52. Which funding or regulatory policy changes could speed up progress?

Funding: support a large multi-disciplinary initiative focused on fundamentals of aging and on the possibility of achieving large changes in lifespan and healthspan. Rather than funding only individual diseases, a dedicated NIH institute or program for geroscience could prioritize potentially groundbreaking research on aging itself while still supporting social, geriatric and disease-focused work where it is mechanistically informative. Regulatory policy: accept validated aging/organ-age biomarkers as surrogate endpoints in adaptive platform trials when they are linked to function and outcomes. This would compress timelines, enable mechanism-anchored approvals, and de-risk prevention. Finally, regulatory and bureaucratic burden on scientists should be greatly reduced where it does not improve safety or rigor.