Longevity Inc.: India Joins the Immortality Race

SHE SITS IN the last of five recliners on the second floor of a glass tower in Indiranagar, Bengaluru. A bag of NAD+—an essential coenzyme, nico­tinamide adenine dinucleotide, has become the marquee molecule of the longevity trade—drips into a vein in her arm. It costs `40,000 plus taxes, and it is sup­posed to reach the cell and slow the clock. According to her smart ring, her nightly recovery has been poor for weeks. The drip and a fortnightly “dive” into the hyperbaric chamber to breathe pressurised oxygen are supposed to fix that. Outside, the street fills with evening traffic, a thousand engines releasing the particulates she has come to be cleared of. “Does it work,” I ask, citing recent clinical reviews that found no legitimate evidence of NAD+ for anti-ageing or wellness. The 47-year-old interior designer says what matters is that she feels lighter and fresher. “Preventive medicine doesn’t yield immediate results. You have to stick with therapies that you believe work for you,” says the self-proclaimed biohacker.

Forty and tired was, until recently, a con­dition. It is now a market. India has decided to live forever, and it has learnt a new language for the project, absorbing words like health­span, biological age, metabolic score and protocol. Nobody in the longevity industry appears merely to receive treatment. They are put on protocols, medicine’s word for a structured plan, one that gives even specu­lative interventions the gravity of a clinical trial. Well, red light therapy does have small, real effects on skin, and cold plunges are known to relieve aches, even if a Cochrane review found insuf­ficient evidence that full-body cryotherapy prevents or treats post-exercise soreness. Intravenous vitamins, unless you are woefully deficient, mostly enrich your urine. Hyperbaric oxygen is well-re­searched for specific conditions, including decompression illness, carbon-monoxide poisoning and certain non-healing wounds, but anti-ageing and urban-pollution “detox” are not clinically ac­cepted indications. And yet, these “cutting-edge” treatments have arrived beautifully packaged in brochures carrying the language of protocols and panels, the design doing most of the heavy lifting for a science that is still finding its feet.

Elsewhere, a 46-year-old engineer with a genetic predispo­sition to heart disease is at the slick Ultrahuman Performance Lab in Bengaluru to get a DEXA scan to estimate fat mass, lean tissue and bone mineral density, and a VO2 max test to measure the maximum rate at which the body takes up and uses oxygen during intense exercise. There is also bloodwork to measure more than a hundred markers, although he already has most of them tested regularly. He is no stranger even to the lung capacity test, the full-range audiometry and the resting ECG that are part of the `29,999 Pro Plan he has purchased. What drew him to the plan, though, is how “it allows you to dive into the mechanics of the body”. A motion-capture assessment, combined with upper and lower-body strength tests and a force plate measure show not just how strong someone is but how force travels through the body, whether both sides work symmetrically, how the joints move, and what gait and dynamic movement reveal about mobility, bal­ance and power. Read alongside bone density, grip strength and a VO2 max test, it produces a kind of biomechanical portrait, an attempt to find the weak link before it becomes an injury. “They have the best equipment I have seen in any hospital or clinic. The eye scanner is world-class. Thanks to it, we discovered an issue that needs referring to a retinal specialist and a neuro-ophthal­mologist,” the engineer says. Founded in Bengaluru in 2019, Ultra­human started with selling continuous glucose monitors, then made a smart ring that reads sleep and recovery. It has now set up a laboratory that measures the body almost system-by-system.

OPTIMISATION WAS ONCE the province of athletes, the people who were paid to keep their bodies in their best possible shape. Now the rest of us watch them and want the same for ourselves. We have outsourced the ancient question of how to live to a panel of biomarkers. There is an Andrew Huberman fan at every dinner table now, ready to explain your morning sunlight, your dopamine baseline and your cold-plunge protocol.

“Wellness as a trend, biohacking, health optimisation—all these things didn’t really exist four or five years back when we started out. Now it has become part of mainstream culture,” says Rishabh Jain, who founded The Wellness Co with his brother Rohan Jain. The two had played competitive tennis in the US and Spain and encountered, in the recovery rooms of academies, the hyperbaric chambers and cold plunges and red-light panels that professional athletes use to survive their own careers. They came home in 2021, into the middle of the pandemic, and built a clinic offering those exact therapies to anyone who could afford them. Five years since, the company has 13 centres across seven cities, a re­treat near Gurugram and two more retreats under consideration in Mussoorie and Bengaluru, a team of about 150, and roughly 10,000 completed “wellness journeys”. Membership runs to approximate­ly `1 lakh a month and buys unlimited consultations, unlimited technology-driven therapies, a set number of intravenous drips, diagnostics, dietitians and meal plans. Most members stay 12 to 18 months, Rishabh says, but many have stayed on for years.

The business, he says, has been profitable for the last 10 to 12 months. Among his customers are actors, athletes, the successful and the tired. Two-thirds arrive with an actual complaint—say, a chronic pain or a fog that won’t lift—and the rest come because of the fear of decline itself. By number of sessions, Jain says, whole-body cryotherapy is the company’s most popular treatment, fol­lowed by hyperbaric oxygen and IV drips. On diagnostics, the headline offering at The Wellness Co is a telomere test that claims to measure your biological age. Jain says they introduced it about two-and-a-half years ago. Telomere length, however, cannot as­sign an individual a precise biological age, and common qPCR-based consumer testing can also show substantial measurement variability. The Wellness Co also offers DNA sequencing to help evaluate your risk for heart disease, Alzheimer’s, respiratory ill­ness and muscular dystrophy.

Diagnostics are the front door of the whole industry. And the door keeps getting wider. Every few months another centre opens promising to measure more of you than the last. Consider Cent— named for the hundred years it wants you to live—founded last year by Shashank ND of Practo, Arpit Garg, formerly of Lenskart, and Anshul Khandelwal, formerly of Ola Electric. By the found­ers’ own account, they began in the longevity space exploring supplements and interventions, and then walked away from the word. The real problem, they realised, was that cancer, heart dis­ease, the neurological and metabolic conditions that account for a large chunk of premature deaths, were getting diagnosed too late. Cent says its fixed package combines whole-body MRI, cardiac CT calcium scoring, ECG, DEXA and more than 120 blood and urine biomarkers. Its AI-assisted synthesis and medical review are designed, the company says, to flag more than 300 conditions and risk indicators across cancer, cardiac, neurological and meta­bolic disease, the four categories it says account for more than 80 per cent of preventable mortality. At launch, Cent said 26 per cent of its first 1,500 scans had “clinically meaningful” findings and 4 per cent critical findings.

Another Bengaluru startup, Biopeak, says it has served more than 800 clients in the little over a year since its first clinic opened, divided broadly between healthy optimisers seeking better per­formance and people with unresolved or borderline conditions. What Biopeak seeks to do, co-founder and CEO Rishi Pardal says, is connect genetics, the gut microbiome, metabolites, biochem­istry and imaging rather than reading each test in isolation. Testing for one person can generate as much as 50GB of data, he says, and this is interpreted by an AI-assisted multidisciplinary team and converted into a personalised programme of nutrition, movement, supplementation and follow-up. Asked what a client spends on average annually, Pardal gives a range of `80,000 to ` 1.2 lakh, depending on the extent of testing. The figure includes more than six hours of direct engagement with the clinical team. “People are used to wealth managers, not health managers,” Pardal says. “At Biopeak, we start with deep testing, preventive and personalised precision protocols, followed by the process of improvement.” Biopeak is still serving a premium market, but Pardal argues that aggregation, fuller utilisation of costly diag­nostic equipment and eventually cohort-level interventions can bring best-in-class preventive care to a much wider population. “My belief is that the trajectory is going to be very similar to any technology-adoption curve and prices will fall as scale goes up.”

Pardal says Biopeak intends to achieve that scale through what it describes as a proprietary, LLM-based “symbiotic AI”, adding that the emerging knowledge base draws on Biopeak’s own cases, hy­potheses developed through the Longevity India research initiative, analyses from molecular-testing partners that work with Indian drug-research companies, and aggregate phenotype benchmarks from imaging partners. As the dataset grows, Biopeak hopes the system will make sophisticated preventive care reproducible across cities. As we speak, Biopeak is opening its flagship centre in Indi­ranagar, where Bengaluru’s longevity maxxers now move between Pilates, pour-overs and full-body scans, turning the neighbourhood into a showroom for the optimised self.

“Rather than measure fancy parameters, one must monitor fasting insulin because Indians become insulin-resistant at lower body-mass indices than many Western populations. Measure ApoB and triglycerides, besides homocysteine and Vitamin D,” says Tanya Malik Chawla, who describes herself as a functional-medicine practitioner and nutrigenomics researcher. She came to the field through her own diagnoses of polycystic ovary syndrome and hypothyroidism in her twenties, refused the prescription-for-life that followed, and began measuring everything about herself she could measure. Chawla has since coined a phrase she is trying to turn into a field: “women’s biological capacity.” The idea is that decline begins decades before diagnosis. “Ageing well comes from fixing your metabolic and hormonal health, not from getting a hy­perbaric oxygen fix,” says Chawla, who consults from her clinic in Mumbai.

But fixing it requires first knowing what healthy looks like in an Indian body. Most biological-age models were built on Western pop­ulations. Indian physiology, shaped by different ancestries, diets, disease burdens and environmental exposures, remains poorly rep­resented in the datasets against which age and risk are calculated. The Longevity India Initiative was launched at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, in April 2024 with initial grant support from Prashanth Prakash of Accel India and is led by biologist Deepak Kumar Saini. In April 2026, its researchers published the protocol for the BHARAT Study—Biomarkers of Healthy Aging, Resilience, Adversity, and Transitions—which they describe as India’s first large-scale, discovery-driven multi-omics investigation of ageing.

Designed to recruit 5,000 apparently healthy adults across age, sex and rural–urban groups, BHARAT will combine clinical assessments with genomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabo­lomics, lipidomics, immune profiling and the gut microbiome. Its purpose is to build the BHARAT Baseline: an India-specific reference dataset against which biological clocks and biomarkers can eventually be calibrated. It has not produced that validated baseline yet. By 2050, the country is projected to have 347 million people aged 60 and above. The researchers are trying to learn how those Indians will age. Wellness clinics are already charging a small, affluent public to tell them how old they really are.

Beyond the clinic, the promise of longevity passes into the wider, less accountable realm of the internet. A Gurugram func­tional-medicine practitioner who says she reversed her own diabetes and claims to have transformed 5,000 lives sells a Lon­gevity Kit on her website. It contains pine-bark extract, marked down from ` 1,400 to `1,260, alongside a B-complex, magnesium and a probiotic, all familiar supplements arranged beneath a futuristic word. There are worse transgressions as we go up the ladder of pharmacology. Resveratrol and NAD boosters, neither proven to extend human life, and metformin and rapamycin, valuable drugs for diabetes and transplant medicine that are also used off-label by biohackers in the hope of slowing ageing. Past prescription medicine lies the peptide bazaar. Search for BPC-157 in India and you will find storefronts offering 5mg vials with pan-India delivery, cash-on-delivery and assistance over WhatsApp. Other drugs like TB-500, CJC-1295, ipamorelin and MOTS-c circulate under similar claims about injury, muscle, fat, sleep and cellular energy, notwithstanding the thin safety evidence and the risk of peptide impurities.

The body, meanwhile, goes on doing what bodies do. It ages, faithfully, whether or not we are watching, though we have never watched so closely, or so well. n