Issue Radical longevity innovation and the pursuit of healthspan

Summary

Radical longevity innovation is not simply about extending average lifespan but about treating ageing itself like a disease and maximising functional healthspan across medicine, industry, policy and culture. Gene therapy, cell regeneration, immune modulation, AI-based predictive medicine and neural regeneration are advancing, and anti-ageing is emerging as a core axis of the pharmaceutical and bio industry. In advanced economies the rapidly growing share of people over 80 makes medical spending, dementia and chronic inflammatory disease the largest risks of a long-lived society. Longevity technologies are treated as a next growth engine that will reshape pharma, insurance and elder-care industries, and countries regard them as a factor of national competitiveness. Korea has very high medical access and population-scale clinical, claims, imaging and genomic data, but the survey judges that it has not yet turned this system-level advantage into a longevity industry.