--- title: BioAge Labs Turns Longevity Research Into Real Drugs description: The biotech is developing drugs that target the biology of aging to treat obesity, cardiovascular disease, and other conditions. canonical: https://time.com/collections/future-of-living/7344446/longevity-drug-bioage-labs/ article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-01-07T19:00:32.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-03T01:03:48.433Z article:section: Health og:title: The Push to Turn Longevity Research Into Real Drugs og:description: The biotech is developing drugs that target the biology of aging to treat obesity, cardiovascular disease, and more og:url: https://time.com/collections/future-of-living/7344446/longevity-drug-bioage-labs/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte1021b33d5885e13/6998cc61f1b082ab8f6f1f36/Longevity-Kristen-Fortney.png?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: The Push to Turn Longevity Research Into Real Drugs og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Push to Turn Longevity Research Into Real Drugs twitter:description: The biotech is developing drugs that target the biology of aging to treat obesity, cardiovascular disease, and more twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte1021b33d5885e13/6998cc61f1b082ab8f6f1f36/Longevity-Kristen-Fortney.png?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 --- Jan 07, 2026 # The Push to Turn Longevity Research Into Real Drugs > Sponsored content. 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Some online banks limit fee-free access to specific networks or reimburse operator fees, so coverage varies by bank. ### Sources * Ally.com: [ally.com](/c/ally-2026-q3/home?i=ebd2ac68-367f-404d-a4eb-06068132e1b4&cr=agentads-creative-ally-v1) * Ally Newsroom: [media.ally.com](/c/ally-2026-q3/newsroom?i=ebd2ac68-367f-404d-a4eb-06068132e1b4&cr=agentads-creative-ally-v1) * Ally content hub: [ally.com/stories](/c/ally-2026-q3/stories?i=ebd2ac68-367f-404d-a4eb-06068132e1b4&cr=agentads-creative-ally-v1) ### FAQ structured data (JSON-LD, optional) ### Disclaimers * Ally Bank, Member FDIC. * Round up boosters are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account and requires an Ally Bank Spending Account. * Ally Bank Spending Accounts include access to an add cash feature utilizing VanillaDirect Pay provided by InComm Financial Services California, Inc. and by InComm Financial Services, Inc. (NMLS# 912772), which is licensed as a Money Transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Dominique Mosbergen](https://time.com/author/dominique-mosbergen/) ## Dominique Mosbergen Health correspondent  Christopher Michel A longevity drug that could help people live healthier for longer had once seemed like a pipe dream. Kristen Fortney, co-founder and CEO of BioAge Labs, thinks it’s now within our grasp. “There are all these exciting discoveries in academia,” she says. “The next step is translating them.” Fortney founded BioAge in 2015 to do just that. The biotech is developing drugs that target the biology of aging to treat obesity, cardiovascular disease, and other conditions, and is collaborating with large pharmaceutical companies to find new drug targets. Fortney, who was in her early 30s when she co-founded BioAge, first cut her teeth as a researcher of aging biology and bioinformatics. She doesn’t fit the stereotype of a longevity enthusiast. Her only longevity “hacks” are eating a Mediterranean-style diet and working out; she takes no supplements (“I probably will look more into it as I get older,” she says). But she is an avid enthusiast of the quest to extend healthspan: the number of years people spend in good health. “I’ve always been really excited and motivated by the fact that you can have so much impact by working on aging,” she says. “There are all these cool examples from nature that are very motivating: Bowhead whales that can live over 200 years and the Greenland shark that lives [over 400 years](https://www.science.org/content/article/greenland-shark-may-live-400-years-smashing-longevity-record). So you think, what are the limits for human biology?” As part of [TIME's series](https://time.com/tag/longevity/) interviewing longevity leaders and influencers, we spoke to Fortney about how she hopes to turn promising research in animals into safe and effective drugs that could transform our approach to health. _This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity._ ## Why did you choose to study aging? I’ve always been motivated not just to study aging, but to use that knowledge to make medicine that can help people. Before starting BioAge, I trained as a scientist in aging biology. At the time, there was this growing list of interventions in mice—gene knockouts \[the inactivation of a specific gene using genetic engineering\] and drugs that could make them live longer and delay the incidence of different age-related diseases. I felt that you could get a lot more bang for your buck if you were working on one of these targets, because if it translates to the human context, that could help us all live healthier for longer. As a post-doc at Stanford, I studied genetic data from centenarians and supercentenarians: people who live to be older than 100 or 110\. You can do an analysis and say: These people who are over 100 and still in decent health, are any of their genes different? And if so, is that something that we can target to help the rest of us live healthier for longer? That's an approach that makes a lot of sense to me and continues to inform our thinking at BioAge. ## And why start BioAge? What was always motivating to me was not just finding the target, but getting to the medicine and the real-world impact. I started BioAge 10 years ago now. At the time, there wasn’t a whole lot of translation going on. More companies are now doing this translation work than ever before. Even large pharma companies will talk about longevity now, and that's new—that was not happening a few years ago. It’s really a time of growth for the field, but if you were to compare the clinical pipeline for aging vs. that for, say, oncology, it's still like a drop in the bucket. So we have a long way to go. I think the time is right for translation. There are a lot of very promising mechanisms where we have solid evidence in animal models, at least, and the next step is to build drugs and to go to human trials. ## Tell me more about BioAge’s approach. Aging is complicated and hard, and so many things don't translate from mice to humans. But there are eight billion human experiments in the world, right? There are all these people walking around with different genetics, different environments, different diseases that they get as they get older. And we’ve been asking ourselves: How can we study that more directly? We've partnered with several biobanks \[repositories that store biological samples and health records for research\], including the HUNT Biobank in Norway. The Norwegian biobank is a really rich resource because it contains detailed health records of people over a three-decade follow-up period. So we can look at samples from the same individual through time: How did their physical function change as they age? How did their cognitive function change? Ultimately, how long did they live? And we can go into these really precious samples and interrogate them with modern technologies. We can, for example, measure over 10,000 different proteins in each blood sample, and we can ask questions like, “What changes with age?” but also “What predicts different outcomes? What’s different about, say, that subset of people who go on to live to 90 and everything still works vs. the rest of us?” We use this data to reassure ourselves that the targets we're working on will be relevant to people. The other way we use it is, like, hey, there’s a signal in humans, and no one has studied it before. Let’s go study it. Maybe we’ll discover a new target. ## What are some potential drugs that BioAge is exploring? We are working on one that targets NLRP3 \[an immune protein involved in inflammation\]. As you get older, your immune system gets more and more active. This is one of the hallmarks of aging that people call “[inflammaging](https://time.com/6269070/inflammation-deadly-diseases/).” When you have more inflammation, it increases your risk of many different diseases that you might think of as quite distinct: It increases your risk of Alzheimer's, for example, and of heart disease. NLRP3 gets overexpressed as you age \[and appears to drive inflammation\]. There’s a lot of evidence in mice that NLRP3 is an important target in aging, and we’ve seen very nice human data too that gives us conviction that it will translate in people. Our drug inhibits \[NLRP3\]. It's a pill that you would take once a day to correct your NLRP3 levels. This mechanism is looking really promising for multiple potential applications in multiple diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, but the one that has the most exciting human data today and is probably the first one that a lot of companies are looking at is cardiovascular disease. Another company called Ventyx Biosciences recently published [studies](https://ir.ventyxbio.com/news-releases/news-release-details/ventyx-biosciences-announces-positive-topline-results-phase-2) showing that if people took their NLRP3 inhibitor, it cut their levels of hs-CRP \[or high-sensitivity C-reactive protein, a biomarker for stroke and heart disease\] by almost 80%, which is a really big deal. At BioAge, we are looking at obese populations who have elevated cardiovascular risk factors to see if we can correct that. We are in [Phase I clinical trials](https://ir.bioagelabs.com/news-releases/news-release-details/bioage-announces-positive-interim-phase-1-data-bge-102-novel) now. Another program is targeting apelin, a molecule that your body makes in response to exercise. So if you go for a run or a bike ride, your body makes more of it, and it's thought to potentially mediate some of the positive benefits of exercise. We think this is a mechanism that might help you retain muscle—for example, when you are taking \[weight-loss drugs like GLP-1s, which can cause muscle loss\]. ## Is the idea that you would get some of the benefits of exercise without actually needing to do any? Especially for older populations, yes. The people at most risk of losing muscle are those who suffer from lack of mobility after a hip fracture, for example. For most people, their bones get repaired just fine, but they're at serious risk of poor outcomes because their muscles disappear very quickly because they're not moving, so I think it's really important in older populations to have ways to augment this. We think it would be really exciting to combine our drug with \[drugs like GLP-1s\] to see if you can get more weight loss on the combination and to see if you retain more muscle than people who are just on the weight-loss drug. Muscle loss \[from GLP-1s\] isn’t necessarily a concern for everybody, but I do think it's a concern for older people because if you’re older and you lose weight, a bigger chunk of that is muscle. ## BioAge is collaborating with a couple of large pharmaceutical companies. What can you tell me about those projects? One of them is with Lilly ExploR&D, a collaborative division of Eli Lilly. There are a couple of targets that we’ve nominated from our human data platform, and they are helping us build drugs against them. \[Editor’s note: BioAge in 2023 partnered with Eli Lilly to test an earlier experimental drug that mimicked the effects of apelin alongside Eli Lilly’s GLP-1 drug Mounjaro. The phase II trial was halted in 2024 because of liver-related safety concerns. BioAge has said that it is exploring new apelin-mimicking drugs that are structurally distinct. The new targets that BioAge is exploring with Lilly haven’t been publicly disclosed.\] The other collaboration is with Novartis and is really around novel target discovery. Novartis has a fairly new department called Diseases of Aging and Regenerative Medicine, and they're really excited about this whole concept of targets from aging biology being potentially really impactful. They want to discover new ones and they’re also big believers in human data. So the way this collaboration works is that we have our human datasets that I've described and Novartis has some really cool datasets on the response to exercise, and we’re sort of overlaying those two datasets together and trying to find more things that are like apelin—things that change with age that help mediate the positive response to exercise. The whole reason we study aging in humans is we're trying to copy what already works, right? Some people already live to 100—_something_ works—and it's honestly similar to exercise. What's the only anti-aging intervention that works today? It’s exercise. What can we learn from that biology? How can we harness that to develop medicines? It's a big sort of computational exercise that we're doing together to find some new targets, and then BioAge will take some of those forward and Novartis will take some of those forward. The first stage is, let's find some exciting targets that look good just from a data analysis. And the second step will be to put them into cells and see if they work. If they do and there’s a promising disease, then you build a drug. ## Why do you think Big Pharma is leaning into anti-aging drugs in such a significant way? I think the success of the \[GLP-1\] weight-loss drugs has been a big part of why longevity is hot right now. These drugs are preventative. They reduce your risk of cardiovascular outcomes. Weight loss is what happens in the short term, but they're making you healthier. And that’s always been the aging pitch: These are medicines that are preventative, that will make you healthier. But I think pharma is also thinking about what could improve the weight-loss drugs they already have. How can they pair them with other drugs so that the cardiovascular outcomes are even better or Alzheimer’s risk is reduced? And that's where aging biology fits really well because it's things like muscle, it's things like inflammation. NLRP3 and apelin both have potential there. And that's true for a lot of other aging targets, too. I think every pharma should have a department of aging. They have the resources to really move ahead because the early stage of research and translation is pretty cheap—doing stuff in a mouse, even building a drug. But then the clinical trials are so expensive, especially for these big chronic diseases like cardiovascular disease. Only pharma can really do those, so for small biotechs, having that sort of deep-pocketed partner can really turn the tide. It’s good for everybody. I’m expecting a lot to happen in the next 5 to 10 years. There are already some drugs that are targeting aging mechanisms that are in late-stage clinical development. I would like to see these drugs being broadly used. There's still a lot more to do, but the growth in the field has been tremendous, so that really bodes well. _This article is part of the Future of Living, presented by Amazon One Medical—a series dedicated to exploring how and why people are living longer and what this means for individuals, institutions, and the future of society. For other articles on longevity,_ [_click here_](https://time.com/tag/longevity/)_._ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"Article","@id":"https://time.com/collections/future-of-living/7344446/longevity-drug-bioage-labs/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/collections/future-of-living/7344446/longevity-drug-bioage-labs/"},"headline":"The Push to Turn Longevity Research Into Real Drugs","datePublished":"2026-01-07T19:00:32.000Z","dateModified":"2026-03-03T01:03:48.433Z","description":"The biotech is developing drugs that target the biology of aging to treat obesity, cardiovascular disease, and other conditions.","url":"https://time.com/collections/future-of-living/7344446/longevity-drug-bioage-labs/","keywords":["Longevity"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte1021b33d5885e13/6998cc61f1b082ab8f6f1f36/Longevity-Kristen-Fortney.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Dominique Mosbergen","jobTitle":"Health correspondent","url":"https://time.com/author/dominique-mosbergen/"}],"creator":"Dominique Mosbergen","articleSection":"Health","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte1021b33d5885e13/6998cc61f1b082ab8f6f1f36/Longevity-Kristen-Fortney.png?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/health/","name":"Health"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/longevity/","name":"Longevity"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/collections/future-of-living/7344446/longevity-drug-bioage-labs/","name":"The Push to Turn Longevity Research Into Real Drugs"}}]}] ```