TL;DR
Living a very long time in a young body would mean, among other things, keeping the body clean of the worn-out "zombie" cells that pile up with age and sour the tissue around them. Today's best drugs for clearing them are pills taken from outside. On Oct. 12 a small company, Immorta Bio, said it had found a different route: a tiny, AI-designed protein fragment that got the immune system's own killer cells to destroy zombie cells while leaving healthy cells alone. If that holds up, the body might one day be taught to do its own housekeeping, the way a vaccine teaches it to fight a virus. For now this is a lab-dish result, with no animal tests reported, and the company's plan to try it in people before year-end is its own claim.
Below the line, for paid subscribers: The full story: where it stands, how we got here and what's dated next; our Odds board on 5 milestones, starting with "Immorta Bio begins human testing of SenoMune-0257 by 2027"; and every source.