Prof Andrea Maier says governments are motivated by financial rather than health benefits when it comes to healthy longevity medicine.
This week, over 2,500 attendees and more than 175 speakers are convening in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for the Hevolution Foundation’s second Global Healthspan Summit (GHS). The event, hosted by the global non-profit, is exploring the pathways and frameworks needed to drive and accelerate progress in the healthspan ecosystem.
In just three years, Hevolution Foundation has become the world’s largest philanthropic backer of aging biology and emerging healthspan science, committing over $400 million to the field. Through its Global Healthspan Summit, it has also become a leading convener and catalyst of the global healthspan ecosystem.
From insights into the research and technologies reshaping the field, to exploring the healthspan investment landscape and funding opportunities, Hevolution’s GHS 2025 is hosting discussions and actions that will shape the future of healthspan. Hevolution Foundation will also be releasing the second edition of its Global Healthspan Report, one of the leading publications on the state of healthspan science, technology, investments and policy globally.
Building on two global surveys, investment data from Longevity.Technology, expert interviews and research, the 2025 Hevolution Global Healthspan Report will examine the current state and future prospects of healthspan, highlighting key developments and actions the field can take as an ecosystem to bring healthspan to the next level. Longevity.Technology was delighted to be part of the team that contributed to producing the report.
Longevity.Technology: Continuing our interview series ahead of the Hevolution Global Healthspan Summit, today we bring you an interview with Professor Andrea Maier, Oon Chiew Seng Professor in Medicine at the National University of Singapore. A leading authority on all things healthspan, Maier is focused on leveraging advances in geroscience research and precision geromedicine to extend population-wide healthy aging. We sat down with Maier as part of the research for the 2025 Hevolution Global Healthspan Report to explore her perspective on healthspan science and medicine.
When it comes to making the case for healthspan at a country level, Maier states that governments are starting to “feel the pain” of a healthcare system based on caring for the sick.
“The number of dollars they have to spend on healthcare is rising and rising, while the healthspan of their population is not,” she says. “So there is a mismatch between investment and return of investment with their current healthcare services.”
The economics of healthspan
Citing Singapore as an example, Maier says that in five years’ time, the city-state will be considered a “super-aged” country, because 22% of its population will be aged 65 years or older.
“In countries like Singapore, it’s often an economic argument next to the health argument,” she says. “If you have an aging population, disease prevalence is likely also higher, even if healthspan is stable. This creates a problem. This means that there are more incentives for healthspan-focused care, to enable aging individuals to engage meaningfully with societal domains, including the workforce. You have to run the country, so it’s about economics in the end.”
According to Maier, governments are starting to hear the argument for healthspan and, for the first time, acting on it.
“It’s a financial argument, and not just because of health costs – it’s much, much broader than that. It’s about productivity, it’s about keeping people healthy to be able to function meaningfully,” she says.
Defining healthspan is key
Of course, there is still a long way to go before healthcare becomes truly healthspan-focused, and Maier says part of the challenge is lack of clear definition and agreement around what healthspan actually means.
“When I talk about healthspan as a physician, I’m talking about the duration of life without an age-related disease,” she says. “Now governments are starting to talk about what kind of definition they are using, often using the definition of the number of years spent without physical limitations. But various definitions are being used.”
But Maier states that the right conversations are now happening in order to ensure clarity in the field.
“Various contributors in the longevity field are talking to each other, which is, I think, the first and most important step,” she says. “We are now defining the field. We are defining what healthspan is and how to operationalize it. We are defining what the biomarkers of aging are. We are defining healthy longevity medicine, also now called precision geromedicine, and we are defining gerodiagnostics and gerotherapeutics.”
Maier notes that it’s critically important that the field moves quickly, because consumers are increasingly demonstrating awareness and interest in healthspan.
“People now understand the concept that they have to invest during their aging process, into their health,” she says. “They also are exposed to biohackers and influencers who, at this moment in time, are investing hugely into shaping the views of individuals.”
“From a consumer perspective, why would you invest in optimizing your health and healthspan? Because you want to feel better. You can measure your biological age. You have a target. Why should you wait?”
Democratization needs caution
With healthspan and access to healthy longevity medicine currently regarded by many as a luxury that only the wealthy can afford, there are growing calls for democratization of access to services. While Maier agrees in principle, she says that the field must first prove how to increase healthspan effectively clinically and financially in the first place.
“If you look at most of the diagnostics and therapeutics which are being offered today, they are à la carte and not affordable for 99% of the population,” she says. “Healthy longevity medicine is not yet regulated. People can buy ‘medical longevity products’ without analyses if they need it – consumers want something, and the market is providing products. The market is huge, but this form of healthcare provision should never be democratized – it can be harmful, and it’s dangerous.”
“Healthspan has to go from an à la carte menu to evidence based medicine, and then it will be ready to democratize on a very broad scale. We have to build evidence-based precision geromedicine where we treat aging as one of the targets to optimize health, and it should be precise to what the needs of individuals are.”
Through the work of Maier and others like her, Singapore is helping bring the field towards building that ecosystem.
“We opened a healthy longevity medicine clinic in a publicly funded hospital,” she says. “Translational geroscience research is driving innovation and implementation into clinical care. There are not many established protocols yet – clinician scientists are learning from high quality research what is working and what not.”
The future depends on education
According to Maier, the next decade will be a “huge learning curve” to finetune diagnostics and interventions to optimize health and healthspan.
“By working together in networks, we will establish how healthy longevity medicine could best be delivered to the public,” she says. “At this moment in time, nobody can claim to have established a clinically effective and cost effective framework yet.”
Education is a critical component of establishing healthy longevity medicine, and Maier has long been at the forefront of discussions around how that should happen.
“To make healthy longevity medicine work, we need healthcare professionals who can apply the evidence in clinical practice,” she says. “It’s absolutely not dependent on only physicians – it’s multidisciplinary. We have to train individuals who can serve very large populations. What we need to establish, in my view, is to define a basic curriculum, to train the first teachers to then teach the next teachers, and in parallel, we need publicly funded hospitals to establish the evidence base about what to teach and how to bring that into clinical practice.”
“Parallel to that, what needs to happen is larger trials, where you compare current healthcare against healthy longevity medicine care, and hopefully we show that there is a business case – not only that we have clinical efficacy, but that we also have cost efficacy. We have to show that we can increase healthspan, but it also needs to be cost effective.”
To watch the Global Healthspan Summit live, please visit: www.hevolution.com
