Will Anti-Aging Drugs Lead To A Brave New World? - Forbes

Ponce de León’s Fountain of Youth may soon be more than just a myth. According to Aubrey de Grey, a leading anti-aging researcher, there is likely a person alive today who will be immune to aging.  This optimism stems from the promising field of longevity research, which has shed its reputation as a quackery-ridden fringe science. If clinical trials of anti-aging drugs prove successful, it would utterly transform society in far-reaching ways. Could today’s generations live to see a world where 100 is the new 60?

There has been a growing push to examine the basic molecular processes behind aging and find ways to counteract them. Some treatments already exist as on-label drugs for other conditions, while others are experimental. The goal is to target aging itself as a major risk factor for the chronic diseases that cut lives short. “Drugs that lengthen health span,” The Atlantic proclaims, “are becoming to medical researchers what vaccines and antibiotics were to previous generations in the lab: their grail.”

Of all these possibilities, rapamycin has emerged as the most promising. It inhibits a gene called mTOR, which switches the body’s resources from “growth” to a more stress-resistant “maintenance” mode. This reflex taps into the same biological processes triggered by “caloric restriction,” a faminelike diet that, while known to reliably extend life span in a variety of organisms, would basically require humans to starve themselves. In a study funded by the National Institutes of Health, male and female mice given rapamycin in late middle age lived 9 percent and 14 percent longer, respectively, than untreated mice. As Businessweek explains, this is roughly equivalent to giving 60-year-old women a drug that enables them to live to 95.

What’s more, rapamycin has also produced encouraging results in human trials. A recent study of elderly patients found that small doses of a rapamycin-like drug improved their immune response to a flu vaccine by 20 percent, sating worries that it would suppress immune response. Pharmaceutical companies large and small, from Novartis to Calico, are now pouring resources into a field Big Pharma has long viewed with suspicion.

A scientist examines human cells under a microscope. (Photo by Ted S. Warren via AP)

But many scientists remain unconvinced.The history of anti-aging research is littered with misfires. Rapamycin isn’t without side effects: In mice, it limited fertility and increased the likelihood of developing cataracts and diabetes. The last focus of such hype, the “red wine pill” resveratrol, ended up failing in human trials. Everything from gold to vitamin C to growth hormones has been touted for its supposed life-extending propertiesâ€"often by hucksters.  And the fact that anti-aging drugs will likely first find their way to consumers as repurposed versions of existing medications does not add to their credibility.

In the eyes of these researchers, we’re no closer to finding an “elixir of life” than we were thousands of years ago. “There are no interventions that have been documented to slow, stop, or reverse aging in humans,” S. Jay Olshansky, a professor of public health at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a famed critic of life-extending treatments, tells Businessweek. “The batting average is zero.”

Even those who are optimistic caution that there is much scientists still don’t understand.A team of German researchers, for example, recently argued that the rapamycin’s effect on mice is largely due to the fact it inhibits tumors that represent their main cause of death. Moreover, even if it does slow aging, it might take decades for researchers to definitively establish its real effects. And in the end, these treatments might not make as much of a difference as the life-extending behaviors doctors have always recommended: exercise regularly and eat healthy food.