Geroscience in 2025: The Expert Roundup
2025 was a good year for geroscience, marked by rapid strides and critical milestones. Yet, the path wasn’t always smooth: progress in some areas lagged, research hit dead ends, and familiar bottlenecks persisted.
Against this backdrop, we asked five prominent geroscientists to share their perspectives on the highs and lows of 2025, along with their outlook for 2026. We are proud to have covered many of the breakthrough papers they highlight, and we remain committed to keeping you at the forefront of science’s most important field in the year ahead.
Matt Kaeberlein, CEO of Optispan
One thing that impressed me in 2025 was how much traction geroscience gained outside the usual scientific circles. There’s been a clear shift in awareness among industry leaders and policymakers.
At the A4Li Summit in April, for example, Dr. Mehmet Oz, now Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, explicitly referenced geroscience and the Hallmarks of Aging in his remarks. That would have been unthinkable not long ago.
We now have a Longevity Science Caucus in the U.S. House, and similar initiatives are emerging internationally. Geroscience is increasingly part of a broader conversation about healthcare sustainability, prevention, and long-term outcomes, and that momentum is encouraging.
On the flip side, 2025 was another year where no intervention convincingly outperformed rapamycin, let alone caloric restriction, in terms of effect size on aging biology. While there has been meaningful progress translating geroscience principles into clinical practice, particularly around lifestyle-based interventions, and while a few promising candidates are moving through regulatory pipelines, I don’t see strong evidence that we’re close to large-effect interventions that can substantially slow or partially reverse aging. There’s no shortage of hype, but the data simply haven’t caught up yet. That hasn’t dampened my long-term optimism, but it has reinforced the need for rigor and innovative discovery science.
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