Meet the 11 rising stars of longevity medicine

Longevity medicine has gone mainstream: Staying healthy is now as much a priority as treating disease.

The longevity industry is expected to grow to $8 trillion by 2030, according to UBS analysts, up from an estimated $5.3 billion in 2023. Those with ambitious ideas who can meaningfully improve our lives will be remembered as the true innovators in this growing field.

For years, Business Insider has been helping readers navigate what really could help you live longer, and what's cleverly packaged hype.

Now, for the first time, we are naming Business Insider's Rising Stars of Longevity, the latest in a series that has included Wall Street, venture capital, marketing, and real estate.

The 11 finalists were chosen for their contributions to shaping the future of longevity science, investment, and medicine, and for their discoveries and solutions to prevent the harms of aging.

Andrea Maier, a professor of medicine at the National University of Singapore and a member of the expert panel that helped decide the finalists, said the winners are "pioneers" who have a deep understanding of the biology of aging and are helping bring advancements to patients.

Meet Business Insider's 2026 Rising Stars of Longevity.

Daniel Belsky

Associate professor of epidemiology, Columbia University, Columbia Aging Center

A Rising Star for measuring how fast people are aging, and investigating evidence-based ways to slow down the process.

When Daniel Belsky started his career in academia, he wanted to understand why, exactly, poor people tend to get sicker and die earlier, and how rich people often can stay so well for so long. This led him to try to understand the mechanisms behind aging.

Belsky's first major discovery in longevity science established a new paradigm in aging research. Co-authored by fellow Rising Star of Longevity Morgan Levine, the 2015 paper published in PNAS suggested that some people aged far more rapidly than others, even by age 38, setting them up to get sick and die prematurely.

The hypothesis that it's more useful to track a person's pace of aging rather than their "biological age" when trying to preserve their health led him to develop a new kind of aging clock. In the newest phase of his aging research, Belsky will study whether common prescription drugs for conditions like diabetes and inflammation could actively improve aging, and how.

The idea isn't to get everyone above a certain age to take these drugs for longevity. Instead, it's a first step to identifying the "molecular signatures" that indicate when aging processes are slowing down, he said. He hopes this will bring us closer to a new class of drugs that would preserve our health as we age, called "gerotherotherapeutics."

"If we can shift average healthspan in the population by six months, that's an extraordinary achievement," Belsky said.

Hilary Brueck

Dr. Evelyne Bischof

President of the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, concierge doctor in internal medicine and healthy longevity, and medical director at the Sheba Longevity Center, Tel Aviv.

A Rising Star for bringing a preventive lens to patient care with evidence-based tests and treatments.

A typical doctor's visit in the US lasts about 18 minutes. When Dr. Evelyne Bischof sits down with a new patient, the appointment lasts roughly 90 minutes. Her clients, mainly in Tel Aviv and Shanghai, include Nobel laureates, business executives, and their families, as well as middle-aged public hospital patients interested in how to stay healthy.

She asks patients questions like "Were you born naturally or via cesarean section?" to identify clues about the makeup of their microbiome. She might ask about their birthweight and whether they were formula-fed. People sometimes find these questions "freaky," she said, adding, "They're like, 'I don't know. It was 80 years ago!'"

Then there are the many tests she runs to examine the body, inside and out, spanning genetics to oral hygiene and brain MRIs. Critics say too many tests can sometimes lead to unnecessary anxiety and treatments.

But Bischof says she only picks those supported by the highest quality evidence to help paint a comprehensive picture of a person's health. The data are used to personalize the patient's care and develop a protocol that includes tips on nutrition, sleep, and exercise, plus prescriptions and supplements.

Bischof is at the forefront of an emerging field of medicine called healthy longevity, which she is spearheading efforts to formalize as a recognized discipline. In February 2025, she became president of the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society.

Some people still confuse healthy longevity with "living forever and biohacking," but, she said, "it's just not the same."

Hilary Brueck

Peter Fedichev

Co-founder and CEO, Gero

A Rising Star for experimenting with helping humans live to around 120 years in good health.

Peter Fedichev does not want to add an extra couple of years to your life. Instead, he sees no reason why humans couldn't, under the right circumstances, reach our maximum lifespan of 120 years old, happy and healthy.

Inspired by animals who are exceptionally resistant to disease and aging, like the naked mole rat and the bowhead whale, Fedichev said: "We are bringing physics to biology in order to understand why these guys are aging so slowly or not aging at all, to replicate their ability with biotechnology."

Fedichev studied theoretical physics in Moscow and Amsterdam and published his first paper on aging mechanisms in 2015. To him, the problem of aging is just an equation waiting to be solved. One approach, he thinks, is to use new anti-aging drugs to more tightly control our biology, reducing the stress our bodies experience.

By 2018, he realized his concept could be the foundation of a standalone company, and he founded Gero, with the aim of finding new ways to develop anti-aging drugs using both physics principles and AI models.

Fedichev is partnering with Pfizer to use Gero's AI to analyze millions of medical records and develop new ideas for targeting specific diseases, like fibrosis. And he has a larger, more ambitious partnership with the Japanese pharmaceutical maker Chugai, to discover new drug targets for age-related diseases.

Fedichev says his anti-aging drugs could be ready for you in just a few years — if you are a dog. For people, things might take a little longer.

Hilary Brueck

Celine Halioua

Founder and CEO of Loyal

A Rising Star for leading the team that has come closest to creating an FDA-approved longevity drug.

While interning at a California neuro-oncology clinic in the mid-2010s before starting college, Celine Halioua saw patients receive the worst possible prognoses with no treatment options.

"I couldn't accept that answer and wanted to understand the precursors of disease to change the trajectory of unhealthy aging pathways well before we started chasing symptoms," Halioua said.

Halioua studied neuroscience in college, then served as chief of staff to Laura Deming, the founder of the first longevity biotech venture firm. In 2019, she dropped out of a Ph.D program at the University of Oxford to found Loyal, a company developing life-extension drugs for dogs.

"Proving that a pharmaceutical drug can extend lifespan in humans first is challenging, expensive, and could take decades," Halioua said. "In veterinary medicine, we could test that same hypothesis with the same FDA and possibly see results sooner and with less capital."

To date, Loyal has raised over $250 million, including $100 million in Series C funding in February. The company is seeking FDA approval for LOY-002, a prescription pill for large dogs over 10 years old that tastes like beef. LOY-002 is now in Phase 3 clinical trials — the final stage before FDA approval.

Some longevity experts say it is the closest we've come to developing a true anti-aging drug.

Noah Sheidlower

Jamie Justice

Executive director, XPRIZE Healthspan

A Rising Star for driving cutting-edge longevity research.

When Jamie Justice discovered a scorpion in her shoe while camping in fourth grade, little did she know it would lead her to a career in longevity research.

Justice took the scorpion home, named him Elmo, and raised crickets as his food. Her observations on which crickets lived the longest when given different foods won a local science fair prize in her Texas community. Fast forward three decades, and Justice is the executive director of XPRIZE Healthspan: the grown-up version of her childhood science fair project.

The seven-year competition launched in 2023 to support research into innovative therapies that aim to give people at least an extra 10 healthy years at the end of their lives, by restoring their cognitive, immune, and muscle function. This July, XPRIZE is slated to name 10 finalists, who will split a $10 million prize and run clinical trials to prove their ideas. In 2030, the winner will receive up to $81 million.

Justice gravitated toward helping older patients during her master's in integrative physiology at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also earned a Ph.D in the integrative physiology of aging. After attending a lecture on the genetics of aging, she asked herself, "Is there a medicine that can change how we age?" Now she's judging the high-stakes global competition that aims to answer that very question.

Noah Sheidlower

Nathan LeBrasseur

Professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, the Mayo Clinic

A Rising Star for taking cutting-edge longevity research from the lab bench to the hospital bed.

When Nathan LeBrasseur was an athlete in his 20s, he was obsessed with performance: running faster, jumping higher, and breaking records — until he worked at a hospital.

As part of his training to be a physical therapist at a sports medicine clinic, LeBrasseur saw older adults relearning how to walk, safely get out of bed, and support their body weight. It was an "aha moment" that human performance isn't just about functioning well now, but for many years to come, he said.

At the Mayo Clinic's aging centers, LeBrasseur leads scientists conducting "bench-to-bedside" research, aiming to translate lab discoveries to treatments that can benefit real-world patients.

One of his major achievements is related to the study of senescent, or "zombie," cells, which are damaged but linger in the body and accumulate as we age, wreaking havoc on our health. In a 2016 study published in the journal Diabetes, LeBrasseur's team at the Mayo Clinic showed that physically active mice were less likely to suffer the ill effects of senescent cells triggered by aging and an unhealthy diet.

The team later successfully applied the principle in humans in a 2024 study, developing a workout regimen of walking, strength training, and stretching exercises that helped lower markers of aging in a group of elderly volunteer patients. This is "just the tip of the iceberg," LeBrasseur said.

Gabby Landsverk

Morgan Levine

Vice president of computation, Altos Labs

A Rising Star for developing AI models that may someday improve — or even reverse — aging.

Watching her parents grow old as a kid, Morgan Levine knew what she wanted to do when she grew up: help people stay strong and healthy up to the very end of their lives.

By 2018, as an assistant professor of pathology at Yale University, she had developed a new kind of biological age test called PhenoAge, which captures whether a person is aging at an average speed using regular blood test results you'd get at an annual exam.

In 2022, Levine left academia when she and her husband became two of the first hires at the $3 billion longevity startup Altos Labs, whose investors include Jeff Bezos and Yuri Milner.

"I wanted the work that I was doing to actually have real-world implications," she said.

Today, she says, her job is to design, develop, and train what are known as AI "world models." She works with big datasets and models to build systems that could one day run virtual experiments to predict how different interventions affect cells, tissues, and organisms, before hitting the lab or clinical trials. If it works, it could save huge amounts of time and money, rapidly accelerating scientific discovery.

She hopes the models will someday spit out new ideas for aging more gracefully, by offering things like personalized anti-aging advice, building digital twins for people to model healthier routines, and designing new kinds of anti-aging drugs.

Hilary Brueck

Dylan Livingston

Founder, the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI)

A Rising Star for campaigning to democratize access to longevity treatments.

Dylan Livingston's earliest thoughts about longevity were straight out of a fantasy novel. When his dad introduced him, at age 12, to the work of the radical immortality advocate Aubrey de Grey, he imagined a mystical wizard mixing up potions for eternal life.

Eleven years later, in 2022, Livingston founded the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives (A4LI), the first nonprofit organization specifically dedicated to advancing policies to fight age-related illness across the population.

Livingston believes the innovations, and technological and pharmaceutical breakthroughs to live longer and better already exist. The challenge is getting them to the people who need them in time to make a difference.

A4LI combines Livingston's passion for longevity with his experience in grassroots political organizing. During his teens and early 20s, he became interested in politics and eventually worked on Joe Biden's 2020 campaign. Livingston's interest in human lifespan was revived during the COVID pandemic, when he found himself living in his parents' basement, waiting out the virus with his 92-year-old grandfather.

Now 28 years old, Livingston and his two staffers at A4LI have helped pass "Right to Try" legislation in Montana, which they hope to replicate in New Hampshire. The policy, which critics say is risky for offering false hope and bypassing FDA oversight, makes it easier for patients with serious illnesses to access treatments that have passed early clinical trials but aren't FDA-approved. In 2023, A4LI was instrumental in forming the bipartisan Longevity Science Caucus in Congress.

"The irony of this whole thing is I think I'm aging myself more rapidly," he said.

Gabby Landsverk

Dr. Nicole Sirotin

CEO, Institute for Healthier Living, Abu Dhabi

A Rising Star for running the world's first licensed healthy longevity medicine clinic.

Doctor Nicole Sirotin spent 20 years delivering "regular" primary care with a longevity bent. "I've been doing this kind of medicine since before we had a name for it," she said.

She realized that, to achieve her goal of helping people live healthier, maybe even longer, she needed to gather far more baseline information about a patient's health than a typical doctor's visit (or insurance billing codes) would allow.

"We're not waiting for a diagnosis to appear as we do in traditional medicine," Sirotin, the chief executive officer at the Institute for Healthier Living Abu Dhabi, said. "We gather data on people, we understand their risk better, and then we intervene earlier."

Take blood sugar, for example. If Sirotin sees a patient whose blood sugar levels have slowly risen over time, she might intervene and course-correct before they have prediabetes.

In 2024, Sirotin developed the world's first longevity clinic standards for practitioners, requiring designated "healthy longevity medicine" providers across the United Arab Emirates to follow an evidence-based evaluation of patients, and streamlining how they deliver care. The guidelines support improving patients' nutrition, exercise, and sleep regimens, but reject interventions like IV drips and hyperbaric oxygen treatments, due to a lack of solid evidence.

"It is the wild west right now," Sirotin said.

Hilary Brueck

Alex Zhavoronkov

Founder and CEO, Insilico Medicine

A Rising Star for using AI technologies for longevity drug development.

Alex Zhavoronkov concluded early on that "life is incredibly unfair" and "nature is not your friend."

With the aim of helping people live longer, Zhavoronkov studied computer science, which kickstarted a career spanning roles in semiconductor companies, biotech, bioinformatics, and regenerative medicine labs.

In 2014, he founded Insilico Medicine. Named after "in silico" experiments performed on a computer, the company uses deep learning and AI to study how compounds may impact cells and to develop drugs that prolong people's lives.

Insilico quickly got the attention of Nvidia, which named it a top five AI company in 2017. By 2019, Insilico began developing therapeutics in immunology and fibrosis, partnering with Fosun Pharma in China, and raising millions of dollars nearly every year this decade.

On December 30, 2025, Insilico IPOed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. In March, Eli Lilly gave Insilico exclusive rights to manufacture oral therapeutics identified by Insilico's AI. The deal was valued at up to $2.75 billion.

Zhavoronkov said Insilico has developed 28 drugs in total using generative AI, 12 of which have reached the clinical trial stage. None of the company's drugs have entered late-stage studies, though it has gotten close with rentosertib, which is in development to treat progressive lung disease. The drug went from being identified to a successful Phase 2 trial in 18 months — a process that often takes double or triple that time.

Noah Sheidlower

Garri Zmudze

Longevity and biotech investor, cofounder of LongeVC and AniVC

A Rising Star for investing in cutting-edge, evidence-based longevity research.

In 2015, both of Garri Zmudze's parents were diagnosed with age-related diseases: His father with bladder cancer, and his mother with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. As their only child, he felt responsible for finding them accessible care options. This sparked his interest in longevity and healthy aging.

Born and raised in Latvia, where he studied finance, Zmudze said he got his start in the longevity field by connecting with one of his former high school classmates: fellow Business Insider Rising Star of Longevity Alex Zhavoronkov. In 2017, Zmudze became an early investor in Insilico, advising the company on strategy and fundraising, which he continues to do today.

Zmudze cofounded LongeVC in 2020, which supports early-stage longevity and biotech founders. He went on to cofound AniVC in 2024, which focuses on early-stage ventures aimed at achieving longevity in the animal and pet sector. Zmudze hopes to help crack the code of managing or preventing age-related diseases like the ones his parents had, with a focus on early diagnostics and personalized medicine.

It's a passion that has caught on in his family. Zmudze's 10-year-old daughter participates in his calls with startups, taking a special interest in his animal-related ventures.

"Recently we had a conversation about what she wants to do in the future. She said, 'I want to be like you. I want to invest. I want to support,'" Zmudze said.

Julia Pugachevsky