Aging is a fact of life, but growing older doesn’t necessarily need to come with the various degenerative diseases associated with it. Researchers and industry leaders at aging-focused biotech companies want to help people maintain their health while living longer.
This week, scientists, investors, and biotech and pharma professionals descended on San Francisco for the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. Occurring in parallel, the 2026 Biotech Showcase drew those interested in aging to its session “Transforming Aging: Longevity and Healthspan Therapeutics” to discuss the aging-research field.
The four companies that participated in the discussion—Gero, Fauna Bio, Cellino, and R3 Biotechnologies—each take a different approach to drug discovery and therapeutic development in relation to aging. However, they were all united in underscoring how aging touches on all aspects of biology from the nervous system to metabolic function and cardiovascular disease.
“A little over a century ago, the idea of developing vaccinations and antibiotics and agricultural systems would have been considered anti-aging,” said Marianna Madrid, the cofounder and chief product officer at Cellino, during the panel discussion. “Healthcare is anti-aging.”
During the session, the biotech leaders discussed their different angles of approaching therapy-development for aging, funding prospects for aging research, and how they see the aging field moving forward in the future.
Pinpointing Disease Processes from Millions of Medical Records
From analyzing millions of human genomes to thousands of years of animal evolutionary history, scientists take a variety of approaches to tackle aging and age-related conditions. At Gero, chief business officer Alexey Kadet explained that they analyze over 100 million electronic heath records that contain longitudinal data about people’s health.
“We started a company with an idea to understand what human aging is, to better understand what drives it, what prevents us from [deriving] effective therapeutics against it,” he said. “We figured out that the best way to study it is actually by getting a lot of human data and trying to model different processes that are going on in our bodies with age.”
The electronic health records they analyze contain longitudinal genomic and proteomic information. With this data, they use principles of physics and AI models to identify diseases associated with aging that can be revered. Gero recently entered into a collaboration with the biotech company Chugai, which will help develop antibody drugs for age-related targets that the team at Gero identifies.
Hibernators Hint at Genes Involved in Aging
While some companies search for targets in humans, others take a more evolution-based approach. The team at Fauna Bio, led by cofounder and chief executive officer Ashley Zehnder, draws inspiration from animals that evolved to survive in extreme conditions, like hibernators, to find ways to extend the healthy human lifespan.
“What can we learn about how other species use the same genes you and I have, but in ways that allow them to actually actively resist and reverse disease?” she asked. The Fauna Bio team identified their lead therapeutic program for heart failure by studying the thirteen-lined ground squirrel as it comes out of hibernation.1
“We can directly sample these hearts as they’re repairing the damage that happens after this ischemia-like event during hibernation. We can then say, ‘Okay, what genes are going up? What genes are going down when the tissue is actively repairing itself?” Zehnder said.
They used heart tissue from just 60 ground squirrels to identify the genes involved in this process, and then they looked at large human genomic datasets to ask if humans with mutations in the same genes have cardiac phenotypes.
“It’s really about leveraging all of the prior work in human genomics but really using the extreme animal data to shine a spotlight on where evolution has prioritized these pathways to heal tissue directly. You can actually do that with small, precise datasets,” she said.
Personalized Regenerative Cell Therapy
Many age-related diseases arise due to damaged or dying cells, including Parkinson’s disease and retinal degenerative conditions that lead to vision loss. The researchers at Cellino are developing a manufacturing technology to make autologous induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-based cell therapies more accessible for patients. This approach uses a patient’s own stem cells to create therapeutic cells that can be given back to them, creating a personalized drug.
“Traditionally, these cells have been manufactured by super talented, highly skilled scientists with magic eyes and magic hands,” said Madrid. These researchers would culture the cells for months, observing the cells and manually removing ones that don’t look promising.
“It takes a ton of skill. It’s basically an artisanal process,” she said. “We’re autonomizing that process, so instead of a human going in and looking at the cells, we use AI-based image analysis to characterize the cells…Instead of physically scraping away the bad cells with a little piece of plastic, we have a laser technology that zaps away the bad cells.”
The Cellino team collaborates with the hospital Mass General Brigham to do point-of-care manufacturing of iPSC-based cell therapies for patients. They hope that any autologous iPSC-based cell therapy company will use their platform and bring regenerative medicine to more people who need it.
Developing New Models for Age-Related Drug Testing
Recent efforts to move away from animal models for drug testing will require the development of new models that recapitulate human biology well. The company R3 Biotechnologies is currently in stealth, but their chief operating officer and cofounder Alice Gilman explained that they are “replacing and making better models for animal testing.” So far, they have made some advances in growing organ systems in mice, and they hope to grow full organ systems that can replace nonhuman primate drug testing.
“If we can find a way to translate that from mice to nonhuman primates, we believe that could really unblock a lot of bottlenecks for people without having ethical considerations that you have as an issue with monkeys,” she said.
Growing and Funding Aging Research
When many of the panelists started their companies, they received quite varied reactions from venture capitalists and other companies. Zehnder explained that often Big Pharma companies consist of small teams going after different therapeutic areas with aging being one of them. But because the mechanisms of aging touch on many different aspects of biology, she and her team took a different approach at Fauna Bio.
“We’re working on neurologic health. We’re working on cardiovascular health. We’re looking at metabolic health. We’re looking at immune health. Okay, all of those things get worse as you get older,” she said. “If you have therapies that are addressing core mechanisms of action across those therapeutic areas, it’s just a good business decision.”
At Gero, Kadet explained that they took practically the opposite approach. “We had almost to pretend that we’re not an aging company to start talking with pharma companies,” he said. When they were collaborating with Pfizer on a project focused on target identification for fibrotic diseases a few years ago, he said that most discussions were directed to focus just on fibrosis as a disease and not on understanding it in the context of aging. However, in their current collaboration with Chugai, the team is much more interested in aging. “The ambition there is to try to slow down the age-related functional decline overall,” he said.
Gilman explained that she pitched potential investors on how R3 Biotechnologies could improve known problems in models for drug testing rather than the pie-in-the-sky goal of reversing aging overall.
“We don’t know how to reverse cell aging, and it’s been 40 years,” she said. “But I can guarantee, if I get you a new heart that is your own, you’re likely to live 20, 30 years because our approach is not relying [on] miracles but improving the bottlenecks that we knew would already lead to something meaningful.”
In terms of funding aging research, all of the panelists agreed that the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) is the most active agency awarding research funding for aging research. Outside of the US, the industry leaders named China as competitive in the autologous iPSC-based cell therapy space and that Japan as investing in the aging field generally as well.
The Future of Aging Research
As aging research pushes forward, Zehnder sees a hunger for novel biology among pharma companies: both in new drug targets as well as mechanisms of action. For Fauna Bio, in particular, the team hopes to get their drug programs into the clinic. Zehnder is especially excited about Fauna Bio’s therapeutic FB-1083 for heart failure preserved ejection fraction in patients with pulmonary hypertension, which was developed from insight from the thirteen-lined ground squirrel.2
“It would really be exciting for us to see impacts on patients from insights we got directly from ground squirrels,” she said.
Similarly, Kadet hopes that Gero’s therapeutic with Chugai will move forward into human clinical trials and will give an efficacy readout on an age-related disease as well as on human lifespan.
Madrid predicts that iPSC-based therapies for age-related neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s disease will come to market and that Cellino will be doing clinical manufacturing of autologous stem cell therapies. For Gilman, she aims to partner with an automation company to accelerate model development.
With the potential to touch multiple aspects of biology, the aging field is certainly one to watch.
