Human Longevity, a medical clinic in South San Francisco’s biotech corridor, feels more like a spa than a doctor’s office.
The floors of the 8,000-square-foot space are sleek and white, the walls bamboo with moss accents. Visitors are referred to as clients, not patients, as they are ushered into private rooms equipped with Wi-Fi, snacks, full bathrooms with showers, and cameras for Zoom meetings — a feature meant to accommodate executives who fly in for the day for multi-hour batteries of tests that can lead to tailored treatments.
More than just health care for the wealthy, Human Longevity is part of a lucrative and growing industry, a mostly privately funded sector that sells customers something priceless: the hope of achieving a longer, healthier life.
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
Dozens of similar upscale firms — whose services are loosely defined as longevity, anti-aging, concierge medicine, executive health or some combination of those terms — have opened in recent years all over the world, including in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles and Dubai. The global longevity market, estimated at $19 billion in 2023, is expected to reach $63 billion by 2035, according to Market Research Future, an industry research group. At Human Longevity, annual membership will cost you $8,000 to $19,000. The company currently has more than 10,000 clients.
The Bay Area, where the average age is rising at one of the fastest rates in the U.S., is uniquely situated for — and perhaps uniquely receptive to — the longevity industry. The region has long been a hub of innovation, wealth and healthy living. And in recent years, some high-profile tech executives’ preoccupations have turned to longevity, with billionaires like Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison reportedly investing millions in anti-aging research aimed at extending lifespan, and evangelizing lifestyles that, in theory, would extend human life.
Indeed, business has been good at Human Longevity’s Bay Area clinic, the company says.
But while life-extending-focused clinics like Human Longevity make lofty claims for their effectiveness, some medical professionals are skeptical. They point out that the additional medical testing that is key to their value proposition can lead to unnecessary, and potentially harmful, interventions. Though this kind of care is appealing to consumers, these experts say, more research is needed to determine whether it actually leads to long-term benefits — or longer lifespans.
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
Human Longevity plans to move its headquarters to San Francisco. Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle
The pursuit of extending one’s life is nothing new, descending from the legend of Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon’s search for the Fountain of Youth. In recent decades, the quest is less fanciful with the rise of anti-aging diets, wellness therapies and targeted supplements. Other methods are more extreme. Some receive infusions of blood plasma from their children or spend thousands a month for a battery of techniques, from red light therapy to machines that claim to break down fat under the skin using ultrasound technology.
Human Longevity’s focus is more narrow. The key to a healthy lifespan, company executives say, is to prevent or delay the most common age-related chronic problems that cause death: cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia and metabolic diseases like diabetes.
“Being able to delay those major killers by 10 or 20 years is one of the pillars of longevity care,” the company’s executive chairman, Wei-Wu He, said in an interview at the clinic. “We think, using technology, you can delay them by 20 years. If you come in, the first step is we want to know your body inside out.”
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
To that end, Human Longevity doctors collect 150 gigabytes of personal health data for each client — including blood draws for genome sequencing, full-body MRIs, bone density scans, cardiac tests to assess calcium buildup in the arteries and lab work for measuring glucose, A1C, vitamin deficiencies and other metrics.
Human Longevity’s team of doctors then designs a personalized care plan based on the results. Clients can choose to have the results sent to their primary care doctor — or, under the priciest membership tier, they can have Human Longevity provide continuous, concierge-style care.
The exhaustive testing and follow-up protocols are geared toward predicting potential health issues early, before clients realize they have problems. Think of it as preventive medicine, but amped up and highly customized.
Executive chairman Dr. Wei-wu He says the tests that patients undergo at Human Longevity have detected breast cancer, lung cancer and colon cancer in some patients. That early detection could prolong lives. Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle
Similar testing can be done at conventional medical facilities. But doctors typically offer testing this extensive only if patients are displaying specific symptoms, have a family history of certain diseases or are getting routine screenings that start at a certain age. In general, mainstream insurance pays for such tests only if they are deemed medically necessary.
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
Human Longevity opened its South San Francisco clinic, its third location, about three years ago with plans to eventually make it the company’s headquarters. The Bay Area has been an unusually good market, said the firm’s chief technology officer Wei Zhou.
“We’ve seen strong local demand, particularly among executives, technologists and investors who value proactive, data-driven approaches to longevity,” Zhou said.
Co-founded by scientist Craig Venter, who led one of the first efforts to sequence the human genome, Human Longevity says it has helped many clients catch health problems early, before they showed symptoms. Company leaders cited anecdotes they say show their approach is successful:
One client, a healthy 45-year-old woman who had occasional headaches, discovered a small brain aneurysm from a brain scan. Human Longevity connected her with doctors at UC San Diego, who removed it.
Another client found a small pancreatic tumor that turned out to be stage 1 pancreatic cancer. Human Longevity referred him to surgeons at Massachusetts General, who removed the tumor; he remains cancer-free about four years later.
Advertisement Article continues below this ad
Human Longevity is so confident in its ability to detect early-stage cancer that it has pledged $1 million to any client who develops late-stage prostate cancer. The company says it will pay for innovative treatment if it goes beyond what the client’s insurance will pay, such as a phase 2 or phase 3 clinical trial.
Marina Caprotti, a Human Longevity patient who traveled from Italy to get the testing done, gets her blood drawn and a CT scan at the clinic in South San Francisco. Marina Caprotti, a Human Longevity patient who traveled from Italy to get the testing done, gets her blood drawn and a CT scan at the clinic in South San Francisco.
“It’s on our nickel,” he said.
Among the roughly 5,000 male clients who’ve gone through Human Longevity’s program in the past 10 years, more than 60 discovered they had prostate cancer, and none have died, He said.
“We discover a lot of breast cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer,” He said, adding that cancer rates in their patients are on par with national rates.
Despite detecting some diseases early, though, it’s not clear whether Human Longevity’s services are prolonging clients’ lifespans or enabling clients to live longer than the average American. Measuring longevity, the company says, takes a long time.
“Quantifying longevity outcomes is inherently long term, but early indicators from our clinical programs show promise,” Zhou said. “While we don’t yet have longitudinal survival data to directly compare against population averages, we’re actively building long-term datasets that will allow us to quantify lifespan and health span gains over time.”
Not everyone finds alarming news.
Patti Gahagan of San Jose initially signed up for Human Longevity membership because an integrative medicine specialist she’d previously worked with joined the company. Gahagan, 66, had breast cancer about 20 years ago and was interested in early detection through full-body scans, as well as learning more holistic ways to manage her health, like through nutrition and exercise.
“I’m getting older,” she said. “So it made a lot of sense to me to be able to assess that, and have all that information available. There’s really nothing I don’t know about my body.”
Through scans of her heart, she learned she had some plaque buildup in her arteries, and followed up with a cardiologist to do a stress test to get a baseline measure of her heart health.
“You don’t leave any stone unturned,” said Gahagan, who is paying $100,000 for a four-year contract for herself, husband and two adult daughters.
Patti Gahagan, right, and her daughter prepare food for a dinner party at their home in San Jose. Gahagan pays $100,000 for a four-year contract for herself, husband and two adult daughters. “I’m getting older,” she said. “So it made a lot of sense to me to be able to assess that, and have all that information available. There’s really nothing I don’t know about my body.” Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle
The average age of a Human Longevity client is 53, and the most popular membership tier, called 100+ Care, costs $12,000 a year. It comes with two medical assessments a year, one more than the $8,000-a-year Executive Health tier. Membership fees are often paid for by clients’ employers, including large corporations that provide the benefit for their top executives.
The highest membership level, 100+ Longevity Concierge, costs $19,000 a year and comes with additional testing — though not all of it may reap meaningful benefits.
“Testing, there is no end,” He said. “I could spend $1 million on you. We can test 7,000 proteins in your blood. Those probably have very marginal benefits. It’s like you’re trying to build a race car. The marginal benefit of 0.1 second for ordinary driving is probably worthless. But if you’re trying to win an F1, that might make all the difference. But if you’re a billionaire, you may not care.”
Not all medical experts are sold on the approach. Full-body screenings should be used cautiously, as they may lead to more harm than benefit — such as over-testing, over-diagnosing and over-treating things that may never progress to a disease state, some doctors said.
A patient, for instance, may find a lesion or nodule on a scan and undergo further testing, like a biopsy or other invasive procedure that can lead to complications including bleeding or pain.
“The consumer should go in with their eyes open as to what they’re asking and what could happen,” said Dr. Deborah Kado, a Stanford geriatrician and co-director of the Stanford Longevity Center. “Because it’s not often ‘Great, I found something early and my life is better.’ Sometimes it’s ‘I found something, didn’t know what it was, had three months of testing, suffered a complication as a result of testing, and now I’m sick when I was fine three months ago.’”
MRI scans can reveal anomalies, including many that are within the normal variance that occur in the body, and it’s hard to distinguish which of those may become a problem and which will not, said Dr. Rebecca Smith-Bindman, a UCSF radiologist and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics.
Not all early forms of cancer, for instance, need aggressive treatment, such as renal cancer under a certain size and prostate cancer in older men, she said.
“You end up treating more patients that’ll never have symptoms related to that, and that’ll lead to more harm,” she said.
For diseases like breast, colon and lung cancer, studies have shown that the benefits of screening outweigh the harm. But there haven’t been studies weighing the benefits of full-body screening, Smith-Bindman said.
“It’s not that MRI is not beneficial, it’s that we know there are quantifiable harms and we don’t know there are quantifiable benefits,” she said. “If you’re going to do something like that, you need to study it to make it valuable. Otherwise it’s experimenting.”
Human Longevity caters to working clients, with some rooms equipped to handle Zoom calls during procedures. Gabrielle Lurie/S.F. Chronicle
Zhou, of Human Longevity, acknowledges that over-diagnosis and over-treatment are legitimate concerns. But Human Longevity does not rely on imaging alone, he noted. The company considers each client’s genomics, blood biomarkers and other metrics, plus their personal and family history.
“This layered evaluation enables our physicians to distinguish between clinically meaningful findings and benign anomalies,” he said, citing a 2020 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that showed a precision medicine program that included genome sequencing and whole-body imaging helped identify early-stage diseases, including several cancers, in a study group of nearly 1,200 healthy adults.
Like many companies that sell luxuries, Human Longevity is working on a way to reach the masses. It hopes to launch a pared-down membership tier for $2,000 by year’s end, which will likely include genome sequencing, blood work and wearables, but not a full-body MRI.