvard, Dr. George Daley, Dean of Harvard Medical School, delivered an important reality check to the longevity field, and hearing it really surprised me. “I’m concerned that the optimistic claims being made by some in the aging community far exceed what one can responsibly conclude from our current understanding of the biology.” He also made a point that I think deserves particular attention: “Hype is not inevitable. It isn’t. Indeed, it is our prerogative to pursue aging research with all manner of enthusiasm and passion. But it is also our duty to communicate our work to the public in appropriately measured terms, centered on facts.” Longevity research is progressing rapidly, attracting unprecedented attention from investors, pharmaceutical companies, regulators, and the general public - one could say, finally! But with that attention comes an enormous responsibility. There is a fundamental difference between discovering a mechanism associated with aging, demonstrating that it can be manipulated experimentally, and proving that an intervention meaningfully extends healthy human life. Too often, those distinctions get lost in the headlines. And this matters beyond scientific credibility. Overpromising can undermine public trust, distort investment decisions, and ultimately make it harder for genuinely promising longevity therapeutics to reach patients. We dont need to make longevity science sound more revolutionary than it already is. We need to demonstrate just how revolutionary it can become. #ARDD2026 #Longevity #AgingResearch #Geroscience #Biotechnology #ScientificIntegrity Aging Research & Drug Discovery Meeting