Insilico drug shows early signs of reducing biological age

Insilico Medicine’s rentosertib has produced early clinical evidence that an AI-designed drug can affect both disease biology and predicted biological age. Findings published in Nature Biotechnology on 7 September showed that six separate proteomic ageing clocks reached the same conclusion after analysing blood samples from treated trial participants.

Rentosertib was developed for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive lung disease associated with ageing. Its Phase IIa trial enrolled 71 patients across 22 medical sites in China, with safety and tolerability as the main focus over 12 weeks. Patients taking a 60mg daily dose saw forced vital capacity rise by 98.4ml, compared with a 20.3ml drop in the placebo group.

The ageing signal came from stored blood samples from 42 participants. The peak change appeared at week four among patients taking 30mg twice daily, with most models showing roughly three to four years of biological-age reversal and one model showing a drop of nearly six years. Statistical checks found 326 proteins with modified trajectories in treated patients, against just two in the placebo group.

The findings remain preliminary because the trial was small, short and focused on patients with serious lung damage. Rentosertib entered Phase III trials in China in July 2026, making it one of the first AI-designed molecules to reach that stage.