You drink your two litres of water a day, hit 10,000 steps, take the right supplements and try to eat a balanced diet. Okay, maybe not all the time, but you’re giving it a good go. Yet despite your valiant effort, you still look older than you did a decade ago – and more than likely, you feel it too.
Ageing is an inevitable fact of life. Being healthier may slow the process down, but one thing that's certain – your biological clock will keep on ticking.
Except that that inevitable fact may be about to become, well, less inevitable. That’s because scientists are on the brink of not just halting, but maybe even reversing some aspects of ageing.
And if you think this sounds like a sci-fi fever dream of some far-flung future, think again. The first of this new generation of wonder drugs is heading to human trials early next year.
A cheat code for our biology
Your biological age is a measure of how old your body is, as opposed to how many laps you’ve done around the Sun. One good measure of it is how your genes – the sections of DNA that contain the instructions for building and running your body – are switched on and off.
Over time, those genetic instructions become muddled, and cells start behaving less like they did when you were young, making your body older in function.
By this metric, when babies are born, their biological age is pretty much zero. This sounds obvious, but it’s a remarkable biological magic trick.
Think about it: two people whose biological ages are not zero, whose DNA carries all the marks of ageing, combine their cells together and, somehow, those marks are wiped clean.
This happens in the earliest stages of development, as the fertilised egg resets itself to a brand-new biological state. Simply put, literally reversing ageing is a built-in biological process. We’ve all done it – every single one of us.
Since each of us is a living proof-of-concept that the body can reset its cellular age, it begs a bold question: can we harness that process on demand?
Enter Prof Shinya Yamanaka, who in 2012 was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work answering that very question.
Six years earlier, Yamanaka discovered four proteins – called transcription factors – that are switched on in embryonic stem cells, the body’s master cells from which all others arise.
These ‘Yamanaka factors’ can be reactivated in adult cells by turning on the genes that produce them, effectively turning back their biological clock by resetting those cells to a stem-cell state.
“Clearly, biology has the tools to perform this reset,” says scientist and ageing expert Dr Andrew Steele. “By some sort of remarkable stroke of luck, we found that just four genes can do this.”
Steele describes this process of reprogramming as a “cheat code for our biology.” Now, almost two decades on from Yamanaka’s discovery, we’re finally figuring out how to use it.
Drugs that can wind back the clock
The process by which genes are switched on or off is called gene regulation, and one important part of this is known as epigenetic regulation.
n simple terms, your ‘epigenetic code’ is the pattern of chemical tags that control which genes are active and which are silent.
Your epigenetic code is generally a good thing: for example, it tells a cell that it is a heart cell, and should therefore perform heart cell jobs like beating. But, of course, these patterns change as we age, and malfunctions start to happen.
Following the discovery of the Yamanaka factors, scientists and companies around the world quickly realised their potential to combat the scourge of ageing.
Billionaires piled in, with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos backing Altos Labs and OpenAI’s Sam Altman funding Retro Biosciences – both chasing treatments that could reverse aspects of cellular ageing.
One of the frontrunners is Life Biosciences, which has harnessed the power of this process for a therapy expected to enter human clinical trials in early 2026.
“Our platform is in a space called partial epigenetic reprogramming,” says Life Bioscience CEO Jerry McLaughlin. “We’re taking that corrupted software and resetting back to the factory settings.”
‘Partial’ is the crucial word here. Full activation of the four Yamanaka factors resets cells entirely to a stem-cell state, which would be less than ideal for anyone receiving them as treatment.
Stem cells, after all, don’t have specialised roles. Remember that epigenetic code instructing a heart cell to beat? Trigger a full reset, and that code is wiped away. Your cells may be young again, but you wouldn’t be around to enjoy your new youthful glow.
But David Sinclair, a professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and founder of Life Biosciences, discovered a handy way around this conundrum: just use three Yamanaka factors, instead of four.
“If you only use three of those factors, we can now take those aged, injured cells and turn them back to that younger, healthier stage,” says Dr Sharon Rosenzweig-Lipson, chief scientific officer at Life Biosciences.
She likens the process to a scratch on a record: “Buff out the scratch, and the record plays well again.”
The company plans to apply this method to the eye first. Preclinical trials in animals have shown it can regenerate the optic nerve after it is literally crushed, restore loss of vision caused by glaucoma (a leading cause of blindness in people over 60), and improve age-related vision loss.
In humans, the treatment will be delivered via an injection in the eye. That may sound less than comfortable for those of us who are more needle-averse, but they say it will only be required once.
To stop the ageing reversal from going too far, the therapy is only activated when patients are administered oral doses of the common antibiotic doxycycline.
“We’re going to turn it on for eight weeks by having the patients take doxycycline, and then it’ll turn off and that’ll be it,” Rosenzweig-Lipson says. “We don’t think you’ll have to do it again once the cells are reset.”
According to Rosenzweig-Lipson, the eye was an easy choice to target for the first-of-its-kind treatment because they knew how to safely administer it there. Plus, the impact a loss of vision has on someone’s life would make success even more meaningful.
While this first treatment is specifically for the eye, the Life Biosciences team has already confirmed it is working on a similar treatment for the liver, as well as other tissue types that they haven’t yet disclosed.
“We can do it almost anywhere,” Rosenzweig-Lipson adds. “Whatever age-related diseases are most important to you, those are the ones we’re thinking about.”
A future without ageing
For now, Life Biosciences is going for an organ-by-organ approach – and for good reason.
As Steele points out: “What we can’t do at the moment is inject a gene therapy into a whole animal or human and expect to get one copy of that gene into every single one of your cells.”
A major hurdle to this is that some organs soak up far more of what enters our body than others, particularly the liver and kidneys.
It’s a bit like trying to fill a series of lakes at different altitudes: the lowest ones fill up long before the higher ones even have a chance. Turn up the flow to reach every lake, and you’ll end up flooding the ones below first.
That’s not to say scientists aren’t thinking about how they can wind back our cellular clocks more broadly.
“We’ll start out with individual, age-related indications and treat them one at a time,” McLaughlin says. “The next stage is small molecules. We believe there’ll be an opportunity over time to introduce small molecules that have multi-organ response – and eventually whole body rejuvenation.”
But even if companies like Life Biosciences solve the problem of full-body delivery, it’s important to note that our epigenetics are just one of several hallmarks of ageing.
“There are still multiple hallmarks which we wouldn’t expect to be addressed by this approach,” Steele explains, pointing to DNA mutations as one example that would be unaffected by edits to the epigenome.
“Since you're modifying the epigenome, which is basically modifications on the surface of the DNA, what that can’t do is it can't correct any mutations that have happened inside the DNA,” he adds.
Rosenzweig-Lipson makes a similar point: “We’re not changing your genes, we’re not fixing your genes, we’re not replacing your genes, we’re not editing your genes. What we’re doing is just making a change to the epigenetic code.”
And yet, despite the challenges ahead, there is genuine cause for excitement. For the very first time, drugs are entering trials to directly combat a fundamental element of ageing – a shift from treating its symptoms to attempting to cure it entirely.
As Steele puts it, epigenetic reprogramming may be a cheat code – but the question is whether “this is a cheat code that’s fallen through a wormhole from the future.”
In other words, do we really have the biotechnology, here in the 2020s, to take it from sci-fi dream to reality?
Read more: