But the pursuit is no longer fringe. Animal longevity, human function, organ preservation, and connectomics are moving at very different speeds. This survey separates the strongest signals from the longest bets.
The order combines replication, mechanism, human data, and tractability. “Promising” means scientifically promising, not proven, safe, or commercially ready.
The most informative trials are not a clean victory column. They show where biomarkers diverge from outcomes, where subgroups matter, and where a missed primary endpoint outweighs a promising secondary result.
Laromestrocel produced a +63.4 m change in 6-minute walk at month 9 in ambulatory frailty (p=0.0077). TIE-2 emerged as a candidate response biomarker. Phase 3 and durability remain open.
Longeveron result ↗Intermittent dasatinib + quercetin for 20 weeks did not improve the primary bone-resorption endpoint (P=0.611). A high-senescence subgroup showed increased radial bone density. No serious adverse events were reported.
NIA trial summary ↗The PEARL trial tested 5 or 10 mg weekly. The primary aging endpoint did not move significantly. Secondary signals suggested preserved lean mass in women and bone mineral in men; the trial was likely safe over one year.
PEARL summary ↗NMN raises circulating NAD+, yet a 2024 meta-analysis found no significant difference from control in fasting glucose, triglycerides, or total, LDL, and HDL cholesterol. This is the field's cleanest warning against treating biomarker movement as health benefit.
Clinical review ↗Partial reprogramming now has its first human data. On 8 October 2026 Life Biosciences reported that ER-100, an AAV therapy expressing the OSK reprogramming factors under a doxycycline switch, was well tolerated through Day 56 in the first three participants of its Phase 1 trial in open-angle glaucoma (NCT07290244), with no dose-limiting toxicities or serious adverse events, and the safety board cleared escalation to a higher dose. Two of three participants showed early visual-field improvement signals. This is company-reported, open-label safety data in three people with no control group: it establishes that in vivo OSK expression has begun human testing, not that reprogramming works in humans.
Life Biosciences release ↗The largest rigorous test of an NAD+ precursor so far came back negative. In the Phase 3 NOPARK trial (JAMA, 2026; 410 people with early Parkinson disease, one year of nicotinamide riboside), the supplement raised NAD metabolism as intended but produced no clinical benefit, with disease scores slightly worse than placebo. This does not settle NAD+ boosting for other conditions, but it removes Parkinson disease as a supporting example and shows that raising NAD levels is not, by itself, evidence of a clinical effect.
NOPARK report ↗Cryonics, structural brain preservation, and emulation are often collapsed into one idea. Their evidence, failure modes, and definitions of continuity are not the same.
Legal-death preservation uses cryoprotectant perfusion and storage near −196 °C. Alcor lists roughly $80k for neuropreservation and $200k for whole body; Cryonics Institute lists $28k plus roughly $60k standby and transport.
Evidence boundaryNo full mammal has ever been cooled to cryogenic temperatures and revived. Organ nanowarming is the strongest adjacent result, not proof of human revival.
Provider landscape ↗Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation preserves microscopic structure by fixation and vitrification. Rabbit and pig brains passed independent prize evaluation, but the process crosslinks proteins and preserves structure rather than viable tissue.
Evidence boundaryA complete human connectome is estimated near 1 zettabyte. Serious assessments place human whole-brain emulation several decades to more than a century away.
Large Mammal Prize context ↗Rat kidneys were vitrified at −122 °C, stored for up to 100 days, rewarmed in roughly 90 seconds, and transplanted into five rats. Full life-sustaining function returned within roughly 30 days. Cryoprotectant toxicity was the limiting factor.
Primary paper ↗The adult fruit-fly connectome contains about 130,000 neurons and took roughly 12 years. A mouse has about 70 million neurons and is not technically feasible today, according to the Allen Institute.
Connectome report ↗The preservation field's next scale test has been passed at preprint stage. Reported on 15 October 2026, porcine kidneys of about 100 g were vitrified with a new cryoprotectant, stored at −150 °C for up to a year, nanowarmed, and recovered function on machine perfusion approaching standard cold storage; acutely transplanted organs reperfused at once and produced urine. The work is a bioRxiv preprint that has not yet passed peer review, and the transplants were acute experiments, not long-term graft survival.
Preprint ↗Large private labs, public research programs, and philanthropy now sustain a serious geroscience ecosystem. Funding totals vary sharply with the definition of “longevity.”
Cellular reprogramming and senescence; acquired Dorian Therapeutics in May 2025.
Committed over roughly two years, making it the largest philanthropic funder of geroscience globally.
Ten Milestone 2 teams received $1M each in August 2026 and now target muscle, cognitive, and immune function.
Reported in January 2025 as a raise in progress; completion was not confirmed.
The field's most useful negative cases expose assay artifacts, regulatory arbitrage, biomarker substitution, and ordinary clinical failure.
Resveratrol's apparent SIRT1 activation was traced to the assay reagent. GSK had acquired Sirtris for $720M in 2008, then terminated SRT501 in 2010. Source ↗
Commercial plasma transfusions ran ahead of evidence until the FDA issued a 2019 safety warning. Alkahest/Grifols plasma-fraction trials did not deliver a translation.
The AAV-hTERT trial was announced in Colombia outside FDA jurisdiction. Bioethicists flagged the setup; no peer-reviewed results have been published. MIT Technology Review ↗
UBX1325 missed its phase 2b primary endpoint and Nasdaq suspended the listing. Liquidation is reported but lacks a primary corporate or SEC dissolution statement, so it remains probable rather than confirmed. Trial outcome ↗
The Phase 3 NOPARK trial (JAMA, 2026) tested one year of nicotinamide riboside in 410 people with early Parkinson disease. NAD metabolism rose as intended, but there was no clinical benefit and disease scores were slightly worse than placebo - the largest rigorous test of an NAD+ precursor, and a direct demonstration that raising NAD levels is not, by itself, evidence of a clinical effect. Source ↗
Issue 02 is the first scan measured against a prior position. Against the October baseline the ranked stack holds; the month's movement sits in reprogramming's wider map, one MSC program's regulatory turn, and the field's shared measurement project.
Near term: functional healthspan evidence, with shared measurement joining it as the field's common project. Long term: partial reprogramming has the strongest animal effect sizes, and its map widened this month from the eye to the brain; the open questions shift toward timing and identity.
Emulation welfare and release governance; de-aging with identity held; reprogramming as preconditioning (durability and post-injury dosing windows); and one yardstick, many therapies: the XPRIZE finalist cohort as a shared-measurement experiment.
Against Issue 01, the ten ranked directions hold their order. Thread 1 gains an animal brain result and its identity-question case; Thread 5 opens a new branch (emulation welfare and release governance); the laromestrocel watch item advanced to an FDA-meeting decision point; Thread 6 files two October cases on claim discipline.
Promote a direction only if the new evidence improves replication, advances from animal to human, reports a prespecified clinical endpoint, or resolves a named safety or delivery constraint. A prespecified secondary counts as a signal to track, and the primary endpoint result travels with it in every summary.
Three developments carry the month. Partial reprogramming protected the aged brain in animals: four weeks of cyclic OSKM expression before a permanently occluded cerebral artery left aged mice with a smaller ischemic area at 48 hours (24.9% of the hemisphere against 31.5%), neurons and myelin preserved; dosing ran before the injury and the readout is acute (Aging Cell, October 2026). Laromestrocel's ELPIS II analysis (26 October 2026) confirms a missed primary endpoint on right ventricular function (p = 0.68) beside a significant prespecified secondary: major adverse cardiac events 1 against 8 (P = 0.043) across 40 infants; an FDA meeting is requested and the data present at the AHA sessions on 8 November. A dated catch-up from 3 October: direct conversion of human blood progenitors into neural stem cells reset epigenetic age to about 5 to 13% of donor age while changing cell identity (Aging Cell), sharpening the question of what counts as rejuvenation. The November issue's sources were fetched and verified in live sessions on 31 October 2026.
Previous issues stay published. October 2026 · Issue 01 (Baseline)
The next credible turn will not be one dramatic headline. It will be independent replication, validated measurement, targeted delivery, and function that lasts.
Selected primary or closest-available sources for the core findings in this brief. The underlying survey used web-search index results gathered on 11 October 2026. On 21 October 2026 every source was fetched and verified in live sessions; three citations did not survive that check and were corrected: a dead link replaced with the primary paper, a link to a removed site replaced with the institution's own page, and one updated to the publisher's new domain.