I used to think this was sort of the domain of crackpot billionaires faced with the fear of their own unavoidable death, the ultimate obstacle for them personally.
It may be, but with demographic trends I see it as more of a urgent public health issue. The inverted pyramid starting to show up in many places means we either have to increase the population of young, or somehow increase the health of older individuals into older ages. Both are probably necessary but the former often implies an increasing population size as a whole, which has its own consequences (it doesn't have to be that way but often is).
I just saw a couple of articles somewhere about investments in a major research institute, where they were luring people away from academic positions? So it seems at least nominally there still is ongoing investment in the area.
My impression is that so far it seems to be progressing like most areas of science: there seem to be a couple of well-established findings (like caloric restriction), along with a steady rate of new findings that usually don't replicate or generalize.
The most recent interest I've read about has been in senolytic compounds like fisetin and quercetin-dasatinib mixtures. It's unclear to me how that is working out one way or the other. It seems promising but also without a lot of data yet. If I remember correctly there were some concerns about ongoing use of low-dose dasatinib in some people but I might be misremembering that.
My sense is this area is somewhat difficult because it has had the reputation of "searching for a fountain of youth" and being the domain of aging billionaires. It also requires time in humans, which is notoriously difficult in research for practical reasons.
Also, a lot of it falls into this area that is medically regulated, but outside the domain of traditional clinical practice. This creates a problem because it's not treated as a disease that could be leveraged for clinical research. E.g., you can't apply the model of "randomize treatments to people who would be coming into the clinic anyway for disease X" because it's not recognized as a disease. But if it's something like quercetin-dasatinib compound, you can't just get it as a supplement, and so study it that way.
Hopefully the stigma issue will decline; the longitudinal issue is more challenging in some ways. The issue about it being regulated but not a disease is more problematic, and will either require a change in mindset (maybe going along with the stigma issue) and/or will require some deregulation of healthcare.
What used to be thought of as a "natural causes" death has now been classified and because of this classification, opportunities for new and exciting treatments and preventative measures are being applied.