Hevolution documents rising public expectation, scientific momentum and gaps that must be closed for healthspan to become a global priority.
Hevolution Foundation has released the second edition of its Global Healthspan Report, a wide-ranging assessment of public attitudes, scientific progress, investment trends and policy readiness across 23 countries. Authored by Longevity.Technology CEO Phil Newman and team, the report draws on new data generated by our research team, combined with thousands of citizen and clinician survey responses, expert interviews and global sector analysis. The result is one of the most comprehensive attempts yet to map the emerging healthspan landscape – not only its scientific promise but its social, economic and political contours.
The tone of the report is neither triumphal nor tentative; instead it captures a field moving with increasing pace yet still piecing together the infrastructure required to scale. As Dr Mehmood Khan, CEO of Hevolution Foundation, notes in the foreword: “Momentum behind healthspan is accelerating,” but, as he cautions in the same breath, “Acceleration is an opportunity for success, not a guarantee [1].” From the doubling of investment to rising public demand, the data reflect a sector that is beginning to outgrow its early-stage constraints, even as those constraints continue to shape its trajectory.
Longevity.Technology: What emerges from this year’s report is not simply a snapshot of progress but a portrait of a field in accelerated motion; public appetite for prevention is rising sharply, yet the systems designed to deliver it are still assembling themselves in real time. Two-thirds of clinicians now face regular healthspan inquiries and citizens overwhelmingly want governments to fund preventive programs, but investment, regulation and clinical frameworks remain uneven across regions. It is a reminder that demand often outruns preparedness – a problem not unique to longevity but particularly acute here, given the scale of the demographic pressures bearing down on healthcare systems. The report’s emphasis on converging scientific pipelines – senotherapeutics, mRNA platforms, reprogramming, biomarkers – suggests a sector reaching scientific maturity faster than societal coherence.
Perhaps the most revealing thread, however, is the tension between optimism and infrastructure: AI heralded as transformational by three-quarters of experts, yet mistrusted by a sizeable minority; investment nearly doubling year on year, yet widely regarded as insufficient relative to the challenge; and governments flirting with healthspan policy while grappling with inequity, governance gaps and limited public understanding. What this report captures is a moment when momentum is unmistakable but direction is not yet assured – a dawn, as the authors put it, but one that needs rather more than sunlight to become a day. The question now is less whether healthspan will become a global priority and more whether scientific progress, policy leadership and capital allocation can be coaxed into moving at the same speed.
Awareness rising, expectations shifting
One of the report’s strongest signals is public appetite. Eighty percent of citizens believe governments should fund preventive care to extend healthspan, and clinicians are encountering growing demand for personalized guidance. This aligns with comments from Dr Eric Verdin, President and CEO of the Buck Institute: “We’re right at the beginning of something that will be transformative for society… we are on the verge of a whole series of discoveries [1].”
Within academia and clinical practice, the conceptual frameworks of the field are also firming up. As Professor Andrea Maier from National University of Singapore notes: “We are defining what the biomarkers of aging are… what gerotherapeutics and gerodiagnostics are, and what precision geromedicine is [1].” Such codification is essential for the standardization that investors and regulators increasingly expect.
Scientific momentum tempered by unmet needs
Scientific developments span the full drug-development pipeline, from senolytics and senomorphics to genome editing and reprogramming. The report highlights the translation gap: enthusiasm is rising, but alignment around biomarkers, clinical endpoints and safety frameworks is still patchy.
Dr Peter Diamandis, XPRIZE founder, argues that the next decade will bring “technologies that hold transformative potential for extending healthspan,” citing gene writing, CRISPR, AI-powered diagnostics and regenerative medicine as converging tools for earlier prediction and intervention [1]. Alongside these modalities, progress in multi-omic and longitudinal biomarker development is helping to establish the measurable endpoints that will be essential for robust, regulator-ready aging interventions.
But the field’s expansion also raises the stakes for evidence. As Dr Jordan Shlain, Private Medical founder, puts it: “Every diligence I undertake is measured against one question: is it safe and is it effective?” – a simple standard that many consumer-facing longevity offerings would struggle to meet [1].
Investment strengthens but gaps remain
Investment reached $7.3bn in 2024, with deal sizes up 77% since 2020 [1]. This reflects a shift toward later-stage assets and a growing willingness to back companies that have moved beyond pure discovery into translational work.
Yet the report is blunt: the sector remains “severely under-invested” relative to the scale of global aging, with 59% of investors citing lack of awareness as the top barrier and 46% highlighting limited experts and unclear regulatory pathways. Many investors are still feeling their way through the boundary between longevity as lifestyle and healthspan as evidence-led medicine, a distinction the report is at pains to maintain.
Jorge Conde, General Partner at a16z, notes that the success of GLP-1 agonists has changed expectations: their commercial and clinical impact “has increased [investors’] confidence that other major new segments can open in the healthspan space,” yet few assets have the same clarity of mechanism, outcome and reimbursement [1].
AI and infrastructure as accelerants
Three-quarters of experts surveyed believe AI will meaningfully transform R&D and healthcare delivery, particularly in diagnostics, risk stratification and longitudinal monitoring [1]. Digital twins, multimodal models and AI-assisted trial design are already shortening timelines and helping to identify the right patients for the right interventions.
At the same time, 26–30% of respondents remain cautious about AI in diagnostics, citing concerns about transparency, bias and ethics. The report treats AI as a force multiplier whose impact will ultimately depend on whether datasets become more representative, governance more robust and clinical teams more comfortable working alongside algorithmic tools rather than in competition with them [1].
Dr Raghib Ali, CEO of Our Future Health, points to a broader structural opportunity: “Prevention is relatively simple… I think we’re going to have something new – call it a national prevention service, which will have a mission to keep us in good health [1].” AI-enabled risk prediction and remote monitoring would be natural components of such a service, provided they are deployed with appropriate guardrails.
Economics, inequity and policy readiness
Healthspan is also framed as an economic imperative. Extending healthy years could deliver up to $220bn in annual productivity gains, and every $1 invested in prevention could return up to $16. In a world of shrinking workforces and rising age-dependency ratios, the report argues that prevention is no longer a discretionary line item but part of macroeconomic strategy.
Yet only a quarter of citizens believe governments will lead, despite one-third saying they should. The gap between expectation and political will remains stark. Sir Jonathan Symonds notes that certain regions “get it,” pointing to investment in data and technology in Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Singapore, where healthspan is being treated as both health policy and industrial strategy [1].
Equity, however, is a fault line running through the analysis. As Diamandis cautions, “Healthspan must not remain a privilege of the wealthy; it should become a universal right.” The report is clear that current access to diagnostics, clinics and advanced interventions is heavily skewed toward high-income groups and early adopters [1]. Bridging that gap will require public–private partnerships, new reimbursement models and a much stronger focus on evidence over aspiration.
Contours of a wider shift
The report concludes by asserting that science, investment and awareness are converging. But convergence alone does not constitute a movement; it simply marks the point at which inaction becomes harder to justify. Healthspan now sits within a more explicit economic, social and political narrative, yet whether it becomes a sustained priority will depend on how convincingly its advocates translate momentum into tangible, equitable public benefit.
Khan’s closing reflection is deliberately forward-looking: “Let us architect a future where healthy lifespan is expanded for the benefit of all humanity [1].” The phrasing is intentional – architect, not simply await – and speaks to the systemic work still required to turn trial pipelines, AI platforms and prevention rhetoric into durable healthspan infrastructure.
Toward a more intentional future
What this second Global Healthspan Report ultimately offers is a picture of a sector learning to think in systems rather than silos; progress is evident in laboratories, clinics and capital flows, but the decisive test will be whether these elements can be woven into health systems that keep people well for longer, not just treat decline a little more efficiently. If that shift continues, future editions may be less about proving healthspan’s importance and more about comparing how different countries choose to build it.
