London, Stockholm, Singapore, New York: pick a metropolitan city anywhere in the world, and chances are, a longevity clinic will have just opened.
Where private clubs were once a byword for mahogany panelling and debauchery, a rapidly growing new breed is focused squarely on helping well-heeled clients in their bid to live forever.
Surrenne is the latest to join the march in London, which is rushing to overtake New York as the world’s longevity capital. Spanning multiple (equally heavenly scented) levels of the basement beneath the luxury Emory hotel in Hyde Park Corner, its clinic offers personalised testing to members, assessing bloods for cardiovascular risk, metabolic and hormonal health. There is microbiome analysis and DNA methylation, and a dissection of clients’ libido, fitness and nutrition, all of which help to map out the rate at which they’re ageing. On-call clinicians then develop a protocol they are to follow to turbocharge their cells.
On the board of the £10,000 per-year club are the neuroscientist and podcaster Andrew Huberman and biologist David Sinclar – among the biggest names in the longevity game, with a combined online following of tens of millions – and Tracy Anderson, the Hollywood personal trainer whose age-defying clients include Madonna and Jennifer Lopez. Her studio, with bouncy ‘Super G Floors’, is installed in Surrenne too, along with a suite of beautifully designed treatment rooms.
Its longevity arm is presided over by Mark Mikhail, who runs 3 Peaks Health, a performance clinic. He says that for his clients – who include actors, athletes and a suite of ultra high net worth individuals – the longevity goal now isn’t “I really want to live forever”, or what he calls “the historical longevity talk” that helped to create a wellness industry worth £2.8trn globally.
And it’s no longer enough to look buff, slim or toned. “What people want is to try and maximise how they’re living now… to improve their healthspan [the number of years lived in good health]. It’s about being fit, healthy, cognition, mobility, until their later years. A lot of people don’t really want to live for 150 years,” Mikhail adds. “Most people want to live well until they’re elderly, and then pass away peacefully.”
Kate Woolhouse, chief executive of Hooke, the £60,000 per year service based in Mayfair, says London has secured its longevity capital status for two reasons: being “a centre of excellence for both scientific and medical expertise” and that the capital is “an international centre for high net worth individuals”.
Just as admitting you want to lose weight has fallen out of fashion, announcing a desire to ‘live well for longer’ has become the new health status symbol. A quick scan of the bare arms in your midst will typically reveal continuous glucose monitors, worn beneath a circular patch on the back of the arm – once a vital device for diabetes patients, and now the health tracker du jour. It’s 2024’s FitBit, an entry point for many into the world of healthspan-extension, where treatments are primarily undertaken by those who can afford the hefty price tag.
At Surrenne, members are given a 90-minute consultation before testing begins, and a personalised treatment plan is created (non-members can also pay for one-off services, such as glycan testing at £400 a pop, or £800 for whole genome sequencing). It’s a similar conceit to that at Hooke, where clients are put through organ ultrasounds, weekly training sessions and a bespoke nutrition programme; at Vitruvian in north London, there are IV drips for the brain (featuring ginkgo biloba, a plant ‘which has a long history of use in treating blood disorders and memory issue’ and vitamin B12) and anti-ageing (also based on gingko biloba, and vitamin A). At Harpal, in the City, there are NAD+ drips – a coenzyme made a household name by Sinclar, important for energy and brain function, which depletes after the age of 40 – along with low doses of rapamycin, a drug found to increase lifespan by up to 14 per cent in mice, and metformin, a drug used to treat type 2 diabetes, which is also considered among the most promising leads for turning back the cellular clock.
So can money buy you longevity? Richard Barker, visiting professor at King’s College London and founder of New Medicine Provision, a healthspan advisory firm, says “there’s a big difference between a clinic focused on high physical and mental performance for hi-tech entrepreneurs” and wishy-washy wellness offerings that “seek to keep the middle-aged happy with their looks and attractive to their partners”.
He is optimistic about the potential of epigenetic testing (which can deduce lifestyle habits’ effects on our genes) to improve the quality of our later years, but adds that some clinics may be overpromising what their treatments can deliver. “The urgent need is to develop the science that connects the results of the tests to the healthspan strategy for an individual.” The main barrier now, he adds, is a lack of human data about how well these treatments work, and how they might be used most effectively.
“A lot of the evidence for things like rapamycin and NAD+ infusion comes from animal studies, so again collecting evidence in humans is vital – and disentangling the placebo effect for things like cryotherapy [another common longevity treatment] is very hard/impossible,” Barker says.
Little is known too about how this variety of treatments work alongside one another. While randomised controlled clinical trials – typically involving thousands of patients who are treated identically – are required to prove the efficacy of drugs before they are approved, the nature of private clinics and personalised testing means it will be far harder to capture an accurate picture of how well such treatments work, if at all. “Unless we create a common evidential infrastructure we will never be able to make substantiated claims based on sufficient numbers of clients and treatments,” Barker says.
Mark Mikhail, at Surenne, agrees that while “there’s a huge interest in this very exciting space” from a scientific standpoint, “we’re really just scratching the surface of all of this. At the moment, a lot of what’s out there, some of it will be rodent models – it’s just not really good enough to go with. There’s a long way to go”.
That hasn’t stopped the longevity juggernaut from cashing in. As well as dedicated clinics, there are swathes of at-home testing programmes now available to Brits. There are drinks and supplements and tinctures, endless podcasts and tomes by longevity-fluencers including Huberman, Peter Attia (whose book, Outlive, last year became a bestseller) and Mark Hyman (a ‘functional medicine’ practitioner with 15 bestsellers), and an entire booming category of travel that’s about as far as humanly possible from fly-and-flops with unlimited white wine spritzers. While the Lanserhof clinic in Austria started out as the original wellness destination, promising attendees would lose a significant amount of weight via ultra-fasting and colonics (with a price tag starting at the £4,000 mark), numerous others now put healthspan extension front and centre.
In January, Condé Nast Traveller decreed that the “pursuit of longevity is the new reason to travel”, with resorts in Thailand, the US, Switzerland and beyond seeking those for whom a whirl through a hyperbaric oxygen chamber (where highly pressurised air is said to stimulate cell repair) or photobiomodulation (exposure to particular wavelengths of infrared light, to recharge mitochondria, where the cells derive their energy) is now the primary reason to go overseas. Where fitness retreats and weight loss trips might once have cornered the market for health-concerned travellers, clinics have wised up to the fact the brag du jour is not a dropping number on a scale, but a biological age below your years.
In London, the trend for longevity is trickling down to wider audiences. Increasingly, the members’ clubs are no longer designed simply for discreet meetings and late night drinking. Members of Maslow’s, for example, can access gyms, yoga studios and wellness-themed events such as talks with epidemiologist Tim Spector and breathwork expert Michael James Wong along with stylish social spaces.
Inge Theron, Surrenne’s founder (and creative director at the Maybourne Hotel Group), says that “we are at an exciting time in the wellness and longevity space where clinics are popping up and offering protocols that will truly impact a person’s healthspan. There is also a lot of unproven programming, so knowing what ‘the best’ [where health is concerned] looks like has never been so important”.
Still, the industry has seen some setbacks: Remedy Place, the world’s ‘first social wellness club’, which opened in New York in 2019, announced its closure in January due to funding issues. That hasn’t dimmed hopes in our own burgeoning longevity capital, of course, where appetite for life-extending treatments appears to be growing by the day. Even if the science is yet to catch up.