Biological age

She is 64 and aging at 0.74 years per calendar year. Your age is fixed. Your rate is not.

Chronological age counts birthdays. A second clock counts how fast you collect them, and that one moves.

Updated August 13, 2026 · 8 minute read

Ask anyone how old they are and the answer arrives in half a second. Ask how fast they are aging and the question does not compute, because almost nobody has ever been handed a number for it. There is one. It can be measured from a blood sample, it moves, and it is the number sitting underneath the headline that brought you here.

Amy Hardison is 64. She is a mother of four and a grandmother of eleven. In a six month case study run by NOVOS Labs, her pace of aging measured 0.74. Not her biological age. Her rate.

Part 1

The number almost nobody has

Chronological age is a count. It advances at exactly one year per year for every person alive and nothing you do touches it. It is useful for filling in forms and almost useless as a target.

Pace of aging is a rate. It answers a different question: right now, how many biological years are you accumulating for each year on the calendar? The reference value is 1.00. At 1.00 you are aging at par. Below 1.00 you are running slower than the clock on the wall.

The algorithm that produces the figure is called DunedinPACE. It reads epigenetic marks in a blood sample, and it is the same test that sits behind NOVOS Age, the kit the company sells to let people measure themselves.

That gap is the whole argument. A quarter of a year, every year, compounding quietly in the background while nothing about her birthday changes.

Part 2

Why a rate is a better target than an age

You cannot negotiate with a birthday. You can act on a rate this quarter and measure it again next year, which turns an act of faith into an experiment with a result.

That matters more than it sounds. Most people who start a longevity routine stop within a few months, and the reason is rarely that it failed. It is that nothing about it was measurable, so there was never a moment where the effort was answered by evidence. A rate supplies that moment.

Part 3

What NOVOS actually ran, and what came back

From February to August 2022, NOVOS ran a case study on twelve people: six men, six women, aged 39 to 76. Each gave a blood sample for epigenetic testing before ever touching the product. Then six months of one sachet of NOVOS Core and two NOVOS Boost capsules a day, at a 250 mg NMN dose. Participants were asked to change nothing else about their lives unless a doctor told them to, and to report it if anything did change. At the end, a second blood sample, and the two DunedinPACE outputs placed side by side.

In the company's own plain language framing, the group moved from aging roughly twelve months per calendar year to roughly eleven.

Twelve people is a small study and NOVOS labels it as one. What makes it worth reading anyway is the design detail: participants were told not to change anything else. Whatever moved, moved against a fixed background.

Part 4

The detail in Amy's interview that is easy to miss

She did not overhaul her life. She was already doing nearly everything a longevity clinic would prescribe, and had been for decades.

In her words, "integrating NOVOS into my routine didn't necessitate any drastic changes to my already health-conscious lifestyle." She also describes herself as having been "somewhat skeptical about supplements."

So what convinced her was not how she felt. She reports no dramatic change in appearance or fitness, and says so plainly, because there was very little room left to improve. What convinced her was the lab work.

The difference that showed up in my bloodwork was convincing, and it was significant, and it was surprising… and that is measurable data! Amy Hardison, interviewed by NOVOS Labs, published September 11, 2024

That cuts both ways, and it is the most honest thing on this page. If Amy had gone on feel alone she would have concluded that nothing happened. The case for measuring is not that it makes you feel better. It is that feeling is a bad instrument.

Part 5

What is actually in the drink

Aging has at least twelve underlying biological drivers, often called the hallmarks or root causes of aging. Most supplements push hard on one of them. NOVOS Core is built to target all twelve at once, which is why it is a twelve ingredient formula rather than a single molecule in a capsule.

• Calcium Alpha-Ketoglutarate
• Glycine
• Pterostilbene
• Fisetin
• Magnesium Malate
• Glucosamine Sulfate
• L-Theanine
• Rhodiola Rosea
• Hyaluronic Acid
• Vitamin C
• Ginger
• Micro-dosed Lithium

No proprietary blends. Every dose is printed on the label, and the formulation is patent pending. It is vegan, gluten free, sugar free and erythritol free, sweetened with stevia, except the unflavored version which contains none. Three flavors: Orange, Tropical Passion, Unflavored.

Part 6

The part that is not a case study

A twelve person case study is a signal, not a proof, and it would not be worth much on its own. It sits at the fourth rung of a longer ladder that NOVOS has built deliberately, from cells upward.

That last rung is the one that separates NOVOS from most of the shelf, because it tested the finished product rather than its ingredients one at a time. Three markers moved.

This trial provides rare human evidence that a multi-pathway nutritional strategy can meaningfully influence cardiovascular aging biology itself. Dr. Christian Heiss, Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, University of Surrey

The reason those numbers are worth a second look is the company they keep. NOVOS published both markers against the interventions a doctor would recommend first.

Part 7

What none of this proves

A page like this one is usually where the caveats go missing. NOVOS publishes its own, so there is no reason to hide them, and reading them is the fastest way to judge whether the rest is worth trusting.

None of that makes the evidence worthless. It makes it early, which is a different thing, and it is roughly where the whole longevity field currently sits.

Part 8

Who else has looked at it

NOVOS is a Public Benefit Corporation, and its scientific and medical advisory team is public. It includes Dr. George Church, professor at Harvard Medical School and MIT, Dr. Matt Kaeberlein of MIT and the University of Washington, and Dr. Pamela Maher of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. The co-founder, Dr. Kris Verburgh, is a physician.

It is stocked by the Mayo Clinic Store and select health retailers. The company is a member of the Longevity Biotechnology Association and the Healthy Longevity Medicine Society, and was selected for the XPRIZE Healthspan Competition and the Wall Street Journal Future of Everything.

Part 9

What people who took it say

Two longer accounts sit in the write-up of the case study itself. The second is the one worth reading slowly, because the man is arguing with his own lab.

I took a blood epigenetic test before starting on NOVOS. I was 72 years old and the result said bio age 71. I then took Core and Boost consistently over 6 months, made sure not to add or remove any other supplements or make any significant lifestyle changes, then retested. I turned 73 and the result came back as bio age 63, minus 10 years! I asked the lab to check if there were any errors in their analysis. To my delight, there wasn't! Len M., New York, quoted by NOVOS Labs

Individual results vary, and anecdotes are anecdotes. The reason these two are worth quoting is that both men did the same thing Amy did: they measured before, changed one variable, and measured again.

Part 10

If you want your own number

There are two halves to this, and they are sold separately. NOVOS Age is the epigenetic test, the same one used in the case study, and it is what turns any of this into a before and after rather than a hope. NOVOS Core is the daily formula.

Free shipping on subscriptions, and the plan can be paused, skipped or cancelled from the account page. If a hundred dollars is a lot to spend on a taste you have never tried, there is a sample pack at $15 with one of each flavor.

Questions people ask first

The short version

Your age is a count you cannot argue with. Your pace of aging is a rate, it can be measured from a blood sample, and in a twelve person case study most people who took NOVOS Core and Boost for six months slowed theirs, with nobody speeding up. The strongest evidence in the file is a randomized, placebo-controlled human trial on cardiovascular markers, and it is still awaiting peer review.

Amy Hardison did not change her life to get 0.74. She measured it. That is the part worth copying.

See NOVOS Core Twelve ingredients, no proprietary blends · 4.9 stars from 1,331 ratings · from $79 a box