Greg MacPherson has spent five years building a global anti-aging brand and now has data showing a 5.71-year biological age drop in 50 adults. Experts call it intriguing — and riddled with caveats.
Greg MacPherson has a problem. He’s got a supplement, Cel, he reckons will add years to your life, but all the knockers ask, “Where are the studies?”
Cel is a range of three capsules containing various natural ingredients targeting the “hallmarks of aging”. It’s going gangbusters, having sold more than 3 million units, generating nearly US$300 million over the past five years, much of it to China, Macpherson tells Forbes Australia.
So he forks out hundreds of thousands of dollars [he declines to give the exact amount] to study “50 free-range Americans” and the results come back a little bit startling.
After popping six of his capsules a day for a year and testing them for various hallmarks of aging, the subjects came back with a “biological age” – as opposed to “chronological age” – 5.71 years younger than when they started.
At least, that 5.71 number is the one he chooses to highlight among many, not all of which were headed in the same direction.
But the Cel study lands in the longevity industry’s “trillion-dollar moment”, when it is straining to prove its claims. Aging science has exploded from fringe curiosity to a multibillion-dollar race, yet most products still lean heavily on theory and animal data rather than human evidence.
Macpherson’s trial, imperfect as experts say it is, attempts something unusual in the supplements world: putting a commercial formulation through a year-long human study and publishing the results. Whether that makes Cel a breakthrough or just a polished entry in a hype-heavy field is now the question Macpherson has to answer.
The company Macpherson founded in 2019 in New Zealand, SRW Laboratories, is now 70% owned by Australian wellness portfolio business Wellizen.
Macpherson, a pharmacist, had spent the first part of his career building businesses around medication management and health technology — first as a pharmacy owner, then as the founder of Pharmacy Direct, one of New Zealand’s earliest online pharmacies.
Later he developed software that streamlined medication administration in rest homes and hospitals. But a decade ago, he stepped into biotech, taking the helm at Otago University spin-out MitoQ, a company built around a patented molecule targeting mitochondrial health, now enjoying exploding global sales.
Immersed in mitochondrial biology, he had a realisation: focusing on one mechanism was like “servicing the engine of your car and ignoring the brakes.” Around the same time he came across a seminal 2013 scientific paper – The Hallmarks of Ageing – in the journal Cell — which outlined nine biological processes that drive ageing.
“It was dense, amazing science,” he says. “But nobody had translated it for the rest of us.” Macpherson wrote a book aimed at decoding the science for ordinary readers — explaining, for example, how to reduce senescent “zombie cells”, or support DNA repair.
The more he read, the clearer it became that he could, perhaps, create a product to address the hallmarks in a coordinated way. “I went away and looked at a lot of research on natural products which interact with the pathways associated with the hallmarks.”
He found herbs and legal food ingredients that had been shown to help those hallmarks. “The reason I went for natural supplements is, one, I didn’t have the billions I was going to require to do it with drugs, but two, we can get something out to people now. And it’s a safe, unique combination put together in a unique way to encompass all of those hallmarks.”
That idea became the foundation for SRW Laboratories in 2019 and it launched its three products – Cel1, Cel2, and Cel3 – in 2021.
“Overall, it is interesting,” Mantzioris says, “but the evidence base is not high quality — not the kind we would use to make recommendations to people.”
Dr Evangeline Mantzioris, Nutrition & Food Sciences, University of South Australia
“It’s about treating aging with the right stuff at the right time,” says Macpherson. “There’s no point taking anything that supports your mitochondria in your 20s because you’ll be bouncing off the walls with energy. It’s just not the time to do it.”
Cel1 is designed for people over 30. “I call it sunscreen for your cells. It’s helps support healthy DNA repair mechanisms, and lowers inflammation.”
Cel2 is for people over 40. “It’s all about the mitochondrial dysfunction.”
Cel3 is about removal of unhealthy cells for people over 50. “As we get into our 50s, our immune system is getting a bit sleepy so you build up more and more of these zombie cells, and they increase inflammation and that causes disease and compromises cellular function.”
Where’s the proof?
That brings us to the study.
Integrative doctor Steve Warren from Utah conducted a study of 50 of his patients – healthy adults with an average age of 65 who took the full Cel protocol daily alongside 10 minutes of walking and five minutes of mindfulness. After 12 months, the paper published in the journal Aging reported the Cel system “may effectively reduce biological age and improve health metrics”.
SRW highlights its best result – a 5.71-year biological age reduction on one of the biological clocks – though others were less dramatic, and a few moved in the opposite direction.
Longevity researchers say the data on Cel is intriguing, but it comes with large caveats.
Professor Andrea Maier, director of the NUS Academy for Healthy Longevity in Singapore, says the study is “a meaningful first step” – but only a step. The fundamental issue, she says, is design.
“Our field is struggling with bringing good study designs to the table, and that means including a placebo,” she says. Without a control group, “you cannot actually say what the reason was for the favourable changes … Is it because of the supplements, or is it because of the mindfulness, or something else entirely? We simply do not know.”
Maier says the results show something important — that older adults can move the needle on their biological age — but she would not endorse MacPherson’s claim of a 5.71-year reversal.
“What I see is that some of the biological markers are declining and people are a little bit better in terms of their immune profile.”
“The technology I’m seeing coming in right now will easily add a decade in healthspan. We’re just getting started.”
Greg MacPherson, founder and CEO of SRW
Even so, she said the study should not be dismissed and that it is a constructive contribution to a young field that has relied on theory and enthusiasm more than evidence. “Let’s put it in a positive way. This is the first step. The next step is to do it properly — larger numbers, with a placebo — and then we’ll see what the real effect is.”
Nutrition scientist Dr Evangeline Mantzioris, Program Director for Nutrition & Food Sciences at the University of South Australia, agrees the study is interesting — but says it leaves too many unanswered questions to support strong claims. It wasn’t registered, had no placebo group and did not track the diet and exercise of the participants nor their clinical outcomes such as blood pressure, lipids, glucose, illness frequency or healthcare use.
“Overall, it is interesting,” Mantzioris says, “but the evidence base is not high quality — not the kind we would use to make recommendations to people.”
But Macpherson points out they did traditional test associated with health and longevity, such as grip strength, sit-stand and body composition.
“I’m glad that we did that because the biological clocks are quite nascent technology. They’re giving us remarkable insight into the health of our cells, but no one knows quite yet what that means. Like, you’ve got to project it you know out 50 years to understand what a reduction of biological age actually means in terms of someone’s lifespan.”
He points out that 10 minutes of walking and five minutes of mindfulness can hardly explain the improvements.
“Remarkably, participants came out with more youthful bodies. They were stronger and leaner and slimmer. And that reflects almost a shift back in time in terms of a younger body.”
AI supplement design
Macpherson certainly has more studies in store.
SRW Laboratories has gone into partnership with Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong- and New York-based biotech that uses genomics and big data for drug discovery. But they’re working with SRW to do for herbs and supplements what AI is more famously doing for finding new drug treatments.
“Insilico can do in weeks what would have taken us years,” says Macpherson. “It’s just incredible.
“The insights that the artificial intelligence is giving us in building our next formula is a thing of beauty. That’s still a wee way away, because we want to repeat the clinical trial and both us and Insilico have a significant brand equity to protect, so we want to make sure that what we think we’ve got is the real deal.
“All the diseases we encounter in later life — Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, cancer — are just syndromes of cellular ageing. If you can slow that process, you can delay these problems.
“There’s billions of dollars of research going into this space, and if you can successfully modulate ageing, you’ve got a blockbuster on your hands.”
Society stands to benefit if aging can be unlocked. A study published in Nature Aging by economists Andrew J. Scott, Martin Ellison, and longevity scientist David Sinclair suggests that extending global lifespan by just one year would unlock US$38 trillion in value. Times that by ten for a ten-year life extension.
If you want in on that, Macpherson’s message: Stay healthy for the next ten years. “Because the technology I’m seeing coming in right now will easily add a decade in healthspan. We’re just getting started.”
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