Too Old to Wait: Age-Reversal Gene Therapy Is Now Being Tested in People

I recently turned 72. Kenneth Scott is 83 and Helga Sands is 88.
When people our age hear that a promising rejuvenation therapy might be approved “in 10 or 15 years,” we do the arithmetic quickly. Scott and Sands did, and they decided not to wait.

On September 30, their KHL Foundation disclosed that a few people had already received an experimental gene therapy built around the “OSK” reprogramming genes that Harvard researcher David Sinclair made famous. One was Scott’s wife, Christine. Then on October 8, Life Biosciences, the company Sinclair co-founded, released the first human results from its formal clinical trial of an OSK therapy for glaucoma. Neither proves anyone has reversed human aging. But together they mark a turning point: rejuvenation is no longer being tested only in mice. It’s being tested in people, some in their eighties, on very different paths.

The Science in Two Minutes

Every cell carries essentially the same DNA. What makes a nerve cell different from a skin cell is which genes are switched on or off, a control layer called the epigenome. One leading theory holds that aging is largely a loss of this information: the DNA is intact, but the cell gets worse at reading it. Harvard Aging Lab head David Sinclair compares it to a scratched CD: the music is still there, but it skips.

In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka discovered that four genes could turn an adult cell back into an embryonic-like stem cell, work that earned him a Nobel Prize. The catch: going all the way back erases the cell’s identity, and one of the four genes, is linked to cancer.
So researchers dropped the cancer related gene and used the other three, OCT4, SOX2 and KLF4, known as OSK, to turn the clock back only partway. In a landmark 2020 Nature study, Sinclair’s team did this in mice, restoring youthful gene activity in damaged optic nerve cells and improving vision.

Why the eye? Sinclair has explained that the optic nerve is part of the central nervous system, in effect an extension of the brain, and adult nerve cells there don’t recover once damaged. “If you damage your brain or your optic nerve, or your spine, it’s not going to grow back,” he said. Success there, he added, “will pave the way for other rejuvenation processes.”

The Careful Path: Life Biosciences’ Glaucoma Trial

Glaucoma destroys the nerve cells that carry visual signals to the brain. Today’s treatments slow the damage but generally can’t restore lost vision. Life Biosciences’ ER-100 aims to change that. A single injection delivers the OSK genes into the eye, where they stay switched off until the patient takes the antibiotic doxycycline daily for eight weeks.

On October 8, the company reported day-56 results for its first three patients. There were no serious adverse events, and in two of the three, at least 28% of the points tested in their field of vision showed measurable improvement. The independent safety board approved moving to a dose three times higher.

That’s encouraging, but it’s a study designed mainly to test safety. What we can say is that OSK has been given to people under a formal, closely monitored protocol, and so far appears safe at the starting dose.

The Bold Path: A Husband, a Wife, and an Experimental Treatment

Christine Scott suffered substantial cognitive and neurological decline after what KHL website describes as a severe reaction to the antibiotic ciprofloxacin. On March 11, 2026, three months before Life Biosciences announced its first trial patient, she received an experimental OSK therapy aimed at restoring cognitive function.

Developed through an initiative led by physician Patrick Sewell with Triple Helix Science, it contains 11 genes, only three of which (OSK) have been named publicly. To its credit, the Foundation is clear about its limits: “This is not an announcement that we have proved that OSK reverses cognitive decline.” KHL believes these may be the first OSK treatments ever given to people.

Being first isn’t the same as showing it works. But it’s hard not to be moved by a man watching his wife’s mind decline, with a therapy that might help and no prospect of seeing it approved in time.

Who Are Kenneth Scott and Helga Sands?

Scott, born in 1942, has an unusually Canadian résumé. According to his foundation and a Longevity Live profile, he served as an aeronautical engineer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, worked as a labour economist for the federal government, and co-founded a software company with Christine. Today he calls himself “an investor, but I’m also a guinea pig.” He has tried follistatin gene therapy, stem cells, peptides and more, and moved to Panama in 2025. Sands, born in Germany in 1938, became the first female director at Nomura during a long finance career. She’s now a biotech investor and philanthropist.

Their Panama-registered foundation aims to make rejuvenation therapies available to people over 60 “regardless of regulatory delay in any particular country.” The founders had already tested a separate treatment on themselves, the Rejuvenation Cocktail: three gene therapies, follistatin for muscle (injected), plus Klotho for brain and blood vessel health and SIRT1 for metabolism (both applied inside the nose). After about five months, they report less visceral fat for Scott, better grip and balance, fasting blood sugar down from about 100 to 75 mg/dL in both, Sands’ bruising virtually gone, and no more jet lag.

Interesting, but these are self-reports from the therapy’s promoters, with no control group. The claim that the effects “will persist for 15 to 20 years” is a design goal, not something anyone has measured.

We’ve Been Here Before: Liz Parrish

In September 2015, Liz Parrish, then the 44-year-old CEO of BioViva, travelled to a clinic reportedly in Colombia and received two experimental gene therapies, follistatin and telomerase, without FDA approval. “I am certainly not going to ask someone’s permission to potentially create new industries and cures,” she told MIT Technology Review.

Scientists were scathing, and an adviser to her company resigned. But Parrish kept sharing her numbers. The protective caps on the chromosomes of her white blood cells, called telomeres, reportedly grew from 6.71 kb before treatment to 8.94 kb by 2021, according to a 2022 case report. MRI scans showed slightly more muscle and less fat within her muscles, and her fasting blood sugar fell from the low 90s to 71 mg/dL. The case report found no treatment-related side effects over almost six years.

It’s still one person, and critics, including Fight Aging’s Reason, note that blood-cell telomere length is a weak measure of aging. But eleven years later, follistatin gene therapy is offered through medical tourism, and her approach is being pursued by people twice her age at the time. Whatever you think of Parrish, she was early. The difference today is that a major company is running a formal trial at the same time.

The Medical Tourism Question

Back in 2019, I wrote that health advances were accelerating faster than regulators could approve them locally, and that you “may need to take a quick trip to Singapore or Panama to access that stem cell therapy” (Will Health Extension Make Retirement Savings Unnecessary?). In 2024, I suggested retirees set aside a health care bucket for experimental therapies, “including costs of ‘medical tourism'” (The Bucket Approach to Financial Planning in an Exponential World). Today Kenneth Scott lives in Panama and gets stem cell treatments there. The KHL story is that prediction playing out.

I think about it as I did during 40 years as a financial planner: the right balance of risk and return depends on your time horizon. A 40-year-old shouldn’t invest like an 85-year-old. At 45, waiting a decade for a proven therapy is reasonable. At 88 and declining, waiting has a very different cost. For Scott and Sands, accepting the risk of an unknown side effect may be a rational trade against the near-certain loss of more function. That’s a calculated risk, not a reckless one, and not a proven treatment.

The concerns are real. Fight Aging’s Reason expects this market to grow much as the stem cell clinic industry did, and warns that “few companies will publish data, it will be hard to distinguish high quality versus low quality clinics.” Gene therapies can trigger immune reactions, and reprogramming carries a theoretical risk of abnormal cell growth. Even Kenneth Scott has said he isn’t advising others to follow him.

If you’re tempted to check out medical tourism therapies in places like Mexico or Panama where these clinics operate, ask hard questions first. Is the treatment registered as a clinical study? Who independently monitors safety? Are all the ingredients disclosed? Will the results be published? The answers tell you whether you’re joining an experiment or just paying for hope.

What This Could Mean for Retirement

For most of my financial advisor career, every retirement plan assumed our physical and mental abilities would decline gradually, and the best we could do was slow it down.

These stories hint that this may change. Not necessarily by making an 80-year-old 30 again, but through more modest gains that could still be life-changing: restoring some eyesight, rebuilding muscle, perhaps one day protecting memory. That could mean more years of independence, travel, learning, work and family time. It would also reshape much of what I used to plan around, from how long savings must last to when it makes sense to stop working.

What I’m Watching Next

1. Life Biosciences’ higher-dose results. If vision gains hold up and grow without new safety concerns, that’s a big step.
2. Whether KHL publishes Christine Scott’s data. Openly shared results, good or bad, would make her experience valuable to everyone.
3. How the FDA responds. The FDA approves treatments for specific diseases, not “aging,” which is one reason ER-100 targets glaucoma. That may be shifting. At last week’s ARDD aging conference in Boston, senior FDA officials discussed how a therapy aimed at aging itself might one day earn approval and invited companies to bring data. The FDA’s chief scientist said aging and longevity will feature in the agency’s next regulatory science priorities report, tentatively due in fiscal 2027. It’s not formal policy yet. But if it develops, it could shorten the very wait pushing people like Scott and Sands offshore.

The Future of Aging Is Now a Real Experiment

For decades, reversing aging was an aspiration backed by results in mice. Now it’s being tested in people on two tracks: one careful and systematic, the other driven by people who don’t have time to wait.

Some efforts will fail, some may reveal unexpected risks, and some may become real treatments for age-related decline. For those of us 60+, that’s worth following closely. The future of aging isn’t only about how many birthdays we get. It’s about what we’ll still be able to do with them.

Live long, live well and prosper!

Michael

Michael Nuschke is the founder of Retirement Singularity, exploring how AI, healthy life extension and accelerating technology are changing the future of retirement.

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Sources and further reading

1. Life Biosciences: First-in-human data from the ER-100 Phase 1 trial, October 8, 2026
2. Life Biosciences: First patient dosed in ER-100 trial, June 9, 2026
3. KHL Foundation: Madrid 2026 press release, September 30, 2026
4. KHL Foundation: The Rejuvenation Cocktail
5. Fight Aging: KHL Foundation reports likely first human partial reprogramming treatments, October 7, 2026
6. Fight Aging: KHL Foundation launches a medical tourism gene therapy program for older patients, May 2026
7. Slate: The longevity tourism boom, March 2026
8. Longevity Live: Kenneth Scott profile
9. MIT Technology Review: A tale of do-it-yourself gene therapy, October 2015
10. Glaucoma Research Foundation: The 2020 Weston Lecture, David Sinclair, PhD
11. Nature: Reprogramming to recover youthful epigenetic information and restore vision, 2020
12. Lifespan.io: FDA leaders name longevity a priority at ARDD, October 2, 2026
13. GEN: FDA to highlight aging, longevity medicine in planned FARS update, October 2, 2026
14. ClinicalTrials.gov: ER-100 study, NCT07290244
Michael Nuschke is the founder of Retirement Singularity, exploring how AI, healthy life extension and accelerating technology are changing the future of retirement.