Insilico Medicine launches its Longevity Vaccines program: a single injection designed to temporarily turn a patient's immune cells into hunters of the senescent cells that drive age-related disease
Insilico Medicine launches its Longevity Vaccines program: a single injection designed to temporarily turn a patient's immune cells into hunters of the senescent cells that drive age-related disease
On September 15 the company announced the Longevity Vaccines program. A circular RNA encapsulated in a lipid nanoparticle temporarily teaches a patient's T-cells to find and destroy the culprit cells: senescent cells, activated fibroblasts, and autoreactive lymphocytes. The first target is senescent immune cells, which weaken the response to vaccination and increase susceptibility to infections and cancer with age.
T-cells are the fighters of the immune system that locate and destroy infected or tumor cells. CAR-T therapy installs an engineered receptor for a specific protein on a T-cell and directs it to attack; this approach already treats blood cancers by reprogramming the patient's cells in a laboratory. Insilico proposes doing the same thing inside the body with a single injection: an RNA instruction packaged in a lipid nanoparticle temporarily converts the patient's T-cells into receptor carriers, and then degrades. The logic is that of a vaccine, except the target is not a pathogen but the body's own culprit cells.
Killing senescent cells with T-cells began in 2020, six years before this announcement. Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center identified the protein uPAR on the surface of senescent cells and built a CAR-T against it that helped mice with liver fibrosis and lung cancer.
"When you hear CAR-T, you think cancer. But immune-cell engineering has far broader potential." Scott Lowe, laboratory head
Later, the same group showed that in old mice the therapy improved glucose metabolism with no apparent side effects, and in young mice it protected against metabolic decline. Delivery of the CAR receptor without extracting T-cells was tested in mice between 2022 and 2025; since January 2026 the same combination is being tested in humans for the first time, in a different disease. A similar in-body CAR-T technology was demonstrated by Typewriter, which raised $56 million for the approach against cancer.
Insilico has combined these technologies and brought in Pharma.AI, a platform that ranks targets by the strength of their evidence, the timing of their emergence, and their druggability. The target, the receptor design, and the animal data have not yet been disclosed: an independent analysis shows that the target-scoring table on the company's website is an illustrative mockup built from third-party data. Rentosertib supports confidence in the company's speed: the same AI platform advanced a pulmonary fibrosis target from hypothesis to preclinical candidate in 18 months and then through a successful Phase II trial; Phase III is now underway.
"We built Insilico to simultaneously treat aging and disease and to prove that AI can design medicines with real benefit for patients. The Longevity Vaccines program brings that same rigor to preventive medicine, creating programmable single-dose treatments that eliminate the root-cause cells of age-related disease, starting with the immune system itself." Alex Zhavoronkov, founder and co-CEO of Insilico Medicine
Senescent cells play a dual role: they suppress tumors and help heal wounds, so a CAR-T must distinguish the harmful varieties from the beneficial ones. In a healthy person the safety bar is higher, because an error would damage healthy tissue rather than a tumor.
Insilico's proposition is a bet on prevention over repair: clear the cells that initiate damage before disease sets in. Individual components have been validated in mice and, in part, in humans; what remains for Insilico is to assemble them using its AI platform and its track record of advancing targets to the clinic. The program will become a drug candidate when the company names its target protein and presents animal data.