The six-month competition uses multiple aging clocks and a leaderboard to track changes in participants’ biological age.
A new contest called Younger will ask about 500 people to reverse their biological age over six months. Participants will use multiple tests, including blood spot measurements, cognitive tasks, physical checks, and selfie-based face age estimates. A leaderboard will rank competitors by the gap between chronological and biological age and by the largest reversal.
Neuroscientist and physician Christin Glorioso created the contest and leads NeuroAge Therapeutics, which tracks brain health and aging. The company is running a trial to see whether biological brain age can predict Alzheimer’s onset. Glorioso wants the contest to explain aging clocks and produce a broad dataset for studying what each clock measures.
For builders, the contest tests how well multiple aging clocks work on individuals. More than 100 clocks exist, and each captures a specific part of biological aging. Using one clock to estimate personal biological age remains controversial because scientists do not fully understand what each clock measures.
Longevity clinics combine several clocks to offset the limits of any single test, and the Younger contest follows that approach. Participants will send blood spots to TruDiagnostic for epigenetic DNA marks, get a brain age score from NeuroAge, and upload selfies for face age estimates. Researchers hope the data will clarify what aging clocks capture and whether they can guide individual health decisions.
What matters
- About 500 participants will spend six months trying to lower biological age across several tests.
- Builders can watch how multiple clocks handle individual biological age estimates.
- Researchers aim to use contest data from participants to build a broad dataset of aging clocks.
Why it matters
Researchers aim to use contest data from participants to build a broad dataset of aging clocks.
This GenAI News article was prepared in original wording using reporting and materials published by MIT Technology Review AI. Source reference: https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/10/02/1145610/younger-contest-race-to-biological-youth/.
Drafted by the GenAI News review pipeline.