The US funds longevity research; Asia treats patients first
Japan was the first country to approve a stem cell therapy. Singapore is spending public money to add healthy years to its population's lives. In China, a hospital's own ethics committee is enough to start a human trial – no national regulator required. The United States has the deep pockets, and in December it wrote into law that its money may no longer flow to Chinese biotech.
In March 2026, a treatment for Parkinson's disease received approval in Japan. Not an ordinary drug: nerve cells grown from stem cells, placed in the brain to replace the cells that Parkinson's destroys. It is the first time any country has brought such a cell therapy to market – conditionally and for a limited period, while research continues. The study behind it involved seven patients.
That a country would approve such a treatment says something about the race now underway. Longevity research has made it onto the political agenda, and different countries are backing it with different tools: the United States with money, Japan with regulation, China with laboratories, Singapore with its family doctors. At the same time, the two biggest players are pulling away from each other.
What scientists discover about ageing in the lab rarely reaches patients as a pill. It arrives as tissue: cultured cells replacing worn-out ones. That is why the race for regulatory approval centres on cell therapy – and on that front Japan and China are reaching patients well ahead of Europe and the United States.
Three countries, three tools
Japan built its lead on a 2014 law that grants conditional, time-limited approval to regenerative treatments while research is still ongoing. That is the route the Parkinson's therapy took. At Keio University in Tokyo, four people with recent spinal cord injuries received nerve cells derived from stem cells; after two to four years, no tumours had developed – the biggest concern with this type of treatment.
In China, what matters is what happens in the laboratory and how quickly it moves into humans. Researchers at Peking University converted ordinary body cells back into stem cells using only chemical compounds, then grew insulin-producing cells from them. A patient with type 1 diabetes no longer needed insulin after the transplant, measured up to a year later. Colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences gave elderly macaques human cells that had been engineered to resist ageing and observed signs of ageing diminishing, including in the brain.
Singapore is not aiming at a single treatment but at the health of an entire population. In May the government allocated 350 million Singapore dollars to a national healthy ageing programme, and since 2023 anyone over forty has been able to register with a regular GP focused on prevention. Alexandra Hospital is home to a centre tasked with bringing that research into the clinic, led by Brian Kennedy and Andrea Maier. Kennedy ran the Buck Institute in California until 2016, then moved to Singapore. When the centre opened, it set itself a target that is not a breakthrough but a number: five extra disease-free years for the population.
America invests
The United States has one instrument, and it works. Altos Labs, which wants to turn back the clock in cells, launched in 2022 with a starting capital of three billion dollars – including money from Jeff Bezos – roughly two thirds of what the US government's own ageing research institute has to spend in an entire year. That same institute faced budget uncertainty in early 2025, when the White House proposed cutting its funding by more than 40 percent, before Congress restored it to its previous level in February 2026. Public money is standing still; private money is setting the direction.
And in December 2025, Washington made the break with China official. As part of the defence authorisation bill, the president signed the BIOSECURE Act, which will ban federal contracts and grants to anyone working with Chinese biotech companies deemed a risk. The law does not name those companies directly: they are defined as those already on the defence department's list of Chinese military-linked firms. That list includes BGI, the world's largest genomics centre, whose equipment sits in laboratories across the globe. The ban is not yet in force – procurement rules must first be updated and the final list published before the end of 2026.
Policy is running ahead of science
That decoupling is not yet visible in the research itself. American and Chinese scientists actually published together more often in 2025 than they did ten years earlier. What has changed is that Chinese output has grown far faster, so that only one in fourteen Chinese ageing papers now has an American co-author, compared with one in six a decade ago. That growth is almost entirely homegrown.
The speed at which treatments reach patients in China comes down to a local rule. Alongside the standard drug approval route – which goes through the national regulator – the law allows a second path: a trial launched by a researcher with sign-off from the science and ethics committee of their own hospital and a notification to the health authority. No regulator reviews the file before the first patient is treated. Along that route, more than two hundred cell and gene therapy trials were running in 2023 – eleven times as many as eight years earlier. Since 1 May 2026 some limits have been introduced: a government order restricts such trials to top-tier hospitals, requires notification to the national health commission within five working days, and prohibits charging patients before a basic threshold of safety and efficacy has been met. The national drug regulator remains out of the picture.
The summer of 2026 showed what that can cost. Two children died in Chinese gene therapy trials – not in ageing research, but along that same fast-track route – and one of those deaths only came to light through an investigation by the journal Science and the platform Retraction Watch. Both trials had used that accelerated pathway, as did a third fatal case that became known in 2026.
The slower route in Europe and the United States exists for a reason. Cultured cells can form tumours, an effect needs to be large enough to be worth having, and a regulator keeps clinics from selling what has not been proven. Speed and certainty trade off against each other, and countries are making different choices.
Europe supplies the knowledge; America buys it
In the journals where the major breakthroughs appear, the United States published more than three times as much as China or the United Kingdom – the next two countries in the ranking – over the past five years, in a count by LongevityWatch. What Europe contributes is not publication volume but people.
What is shifting, though, is not the knowledge but the ownership. Altos opened its European base in Cambridge and recruited, among others, Wolf Reik, until then director of the Babraham Institute, and Manuel Serrano, who spent more than twenty years in Spain after a postdoc in the United States. Both are still doing their work in Europe – just for an American laboratory now. Europe lacks the instruments the others have: venture capital, and a regulatory pathway that gets a treatment to patients sooner.