The longevity industry is booming with high-tech tests, drugs, and medical devices. What to know for your health -- and personal finances. By Elizabeth O'Brien
Abby Miller Levy thinks a lot about what really pays off in healthcare.
Co-founder of venture-capital firm Primetime Partners, she invests in start-ups involved in everything from dementia prevention to "bioidentical pellet therapy" for better libido. Only after crunching the numbers, interviewing experts, and analyzing all of the angles do she and her partners invest.
Miller Levy also takes a data-driven approach to her own health. She has undergone advanced imaging and does regular blood tests and data analysis. Her physician knows the true biological age of her vital organs; if something turns up on a scan, they're on top of it.
"There is no value you can place on early detection of cancer, heart disease, etc.," says Miller Levy, 51.
The umbrella term for this is longevity medicine, and it's expanding rapidly. The core pitch: monitor your physiology like a hawk, take treatments on the cutting edge of science, and boost your odds of a longer, healthier life.
Efforts to boost life span go back to ancient Chinese herbal medicine (it still holds up). Today, many consumers aim to "biohack" their way to better health, or work with physicians on a longevity program that may include everything from advanced imaging to supplements, prescription drugs used off label, and other treatments aimed to turn back the clock.
Longevity medicine isn't an officially recognized specialty. But it's attracting practitioners from internal medicine to endocrinologists. And companies across the healthcare spectrum aim to capitalize.
GLP-1s are part of the longevity pitch, fueling growth for companies like Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Hims & Hers Health. Device and monitoring companies include DexCom, for glucose levels, and firms like Garmin that sell smartwatches with increasingly sophisticated biosensors.
Overall, "consumer driven" diagnostic testing is a growth sector, rapidly turning into a $4 billion market, according to Morgan Stanley, which recommends Quest Diagnostics as a thematic winner. The testing company says it's seeing "double-digit customer repeat rates" at its consumer site questhealth.com.
For consumers in the do-it-yourself camp, biohacking is now as easy getting an Amazon.com delivery. Tests to track thyroid function and inflammation markers can be delivered to your doorstep with the paper towels or dog food. Peptides that sound like they're named after Star Wars characters (Epitalon, GHK-Cu, BPC-157) are often pitched by influencers as longevity drugs.
Banks are angling in, too. Earlier this year, JPMorgan Chase's Sapphire Reserve card offered a discount on membership with Function Health, a company promising to empower customers to live "100 healthy years."
How much hard science backs all of this? It depends. On the longevity conference circuit, attendees enjoy cold plunges amid talks of plasma replacement therapy and microdosing GLP-1s. Clinical trials proving their benefits aren't nearly as commonplace.
Investment capital is flowing in, though. Longevity Technology, a trade publication, calls 2026 a "breakout year" for longevity biotech, saying that total capital raised in the first quarter was up 56% year over year to $3.74 billion.
Miller Levy's venture-capital firm, backed by veteran venture capitalist Alan Patricof, 91, is in the thick of it. Two of their investments -- BetterBrain and Cenegenics -- test for individuals' biomarkers and offer consumers targeted plans to boost their brain health and extend their longevity, recommending activities like piano lessons or fish oil for the brain, or nutrition and exercise plans for better physiological health.
Despite the gray areas of longevity medicine, there can be tangible benefits for your health and personal finances.
Catching a cancer or heart condition early on could be lifesaving. If you have a better sense of how long you'll live, you can claim Social Security at the optimal time and adjust your portfolio to match your expected life span. Your estate plan might look very different with a more data-driven approach to your health.
The flip side is that it's hard to determine which products and services are likely to pay off medically versus the snake oil. Too much knowledge can also be harmful, leading to unnecessary tests and costs, and more anxiety than it's worth.
"There's a lot of progress, a lot of knowledge, and 10 times more noise, " says Dr. Nir Barzilai, president of the Academy for Health & Lifespan Research and board member of American Federation for Aging Research.
Here's what to know.
Connecting the Data Dots
Longevity medicine is many things, from peptides to body scans and biometric devices like the Oura ring. Some of this comes cheap, but going all out can run up the tab sharply.
West Palm Beach, Fla.-based Radence, for instance, bills itself as an "elite membership" practice, offering patients a "360-degree look at your health data and what may be developing beneath the surface." Its $50,000 a year membership (after a one-time, $50,000 enrollment fee) includes advanced biomarker panels, organ imaging, genetic analysis, microbiome profile, and wearables.
Memberships with recurring revenue streams are now a key business model. Function Health, for one, offers members upward of 160 lab tests a year for $365 and recently partnered with Equinox to give a discount to members of the gym. Function also acquired Ezra, a maker of diagnostic scans, last year. A competitor, Prenuvo, promises "the full picture of your health" through magnetic resonance imaging starting at $1,199 for a scan and core membership plan.
If there's a common theme to all of this, it's that more data are better than less. And proponents argue that it pays to monitor your biometrics, often in real time, so your physician or medical team can swoop in at signs of trouble.
It doesn't cost much to get started. Wearables like a Garmin or Apple Watch can let you know how much rapid-eye-movement sleep you get, whether you have signs of sleep apnea, if your blood oxygen is too low, or if your heart is skipping a beat. Genetic tests can show your risk of Alzheimer's disease, while other tests measure your telomeres -- that's the tip of the chromosome, whose length indicates biological age.
Artificial intelligence is helping to drive the expansion, as companies link test results to personalized recommendations based on users' biological data.
Hims & Hers, an online purveyor of weight-loss and erectile dysfunction drugs, recently launched Labs by Hims & Hers, offering testing for biomarkers and a "doctor developed action plan" for up to $349 a year.
For most of these products, consumers have to pay out of pocket. Insurers generally aren't paying for the tests or treatments offered in response to their results.
In a sense, the rash of at-home testing can be seen as a response to an expensive and often inaccessible health system, where patients often have trouble getting an appointment and spend a fortune after they get in the door.
Indeed, most of the new products and services sit outside of the traditional insurance system. Health plans typically don't cover experimental or investigational treatments, according to AHIP, an insurers' trade group. For them to do so, there would need to be evidence of a "substantial clinical benefit," a spokesperson said.
In other words, there would have to be evidence linking test results to a treatment that has been proved to improve health, and many longevity interventions don't have that backing.
Part of the issue is a vast gray market and lack of regulation. Purveyors of supplements aren't required to prove effectiveness. Test results from federally certified labs must be accurate but not necessarily clinically meaningful or actionable. Outside of medications like insulin and semaglutide (both peptides), the FDA doesn't evaluate the amino acid chains for long-term efficacy.
More broadly, the country's regulatory framework reinforces a disease-centric approach. The Food and Drug Administration oversees drugs to treat diseases. The system also rewards treatment more than prevention; patients are more lucrative when they're sick.
Some longevity proponents want aging classified as a disease, partly so the FDA would approve preventive treatments. Clinical trials are in the works; a major one aims to determine if metformin, now approved as a diabetes medication, can delay age-related diseases like cancer and dementia, and improve cardiac health.
Amid the uncertainty, longevity doctors view themselves -- and their patients -- as trailblazers. For now, the technology is being test-driven on a "population that can afford it," says Dr. Julie Chen, chief medical officer for Radence, which uses AI to help sift through clinical studies. As the technology improves and costs fall, it's likely to be more widely adopted, she says.
Which Tests Are Really Worth It?
If you're unsure whether to pay for a battery of lab tests, consider the approach taken by Dr. Andrea Klemes: If it doesn't have strong clinical trial backing, she doesn't recommend it.
Klemes is chief medical officer at MDVIP, a network of concierge medicine practices. She scours the literature for diagnostic tools that show promise in clinical trials, and only a handful make the cut.
One good test, she says, looks for an enzyme called myeloperoxidase, which can indicate arterial inflammation. Most standard blood panels don't include it, and insurance rarely covers it. But it's a biomarker with clinical backing for impending heart attack risk, and she recommends it at MDVIP.
"We're looking for things you can do something about," she says.
MDVIP takes a cautious approach towards "liquid biopsy" cancer tests, a popular offering by many longevity firms. These tests might make sense for high-risk patients, Klemes says, but they can throw off false positives and often require follow-up testing to make a definitive diagnosis.
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May 22, 2026 21:30 ET (01:30 GMT)
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