When Chinese state television’s microphone recently captured images of China’s supreme leader, Xi Jinping, and Russian President Vladimir Putin contemplating the possibility of living to 150, and perhaps even forever, the reaction of many was one of anxious panic.
But there was no failure in the laboratory of Lonvi Biosciences, a longevity medicine startup in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. “Living to 150 is definitely realistic,” says Liu Qinghua, chief technology officer of the company, which has developed anti-aging pills based on a compound found in grape seed extract. “In a few years, this will be a reality.”
He is skeptical about modern medicine’s ability to completely overcome death – something Putin has said is possible through organ transplantation – but says he believes the science of longevity is advancing so rapidly that even what seems impossible can become a reality.
He predicted that “in 5 to 10 years, no one will get cancer.”
The search for the elixir of life, which American tech billionaires like Peter Thiel has enthusiastically embraced in recent years, has been underway in China for more than two millennia. It started with the first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who ordered a nationwide search for death-defying potions. If that didn’t work, he also ordered the creation of thousands of Terracotta Warriors to protect him in his tomb if he died.
The Emperor died at the age of 49, possibly from mercury poisoning caused by anti-aging treatment.
There has been an air of sorcery hanging over Longevity’s work from the beginning. But investments from the state and private companies, as well as growing interest among Chinese leaders and the general public, have turned it into a legitimate and sometimes profitable branch of medicine.
China, eager to catch up with the West and, where possible, outperform it in biotechnology, artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies, has made the longevity industry a national priority, investing billions in related research and commercial derivatives.
“They improved very quickly,” says Vadim Gladyshev, a professor at Harvard Medical School who has done pioneering work on longevity, including an experiment that extended the lives of elderly mice by attaching their circulatory systems to young mice. “A few years ago, there was nothing here and the West was still far ahead.”
Chinese researchers during a recent trip to China for two scientific conferences are “catching up quickly,” he says.
Life expectancy in China last year was 79 years, five years higher than the global average, according to the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party.
But this, achieved through steady improvements in health care and lifestyle, is still below Japan’s average of about 85 years and far from the 150 years mentioned by Xi.
Xi and Putin, both 72, may have just spoken casually. But it was taken seriously by exiled Communist Party opponents, who pointed to a 2019 video that appeared on Chinese social media purporting to be a promotional 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 doing pioneering work on the “981 Leaders Health Project” – aiming to extend the life expectancy of senior party figures to 150 years.
“The life expectancy of Chinese leaders is much higher than that of leaders in developed countries,” the video states, referring to decades of hospital work keeping leaders like Mao Zedong, who died at age 82 in 1976, and Deng Xiaoping, who was 92 when he died in 1997, alive.
Sensitive to all discussions regarding the health of the two leaders, Chinese state television, which inadvertently captured the conversation between the two leaders before the military parade in Beijing in September, ordered Western news agencies to delete the footage.
Far from the musings picked up by microphones, China’s enthusiasm for extending life expectancy has grown alongside its rapid economic growth, which has given hundreds of millions of people the time and money they need to look beyond everyday survival.
One Chinese company riding this wave is Time Pie, a group in Shanghai that started out selling nutritional supplements and now organizes scientific conferences and publishes a magazine called “Aging Slowly, Living Well.”
“No one in China talked about longevity before, only wealthy Americans,” says Gan Yu, the company’s co-founder. “Now many Chinese are interested and have the money to prolong their lives.”
This growing interest was evident at a recent international meeting organized by Time Bay in Shanghai, which brought together Chinese and foreign scientists presenting their research, as well as companies promoting anti-aging creams and potions, goji berries, cryogenic and hyperbaric chambers, and other devices that supposedly slow aging.
Rlab, a Shanghai company that claims that “technology can stop human aging,” invited potential customers into what looks like a phone booth — a refrigerated device in which the temperature drops to minus 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Ivor Yu, a businessman from northeastern China who works in the field of longevity, walked in and walked out a few seconds later, shivering from the cold. He also inspected the company’s “magic anti-aging box.” Left without purchasing.
The idea of living forever continues as a marketing tool. Immortal Dragons, a Singaporean investment fund focused on longevity projects, is run by a young entrepreneur from China, Bo Yang Wang, who has explored money-making opportunities in cryopreservation, 3D organ printing and “total body replacement.”
Lonvi, the long-lived startup in Shenzhen, has more modest goals.
It opened a lab in 2022 in an office tower on the outskirts of the sprawling Chinese city near Hong Kong, after scientists in Shanghai discovered that a natural compound found in grape seed extract — procyanidin C1, or PCC1 — increased the life expectancy of mice by selectively killing senescent or senescent cells and protecting healthy cells. (Lunfei has no relation to the Shanghai scholars.)
Mice treated with the compound lived 9.4% longer throughout their lives, and 64.2% longer from the start of treatment.
The results, published in a paper in the journal Nature Metabolism in 2021, were revolutionary. But in September, the magazine issued an editor’s note warning readers of “data errors,” although it did not remove the article. Subsequent studies, including one in Japan, have supported the initial claims.
Translating what worked in mice to humans requires long, rigorous testing, and what works in mice is often disappointing in humans, says David Barzilai, an American physician and founder of Barzilai, a longevity consultancy. A “primary example” of this is rapamycin, a compound that has been shown to “strongly” extend the lives of mice and other animals but has an “unconfirmed” effect on healthy adults, he said.
He says China “is taking the issue of longevity and the biology of aging increasingly seriously at both the institutional and political levels.” But he adds, “Strong scientific intent does not guarantee uniformly high accuracy 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 the West and in traditional Chinese medicine. But Lonvi claims to have molecules isolated inside it that “kill zombie cells” — senescent cells that don’t die and damage healthy cells — and he’s found a way to produce capsules containing high concentrations of these molecules.
“This is not just another pill. It’s the Holy Grail,” says Yip Chu, known as Zico, Lonvi’s CEO.
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