A longevity panel advertised as covering more than a hundred biomarkers may involve fewer than sixty blood draws worth of actual measurement, with the remainder calculated from the results of the first sixty. Whether that difference is a rounding convention or a misrepresentation is now a question for a federal judge in California. This piece sets out what the Atlas of the Healthspan Economy can verify about panel claims and prices in this category, and what it deliberately declines to assert.
A hundred biomarkers. How many of those were measured?
A biomarker, in the ordinary clinical sense, is something observed in a sample. Hemoglobin A1c is measured. So is ferritin. A ratio of two measured values, or an index computed from several of them, is arithmetic performed on measurements rather than a measurement itself. Nothing about that arithmetic is illegitimate. Clinicians use derived indices constantly. The question is whether a derived value should be counted alongside a direct one when a company advertises how many biomarkers its panel covers.
On January 26, 2026, Function Health filed suit against Superpower in the Central District of California under the Lanham Act. The complaint characterizes the defendant’s marketing as a “sweeping campaign of deception” and alleges, among other claims, that members receive roughly fifty five direct lab measurements while the advertised figure exceeds a hundred, the balance being calculated ratios and indices derived from those same measurements. The filing also disputes comparative advertising, claims about doctor availability and testing locations, and the presentation of consumer review content. Function sought an injunction, corrective advertising, damages and disgorgement.
Superpower has a defensible answer. In a response to the Better Business Bureau, the company explained that the number of biomarker results shown in a member dashboard exceeds the number of underlying laboratory tests ordered, and described this as expected in laboratory medicine and standard for panels such as lipid particle testing. That is true. It is also true that a buyer comparing two advertised numbers has no way to know it.
These remain allegations. As of the most recent legal commentary available in March 2026, Superpower had not filed an answer, and no court has ruled on any of it. The Atlas records the dispute, not a verdict.
What the record shows:
- Two well capitalized companies, each selling a real product to real patients, disagree about the meaning of the central noun in their own category.
- The disagreement is definitional rather than scientific. Neither party is arguing that the other’s laboratory results are wrong.
- Because both positions are defensible, this will be resolved by disclosure conventions rather than by evidence.
- No regulator, standards body or professional society has published a binding definition of what a longevity panel may count as a biomarker.
- The Abu Dhabi Department of Health published clinical guidelines and a licensing standard for healthy longevity medicine in April 2025, which remains the only jurisdiction where the service category has a legal definition at all.
The most common failure: the derived number. A figure that reads as a count of tests performed but is partly a count of calculations performed on those tests. It is not a lie and it is not a measurement. It is a number that survives contact with a marketing page and does not survive contact with a clinician asking what was in the tube.
One hundred ninety nine dollars a year. In which state, and how many panels?
Advertised price and annual cost are different quantities in this category, and the gap between them is not small.
The figures below are what each operator or a dated secondary source published. They are recorded as claims with a date attached, not as verified equivalents. Comparing any two of them without checking the basis will mislead you.
| Organization | Reported price | Basis | As reported |
|---|---|---|---|
| Superpower | $199 per year, with pricing stated to vary in New York and New Jersey. A late June review reports $399 in those states. The operator’s own site does not publish that figure. | One panel per year, specialty tests and recommended supplements additional | superpower.com, checked July 27, 2026 |
| OneTwenty | $499 per year, $749 per year in New York and New Jersey | Membership, 85 biomarker baseline with quarterly retests | onetwenty.com, checked July 27, 2026 |
| Function Health | $365 per year, reduced from $499 | Membership, 100+ biomarkers plus a six month follow up panel | July 2026 review |
| Fountain Life BASE | $595 per year | 100+ blood biomarkers, clinician guided review, one DEXA scan at a center | Longevity.Technology, July 3, 2026 |
| Fountain Life APEX | $21,500 per year | Annual membership, full-body and brain MRI, DEXA scan, physician access | Fountain Life store (shop.fountainlife.com), checked July 27, 2026 |
Two things are visible in that table and neither is a price.
The first is what an undated figure can conceal. A price tracker published on July 13, 2026 listed the Function Health membership at $499 and described it as unchanged since launch. The company had in fact cut the price to $365. The tracker was not merely stale. It reported the opposite of the most newsworthy thing that had happened to that number, which is that the cheapest tier in the category got cheaper again. A price without a verification date is not a weak fact. It is a fact that can hide its own reversal.
The second is that the apparent gap between the lowest options narrows considerably once geography and panel frequency enter the comparison. A figure that looks like half price in an advertisement is closer to parity for a buyer in New Jersey who wants more than one panel a year. That is, in ordinary language, roughly what the lawsuit argues in legal language.
A third thing is visible only if you open the operators’ own pages side by side. Both Superpower and OneTwenty charge more in New York and New Jersey, for the same regulatory reasons. OneTwenty publishes both numbers, $499 and $749, on its own site. Superpower states that pricing may vary in those two states and does not say by how much. The $399 figure widely repeated for Superpower comes from a review, not from the company.
Neither approach is deceptive. One of them lets a buyer in Newark know what he will pay before he signs up. That difference is not visible in any comparison table that lists a single number per company, which is most of them.
The most common failure: the headline price. The national advertised figure, quoted without the state, the panel frequency or the date it was checked. It is the number that gets repeated across directories and comparison sites until it acquires the appearance of a fact.
Independent and transparent. Verified by whom?
Every directory in this category now describes itself as independent, transparent and free of paid placement. The language has become table stakes, which means it has stopped distinguishing anyone. What still distinguishes a record is whether it separates two different things: what an organization says about itself, and what the record has checked.
Those are not the same claim and they should not appear in the same typeface.
The reason this matters more here than in most industries is that the category contains both careful medicine and unproven intervention, frequently inside the same practice. A survey of 82 longevity clinics by MIT Technology Review found more than a third offering stem cell treatments with no clinical evidence of a lifespan benefit, and a separate review across 47 North American and European clinics described established preventive care sitting alongside unproven treatments under one roof. A record that flattened those distinctions into a single tone of endorsement would be worse than no record.
What the record shows:
- The Atlas of the Healthspan Economy tracks 294 organizations as of July 2026, across longevity and preventive care, femtech and women’s health, integrative and functional medicine, and healthtech and diagnostics.
- Panel sizes and price figures published here are recorded as operator claims with a source and a date, never as Atlas verified equivalents.
- Where an organization publishes no price, the Atlas records that absence explicitly rather than leaving the field blank, because in this category an absent price is itself informative.
- The Atlas takes no position on whether early detection improves outcomes. That question is live and contested in the clinical literature, and a record that recommended an answer would stop being a record.
The most common failure: the republished claim. A directory prints an operator’s assertion in its own editorial voice, and the claim acquires a second source without ever acquiring a second check. Repeat that across enough sites and a marketing figure becomes what a language model tells the next buyer.
What a record does instead
The useful response to a category that cannot agree on its own vocabulary is not to pick a side. It is to publish a method.
Three rules govern how the Atlas records a contested figure. Attribute it to whoever stated it. Date it, because a price checked in April is a different object from a price checked in July. Distinguish the claim from the verification, always, including when the claim is almost certainly true.
None of that resolves the Function and Superpower dispute, and it is not meant to. What it does is make the Atlas usable while the dispute is unresolved, which is the condition this entire industry is operating in and will be for some years yet. The healthspan gap runs to roughly eleven and a half years of poor health in high income countries. The market forming around closing it now attracts billions in capital and remains, by the assessment of the researchers studying it, short on consistent standards and reliable evidence.
A record does not fix that. It refuses to make it worse.
The Atlas of the Healthspan Economy is a neutral record of organizations working on healthspan. It records. It does not recommend. Read the method at about the Atlas, or start with the Healthtech and Diagnostics pillar.
A note on what this piece does not claim. Panel and price figures are as reported by the sources and dates cited, and several are contested or may have changed since. Nothing here characterizes the merits of pending litigation. Where community discussion of a company appears absent, that absence has not been verified across all major platforms and should not be read as evidence of anything.