The Aging Research and Drug Discovery Meeting (ARDD) is the largest scientific gathering dedicated specifically to targeting the ageing process with drugs, and the 13th edition runs across three days at the David Rubenstein Treehouse on the Harvard University campus. Founded around the University of Copenhagen and now international in reach, ARDD is where academic geroscience, pharmaceutical R&D, regulators and investors meet in the same room.
The 2026 programme is organised as a main track plus parallel forums: the Longevity Medicine Forum on 1 October, the XPRIZE Healthspan "Meet the Finalists" workshop on 1 October, the AI in Drug Discovery Forum on 2 October, the Pet and Animal Longevity Forum on 3 October, and the Virtual Aging Cell Forum on 3 October, alongside invite-only receptions. Recurring workshop themes across editions include emerging science and technologies, physics in ageing biology, molecular nutrition, replacement in ageing, and a startup pitch session.
The faculty is unusually senior for a field this young. Announced speakers include George Church and David Sinclair (Harvard Medical School), Vadim Gladyshev (Harvard Medical School), Steve Horvath (UCLA), Morten Scheibye-Knudsen and Daniela Bakula (University of Copenhagen), James Kirkland (Kogod Center on Aging), Jonathan Weissman (MIT/Whitehead), Alex Zhavoronkov (Insilico Medicine), Jamie Justice (XPRIZE Healthspan), Evelyne Bischof (Sheba Longevity Center) and Nicole Sirotin (Institute for Healthier Living Abu Dhabi), together with senior R&D leaders from Eli Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Novo Nordisk, AstraZeneca, GSK, Astellas, Takeda, Boehringer Ingelheim, Lundbeck and Menarini. FDA representatives take part in dedicated regulatory sessions on clinical trials for ageing.
Sessions cover clinical trial design for ageing endpoints, regulatory pathways for geroprotectors, biomarkers of biological age, senescence and cellular reprogramming, AI-driven target discovery, and the economics of a longevity therapeutics industry. Participation is hybrid, so researchers and clinicians who cannot travel can follow the main programme remotely.
ARDD is best suited to researchers, clinician-scientists, pharmaceutical professionals and investors. Clinicians building longevity or preventive-medicine services will find the Longevity Medicine Forum the most directly applicable day of the meeting.
