Pushing the longevity frontier
The 2026 Biomarkers of Aging Conference previewed the latest longevity research
For one week in early October, Boston became the center of the aging and longevity world.
Boston Longevity Week, a collaboration between Longevity Global and the Biomarkers of Aging Consortium that started in 2025, ran from Oct. 1–7, with additional events spilling into Oct. 11. Researchers, clinicians, investors, and entrepreneurs from all over the world mingled in a program that stretched from Harvard Medical School’s campus to fitness wearable WHOOP’s Kenmore Square headquarters. The week’s highlights included the three-day Aging Research & Drug Discovery (ARDD) meeting, as well as the two-day Biomarkers of Aging Conference. In between came an AI hackathon, a biotech pitch night, TEDxBoston, and a good deal of networking.
The anchor of the week was the Biomarkers of Aging Conference, held Oct. 5–6 at Harvard Medical School’s Joseph B. Martin Conference Center. A biomarker of aging is a measurable indicator of a person’s biological age, or how well the body and cells are functioning, as opposed to the number of years a person has lived. The question at the heart of the conference is how to build standardized, clinically validated ways to measure aging and to ensure that longevity interventions can be tested and turned into safe, effective therapies. The first day of the conference covered fundamental and emerging research, from molecular detection platforms to immune aging and stem cells, while the second turned to clinical and translational work.
New this year were parallel tracks that took place alongside the main track. They included Replacement in Aging, Gerophysics, Brain Aging, and Reproductive Aging. The premise of the Replacement in Aging track on Monday was a provocative counterpoint to the biomarker work being presented next door: if tissues and organs wear out, perhaps the answer is to swap them out rather than just measure the decline. Professor George Church of Harvard and MIT opened with a keynote on de-aging medicine through multiplex genetics and organs. He described an aspiration of developing “enhanced organs” that could help people “live longer than the average.”
Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Alibek Moldakozhayev then presented findings on heterochronic transplantation, an approach where a tissue, organ, or cell population from a donor of one age is transplanted into a recipient of a different age. His research demonstrated that while transplanting old fat tissue into young hosts resulted in tissue rejuvenation, single organ transplants do not rejuvenate an entire host system. However, his research suggests that replacing many tissues at once, or replacing key ones, could be a successful longevity strategy.
Then came two talks from MIT professors, which pulled the track in very different directions. Professor Linda Griffith, a pioneer in tissue engineering, described her efforts to understand and slow the biological mechanisms of aging to prevent replacement. She opened by remarking that she was an outsider to the conversation around organ replacement, partially because she has endometriosis.
“Because I myself suffered lifelong, chronic inflammatory disease, I became fascinated with all this stuff about how inflammation causes aging,” she told the room.
Her work includes developing liver-on-chips and fully patient-derived organoids that replace animal-derived models to study endometriosis. She pressed the case for human-based models because “a lot of the things that work in mice don’t translate to humans.”
MIT Media Lab Professor Hugh Herr M.S. ’93 showed what replacement looks like when the replacement part is a machine. Herr is an amputee himself and a pioneer of advanced bionic prosthetics. He described advanced prostheses that integrate powered mechanics with signals from the user’s body to help restore movement. His ideas emphasized letting the person supply the intent, while the machine translates that intent into action. Rather than using a traditional electrical stimulation, Herr’s lab experiments with optogenetics, or using light to control muscle. Looking ahead, Herr predicted that wearable exoskeletons would become an ordinary sight on the streets of Cambridge and Boston.
Boston Longevity Week showed a field in transition, from big ideas to the hard work of validation, regulation, and clinical translation. Boston Longevity Week and the Biomarkers of Aging Consortium will be back in 2027. The challenge now is to turn longevity’s boldest ideas into reality.