The Road To Immortality – Inside the Elite World of Life Extension

Just after dawn in her London home, Sarah Lomas lies on a PEMF (pulsed electromagnetic field) mat, bathed in the blood-red glow of a light chamber – she pairs the two longevity treatments to save time. Lomas, it could be said, is hacking biohacking, or as she calls it, “stacking modalities”. She has already meditated, and after this double dose of red light and PEMF therapy, she’ll swallow a precision-designed sachet of supplements, each ingredient selected from her genome and recent bloodwork. Lunch – typically eggs and spinach or soup – and exercise are also informed by DNA sequencing: every meal and workout is variable. “I don’t believe anybody should have a static daily, weekly, or monthly protocol anymore,” she says. “Your body is talking to you all the time. The only way we can hear that is through testing.”

Testing, in her case, is constant. Blood draws every four weeks. DNA sequencing. Mitochondrial analysis. Toxicity panels. She cycles through anti-inflammatory supplements at noon, detox support at night, and ends her day in an infrared sauna. Her blood metrics, ChatGPT recently informed her, place her in “the top 2% of the world’s average general population.”

Lomas, founder of REVIV, a global precision-health company, sits squarely within the rapidly professionalising longevity-tech sector. The industry’s aesthetic – immaculate labs, hyper-optimised bodies, billionaire patrons – suggests a future built on advanced gene therapies, cellular reprogramming, and an almost devotional commitment to measurement, most synonymous with former Mormon turned poster boy for “not dying”, Bryan Johnson.

And it’s not just the ultra-rich who are drawn in. The Reddit community r/Biohackers sees over 335,000 weekly visitors, with year-on-year growth of 55%. On TikTok, more than 260,000 posts use #biohacking. The 2024 Annual Longevity Investment Report shows investment in longevity has more than doubled, hitting $8.5 billion in 2024. While the US dominates the market, Europe and Asia are catching up, and cutting-edge treatments are increasingly crossing borders.

The Rise of Experimental Medical Tourism

If you’ve watched the Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, you might recall Bryan Johnson flying to Roatán, an island off the coast of Honduras, for Minicircle’s experimental, non-FDA-approved follistatin gene-therapy injections, costing around $20,000 to $25,000 per dose. Johnson claims the treatment slowed his biological ageing to the equivalent of one birthday every 19 months.

Lomas – whose UK-headquartered company REVIV Global has just announced a strategic partnership with Abu Dhabi’s M42 and 10X Health in the States – also travels to Latin America for emerging longevity treatments. In September, she flew to Mexico for natural killer (NK) cell therapy, an immunological treatment whereby NK cells (white blood cells that helps the immune system resist viruses and cancer) are collected from the patient or a donor, expanded and “activated” in a lab, and then infused back into the body. While NK cell therapy shows promise for certain cancers and carries a lower risk of complications than some other cell therapies, it remains largely experimental and is still being tested for effectiveness and durability. Lomas says she will have this treatment every six months for the rest of her life.

These longevity pilgrimages have created a booming medical-tourism economy, with health centres popping up all along the US-Mexico borderlands. Clinics, especially in border cities like Tijuana, market MSCs, exosomes, NK cells, and other regenerative tools to a ballooning class of wellness tourists. Kim Kardashian’s recent stem-cell treatment in Mexico, reportedly costing between $4,000 and $15,000, has also accelerated the trend. Yet this boom has a shadow side: a 2023 web-surveillance study found scores of Tijuana providers operating without verified COFEPRIS licensing, which is issued by the Mexican government’s regulatory body, and there have been CDC-linked cases of drug-resistant infections tied to unregulated injections.

At the same time, a more polished, high-tech wave of longevity tourism is emerging. REVIV’s partnership with 10X Health and Abu Dhabi’s M42 exemplifies it: DNA, blood markers and lifestyle data are combined to produce detailed health reports and bespoke therapies, from precision IV drips to microbead supplements. For Lomas and other early adopters, these treatments promise the ultimate control over ageing, but they also raise an unavoidable question: who truly has access, and how much of the promise is science versus aspiration?

The Slow Longevity Movement

For every high-tech, globe-trotting longevity seeker, there’s someone like Eva Maran. Founder of Eha, a Nordic wellness retreat, Maran sees the longevity boom differently. “I think the industry often overcomplicates what it means to live a long, healthy life,” she says. “True longevity isn’t built on extremes – it’s built on the small, consistent habits we practise every single day, right up until the end.”

Maran spent seven years immersed in functional medicine and biohacking, following protocols with monastic precision – until she realised the irony: “Doing everything ‘perfectly’ was leaving me exhausted.” Now, her philosophy rests on gentler pillars: relationships, sleep, movement, nutrient-rich food, and a handful of daily staples – magnesium, omega-3, vitamin D and K2, MCT C8 oil, and functional mushrooms. Her retreat – which is inspired by the five-season calendar to incorporate “springrise” on Hiiumaa, the island where Eha is based – embodies this approach, she says: “Our aim is to show people that longevity isn’t about chasing perfection but about building sustainable rituals that support you every day.”

The luxury wellness world is beginning to follow suit. “As biohacking evolves beyond performance optimisation to embrace recovery and restorative balance, sleep has become the ultimate luxury,” says Ida Ayu Widiaptini, director of spa operations at Conrad Maldives Rangali Island. At the exclusive Cotswolds’ retreat The Lakes by YOO, the executive team notes that women increasingly seek a holistic approach to biohacking, one that merges cutting-edge treatments with nature-led practices. In Greece, Stella Arvanitakou, senior spa and wellness director at Four Seasons Astir Palace, sees wellness travellers redefining luxury. Treatments may include oxygen therapy, laser light, or lymphatic compression, but the focus is precision paired with care, and a sense that wellness is now the purpose of the trip, not an add-on.

The Gender-Gap in the Longevity Boom

Roxanne Pryor, founder of the functional mushroom brand Superoom, has seen first-hand how the longevity industry has overlooked women. “Longevity conversations have historically been designed by men, for men,” she says. “The metrics, the biomarkers, the optimisation frameworks – they’re all built on male physiology. Women’s bodies fluctuate.”

Her own path into longevity began after copper toxicity and a long period of recovery. Functional mushrooms, she says, were among the few things that helped rebuild her system. But her concerns go deeper: decades of research still ignore women’s bodies, “anti-ageing” language pathologises natural changes, and the high cost of many treatments keeps longevity feeling like an exclusive club.

“Women don’t need to be told to reverse time,” she says. “They need support to optimise the phases their biology already moves through.” Like many women in the space, she has also lived the consequences of what she refers to as “over-optimisation”. “I tried keto. I trained five times a week with such intense HIIT that my period stopped completely. I understand what it means to optimise to the point of depletion.”

Now her longevity routine is based around regulation instead of extremity: “Longevity shouldn’t demand self-punishment or hyper-discipline,” she adds. “It should feel sustainable, nourishing, and intelligent.” Like Maran, Pryor embodies a growing movement of women in the field who want strategies that honour their bodies, not force them into a male-centric blueprint of optimisation.

The Slow Science of Ageing Well

Even in aesthetics – a field often swept up in futurism – we’re seeing a shift. Alice Henshaw, founder of Skincycles and a specialist in regenerative skin treatments, says her approach has “become far more gentle and far more intelligent”.

“We’re moving into an era where we’re not just softening ageing; we’re influencing how the skin ages biologically.” But she warns against believing that longevity has to be complicated or expensive. “The biggest misconception is that longevity is complicated or expensive,” she says. “The basics do 80% of the work: sleep, sunlight, protein, movement, and stress reduction.”

Her advice is refreshingly simple: focus on fundamentals and make them non-negotiable. “Longevity isn’t about intensity; it’s about consistency,” she adds. “Small decisions every day compound into extraordinary results over a decade.”

Who Gets to Live Longer?

The paradox of modern longevity is that the most headline-grabbing innovations – gene therapies, NK-cell infusions, experimental stem cells – remain largely unproven and, for now, the preserve of the ultra-rich. Yet the most impactful levers of long-term health may be the least glamorous: sleep, movement, emotional connection, nourishment, and stress regulation.

Evidence for many next-generation therapies still lag behind their marketing, and regulation varies wildly across borders. But aside from the enormous price tags, the economic implications are profound: models suggest that slowing biological ageing could significantly reduce lifetime healthcare costs. According to UK Research and Innovation, an extra year of healthy life is worth £5 trillion to the UK economy, factoring in productivity, volunteering and care roles.

Lomas says if she could change one thing in prevention, it would be that countries tell their populations the truth: “Healthcare systems aren’t here to give you a longer life. Not even a better quality of life – we’re here to save your life.” She adds, “You need to take control of yourselves and look after yourself.”

When we speak over Zoom, Lomas raises her own critical questions: who gets to benefit from longer, healthier lives? And if someone can’t afford therapies, why not let them trade their own data on their own terms to fund care, rather than allowing big companies to collect it for free? “We will never sell people’s data,” she says, adding: “I’m a believer that if we could broker that to fund treatments for every individual on this planet who can’t afford them, we could do something really good.”

Right now, longevity is not only a medical frontier but a crossroads, caught between the dazzling allure of longevity experiments and a softer movement rooted in recovery, nourishment, and connection – the basics that women like Maran, Pryor and Henshaw champion. Lomas suggests yet another path: a belief that precision medicine will eventually become democratised enough to make radical health-spans accessible.

So, how long does Lomas plan to live? “I could live to 120,” she says. But only on one condition: “You only want to live that long if your family can too.”

She rejects the idea that only wealthy futurists will get to triple digits. “People assume it’ll be the rich,” she says. “It actually isn’t. Wealth gives you something else – scarcity freedom. You don’t have a scarcity of food, restaurants, or alcohol.” Despite her own high-tech interventions, Lomas believes people will live long lives simply through nutrition, stress reduction, and movement. “What’s changing is not that people with wealth will have better health,” she says. “It’s that people are realising their health is their wealth.”