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Longevity Builders tells the stories of those aiming to tackle aging - focusing on the science they’re building, the hurdles they face, and the people willing to do whatever it takes. Check out our previous Longevity Builders companies here.

The name seems straightforward enough: Unlimited Bio. On its face, it promises a biology unbound - aging, disease, death treated not as fate but as engineering problems.

“Life is the only thing that matters,” says Ivan Morgunov, the company’s co-founder. “If we can accelerate progress by even a single day, that could mean 100,000 people alive who would otherwise die.”

Unlimited Bio’s headquarters is not in Boston or Basel, but on the Honduran island of Roatán, inside a semi-autonomous experiment in governance called Prospera*. There, under palm trees and turquoise skies, they hope to sidestep the bureaucratic bottlenecks of medicine and turn therapies around in months instead of years. To Morgunov and his partner, Anna Vakhrusheva, Prospera is not just a place - it is a symbol, a frontier outpost where new medicine can be tested before the rest of the world dares.

* Long-time LEVITY readers are probably familiar with Prospera as we have covered it numerous times. Here and here for example.

Vakhrusheva is the scientist of the pair, trained in biology and biotechnology in Moscow, part of a generation who struggled to find meaningful support for aging research in traditional labs. She moved into industry instead, running vaccine and antibody programs and eventually helping to lead a recombinant COVID-19 vaccine into trials. But her obsession was never pandemics.

“I've always been interested in aging,” she says. “So since my school years I had this question why people age, why they have these age-related diseases, why they die.”

Morgunov comes at the problem from the opposite angle. He is not a bench scientist but an entrepreneur with a missionary streak. A decade ago, traveling abroad, he says he was struck by the absurdity of modern civilization: we can clone animals, send people to space, build technologies indistinguishable from science fiction - yet everyone around him was still aging and dying. “I decided I should dedicate my life to fight against aging.” He launched ventures, raised funds, partnered with aging scientists, and eventually co-founded a UK venture studio. Progress there, shackled to classical regulation, felt glacial. Prospera promised a faster track.

Together, the entrepreneur-activist and the scientist built Unlimited Bio as both a company and a declaration. In the company’s view, the problem is not only the slow creep of biological decline but the procedures that dictate how medicine gets made. Unlimited Bio wants to remove both kinds of limits: the ones written in DNA and the ones codified in law.

That, finally, is the complete meaning folded into the company’s name. Unlimited is not just about an endless lifespan in theory; it is a manifesto that the constraints of biology and bureaucracy alike can be rewritten.

Their first wager is on VEGF, the vascular growth signal that tells the body to sprout new capillaries. A VEGF plasmid therapy has been approved in Russia and Ukraine for more than a decade to treat blocked arteries in the legs; Unlimited licensed the technology for Latin America and repurposed it. Instead of ischemic limbs, they offer intramuscular injections to improve oxygenation and scalp injections to thicken hair. “Capillaries are essential for every organ,” Vakhrusheva says. Unlimited’s idea is straightforward: use VEGF to help tissues grow back the tiny blood vessels that age takes away. The choice is also practical. VEGF is not speculative: it comes with a published safety record.

The experiment has begun to attract attention well beyond biotech. Earlier this year, Khloé Kardashian posted about receiving a VEGF-based procedure connected to Unlimited’s network, sending ripples through both celebrity media and longevity circles.

Beyond VEGF there are far grander ambitions. Unlimited is now working toward combinations of AAV-based therapies* that target several levers of aging at once: follistatin to quiet the brake on muscle growth; BDNF and Klotho to shore up cognition and vascular elasticity. It is an engineering mindset: not one magic bullet, but a stack meant to deliver an effect large enough that people can feel it.

* Plasmids are small rings of DNA that can carry a gene into cells for short-term effect, while AAVs are engineered viruses that deliver genes more efficiently and durably, but at greater cost and complexity.

“People need that ‘aha’ moment,” Morgunov says, likening it to the sudden, visceral recognitions that made ChatGPT and GLP-1 drugs impossible to ignore. “If we can show strength, sharpness, hair - something visible - that will prove longevity is real.”

And they are not coy about their ambitions. In a recent interview, the company said it is on a mission to conduct 100 clinical trials of genetic preventive therapies within ten years - a schedule that would make even the fastest-moving traditional biotech firms look sluggish.

It is, undeniably, a beautiful vision. Yet every step of it rubs against the cold surface of reality. Prospera’s regulatory framework is still a work in progress; its approvals run through an insurer owned by Prospera itself. Unlimited says it runs stringent release testing on each batch, but GMP (good manufacturing practices) certification is not formally required on the island.

And while VEGF may be promising, its use as a rejuvenation tool remains untested. The grand idea of multi-gene cocktails collides with the fact that no regulator in the world has yet authorized more than one gene therapy at a time in healthy adults, let alone four.

To Unlimited’s credit, they have not hidden from those questions. On a recent episode of Optispan, Matt Kaeberlein’s podcast, Morgunov and Vakhrusheva walked into a kind of trial by fire. Kaeberlein pressed the weak points of Prospera’s structure - insurance-driven oversight, evolving standards, boutique quality control, potential conflicts of interest - and the pair did not deflect. They acknowledged the uncertainty, admitted that some thresholds for their AAV programs are still being set, and made the case that speed and prevention can be ethically pursued if matched with transparency and careful follow-up. Not every gene-therapy startup would accept that kind of public cross-examination.

And that willingness to be transparent sits alongside a more formal kind of validation. Unlimited has secured a place in the $101 million XPRIZE Healthspan competition, a seven-year effort to push interventions that restore muscle, cognitive, and immune function by at least ten years (with a goal of twenty) in adults aged fifty to eighty, and to do so within a one-year treatment window. It is not only a biomarker beauty contest; it is built to reward outcomes you can feel in your own body - that ‘aha’ moment Morgunov keeps talking about.

Unlimited advanced into the Top-100 Qualified Teams, recognized as credible entrants, though they were not among the Top-40 Semifinalists who each received $250,000 in May 2025 to begin clinical testing. They remain in the running, but without milestone funding, and the next cut toward ten finalists is scheduled for mid-2026.

The leap however - from incorporation to XPRIZE contender in little more than a year - illustrates one of Unlimited’s core values: speed. From founding to first VEGF injections took less than nine months.

But speed without safety is a false economy, and the founders seem to know it. Vakhrusheva is careful about systemic exposure - ”abnormal angiogenesis* is a risk; we’re taking this stepwise” - and both founders emphasize years of follow-up, not weeks. Still, much remains unresolved: governance in Prospera, the durability of effects beyond anecdotes, and whether a few adventurous patients can ever become a therapy the mainstream will accept.

* Abnormal angiogenesis means blood vessels growing where they shouldn’t, which can feed tumors or cause harmful tissue changes.

Unlimited Bio is trying to erase two kinds of limits at once: the biological limit and the procedural one. It wants to usher in a world where therapies can be piloted swiftly, responsibly, in willing volunteers, and where results that matter in daily life arrive sooner. But we do not yet know whether Prospera’s experiment will prove faster and safer - or either. In reaching for the unlimited, the company may yet rediscover why some limits were there in the first place.

That line of reasoning, though, is something Ivan Morgunov is quite familiar with by now. “We fully understand why traditional regulatory limits exist and agree with their importance”, he says. “But if we lived 50 years ago, we might have agreed with the FDA’s pace. Today the world is different - we can make a sprint toward defeating aging.”