Blood rejuvenation, gut pills and beaded leggings seek eternal popularity

“I’m not saying cryopreservation is a safe bet,” says Kendziorra to the audience at a private members’ club in a five-star hotel. “I’m only saying it’s a safer bet than cremation.”

The crowd of 40 or so high-net-worth individuals (HNWIs) are taut-faced, immaculately dressed – and interested. Kendziorra’s company, Tomorrow Bio, offers to freeze its clients’ bodies after death for £175,000 plus a £44 monthly fee. Or just their brains, for less.

Tomorrow Bio has doctors and nurses – the supposed “standby, stabilisation and transportation” teams – on call 24/7. In the event of a customer’s death, Kendziorra tells the audience, Tomorrow Bio will rush to their home to preserve the body. Speed is of the essence in cryonics, as any delay can cause long-term tissue degeneration.

The hope, of course, is that one day Kendziorra will be able to bring them back to life. He knows it sounds far-fetched. The first person to be frozen – James Bedford in 1967 – is still in storage in Scottsdale, Arizona, because scientists do not know how to safely thaw people, let alone give them a comfortable life when they are reanimated.

And yet two well-placed sources say that private bankers are already offering wealth management plans for the undead, in the event that they should ever thaw.

The LIC, which took place last week, is an exclusive gathering hosted in Gstaad, a Swiss resort town with a private airport and a reputation as a playground for the wealthy.

The annual event is primarily an opportunity for investors to shop for therapies, supplements and technologies that promise everything from delaying ageing to reversing it – or even, in the case of cryonics, raising the dead.

Putative “longevity” is the new luxury. The Palantir billionaire Peter Thiel takes human growth hormone pills to aid muscle recovery. Sam Altman, the chief executive of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, takes the diabetes drug metformin, in the hope of living longer. And the tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson has amassed more than 4 million social media followers “trying not to die”, including by injecting himself with his son’s blood plasma.

The billion-dollar industry is built on an unusual imbalance: scientific progress takes decades but, as is the case with cryonics, financial returns can be immediate.

What makes a company investable is not necessarily its proximity to a breakthrough, but its ability to monetise belief.

There are talks at the LIC by companies such as BioReset, a startup that sells “blood rejuvenation”, where a client’s blood is passed through an external device to adsorb “inflammatory molecules and toxins”, then returned.

The evidence for health benefits remains limited, but the treatment comes with a ringing video endorsement from the Hollywood star Zac Efron.

Elsewhere, there are presentations about a drug called rapamycin, which has been shown to extend the lifespans of male mice, plus leggings with built-in beads that promise to drain your lymph nodes, and faecal transplants, where stool is transferred from a healthy donor into a patient’s gut via a pill or enema, in order to restore a balanced community of “good” bacteria.

Some of these technologies, including faecal transplants, are backed by promising, thorough scientific research. The same cannot be said for beaded leggings.

Tomorrow Bio told The Observer that up to 900 people, 70 of whom are in the UK, have signed up to its monthly subscription service, which funds the infrastructure and research necessary for cryopreservation. In the event of their deaths, those people will pay an additional lump sum to freeze their bodies or brains.

The company has introduced a new revenue stream: cryopreserving pets. It is not only much cheaper – £26,000 for a cat – but there are far more of them.

Twenty humans and 10 pets have already been cryopreserved, and Kendziorra says the company has almost £175m in contracts. Several people in attendance say they have already signed up. “It’s more fun than a boring funeral,” one says.

Investing in such companies may seem an odd proposition. But one Tomorrow Bio backer says it was a no-brainer: the business is already bringing in revenue. If enough people sign up, who cares if the technology never works?

Private investors and family offices – paying upwards of £6,000 a person to attend the event, which lasts two and a half days – dominate the longevity investment landscape. Silicon Valley billionaires including Thiel, Altman, Yuri Milner and Marc Andreessen have committed more than $5bn (£3.7bn) to longevity ventures over the past quarter of a century, though none were present at the LIC this year.

These individuals – in addition to influencers, celebrities, non-governmental organisations and startups – are more likely to invest in longevity than venture capitalists or institutional investors, according to analysis by the Wall Street Journal.

The conference’s founders, Swiss entrepreneurs Marc Bernegger and Tobias Reichmuth, admit that it can be a challenge for investors and consumers to determine whether something actually works.

Reichmuth says all companies should have a scientific advisory board with multiple advisers, including “MDs, PhDs and disease specialists”. As for consumers, it is up to them to do their own research.

“The ‘pitch’ to HNWIs is very different,” says a senior US-based pharma executive. “‘Put money with me and I’ll be your concierge to another world that will help you live longer, scientific validity be damned.’”

Much of the science presented on stage is yet to be tested on humans and could take years to pass through clinical trials. To speed up the process, guests themselves admitted to trying everything from the supplement creatine, which is said to boost muscle energy, to weight-loss drugs and psychedelics.

It may seem as if the LIC is a place for the egomaniacal super-rich to seek eternal youth. But many of the entrepreneurs and investors say they are in the industry because of personal circumstances: a family member with Alzheimer’s, a friend who died young, an elderly parent in pain.

In the US, according to data from 2024, it takes an average of 15 years and $6.5m to develop a drug, and many say they feel desperate to speed up progress for life-saving medicine.

One company at the conference, Insilico Medicine, has already shown some success in cutting down the process of drug discovery from between three and six years to about 18 months.

Others are more transparent about being in it for the money. The longevity industry is booming and this year the cell-rejuvenation company Retro Bio, backed by Altman, announced it was raising a record $1bn to extend human lifespan.

Critics warn the endorsement of experimental medicine risks legitimising bad science, wasting capital and potentially harming desperate patients.

Meanwhile, healthcare systems are already struggle with rising costs and ageing populations. Extending lives without addressing inequities in access could make those pressures worse.

But longevity enthusiasts say the industry will follow the path of Formula One: a luxury pursuit that yields innovations that will benefit everyone. Unlike F1 cars, where advances in crash safety migrated into everyday vehicles, it is not clear that defrosted pets will ever be accessible – or useful – to the masses.

Photographs by Aurelio Schrey