Longevity—the length of human life—is the subject of growing scientific and commercial interest. Often associated with “anti-aging,” the word carries connotations of cosmetic products, speculative therapies, and unproven claims. In our view, this association should not distract from the scientific progress now underway in aging biology research. Advances in aging biology suggest that aging is not a single process that occurs uniformly with chronological age. Instead, biological aging involves the progressive dysregulation of many measurable biological mechanisms that reduce resilience, increase disease risk, and erode function over time.
Our ability to quantify biological aging has improved markedly. Functional performance metrics, molecular biomarkers, multiomics data, and continuous digital signals now can measure what clinicians once inferred almost entirely from chronological age. These tools do not imply that aging has been “solved,” nor that extreme longevity is imminent, but they do make aging a more tractable target for serious scientific study, clinical evaluation, and medical intervention.
What we call “longevity-relevant therapies” already are reaching patients, not through an “aging” indication, but through disease-specific approvals that reduce morbidity and mortality from conditions in which prevalence rises sharply with age. Regulatory and scientific shifts are opening new pathways, among them: the approval of GLP-1 receptor agonists, gene-editing therapies that target genes associated with cardiovascular risk, and a recent U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decision accepting bone mineral density as a surrogate endpoint for osteoporosis trials.
The economic stakes are substantial. Our modeling suggests that premature death in the US claims 46 million life-years each year—worth roughly $4.6 trillion at standard health-economics valuations. Modeling a scenario that eliminates non-accidental deaths and functional decline, we estimate the theoretical potential of the US longevity opportunity is ~$1.2 quadrillion, as further described later in this article.1 Even partial progress against aging biology would generate substantial value: slowing biological aging by 5–15% could generate ~$10–30 trillion in discounted incremental value across the lifetime of the current US population,2 the largest share accruing to younger cohorts thanks to the compounding benefit of slower aging. To put the longevity opportunity in more familiar terms: a 10% aging slowdown could be worth ~$930 billion per year on an annualized basis—roughly double the $467 billion the US spent on prescription drugs in 2024, as shown below.3
Taken together, these developments suggest that “longevity” is best understood not as speculative “anti-aging” but as a tractable scientific problem at the intersection of biology, measurement, and intervention. We believe that the convergence among biology, AI, and broader innovation platforms is accelerating the progress that will unlock that value.