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Who wants to live forever? Inside the Russian authorities’ plan to develop anti-aging technology — even as they keep sending soldiers to die in droves

Source: Meduza

In early 2024, Vladimir Putin declared that Russia needed a new “national project” aimed at “preserving the health” of the country’s citizens. Lawmakers got to work, and just a few month later, they unveiled an initiative with the catchy name “New Health Preservation Technologies.” One of its priorities is to combat aging — an idea that’s long interested Russian officials, most of whom are far from spring chickens. The authorities forecast that the overall project will “save 175,000 lives” by 2030, and they’ve pushed forward with it even amid the full-scale war in Ukraine, in which tens of thousands of Russians have been killed. Meduza teamed up with RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit Systema to find out who got Putin thinking about immortality, how his longtime friends the Kovalchuk brothers are involved, and what organ printing has to do with any of this.

On February 14, 2024, at Russia’s Future Technologies Forum, Vladimir Putin announced a new “national project” called “New Health Preservation Technologies.” Three months later, a few days after Putin’s latest inauguration, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova gave a more detailed presentation on the project at Moscow’s “Rossiya” exhibition.

As part of the new initiative, Golikova said, the government would invest in “technology that prevents cellular aging, neurotechnologies, and other innovations aimed at ensuring longevity.” She noted that one of its programs would focus specifically on developing “biomedical technologies of the future for active longevity and healthy aging.”

The project’s focus on longevity did not go unnoticed in Russia’s medical community. A source from one Moscow hospital called the initiative “the whims of an aging Politburo,” saying:

According to Russian state media, the new national project will facilitate the development of new medical technology to increase citizens’ lifespans. How much this will cost is unclear; the initiative’s budget has not yet been announced. In any case, the authorities intend for it to “save 175,000 lives” by 2030. For comparison, Russia’s military losses in the war in Ukraine over the last 2.5 years amount to over 120,000 people.

Mikhail Kovulchuk’s obsession

The biggest beneficiaries of the Kremlin’s new project will be Russia’s pharmaceutical companies, according to experts who spoke to Kommersant. However, the creation of new medications isn’t the project’s only focus: according to Tatyana Golikova, the government also plans to implement new disease prevention programs “based on biological age.”

These new programs were the subject of a letter sent to multiple research institutes by the Russian Health Ministry in early June. In the letter, the ministry ordered researchers to promptly provide “proposals for developments” in the following areas:

The researchers interviewed by the authors of this article were struck by the letter’s insistent tone and desired turnaround time.

“They asked us to fast-track all of our proposals — it felt like the letter had just arrived today and the deadline was yesterday. To be honest, it was the first time I’d seen anything like it — usually, any national project or federal program is preceded by a number of meetings involving various specialists and some sort of public discussion,” says a doctor from one of Russia’s national medical research centers.

“When we got this letter, honestly, I was stunned. The whole premise baffled me. Oh sure, let’s work on restoring the health of these old fogies — it’s not like there’s anyone else who needs our attention. Right in the middle of the war, we’re just supposed to drop everything. The level of cynicism is really bewildering,” says a researcher from another research center.

A Health Ministry spokesperson did not respond to questions about the national project or the letter to the research institutes.

“All of the research projects envisioned in the national project are very expensive. Developing new medications costs billions [of rubles], and no national project can cover that — especially right now,” says a source close to the Kremlin. A source from the Russian pharmaceutical industry agreed: “I don’t think they’ll be able to organize anything meaningful quickly.”

However, the national project isn’t based solely on practical considerations. “Mikhail Kovalchuk, who’s obsessed with immortality and the ‘Russian genome,’ got this to the president,” says a source close to the Kremlin. Two other sources also named Kovalchuk, a close friend of Vladimir Putin who heads the Kurchatov Institute nuclear research center, as a likely lobbyist for the project.

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The brother of businessman and fellow Putin ally Yury Kovalchuk, Mikhail Kovalchuk also oversees Russia’s genetic research program, which employs Putin’s eldest daughter, endocrinologist Maria Vorontsova. However, this hasn’t stopped Kovalchuk from promoting bizarre ideas such as the existence of biological weapons that exclusively target Russians. He’s also spearheaded a project to “decode the Russian genome” and warned Russian lawmakers about a “new subspecies of human” purportedly created in the U.S. Members of this “subspecies,” Kovalchuk told the Federation Council, have “limited self-awareness” and live on “cheap feed” produced from “genetically modified organisms,” while their reproduction is planned and controlled. According to Russian media reports, even Putin believes in some of Kovalchuk’s conspiracy theories.

Kovalchuk’s longtime “fixation” on anti-aging technology is closely linked to researcher Konstantin Skryabin, who worked under him at the Kurchatov Institute. In addition to sequencing the “Russian genome,” Skryabin has repeatedly spoken to the media about “eternal life.” “We [scientists] love discussing the topic of human immortality,” he told Radio Liberty in 2019.

There’s currently no practical basis for these discussions. According to the experts interviewed for this story, the letter Russia’s Health Ministry sent to the research institutes was essentially a request to “just give us something.” “The higher-ups set the task, and officials scrambled to fulfill it by any means possible,” a researcher at a Moscow research center says.

The industry experts who spoke to Meduza and Systema found the Health Ministry’s letter as strange as its recipients did. “Sarcopenia and asthenia are very important medical problems in countries where people live to old age, but in Russia, unfortunately, many people don’t even make it to pension age,” says a source from Russia’s pharmaceutical industry.

Additionally, the Health Ministry’s letter mentions a technology that it says is “aimed at active longevity” but that actually bears only an indirect relationship to prolonging life: organ printing. In Russia, this field is overseen by the government-owned atomic energy corporation Rosatom, to which Mikhail Kovalchuk has close ties.

For years, the leader of the organ printing industry in Russia was a startup called 3D Bioprinting Solutions, founded in 2013 by Alexander Ostrovsky as a subsidiary of his medical firm Invitro. After the start of Moscow’s full-scale war in Ukraine, Ostrovsky sold most of his business and moved to Europe; the bioprinting lab he left behind now collaborates with Rosatom to develop techniques for treating wounded soldiers.

One new liver, please

The concept of printing new organs first took off in the mid-2000s. “Medicine has done a much better job of making us live longer, and the problem is, as we age, our organs tend to fail more,” surgeon and researcher Anthony Atala said in a 2011 TED Talk. “In the last 10 years, the number of patients requiring an organ has doubled, while in the same time, the actual number of transplants has barely gone up.”

That same year, Dmitry Fadin, Invitro’s strategic development and innovations director, proposed opening Russia’s first bioprinting lab. The company’s founder, Alexander Ostrovsky, was immediately a fan of the idea. In 2013, he said that the project’s long-term goal was to print a kidney. According to a source who knows him, he also joked about printing himself a new liver.

In 2014, 3D Bioprinting Solutions built Russia’s first bioprinter. The following year, after receiving a grant of 23 million rubles ($610,000) from the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, the lab created an organ construct of a mouse’s thyroid gland.

According to a source who worked at Skolkovo at the time, 3D Bioprinting Solutions was constantly making headlines. “The team had an excellent reputation, they were doing great in the media, and everyone loved them. They were considered some of the leaders at Skolkovo,” the source says. (Launched as a pet project of former President Dmitry Medvedev, Skolkovo was regarded as the largest platform for international scientific projects at the time.)

In 2018, the lab achieved its most famous milestone to date when one of its bioprinters became the first in the world to print human cartilage tissue and a mouse thyroid gland in space. Russia’s state space corporation, Roscosmos, helped carry out the project.

The lab’s ultimate goal of printing fully functional human organs, however, still appears far off. Currently, the practical applications of 3D printing in medicine are limited to “non-living” products such as implants and orthopedic devices; bioprinting, on the other hand, involves incorporating cells into the materials used, which raises numerous legal complications. As a result, live cell therapy is only used in research contexts.

Despite this, the Russian authorities still have high hopes for bioprinting, and Rosatom hopes to have the technology for printing “complex human organs” ready within six years. According to Kommersant, Moscow’s interest in bioprinting and related technologies surged in 2022, with the government spending over 57 million rubles ($633,000), compared to just 1.2 million rubles ($20,600) five years earlier.

“[After the space project,] everyone was interested in us. Some [officials] dreamed that they’d now be able to print new organs [for themselves as backups], while the military talked about creating a ‘universal soldier,’” says a source close to Invitro. It was in a military hospital that 3D Bioprinting Solutions first tested its technology on humans.

Biolabs and ‘combat mosquitoes’

In December 2023, an experimental surgery was conducted at Moscow’s Burdenko military hospital: for the first time in history, a bioprinter printed “skin” directly onto a patient’s wound.

“This method […] is particularly relevant amid the numerous shrapnel wounds to limbs, given that donor resources are limited,” said one of the doctors involved. In the year and a half since then, doctors have repeated the procedure, according to a source close to the hospital, and they plan to use the same approach to treat more “extensive” injuries in the future. Asked about 3D Bioprinting Solutions’s partnership with the Russian Defense Ministry, a source from the lab says: “We develop these technologies to treat people — not to kill.”

A few months earlier, in the fall of 2022, Invitro’s owners had unexpectedly put it up for sale. At the time, the company’s annual revenue was about 40 billion rubles ($450 million). Neither Ostrovsky nor his partners commented on the decision, but two sources from his professional circle say the shareholders decided to part with the company following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Two of Ostrovsky’s acquaintances told this story’s authors that the sale was the result of “pressure from above.”

According to one of these sources, this pressure began immediately after Ostrovsky announced in late 2021 that he was filing for an IPO. “As soon as Alexander [Ostrovsky] started this process, some guy in uniform came to him and said, ‘We should collaborate,’” the source says. “Why would I do that? I don’t have any government money, any budget funding. Everything is funded privately,” Ostrovsky responded, according to the source. “Up to you,” the man responded.

Almost immediately after the start of the war, the Russian authorities began talking about “U.S. biolabs in Ukraine,” as well as Kyiv’s alleged use of “infected mosquitoes” that could “selectively target” members of specific ethnic groups. Ostrovsky’s company had already been accused once of “transferring Russian citizens’ biological materials abroad”; former Russian Chief Sanitary Inspector Gennady Onishchenko made the allegation in 2017. Ostrovsky, fearing that this claim might resurface, decided he “needed not only to sell the company but also to leave Russia himself, because otherwise he could be executed on Red Square for gathering biomaterial,” according to his acquaintance. Two other sources close to Ostrovsky say that the authorities “hinted” to him that he needed to part with his company because his son-in-law and business partner, Dr. Alexander Vanyukov, openly supported Alexey Navalny.

During the same period, one of Invitro’s investors, the U.S.-based private equity fund Russia Partners, also began insisting he sell the asset. Russia Partners did not respond to questions. A source close to Invitro says the fund made a “strategic decision” to sell its Russian assets in response to the war in Ukraine.

A year into the full-scale war, pressure on Invitro’s owners intensified. In January 2023, the pro-Kremlin tabloid Life.ru published an “exposé” claiming that the company’s investors might have connections to the U.S. military and that the Ostrovsky family supported Ukraine. A few months later, Invitro was approached by a little-known businessman named Roman Mironchik, whom other market participants refer to as a “dark horse.” The company was sold to him at a significantly lower price than Ostrovsky had anticipated.

The transaction amount has not been disclosed, but a source close to Ostrovsky and a source in the medical industry both say it was between $200 million and $250 million. Publicly available financial statements from Mironchik’s company, RM Investments, indicate the businessman may have borrowed the funds from Gazprombank. In 2021, meanwhile, Ostrovsky had valued the company at $1 billion, though several industry sources say this valuation was inflated. A source familiar with Invitro’s business dealings says the company’s shareholders received offers to sell it for around $500 million after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Why, then, did the shareholders agree to the price Mironchik offered? “He proposed simpler terms without legal complications,” says a source familiar with the deal. Another reason, however, might be the individuals hiding behind the formal buyer. Past media reports have linked Mironchik to the billionaires Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, another set of brothers close to Putin, but open-source information suggests the real buyers could be the Kovalchuk brothers, who have long had an interest in the medical industry.

After selling Invitro, according to a source close to the company, Ostrovsky ended his involvement with it and is now in the process of closing the U.S. company through which he owned 3D Bioprinting Solutions. The technology through which the lab made its name is now being used by Rosatom (which didn’t respond to requests for comment).

Ostrovsky’s departure left managing partner Yusef Hesuani as the most senior figure at 3D Bioprinting Solutions. One of the lab’s co-founders, Hesuani is a former classmate of Maria Vorontsova and remains friends with her, according to two of their acquaintances.

‘You can’t have a good ecosystem in a bad environment’

Six years ago, Forbes Russia named the startup Gero, founded by Russian physicist Peter Fedichev, as one of the most promising companies in the “fight against aging.”

“The international company Gero, which has 16 employees in its Moscow office and researchers at eight leading research centers abroad, is working on finding a way to affect the proteins circulating in the blood to fight aging,” the magazine wrote in 2018. In reality, the company’s team had already begun severing all of its ties to Russia.

“Drug development requires large amounts of capital and proper access to it. After 2014, this access became more limited for obvious reasons, so in 2018, we became an international company. From our perspective, this was a natural and logical step, as it was clear to many that the situation [in Russia] would only get worse,” says a source close to the company’s leadership. Today, Gero’s team is based in Serbia. The startup recently raised $6 million from foreign investors to search for treatments for age-related diseases.

Before the full-scale war, Russia had every chance of making significant progress in aging research, with many of the field’s most cited researchers working there, according to a source close to Gero’s leadership. But now, the source says, the situation for biotech researchers there is bleak: “Just as we were taught, you can’t have a good ecosystem in a bad environment.”

Mikhail Batin, a businessman and former Russian politician who aspires to extend his lifespan through science, agrees: “We can’t overcome our own bureaucratic machinery, and Putin is running out of time to develop a treatment for aging. They can allocate the money, but who’s going to create the technology? Nobody in Russia can boast publications on anti-aging in Nature; the quality of the science is extremely low.”

An activist and former regional lawmaker, Batin spent more than 20 years in Russia promoting the idea of “extreme longevity.” After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, however, he emigrated to the U.S. His explanation is simple: “At the end of the day, we want to prolong life. War is about shortening it.”