---
title: "In Boston, Big Pharma Learns to Say ‘Longevity’ Without Blushing"
description: "At the ARDD meeting the FDA promised trial guidance for next year, and Lilly and Novo brought blood-clock data on GLP-1 drugs and aging"
author: "Jan Sokol"
published: 2026-10-08T10:09:01Z
modified: 2026-10-08T13:43:44Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/in-boston-big-pharma-learns-to-say-longevity-without-blushin-9cef85
language: en
tags: ["longevity", "pharma", "aging", "biotech", "regulation", "business", "science"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# In Boston, Big Pharma Learns to Say ‘Longevity’ Without Blushing

*At the ARDD meeting the FDA promised trial guidance for next year, and Lilly and Novo brought blood-clock data on GLP-1 drugs and aging*

By Jan Sokol · October 8, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/in-boston-big-pharma-learns-to-say-longevity-without-blushin-9cef85

## In brief

- The ARDD longevity conference met in Boston this year after more than a decade in Europe, with FDA officials taking part for the first time
- The FDA promised new clinical trial guidance for longevity drugs next year and urged companies to agree on trial design
- ARPA-H’s PROSPR program is funding seven teams with up to $144 million over five years to develop healthspan trials
- Novo said semaglutide cut heart age by 2 to 4 years in blood-clock data from over 10,000 trial patients; Lilly reported organ data on tirzepatide
- TD Securities values the longevity market at over $250 billion; HSBC projects a $12.5 trillion global GDP uplift by 2050

There are words a respectable industry will not say out loud. For decades the makers of medicines treated “longevity” as one of them. The word belonged to supplement gurus, to Silicon Valley biohackers, to people selling eternal youth. A company with clinical trials, regulators and shareholders kept away from it.

Last weekend in Boston, Pfizer, GSK, AstraZeneca, Novartis and Eli Lilly all said it, and so did the regulator. [Hilary Brueck, who spent three days at the meeting for *Business Insider*](https://www.businessinsider.com/why-big-pharma-betting-longevity-drugs-2026-10), found executives from the big drugmakers talking about “longevity drugs” with open enthusiasm, and found the researchers around them almost unable to believe it.

## The congress crosses the ocean

The Aging Research and Drug Discovery meeting, known as ARDD, is the most important gathering in the longevity field. For more than a decade it met in Europe. This year, its thirteenth, it came to Boston, the centre of American biotechnology, and for the first time leaders of the US Food and Drug Administration took part.

“We think it’s an important space to be in, because that’s where the patients are going to be,” said Thomas Marron, Eli Lilly’s associate vice president of healthy aging.

For the scientists, the moment has a history behind it. They spent whole careers learning how the body ages, then got stuck when it came to turning that knowledge into treatments. Only a couple of years ago they were still arguing over whether aging counted as a disease at all, and complaining that the FDA had no approval pathway built for anything like their work. Now they are drafting frameworks and debating which data the agency will want to see.

## The umpire

On the first day the FDA went up on stage and promised new clinical trial guidance next year. Justin Penzenstadler, an agency clinical pharmacologist, told the drugmakers to agree among themselves on how trials should be designed and data presented.

> “We’re the umpire and not the coach. You guys work out the cookbook.”

A reflection, not a finding: a regulator does not often hand the pen to the people it regulates and ask them to write the recipe, and still less often in public. You can read humility in that. You can also read an agency that does not yet know what it will ask for.

## The fear behind the hope

Behind the excitement in the hall lies something colder. The populations of wealthy countries are getting older, and governments are alarmed, Washington among them. Its answer is a program called PROactive Solutions for Prolonging Resilience, or PROSPR. In February the federal research agency ARPA-H [named seven teams to carry it out](https://arpa-h.gov/news-and-events/research-teams-add-more-healthy-years-americans-lives-they-age), with funding of up to $144 million over five years. As [*Science* reported](https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-agency-will-devote-144-million-studies-slow-aging-extend-quality-life), the teams hold contracts rather than grants, and the money depends on hitting milestones.

“The basic idea is to move medicine away from asking ‘what disease does this person have?’ towards asking ‘what is this person still capable of doing, and how do we measure it?’” said Andrew Brack, the program’s manager.

The drug companies have read the same demographics. Older patients increasingly want preventive treatments that keep them mobile, capable and mentally sharp for years. If a disease takes decades to develop, the reasoning goes, those decades can be spent protecting health instead of waiting to treat the illness. The dream itself is ancient, and lately it has reached even [the private talk of presidents](https://rews.cc/a/a-hot-mic-two-presidents-and-the-four-thousand-year-old-prom-5f0c1a).

## The clocks

The old obstacle was measurement. Nobody could tell in real time whether a drug was actually slowing aging. New blood tests, called biological age or organ “clocks,” now estimate whether a person’s blood vessels, skin, heart or whole body is aging faster or slower than expected. Newer genetic screens point to individual vulnerabilities, such as to Alzheimer’s, or sensitivities to particular foods and medicines. Wearables already count our steps, heartbeats and sleep.

The most promising candidates came from the blockbuster weight-loss drugs. Lilly reported that tirzepatide, sold as Zepbound and Mounjaro, may slow aging in many internal organs, especially the heart, brain, liver and kidneys. Novo Nordisk went further. It analysed blood samples from more than 10,000 patients in several years of semaglutide trials, the drug sold as Ozempic, Wegovy and Rybelsus. Compared with people not taking the drug, those on semaglutide saw their heart age fall by 2 to 4 years, and the ages of their kidneys, brain, lungs and pancreas fall by a further 1 to 4 years. [*MIT Technology Review* put the sample at 10,052 people](https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/06/1145836/weight-loss-drugs-glp1-lilly-novo-aging-clocks/), half on the drug and half on placebo. Novo had shown an [earlier version of the analysis](https://sciencehub.novonordisk.com/content/dam/sciencehub/global/en/congresses-and-scientific-publications/congresses/ada2026/aguayo-orozco/documents/dermit-ada26-longevity-eposter-final-26may26.pdf) at the American Diabetes Association meeting in June.

These are early numbers, and they come from the companies that sell the drugs.

Regulators will need much more before they approve any drug for aging. The bigger open question is whether these medicines help people who have neither diabetes nor obesity. A PROSPR trial funded earlier this year will try to answer it by prescribing semaglutide to healthy older adults and watching what follows. In the end, researchers want to know whether the drugs actually make people function better as they age.

## The arithmetic of old age

The money explains a lot. Bankers at TD Securities value the current longevity market at more than $250 billion, counting fitness, mobility, nutrition, lifestyle and screening tests. That figure leaves out the market of over $560 billion for conventional care of age-related disease, including cardiology, cancer and neurodegeneration. HSBC’s private bank goes further. It imagines new drugs and more healthy years of work adding up to a “12.5 trillion global GDP uplift” by 2050.

Here is another reflection. Government budgets have long treated the old as a cost. The banks’ spreadsheets now treat them as customers.

In Boston it took several hours before Brueck could sit down somewhere quiet with Kevin Duffin, Lilly’s vice president of aging research. Crowds of researchers and startup founders wanted time with the most valuable drug company in the world. Whether these companies should be chasing longevity drugs is no longer the question in that room. The question is whether they can prove the drugs work.