Singapore Bets $350 Million on Geroscience to Extend Healthspan Nationwide
核心洞察
Singapore launched a $350 million healthy longevity grand challenge in May 2026 under its RIE2030 framework to extend healthspan and shorten years lived in poor health.
The initiative aims to validate biological age clocks and biomarkers for Asian populations, enabling primary care doctors to detect cognitive and physical decline before symptoms appear.
Alexandra Hospital's year-long programme demonstrated measurable improvements in biomarkers, fitness, and biological age through personalised lifestyle interventions rather than high-tech quick fixes.
Singapore is making an unprecedented $350 million bet on extending healthspan, launching a national research push in May 2026 that aims to convert the city-state into a test bed for helping its residents age more healthily. The healthy longevity grand challenge, launched under the Research, Innovation and Enterprise 2030 (RIE2030) framework and led by the National Research Foundation in partnership with the Ministry of Health, seeks to add more healthy years to life and shorten the years spent in poor health, disability, and dependence.
The strategy is propelled by geroscience, the interdisciplinary field that studies the biological mechanisms of ageing and treats ageing as a manageable condition. "You don't bring your car in only when you have an accident or (when) it stops working; you advise people (to send it) for regular servicing. We need that for humans as well," said Chong Yap Seng, executive director of the Grand Challenge on Maximising Healthy and Successful Longevity.
Democratising Longevity Through Primary Care
Over the next five years, the grand challenge will establish baseline data on how Singapore's population ages at a biological level, looking beyond chronological age to track how cells, tissues, and molecular systems deteriorate over time. Scientists can track chemical changes in DNA through epigenetic clocks to evaluate cellular health, or measure inflammatory proteins released by lingering, damaged cells.
The goal is to validate new biomarkers and screening tools for brain health and physical function that can be deployed across the broader population. "This means that for the average Singaporean, instead of getting diagnosed with dementia (搜索) or sarcopenia (搜索) (loss of muscle mass) when it is already quite advanced, your GPs might potentially be able to detect and intercept these conditions much earlier," Chong said.
In contrast to expensive longevity clinics worldwide that target affluent clients with costly packages and unvalidated therapies, Singapore is pursuing an approach focused on democratising healthcare. Brian Kennedy, director of the Centre for Healthy Longevity at the National University Health System (NUHS) and chief scientist of the grand challenge, said: "We're not studying $100,000 interventions at the university. We're doing things we can scale, like repurposed drugs and supplements... and biomarker (tests) that cost $200 or less."
A Whole-System Approach to Ageing
Kennedy highlighted Singapore's unique position in the field. "I would say Singapore is becoming a leader in Asia, and one of the unique things we do is we have the whole system. We have mechanistic studies, we have preclinical studies, and then we have clinical approaches too. And so we can run the whole spectrum," he said.
The strategy spans beyond biological age clocks to address socio-environmental factors that influence ageing, bringing together research institutions, healthcare partners, and enterprises to develop solutions ranging from diagnostic tools to biomarkers, health monitoring technologies, and assistive rehabilitation. The network of active ageing centres (AACs), community hubs that keep seniors engaged, forms a core pillar of Age Well SG, a $3.5 billion national programme, and serves as a "wonderful platform for the distribution of public goods," according to Chong.
Kennedy noted that curing all cancers would only raise global life expectancy by roughly three years, because patients soon succumb to other age-related conditions. Instead, geroscience targets the underlying biological network of ageing that triggers these conditions in the first place, delaying the onset of multiple chronic illnesses.
Clinical Evidence from Alexandra Hospital
At Alexandra Hospital's Healthy Longevity Research Clinic, Laureen Wang and her team have demonstrated they can identify cardiometabolic risk before overt disease sets in and improve health risk factors. Rather than relying on high-tech quick fixes, much of this progress comes down to driving sustainable behaviour changes such as optimising sleep, nutrition, and exercise.
"This in turn has helped to improve the physical function, biomarkers, gut health and 'biological age' of some of the participants," said Wang, a consultant cardiologist who heads the clinic. "Whether this translates to additional healthy years requires much longer follow-up data but we measure for now what we can measure."
The clinic's year-long programme comes under the Health Enhancing Active Living (HEAL) study, which examines whether tailored interventions can improve healthspan. Based on participants who completed the one-year programme, improvements have been seen in biomarkers, fitness, and biological age.
One participant, Ivan Low, entered the trial at 71 with a biological age of 67 and reduced it further to 65 by the time his chronological age hit 72. He gained roughly 10 per cent more muscle, cut his body fat by 5 to 6 per cent, kept his cholesterol levels under control with medication, and normalised his blood pressure.
Decoding Asian Biology
A key priority for the grand challenge is obtaining a reliable measure of biological age validated for Asian populations, as no single clock is currently the undisputed gold standard. "Most of what we know about ageing comes from Western populations, Western lifestyles, and Western genetics. But Asians age differently. Our biology is different, and the risk profiles are different," Chong said.
Lisa Ooi, assistant chief executive of A*STAR (搜索)'s Biomedical Research Council, pointed to local evidence showing that more than one in four healthy-weight young Chinese women in Singapore possesses low muscle mass and lower bone density despite appearing healthy by conventional body mass index standards. This thin phenotype risk represents a silent precursor to frailty that standard international metrics easily miss.
Andrea Maier, co-founder and director of the NUS Academy for Healthy Longevity, cautioned against relying on a single metric. "We cannot rely on a single metric for age. In electric vehicles, for instance, the battery and the engine age separately," she explained. "We have to create a body dashboard where you get the different signals, and then it's up to you if you're going to intervene or not."
Testing the Anti-Ageing Pipeline
Local institutions are moving beyond general health advice to test targeted clinical interventions. At the NUS Academy of Healthy Longevity's PROMETHEUS study, researchers test precision geromedicine interventions tailored to adults aged 50 to 80, measuring whether specific lifestyle protocols and certain supplements actively slow the ageing trajectory. The project is competing in XPRIZE Healthspan, a US$101 million global contest to restore muscle, brain, and immune function by 10 to 20 years in participants aged 65 to 80.
The NUS academy is also conducting a one-year trial to evaluate whether daily multivitamins reduce biological age in adults aged 40 to 60 whose biological markers outpace their chronological years. "Supplements can play a huge role in ageing... but they should be given to individuals who need them. We need to measure this," Maier said. In addition, Maier has designed a trial for low-dose rapamycin, a leading longevity candidate, to determine if the immunosuppressant can delay biological ageing.
To prepare future physicians, NUS Medicine is embedding lifestyle medicine into the core medical curriculum, so doctors are taught not only to diagnose and treat diseases but also to optimise health. The school recently launched global-first programmes, including a Master of Science in Nutrition and Lifestyle Medicine and certificate courses in healthy longevity.
"Upskilling healthcare professionals in a broader way (will enable Singapore to) democratise health longevity medicine in the end, because that's what we want, that's what we stand for," Maier said. "We built a framework to be one of the global leaders in the field of geroscience and geromedicine, and especially, globally, we are leading in the implementation into clinical practice."
As part of this effort, the grand challenge is tasked with developing a Singapore Healthy and Successful Longevity Index, a suite of indicators showing at a population level whether the country as a whole is ageing healthily and successfully. "We are very well positioned to be the regional test bed for scaleable, data-driven, culturally adapted models for global longevity care," Chong said. "Not just in theory, but in real life."