David Wood

Note from the Editor: The U.S. Transhumanist Party shares this important update from our Allied Organization, the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation, regarding its achievements in 2025 and the importance of its continued work for the broader mission of achieving significant life extension, first in mice and then (the sooner, the better!) in humans. Full disclosure: I also serve as a Board Member and Treasurer for LEVF, in a volunteer, uncompensated capacity. 

~ Gennady Stolyarov II, Chairman, United States Transhumanist Party, December 10, 2025

Progress at LEVF:
December 2025

Dear friend,

As 2025 draws to a close, it’s a good opportunity to share news from LEVF about progress with our core purpose: conducting and inspiring research to comprehensively cure and prevent human age-related disease.

We’re grateful to be able to describe how donations from our supporters are accelerating that progress – and could accelerate things even faster.

The vital importance of RMR (Robust Mouse Rejuvenation)

Let’s start with a reminder. The shocking fact which, alas, too many people fail to appreciate, is that 70% of all deaths around the world are caused by age-related diseases – diseases that become increasingly likely, and increasingly deadly, the longer people live.

Rather than being content with the modest incremental palliative treatments which much of the “wellbeing industry” and its fellow-travellers pursue, LEVF is determined to address the underlying cause of these age-related diseases: the gradual accumulation of various types of cellular and biomolecular damage.

The good news is that, in recent years, an increasing number of damage-repair interventions have been discovered, proposed, and studied, which each have been shown to reverse aspects of this damage.

LEVF champions the insight that applying a sufficient number of these interventions in parallel has the potential to significantly extend both lifespan and healthspan, even when started as late as middle age.

Most of the world is unnecessarily sceptical about the potential of such combination treatments. The way minds can be changed is to demonstrate significant results in middle-aged mice – Robust Mouse Rejuvenation (RMR):

A successful result will involve a statistically significant number of ordinary middle-aged mice, and will at least double their mean and maximum (90% decile) remaining lifespan.

LEVF anticipates that achieving RMR will trigger a multi-step change in social priorities, leading to a grand “war on aging” with much greater resources applied to translating these results from mice to larger, longer-lived mammals – dogs, primates, and humans.

Between 2023 and 2025, LEVF conducted an initial project (RMR1), involving four different anti-aging interventions. A pilot phase of a second, larger project (RMR2) is now underway, that applies important learnings from RMR1:

• As anticipated, the RMR1 interventions were additive in effect, though the set of only four interventions was insufficient to attain RMR.
• For RMR2, a larger number of different treatments will be applied (ideally at least 8 instead of 4), covering a wider range of types of cellular and biomolecular damage.
• For best effect, each damage repair treatment will likely need to be applied more than once in the remaining lifespan of each mouse.
• Some treatments in RMR1 individually had smaller impacts than anticipated on the basis of previous publications; this emphasises the importance of double-checking all aspects of the experimental setup during a pilot phase.
• The results in RMR1 differed between male and female mice more than expected. Further investigation of data and samples is needed to highlight possible causes; still, this reinforces the importance of continuing to include male and female cohorts, despite the necessary additional costs, to avoid generating results applicable only to one gender.

Based on our current funding trajectory, LEVF is likely to start the main phase of RMR2 around mid 2026, with significant results becoming available in 2028.

That’s pretty soon – but not soon enough.

That’s why we are now reaching out to our friends and supporters requesting extra funding to enable:

1. Faster progress through RMR2 pilots and the main RMR2 experiment, particularly by supporting staffing needs for highly parallel study structures
2. A wider range of analyses of tissue samples, blood, and functional behaviour, to uncover more of the consequences of various combinations of damage-repair interventions
3. The inclusion of a greater number of different damage-repair interventions in parallel, maximising the chances of identifying multi-therapeutic synergies
4. Addressing some very interesting project ideas which are arising from interactions between our supporters and the Aubrai co-scientist AI agent (see more details below) that are strictly beyond the RMR program, but which could also prove decisive in changing public opinion.

In short, extra funding will increase the chance of aging being conquered sooner.

Some highlights from 2025

As you would expect, the LEVF team has been busy throughout 2025. As you might also expect, the path towards breakthrough scientific results involves occasional frustrations and setbacks as well as encouragement and celebration.

Here is a brief round-up of some headlines:

• Aubrai
  LEVF has entered into a very productive collaboration with two of the most capable of the organisations in the Decentralised Science (“DeSci”) space: VitaDAO and Bio Protocol. This partnership has led to the development and release of Aubrai – a pioneering AI BioAgent created to accelerate longevity breakthroughs, trained on the research and insights of LEVF President and Chief Science Officer Aubrey de Grey, and integrated with decentralised science funding tools. Aubrai’s first public appearance was in a short post on X (Twitter) on 7th August, “RMR2 should be funded”. Since that time, Aubrai’s online interactions have blossomed. We encourage you to conduct your own discussions with Aubrai at aubr.ai and/or x.com/Aubrai_.
• RAID
  Our choice of damage-repair interventions to include in RMR projects is strongly informed by RAID – Rodent Aging Interventions Database – which our Chief Science Monitor, Maximus Peto, updates regularly as part of his work in constantly reviewing new scientific publications. Recognising that this compilation of data would be of considerable interest to other researchers in the field of longevity/aging research, we decided to make it publicly available. To make it easier for researchers to explore the content of RAID, we have also developed a visualization tool which depicts the increases in lifespan achieved in different studies as a single bar chart. To read more about RAID, see our open access publication from earlier this year, “The rodent aging interventions database (RAID): a data visualization tool for all studies reporting rodent lifespan extension”.
• HSAC
  Our ongoing support for HSAC – Healthspan Action Coalition – has seen that coalition grow to encompass over 275 organisations from 25 countries worldwide. Whilst LEVF primarily focuses on scientific research, HSAC encourages and facilitates advocacy, with its mission statement “To initiate a global societal movement supporting healthy aging… promoting favorable policy and funding for scientific research, innovations and patient engagement”. Keep up to date with the HSAC newsletter, known as the Healthspan Compass, here. The subscriber numbers for the Compass recently passed the landmark figure of 15 thousand.
• RAADfest
  This year’s RAADfest – an annual festival with the theme “Revolution Against Aging and Death” – featured an unprecedented stream of cutting-edge scientific content, curated and managed by Aubrey de Grey. That stream provided a powerful complement to the other presentations at the event, with their focus on personal motivation, community building, and transformational advocacy. Members of the audience described the mix of the two streams, with the rich networking opportunities arising, as being thought-provoking and eye-opening.
• Other speaking and outreach
  A small selection of the list of other events which highlighted participation from LEVF speakers includes Vitalist Bay, Longevity Summit Dublin, Longevity Biotech Fellowship gatherings, Aging Research and Drug Discovery in Copenhagen, Arc at Austin (as part of the fringe of SXSW), and TransVision Madrid. This ongoing engagement provides important opportunities for the distinctive messages and experimental results from LEVF to be championed amongst news of the more incremental research that is taking place elsewhere in the longevity community.
• EU Pathfinder funding application
  LEVF continues to pursue support from various public and private funding sources. The bureaucracy involved with many of these applications has been considerable, but we have received strong positive feedback on a number of occasions. As an example, LEVF helped coordinate a consortium of five companies and organisations based in Europe to apply for a major EU “Pathfinder” grant to carry out aspects of the RMR programme. To be successful, the application would need to be assessed as scoring 4.0 or higher, out of 5, on each of three criteria. The application was assessed at 4.25 out of 5 for “Impact”, 4.5 out of 5 for “Quality and Efficiency of Implementation”, but only at 3.75 out of 5 for “Excellence”. So the application failed by a whisker. In part, this final score reflected an evaluator’s judgement that RMR lacked sufficient “radical novelty”. Of course, LEVF disagrees with this judgement! But it’s a reminder of the uphill struggle that breakthrough science and engineering often faces.

Magnifying your donations and support

To support research to comprehensively cure and prevent human age-related disease, we invite you to visit  levf.org/donate. We can accept donations in all the usual cryptocurrencies as well as in traditional currencies, stocks, and more.

When you make a donation, you’ll also have the chance to write a note that will be read by members of the LEVF leadership team. We pay close attention to all feedback that we receive.

Note: Depending on where you reside, your donations at levf.org/donate may be tax deductible. If you reside in the UK, consider donating instead via Progress on Longevity, and specify that you wish your donation to support projects at LEVF. If you live elsewhere in Europe, contact us to find how you can make a tax efficient contribution in your own country.

We wouldn’t be here without our current and past supporters

As LEVF looks forward to more breakthroughs in 2026, we offer our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who has provided financial backing for our work so far. Truly we could not be here, with the full in vivo phase of our first RMR study completed and on the threshold of our second, larger, study, without the very generous contributions that so many of you have made, often at considerable personal sacrifice.

But the battle is by no means won. So we offer thanks in anticipation for whichever kinds of support people can continue to provide in the months ahead. Every contribution makes a difference!

Another way in which you can assist our projects

Might some of your contacts be receptive to the content of this newsletter? In that case, please forward it to them! By growing our community, we can all reach LEV more quickly.

— David Wood
Executive Director, Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation