Gordian Biotechnology co-founder Martin Borch Jensen proposes a permanent institute mandated to extend Americans' healthy lifespan at low cost, one that would require every US clinical trial to measure participants' biological age from blood tests
Gordian Biotechnology co-founder Martin Borch Jensen proposes a permanent institute mandated to extend Americans' healthy lifespan at low cost, one that would require every US clinical trial to measure participants' biological age from blood tests
On October 1, engineer and entrepreneur Casey Handmer wrote that less than 0.05% of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) federal budget goes to studying the mechanisms of aging, and called for a dedicated "Manhattan Project" for aging, comparable to those proposed for degenerative diseases. On October 3, Martin Borch Jensen, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Gordian Biotechnology, replied: Handmer is right on the substance, but instead of a one-time "Manhattan Project," aging needs a permanent institution, something like a "National Health Foundation," with an explicit mandate to increase Americans' healthspan in the most cost-effective way possible: the number of years they will live in good health.
Handmer wrote:
"You cannot get Alzheimer's or Parkinson's if your body never ages past 25."
Jensen describes the missing mandate this way: "Can you believe that nobody currently has a mandate for this? No wonder healthcare is so expensive." According to him, no US agency today is responsible for one simple thing: extending Americans' healthy years of life at low cost.
This is the third version of the same idea in nine months, and the most concrete one. In January 2026, Jensen organized a closed-door roundtable at JPM Healthcare, the largest biotech investment conference, with leadership from the agency ARPA-H on a national strategy for life extension, and then publicly proposed creating at least one position at the FDA: an "office of healthy longevity." In late June, he debated Andrew Brack, who leads ARPA-H's aging biomarker program PROSPR: Brack insisted that there were not enough aging trials; Jensen countered that ideas were getting stuck in companies and licensing agreements. On October 2 and 3, he spent two days reporting from the geroscience conference ARDD2026 at Harvard, where a panel of top pharmaceutical executives identified the bottleneck as clinical trials. The January idea of a single FDA staffer had partly materialized by October, but it delivered neither a mandate nor a shift in incentives, which is why Jensen is now calling for a full institution.
The specific lever: develop and validate methods for measuring, through blood tests, how rapidly a person's body is actually deteriorating, regardless of the participant's disease. This measurement should become mandatory in every clinical trial already underway in the United States. Blood samples for such analysis are already sitting in the biobanks of nearly every trial, as a review of biobanks has shown. Yet they are rarely tested for biological age: the regulator does not yet consider such testing grounds for drug approval. By Jensen's estimate, more than $100 billion flows through such trials in the US each year, and he proposes redirecting that money stream toward aging without any new budget.
Separately, he proposes funding trials of off-patent drugs, a direct response to the problem that has left the metformin trial TAME unfunded for more than ten years: a drug without a patent generates no profit, so nobody has a financial incentive to test it against aging, even though the protocol has long been finalized.
Finally, he proposes changing the incentive structure itself: the regulator should pay for preventing chronic disease and aging the same way it currently pays for treating disease that has already set in. "With that incentive in place, capitalism will solve much of this on its own, although funding for basic research will still serve as an accelerator," Jensen says.