13th Aging Research and Drug Discovery meeting opened with a pitch for prevention and a program building the endpoints the field needs.
A quick spin through the attendee list is enough to show where ARDD 2026 now sits among the growing number of longevity events around the world. Big Pharma is in the room in numbers, and so are the policymakers and regulators – the people whose decisions will determine whether and when therapeutics targeting aging reach ultimately reach humans.
The opening morning in Boston on 1 October set the tone accordingly: both a celebration of what the field might one day achieve, with a reckoning with what it must first prove.
Science before spectacle
Dr George Daley, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, opened proceedings with a robust warning: the longevity field must be built on science and clinical rigor. To make the point, he cited the case of a woman who visited a New York wellness center and died of a cardiac air embolism after air was accidentally introduced through her IV catheter – a stark reminder that procedures sold under the longevity banner must carry regulatory and scientific rigor.
It was not a call to retreat. Daley was equally clear that the science underpinning the field has the potential to transform later life for a great many people – and that this potential is precisely why the bar must be set high. He urged delegates to keep their focus on the evidence.
Bigger than ever
Dr Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and CEO of Insilico Medicine and a driving force behind ARDD, welcomed delegates with characteristic passion. Aging, he told the room, is the only problem he has left in his life. The purpose of ARDD is to bring pharmaceutical companies, investors, researchers and biotech innovators together to solve it – and, by his account, the meeting has never been bigger.
Washington’s view: prevention over reaction
Admiral Brian Christine of the US Public Health Service, Assistant Secretary for Health at the US Department of Health and Human Services, followed the ribbon cutting with a Policy & Regulatory Address that brought the government’s perspective firmly into the room. Advances in public health, he noted, have added around ten years of healthy life for many Americans.
His diagnosis was structural. Treating one condition at a time creates a reactive healthcare system, but human biology does not deteriorate in tidy, isolated parcels; it responds to the accumulated exposures of a lifetime. The opportunity, as Christine framed it, is to modify biological systems over time and intervene before disease takes hold – asking how health can be preserved for as long as possible, rather than how illness can be managed once it arrives. Longer healthy lives, he said, are central to making America healthy again, and the lessons should be shared internationally.
Christine credited Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr with breaking down those silos as part of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, and with being unafraid to challenge dogma, including standing up for women’s health and pushing for better evidence behind health claims. The question every agency should be asking, in his view, is a simple one: is what we are doing actually making people healthier?
That means revisiting the guidance on nutrition and disease prevention that underpins both lifespan and healthspan – getting nutrients back into the system – and asking which questions remain unanswered across physical activity, sleep, cognitive health, menopause and andropause. Long-standing assumptions, he suggested, are there to be challenged.
Patients are moving faster than institutions
Christine was candid that the public is not waiting for permission. Patients are moving faster than institutions – biological age tests included – and regulators, he acknowledged, have lessons to learn from direct-to-consumer companies. He pointed to testosterone as an example of how the system should work, with the FDA changing its policy as the evidence shifted. Equally, he was clear that social media should not be the route by which health decisions get made.
Peptides drew the same balance. Public appetite is enormous and many will ultimately prove useful; speaking in a personal capacity, Christine said he believed people should have access to peptides while the evidence base grows.
That openness came with conditions. Rigorous trials, real-world evidence and biomarkers that demonstrably track better outcomes are non-negotiable, and the field must be disciplined about the difference between a result that is interesting and one that is clinically meaningful. Government has an obligation to build a faster pipeline from translation to regulatory guidance – but evidence, he argued, should never mean a field is frozen in time. A new scientific area needs both innovation and safety, and consumers need assurance that longevity interventions are what they claim to be, and are backed by evidence.
His closing argument was that prevention is medicine, and longevity a powerful organizing focus for policy – provided the field can show that an intervention extends the years people remain healthy, and prove it. The next great chapter, he suggested, will be judged on how successfully people are kept healthy in the first place, supported by rigorous longitudinal data and a health system that rewards prevention.
Laying the train tracks
If Christine set out the policy ambition, Dr Andrew Brack, Program Manager for Proactive Health at ARPA-H, set out the plumbing. Addressing clinical trials for aging, he described how the agency’s PROSPR program is laying the train tracks for an industry that does not yet fully exist.
The problem is a familiar one. There is no clear regulatory path for generating evidence that measures efficacy in a way that would let the FDA approve therapeutics targeting aging – nor enough trial data to make that evidence meaningful. The FDA wants hard clinical endpoints; the field, for now, mostly has biological signals. Building a new industry, as Brack put it, means walking in fresh snow.
PROSPR is a five-year, $144 million program designed to identify interventions that deliver for the American people. Its approach is to harmonize larger datasets into a health score that can serve as a trial endpoint, and to test whether that score works in drug repurposing as well as for novel drugs. The program chose intrinsic capacity as a key anchor – what a person is still capable of doing, and how that can be measured. PROSPR has harmonized 20 outcomes into intrinsic capacity scores stratified by gender and age, alongside a proxy test kit designed for use at home, not just in the clinic.
The prize is a qualified Clinical Outcome Assessment (COA): one that can be incorporated into trials more quickly, for everyone to use and benefit from. Brack also highlighted progress at Cambrian Bio, among others, which was awarded up to $30.8 million under PROSPR to advance an mTORC1-selective inhibitor aimed at improving intrinsic capacity in older people [1].
Eight months in, Brack said, PROSPR is clearly beyond theory – and is now looking at longitudinal data.
The burden of proof
Taken together, the opening morning made the same argument from three directions – the academy, the government and the funder. Longevity has the attention it spent years asking for; what it does not yet have is the full evidentiary infrastructure to deserve it. Harvard’s dean wants rigor, Washington wants proof that prevention pays, and ARPA-H is building the endpoints that would let both be tested.
Read more of our on-the-spot coverage of ARDD 2026 – CLICK HERE.
