In the era of AI, who gets to live longer?

The desire to defeat ageing has remained a myth throughout human history and, when the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cleared the human clinical trial of a therapy designed to reverse the biological age of living cells, the ancient quest turned into a real medical milestone for the first time in human history.

The company behind it, Life Biosciences, was co-founded by the outspoken longevity scientist and Harvard professor David Sinclair. For over two-decades, Sinclair argued that ageing is a correctable biological malfunction rather than an inevitable law of nature. Just days after the historic FDA clearance, Sinclair addressed global leaders at the World Governments Summit in Dubai, announcing that his laboratory had successfully reversed the biological age of cells, organs, and complex tissues including the eye and brain by up to 75 percent within weeks. Their experimental therapy, designated ER-100, works by reactivating three of the four Nobel Prize-winning Yamanaka factors. These specific proteins return adult cells to a more youthful state without modifying the underlying genetic code. 

None of this would be advancing at its current speed without artificial intelligence (AI). The human epigenome, the intricate biochemical layer above our DNA that dictates gene activity, is so complex that traditional drug discovery seems like simple arithmetic. Today, AI platforms are rapidly executing tasks that once took generations. This capability was proven by an AI evaluation in December 2025, which revealed that microbiome engineering accelerates the clearance of destructive senescent cells, a link human researchers had missed for decades. Because of this structural shift, immunologist Derya Unutmaz revised his long-standing prediction for full ageing reversal from 2045 to 2040. 

The economic implications are quite massive to fundamentally reframe how governments approach healthcare. A peer-reviewed study in Nature Aging, co-authored by Sinclair alongside economists from the London Business School and Oxford, calculated that extending healthy human lifespans by a single year would generate $38 trillion in economic value through productivity gains and slashed healthcare costs. Expanding that to a decade of healthy life yields a staggering $367 trillion. By 2030, one in six people worldwide will be aged 60 or over, and pension systems across Europe, Japan, and South Korea are already straining under a demographic burden that no government adequately planned for. At the Dubai summit, Sinclair argued that declining birth rates leave civilisations with two choices: replace shrinking workforces with machines or keep human beings healthy and productive for longer. 

However, there is an urgent question the anti-aging market seems deeply reluctant to confront: who gets to live longer? The current pricing models for gene therapy provide a grim roadmap. Look at Luxturna, the approved treatment for inherited retinal blindness, which launched at $425,000 per eye. Should upcoming epigenetic therapies mimic this; they would be exclusive luxury commodities for a narrow segment of the world’s population. 

For countries like Bangladesh, this is not a distant philosophical concern. Approximately 120,000 Bangladeshis develop new cataracts every year, and the number of blind people aged 30 or above is over 750,000. Furthermore, glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy are escalating alongside an ageing population and a surge in diabetes driven by urbanisation. These are the conditions the Life Biosciences trial targets. Fortunately, Bangladesh has strong foundations to build upon: icddr,b stands among the world’s most productive public health research institutions, and the National AI Policy draft for 2026–2030 signals an ambition stretching far beyond simple automation. Bangladesh must act immediately to fund cellular mapping for a population uniquely conditioned by heat stress, arsenic exposure, and regional environmental factors that Western clinical trials completely ignore. The nation must forge proactive research alliances to protect its population data rights and gain scientific leverage before global commercial forces dictate terms that leave public healthcare behind.

Ultimately, this breakthrough may force us to reimagine the structure of society. Should this science deliver even a fraction of its promise, the structural foundations of modern society may need rebuilding. Retirement ages, inheritance laws, pension plans, or the meaning of a human lifetime, none of these were designed for a world in which 70-year-olds carry the biological profile of 40-year-olds. Science itself does not answer these questions; global leaders, institutions, and regular citizens must confront them immediately, ensuring that our collective future is shaped by deliberate design rather than forced upon us by default.

Dr Sabbir Ahmad is a researcher, mentor, and a leader in project delivery and engineering. He can be reached at sabbir@ieee.org.

Views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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