Russia is developing what officials have described as a “vaccine against aging,” a gene therapy drug aimed at slowing cellular aging by blocking a receptor linked to age-related changes in the body, the deputy science minister said Thursday.
Denis Sekirinsky, Russia’s deputy science and higher education minister, said the experimental treatment would target the RAGE receptor, which he said triggers cellular aging when activated.
“The RAGE gene is a receptor whose activation launches the aging of the cell. Blocking this gene, on the contrary, can prolong its youth,” Sekirinsky said at a healthy longevity conference in the Volga city of Saransk, according to the state-run TASS news agency.
He said the goal was to create “the world’s first gene therapy drug” specifically designed to block the receptor.
The project is being developed by the Institute of Aging Biology and Medicine and is part of Russia’s broader push to expand domestic biotechnology research as the country faces demographic decline and a rapidly aging population.
Russian officials have increasingly framed longevity research as both a public health priority and a matter of national importance, with the Kremlin promoting scientific programs aimed at extending healthy life expectancy.
Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova previously said Russia planned to begin producing an anti-aging drug between 2028 and 2030.
“What some time ago we could describe as an incredible future is now becoming reality,” Golikova said earlier.
The work is being carried out under the New Technologies for Health Preservation National Project launched in 2025 at the instruction of President Vladimir Putin.
The program has a budget of more than 2 trillion rubles ($26.4 billion).
A source close to the Kremlin previously told the exiled news outlet Meduza that the project stemmed from what they described as an “obsessive idea” of Mikhail Kovalchuk, a longtime Putin ally and head of the Kurchatov Institute, “who dreams of eternal life and the ‘genome of the Russian person’.”
Kovalchuk also oversees a federal genetics development program involving Putin’s alleged eldest daughter, endocrinologist Maria Vorontsova.
Putin is 73, and many of Russia’s top officials are of a similar age. Average life expectancy for Russian men is around 67 years, according to official statistics.
Read this article in Russian at The Moscow Times' Russian service.
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