Can Science stop or prevent ageing?

Could a Pill Put the Brakes on Aging?

The No. 1 risk factor for all the big diseases -- cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s -- is aging. But instead of treating the diseases, could a drug treat the aging process itself? That’s the idea behind a growing area of research drawing extensive support from both government and private donors, including millions from Silicon Valley executives like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. While federal science agency budgets have struggled in the past decade, funding at the National Institute on Aging has risen more than 50% since 2007. Researchers are seeking a drug to push back the most serious consequences of aging -- and keep people healthy, active, and alert years longer, a notion they call “health span.” “I’m not interested in creating a population that lives to be 200, because that would be a problem for the world we live in,” says Corinna Ross, PhD, a biologist at Texas A&M University in San Antonio. “But if we can keep people out of nursing home care and reduce the number of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients, that would be ideal.” What scientists know about aging has advanced sharply in the past 2 decades as they learn more about what drives the aging process within cells. With the race on to find an anti-aging pill, two of the most promising ones are drugs that already exist: metformin and rapamycin.

Metformin

Doctors have prescribed metformin, the most common drug to treat type 2 diabetes, for about 60 years. But it’s received new attention as a possible anti-aging drug after researchers in Britain found that people with diabetes who took it outlived some of their peers who did not have the disease by 15%. “They compared them to a whole bunch of people who were matched for weight and smoking and [other factors] but who didn’t have diabetes,” says Steven Austad, PhD, chairman of the biology department at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. “It turned out the diabetics on metformin were living longer than the non-diabetics who were not on metformin. ... It was very, very intriguing.” Read more...

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