Younger founder Christin Glorioso on turning a six-month competition into a side-by-side trial of aging clocks.
Younger is a six-month contest to measure and reverse biological aging, hosted by NeuroAge Therapeutics with TruDiagnostic, Vero Bioscience, Harvard FaceAge, BrainKey, and Dr Raghav Sehgal’s lab at Harvard. The science behind the testing comes from Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and Yale. Every competitor measures their biological age across brain, body, and face, makes whatever health changes they choose for six months, then repeats the same measurements. Awards go to the most years turned back over the six months and to the youngest biological age relative to chronological age. Reporters, longevity company founders, and scientists are competing alongside members of the public, and many are posting their results as they go.
The live kickoff is January 11 and 12, 2027 in San Francisco, with talks from speakers including Dr Steve Horvath, Dr Eric Verdin of the Buck Institute, Dr Amy Killen, Dr Raymond Mak, and Dr Raghav Sehgal. Retests are due by August 1, 2027 and winners are announced at the finale in November 2027. A single entry covers either an in-person or a virtual track at the same price and with the same testing, so competitors can take part from anywhere. Along the way they get personalized recommendations built from their results, an online community, and monthly webinars.
What is measured
The standard panel includes epigenetic clocks and eleven organ-system ages from a dried blood spot, a 30-minute cognitive test taken on a phone, a face photo scored by FaceAge, and functional tests of VO2 max, grip strength, and sit-to-stand completed at home. Ultra competitors add two brain MRIs with volumetric analysis, a proteomic organ age from Vero, pre-release methylation clocks from Dr Sehgal’s lab, and NeuroAge’s RNA blood test of brain aging, and dexa scan. A competitor gets the full panel for less than half of what the same tests would cost purchased individually, and some of the clocks, such as the Vero proteomic clock, are not yet on the market, so the contest is currently the only way to access them.
Younger is also a public health project
Most people would only want to live longer if those extra years are healthy ones. The goal aging researchers call squaring the curve, is to push back the age at which chronic illness begins by more than lifespan rises, so the stretch of poor health at the end becomes shorter and arrives later [1]. On a survival curve this shows up as the curve becoming more rectangular. Dr Andrew Scott, Dr Martin Ellison, and Dr David Sinclair valued a slowdown in aging that adds one healthy year of life expectancy at about 38 trillion dollars to the United States [2], and Dr Julie Zissimopoulos and colleagues projected that delaying dementia onset by five years would cut its prevalence by about 41 percent [3]. A contest that helps a large group of people lower their biological age, and shows the public how, is a step toward achieving that goal.
Furthering aging clock research
Anyone who walks into a longevity clinic today can walk out with a biological age from epigenetics, from blood proteins, from a face photograph, or from a chair-rise test. Each is called a clock, there are now hundreds of them, and clinical trials have begun using them to judge whether a treatment worked. This month a reanalysis of a Phase IIa trial of Insilico Medicine’s lung fibrosis drug rentosertib, published in Nature Biotechnology by Dr Alex Zhavoronkov and colleagues, reported that treated patients read 2.7 to 3.5 years younger on six proteomic clocks, and the authors note the study cannot yet separate slower aging from a treated lung [4]. The field does not yet know what each clock measures or how the clocks relate to one another. A 2024 consensus paper in Nature Medicine from Dr Mahdi Moqri, Dr Luigi Ferrucci, Dr Steve Horvath and colleagues laid out a validation framework that requires a clock to respond to interventions before it is used as a trial endpoint [5].
But organs don’t age at a uniform rate
Part of the reason a single number tells only part of the story is that the body ages unevenly. A Stanford team led by Dr Tony Wyss-Coray found that nearly one in five adults had at least one organ aging markedly faster than the rest of their body, with a 20 to 50 percent higher risk of mortality [6]. FaceAge, from Dr Raymond Mak and colleagues at Mass General Brigham, found that a higher face age predicted shorter survival in patients with cancer [7]. Until these clocks are measured side by side in the same people at two timepoints, we are guessing about how they relate to each other.
Younger is that side-by-side measurement. Every partner is measuring the same people at the same two timepoints, and we have agreed to analyze and publish the results together, with all data anonymized. That will show which clocks move with which interventions, which clocks agree with each other, and which minimal set of tests gives a trial or a patient enough signal at a cost and level of hassle that people will tolerate. As sequencing and proteomics get cheaper, I expect clocks that combine several layers of biology at once to become standard for everyone.
How to enter
Registration is open now at neuroagetx.com/events/younger, and baseline kits have been shipping since September 1. Each competitor’s six-month clock starts when they submit their baseline measurements, and all baselines are due by February 1, 2027.
About Christin Glorioso
Dr Christin Glorioso is founder and CEO of NeuroAge Therapeutics, a clinical-stage brain aging diagnostics and therapeutics company in San Francisco, and co-founder and Executive Director of Longevity Global, a nonprofit organizing longevity science events in 22 cities around the world. She holds an MD and a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and completed her postdoctoral training at MIT. She spent twenty years studying the genetics and transcriptomics of brain aging before starting her companies. She writes about brain health and longevity at drglorioso.substack.com.
Photographs courtesy of Younger
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/abs/10.1056/NEJM198007173030304
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-021-00080-0
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27134606/
[4] https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-026-03286-y
[5] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02784-9
[6] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38057571/
[7] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40345937/
