What if the next big target in medicine is getting older itself?
Researchers are taking that possibility seriously, with new tools, new clinics, and growing FDA attention. Instead of waiting for diabetes, heart disease, or cancer to appear and then treating each condition separately, they want to know whether the slow biological wear behind all three can be slowed first.
The prize would be more years lived in good health, what scientists call healthspan, along with a longer life.
That raises a question that sounds philosophical until the practical consequences come into view: does aging need to be officially called a disease before anyone can treat it? Regulators, researchers, clinics, and biotech companies are approaching the answer from different directions.
The evidence in humans is still developing, but the regulatory conversation has already begun. And one company has now won FDA clearance to test a version of the idea in human eyes.
The Case for Treating the Root
Researchers see aging as the shared engine behind the illnesses people dread most.
Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, boils the argument down to two short sentences. “Aging has biology. This biology drives diseases,” he told CNN.
If he’s right, medicine could eventually target the processes that feed diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer together rather than waiting for each disease to emerge on its own.
In the lab, that idea already has traction. Scientists have manipulated aging biology in roundworms and mice, while medicines, exercise and calorie restriction have slowed cellular changes tied to aging and stretched animal lifespans.
People are another matter. Columbia University epidemiologist Daniel Belsky says the approach has never been tested in humans. “For humans, we do not yet have clinical trial evidence that intervention on this biology to extend health span is possible,” he said to CNN.
Why Proof Takes So Long
A trial that could settle the question might have to run for decades.
Following people who begin an intervention at 40 or 50 to see whether it prevents chronic disease could take two or three decades. That makes the usual clinical-trial playbook unusually difficult, so researchers are searching for shortcuts: measurable signs of how quickly a body is aging.
Belsky’s project, known as FAST, collects proteins, metabolites, and epigenetic marks on white blood cells, looking for markers that respond to different interventions. The hope is that one could eventually become a “surrogate endpoint,” meaning a short-term signal that reliably predicts an outcome years away.
So far, nobody has shown that for aging. A December 2025 paper on collecting biomarker data in longevity trials states that no biomarker of aging has been clinically validated to date. An August analysis of 51 intervention studies in Nature Medicine adds another problem: nobody has yet defined how large a change in an epigenetic clock must be to count as clinically meaningful.
Clinics Are Running Ahead
Longevity medicine reached exam rooms before the evidence did.
While researchers work on that proof, longevity medicine is already moving into clinics. Mayo Clinic launched a Healthy Longevity Clinic in 2023, and Singapore’s National University Health System established a similar program pairing detailed assessments with personalized lifestyle or medical interventions.
These clinics often combine conventional checkups with a wider range of tests, and some scientists have said the field needs better regulation.
Abu Dhabi moved in that direction in October 2024, when its Department of Health introduced a licensing framework for Healthy Longevity Medicine Centers, calling it the first of its kind anywhere. The Institute for Healthier Living Abu Dhabi says it was licensed as the world’s first specialized center of this type.
Save this article
Enter your email address and we'll send it straight to your inbox.
Allan Boston, the institute’s chief operating officer, argues that cellular aging is not inevitable and that therapies could someday slow it and maybe even reverse it. For now, though, that remains a goal. A license sets standards for how a clinic operates; it does not validate any particular treatment.
The FDA Starts Sketching a Path
No approvals yet, but the agency is starting to talk about what proof would look like.
Meanwhile, the FDA is beginning to put regulatory language around the idea. Chief Scientist Steven Kozlowski mentioned in a longevity conference in Boston that aging and longevity will be among the topics in the agency’s updated Focus Areas of Regulatory Science report, expected early in fiscal year 2027.
Jeffrey Siegel, director of the FDA’s Office of Drug Evaluation Sciences, described two possible routes for a future therapy. One would show that the same mechanism helps two or three age-related diseases, suggesting it is acting on aging itself.
The other would use a controlled trial to show that treated people lose less ground than untreated people in areas such as cognition, frailty, hearing and vision.
Related: The Truth About Intimacy After 50 Nobody Talks About
So, Is Aging a Disease?
Officially, no, which is why the question keeps coming back.
The World Health Organization’s ICD-11, which took effect in 2022, does not list aging as a disease. It dropped “old age” as a diagnosis and now describes age-related decline in intrinsic capacity, the combined slide in physical and mental abilities.
The FDA has not approved anything for an anti-aging indication either, according to a Science Policy Forum published Oct. 1. Its authors argue that products claiming to prevent or reverse aging already fall under existing FDA rules and should demonstrate safety and effectiveness before reaching consumers.
Yet calling aging a disease would create another problem. At the same Boston conference, UCLA’s Steve Horvath pointed to the catch: somebody would have to define it. Getting there, he argued, will require molecular biomarkers of aging, not only measures of function.
In other words, the label depends partly on solving the measurement problem researchers are already wrestling with.
What You Can Do Today
The best-supported advice sounds a lot less futuristic.
For people wondering what any of this means right now, sleep, exercise, community, and diet are the places where most people can make progress.
Two developments are especially worth watching. The FDA’s updated document will reveal how much regulatory weight the agency gives aging and longevity. Meanwhile, the eye trial will provide the first human data on a technique that has mostly lived in animal studies.
That still leaves the biggest question open: what should count as convincing evidence that a treatment is changing aging rather than simply changing a number on a test?
Which would convince you more that a longevity treatment works: a lower biological-age score, or proof that people stayed mobile and independent for longer?
More Articles You Might Be Interested in:
- 8 Things You Should Never Say to Someone Caring for an Aging Parent
- The Healthy Anti-Aging Foods You Probably Already Have in Your Kitchen
- What Japan Can Teach Us About Aging Actively
