Researchers are harnessing basic biology to develop drugs that foster healthy aging. Just don’t call them antiaging pills.
Each morning after breakfast, Scott Broadbent takes a plastic bottle from the refrigerator in his home in Alameda, Calif., pops the top, and drinks the contents, 2.5 ounces of milky liquid. “It has sort of a pineapple creamy flavor,” he says. “It’s really not bad.”
Just don’t call these potential medicines antiaging therapies. “That term is associated with an industry that is trying to sell products to the public to separate people from their money,” says S. Jay Olshansky, a demographer and geroscientist at the University of Illinois Chicago. The antiaging market includes everything from face creams meant to zap wrinkles to pills that promise to turn back the clock. “It’s bogus,” he says.
By the late 2000s, “the whole perspective of the scientific community changed,” says Felipe Sierra, who was then a program officer at the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Md. Aging biology moved from a phase of description into a phase of molecular investigation. Sierra wanted a name to bring the field together. He landed on, a word he had first seen in a grant proposal by another researcher studying aging, Gordon Lithgow. “Gero-” comes from the Greek word for old man.
One of the most commonly tested senolytic regimens is a combination of two compounds: the anticancer drug dasatinib and quercetin, an antioxidant that occurs naturally in grapes, berries and other fruits and vegetables. Other research efforts plan to compare fisetin, a compound found in strawberries and apples, with a placebo to see if it has an impact on frailty and markers of inflammation in the blood.
What’s more, as James Kirkland, a geriatrician at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., points out, many of the clinical trials happening now will fail. “In fact, most will,” he says. That’s just a part of drug development. But nearly eight years after investigators first announced the 3,000-person trial, they’re still trying to get together funding. Metformin is cheap and readily available, no longer protected by a patent, so drug companies have no incentive to develop it for aging. Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, who is leading the study, has started telling people the trial will start in January.
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