Many people reacted with uneasy surprise recently when a microphone on Chinese state television caught China’s supreme leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin talking about the possibility of living to 150 years old, and maybe forever.
But the lab at Longvi Biosciences, a longevity medicine startup in Shenzhen, China, has not failed. “Living to 150 is definitely realistic,” says Lyu Qinghua, chief technology officer at the company, which has developed an anti-aging drug based on compounds found in grape seed extract. “Within a few years, this will become a reality.”
Although he is skeptical that modern medicine can completely overcome death (Putin has said organ transplants can), he said he believes the science of longevity is advancing so rapidly that even the seemingly impossible can become a reality.
“In five to 10 years, no one will be getting cancer,” he predicted.
The search for an elixir of life, enthusiastically embraced in recent years by American tech billionaires like Peter Thiel, has been going on in China for more than 2,000 years. It all started when Qin Shihuang, the first emperor of Qin Dynasty, ordered a nationwide search for the elixir of immortality. If that didn’t work, he also ordered thousands of terracotta soldiers to be created to protect him in the grave if he died.
The Emperor died at the age of 49, probably from mercury poisoning caused by anti-aging treatments.
There was an air of fraud in the longevity business from the beginning. But investment from the state and private companies, as well as growing interest among China’s leaders and public, has turned it into a legitimate and sometimes lucrative medical field.
China, eager to catch up and possibly surpass Western countries in biotechnology, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, has made the longevity industry a national priority and is investing billions of dollars in research and related commercial derivatives.
“They improved very quickly. A few years ago, there was nothing here and the West was still far ahead,” says Vadim Gradyshev, a professor at Harvard Medical School. He is conducting pioneering research on longevity, including experiments that extend the lifespan of older mice by connecting their circulatory systems to younger mice.
During a recent trip to China to attend two scientific conferences, he said Chinese researchers were “catching up quickly.”
According to the People’s Daily, a mouthpiece of the Communist Party, China’s average life expectancy reached 79 years last year, five years above the world average.
However, this was achieved through steady improvements in medical care and lifestyles, and is still far short of Japan’s average of nearly 85 years, and far short of the 150 years mentioned by President Xi.
Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin, both 72 years old, may have just had a casual chat. But exiled Communist Party opponents took the remarks seriously, and they pointed to a video posted on Chinese social media in 2019 that purported to be a propaganda speech for Beijing’s elite military hospital (301), which treats senior officials.
The video, which was quickly removed by Chinese censors, boasted that the hospital was pioneering the 981 Leadership Health Project, which aims to increase the average lifespan of party leaders to 150 years.
“The average life expectancy of Chinese leaders is much longer than that of leaders in developed countries,” the video said, pointing to the hospital’s decades-long efforts to keep alive leaders like Mao Zedong, who died in 1976 at age 82, and Deng Xiaoping, who died in 1997 at age 92.
Chinese state television, sensitive to any discussion about the health of its leaders, mistakenly recorded a conversation between the leaders before a military parade in Beijing in September and ordered Western news agencies to delete the footage.
Microphone musings aside, China’s enthusiasm for increasing life expectancy has grown in tandem with rapid economic growth, giving hundreds of millions of people the time and money they need to look beyond day-to-day survival.
One Chinese company to ride this wave is Time Pie, a Shanghai group that started out selling nutritional supplements. It currently hosts scientific conferences and publishes the magazine “Age Slowly and Live Healthy”.
“No one talked about longevity in China before, only wealthy Americans,” said Gan Yu, the company’s co-founder. “Many Chinese people are now interested and have the funds to extend their lives.”
The growing interest was evidenced at a recent international conference hosted by Time Pie in Shanghai, which attracted Chinese and foreign scientists to present their research, as well as companies promoting anti-aging creams and potions, goji berries, cryogenic and hyperbaric chambers, and other devices said to slow aging.
Rlab, a Shanghai company that claims “technology can stop humans from aging,” invited potential customers into a telephone booth-like space, a cryogenic device where temperatures can drop to -200 degrees Fahrenheit. Ivor Yu, a long-running business entrepreneur from northeastern China, entered but came out seconds later shivering from the cold. They also toured the company’s “anti-aging magic box.” I left without buying.
The idea of living forever persists as a marketing tool. Immortal Dragons, a Singaporean investment fund focused on longevity projects, is run by Bo Yan Wang, a young entrepreneur from China who has been exploring money-making opportunities in cryopreservation, 3D organ printing and “whole body replacement.”
Lonvi, a long-running Shenzhen startup, has more modest goals.
The company opened its lab in 2022 in an office tower on the outskirts of the sprawling Chinese city near Hong Kong after scientists in Shanghai discovered that procyanidin C1, or PCC1, a natural compound found in grape seed extract, extended the lifespan of mice by selectively killing senescent cells and protecting healthy cells. (Ronvi is not related to the Shanghai scientists.)
Mice treated with this compound lived 9.4% longer throughout their lives and 64.2% longer from the start of treatment.
The results of this study, published in a paper in the journal Nature Metabolism in 2021, were revolutionary. But in September, the magazine did not remove the article but issued an editor’s note warning readers about “incorrect data.” Subsequent studies, including one in Japan, supported the original claim.
Translating something that works in mice to humans requires long, rigorous testing, and what works in mice often disappoints people, says David Barzilai, an American physician and founder of Barzilai Longevity Consulting. He said the “canonical example” of this is rapamycin, a compound that has been shown to “reliably” extend lifespan in mice and other animals, but has “uncertain” effects on healthy adults.
China is “taking the biology of longevity and aging more and more seriously, both at the institutional and policy levels,” he said. But, he adds, “strong scientific intent does not guarantee uniformly high rigor or translational success. The challenge is not just to do more, but to do it better.”
Grape seeds have long been popular as a health food in Western and traditional Chinese medicine. But Ronvi claims he has isolated molecules within them that “kill zombie cells (senescent cells that do not die but harm healthy cells)” and has found a way to produce capsules containing high concentrations of these molecules.
“This is more than just a drug. This is the holy grail,” says Lonvi CEO Yip Tszho, also known as Zico.
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