ARDD 2026 will convene senior leaders from Novartis, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Takeda, Menarini, GSK, AstraZeneca, Novo Nordisk and other global pharmaceutical companies alongside leading academics, regulators, investors and biotechnology innovators at Harvard University from October 1–3.

Newly announced program highlights include a pharmaceutical chief executive panel moderated by TIME Senior Health Correspondent Alice Park; an FDA and ARPA-H discussion on aligning clinical trials with regulatory mandates; and presentations from the 11 XPRIZE Healthspan finalist teams preparing aging interventions for Phase 2 clinical trials.

Dedicated forums will examine AI-enabled drug discovery, pet and animal longevity, and virtual cell models that capture biological change and aging over time. The three-day program will span aging biology, clinical development, pharmaceutical R&D, regulation, investment and the translation of longevity science into new medicines.

Now in its 13th year, ARDD brings together the scientific, commercial and regulatory leaders shaping longevity biotechnology. The meeting will take place at the David Rubenstein Treehouse at Harvard University in Boston.

A side-by-side comparison of three generations of high-sensitivity flow cytometers provides new insights into the detection and quantification of nanoparticles and extracellular vesicles, highlighting how instrument configuration, detection strategy, and sample concentration influence single-particle measurements.

UC SanDiego researchers are using AI and "virtual cells" based on 4D movies to predict how cells will respond to drugs, which could speed up drug discovery for cancer, Alzheimer’s and more.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is associated with more than 1,200 risk genes, raising a fundamental question: Do these diverse genetic changes affect the brain in entirely different ways, or do they converge on shared biological mechanisms?

A research team led by Professor KIM Eunjoon of the Center for Synaptic Brain Dysfunctions within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) has identified two opposing patterns of brain gene activity across mice carrying different autism-risk mutations. By analyzing more than 1,000 mouse brain transcriptomes, the researchers found that genetically distinct models could be grouped according to shared molecular changes, offering a new framework for investigating autism-related mechanisms and responses to experimental drugs.

The paper introduces three interconnected resources for the global scientific community:

LongevityBench, the first open benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate AI reasoning across multiple domains of aging biology;

Longevity-LLMs, a family of compact, open-source language models specifically trained on clinical and multi-omics aging data; and

Longevity Claw, an open-source agentic research platform that autonomously integrates specialized longevity tools to identify and prioritize potential therapeutic targets.

Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and collaborators have identified candidate treatment targets and potential prognostic markers for high-grade glioma, an aggressive brain cancer, in children, adolescents, and young adults. The study found that high-grade glioma varies by developmental stage and sex, showing distinct tumor biology and outcomes across patient groups. Using this information to guide clinical trial design and develop new therapies could advance more precise treatment strategies. The findings were published in Cell Reports Medicine.

Cells rely on complex signaling networks in which different molecular pathways communicate with one another. Small GTPases act as molecular switches in these networks, controlling diverse cellular processes such as intracellular transport and cell morphogenesis. Although crosstalk between different families of small GTPases is established in animal cells, whether and how such crosstalk occurs in plants has remained largely unknown.

A research team led by Associate Professor Emi Ito and Professor Takashi Ueda at the National Institute for Basic Biology (NIBB), together with collaborators at Ochanomizu University, Kyoto Prefectural University, Saitama University, Nagoya University, and RIKEN, has now uncovered a molecular mechanism that connects two distinct types of small GTPases in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. The study was published in Nature Plants.

The researchers identified a protein called REAP1/SWAP70 that links RAB5, a small GTPase involved in intracellular membrane trafficking, with ROP7, a member of the plant-specific ROP (Rho of Plants) family of small GTPases involved in processes such as cell morphogenesis. Their findings reveal a previously unknown RAB5–REAP1–ROP7 signaling pathway and show that this pathway plays an important role in normal pollen development.