The branches · 5 of 7
Lifespan and repair
Living longer, healing faster, and replacing what wears out.
How long a body lasts and how well it repairs itself: slowing ageing, regrowing tissue, replacing organs, clearing the damage that builds up over a life. An upgrade here adds healthy years or fixes something the body cannot fix on its own.
5 upgrades
furthest stage reached: first human- A drug clears aged cells from a person's body
Some cells stop dividing but do not die, and sit in tissue giving off signals that inflame their neighbours; they build up with age. Clearing them makes old mice healthier and longer-lived. In 2019 a Mayo Clinic group gave a short course of two drugs that kill such cells to people with kidney disease, took tissue samples before and after, and found fewer of the cells. It is a first human, on a measurement, and no such drug is approved.
- A printed or lab-grown organ works in a person for a year
Take a few of a person's own cells, grow them on a scaffold shaped like the organ, and put the result in. In 2006 a North Carolina group reported seven young people with bladders made this way, working for years. Nothing more complicated than a hollow organ has been done, and printed organs with their own blood supply remain in the laboratory. The entry is written to count working organs, not patches: skin, cartilage and blood vessels grown from cells are already approved, but they replace a surface or a tube, not an organ's job.
- An organ from a gene-edited pig keeps a person alive
Pigs' organs are the right size for people, and gene editing can take out the pig genes that make a human body reject them at once and add human ones that calm the rest. In January 2022 a man too ill for a human heart lived two months on a pig's; since 2024 several people have lived on pig kidneys, the longest for most of a year. Formal trials cleared by the United States regulator began in 2025. It is a first human, several times over, and the first step towards organs made to order.
- A drug makes people live longer in good health
A pill that slows ageing itself, rather than treating one disease, so that the people who take it live longer and stay well longer. Rapamycin does this in mice, even when started late in life, and several other drugs have followed it. None has been shown to do it in people, because a trial that could show it takes many years, and that gap between the animal result and the human one is exactly what the stage ladder is for. People already take rapamycin and metformin in the hope of it; hope is not a record.
- Partially resetting cells reverses ageing in a living animal
Four genes can turn an adult cell back into something like an embryonic one. Switched on briefly and then off, in a live animal, they turn back some of the marks of age without erasing what the cell is. In 2016 mice with a premature-ageing disease lived longer when this was done to them, and in 2020 old mice regained sight after the nerve from the eye was reset. It is the most direct attempt yet to reverse ageing rather than slow it. The first person was given it, in one eye, in June 2026, with no result yet reported.