Clients, not patients
Joanna Bensz built one of Europe’s first proper longevity clinics from nothing. With Prince Michael von Liechtenstein she opened the Longevity Center at the end of 2019 — the first in Central and Eastern Europe — and has since grown it to Germany and Zurich. Before longevity she spent years as a senior executive in multinational and Fortune 500 companies.
She insists on a distinction that sounds small and is not: the people who come to her are clients, not patients. They are not sick and not there for a cure. They come to understand where their health actually stands today, and to design a plan — lifestyle, supplementation, medicine — to move the needle. A healthspan of 120 in our lifetime, she says, would be a huge win; seeing it inside ten years would be extraordinary.
Underneath the optimism is real rigour. Her first question when she started was the hardest one in the whole field: what is a healthy human, and what parameters do you measure? If healthy people walk in, how do you validate that anything you recommend is helping? She treats biological-age tests — telomere length, GlycanAge, epigenetic clocks — not as diagnostics but as motivational tools, and she is clear they are scientifically, not yet medically, validated.
The line that stays with you is about how she reads them: you are not looking for the lowest number, you are looking for the weakest link.
And she is doing something bigger than one clinic. She founded the International Institute of Longevity and started the Roundtable of Longevity Clinics, held at the Buck Institute, to bring the world’s clinics together — to share best practices, run joint research, and answer the question the marketing has outrun: what actually is a longevity clinic? So many use the word, she notes, with nothing behind it.
