Fight Aging!

Popular science articles covering the longevity industry and research into the treatment of aging tend to be a grab-bag of different projects and people of wildly different value and characteristics, all given much the same weight in the narrative. It takes a year or two of work to come to some initial understanding of the state of the field of aging research, to be able to start to distinguish good ideas from bad ideas, and make arguments about what is likely to have larger versus smaller effects on aging. No popular science journalist has put in that time. If looking for a single point of blame, it may be that there is at present no agreed-upon way to measure efficacy of a treatment for aging in humans, coupled to the point that most approaches to slow aging via metabolic adjustment behave quite differently in long lived species (such as our own) versus short-lived species (such as laboratory mice). Absent a way to rapidly assess a treatment for aging in humans, people can continue to equate likely good and likely bad approaches without being called on it.

Longevity research is advancing - but slowly. Clinical trials are moving forward on select uses for longevity drugs, younger researchers are taking the field more seriously, and private organizations are pledging significant support to research: The Saudi-based Hevolution Foundation has promised up to $1 billion in funding annually for biotech startups and academic researchers.

But while there likely remain many promising treatment candidates that have yet to be identified, they would take decades to reach clinical trials. Even academics who are bullish on the promise of longevity research fear that, for all the fanfare, the field has become too fixated on a few drugs and lifestyle adjustments that have been under investigation for years, while neglecting the basic research that could reveal novel pathways to slow down human aging.

In the last two decades, scientists have performed hundreds of lab experiments - mostly on animals - on drugs like rapamycin, canagliflozin, acarbose, empagliflozin, metformin, and on interventions like calorie restriction in diets and removal of nondividing senescent cells. Instead of testing the effects of these treatments on specific illnesses, many of these studies test whether certain interventions slow down animals' aging processes and help them live longer.

The expansion of longevity research has unearthed some potentially useful information about which biological mechanisms control aging and how to alter them. In mice and other species, changing a single pathway has the power to extend life by significant margins, raising hopes that if humans respond similarly, certain drugs could extend human lives by years. The horizon for this future is still far off. Most researchers I spoke to didn't believe that humans were going to experience a rapid increase in life expectancy any time soon - or maybe ever. They believed progress would instead be made in healthspan, helping people stay healthier for longer and avoiding long periods of physical and cognitive decline as they get older.

Link: https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/24121932/anti-aging-longevity-science-health-drugs