Anti-aging pills are the medications that can slow down the aging process and can make an individual look younger 10-20 years.but do these medications really work
One of the few drug studies ever carried out in an attempt to address this question was reported by Novartis on Christmas Eve 2014. The company had sought to see whether giving low doses of a drug called everolimus to people over 65 increased their response to flu vaccines.It did, by about 20 percent. Yet behind the test was a bigger question about whether any drug can slow or reverse the symptoms of old age. Novartis’s study on everolimus, which looked at whether the immune system of elderly people could be made to act younger, has been called the “first human aging trial.”Last week a Boston company, PureTech Health, said it was licensing two drug molecules, and the right to use them against aging-related disease, from Novartis and making the research the basis of a startup company, resTORbio. The company says it will further test whether such drugs can rejuvenate aged immune cells.
The drug Novartis tested is a derivative of rapamycin, a compound first discovered oozing from a bacterium native to Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, and named after it. Thanks to its broad effects on the immune system, rapamycin has already been used in transplant medicine as an immune suppressant and a version is sold by Novartis as the anticancer prescription Afinitor.What we don’t have yet are formal studies of whether rapamycin or any other drug can lengthen people’s life spans. For many reasons, companies haven’t been keen to pursue potential anti-aging treatments. Scientifically, longevity pills remain an outré idea, the domain of cranks and quacks. Clinically, it’s difficult to prove a drug extends life, as it would take too long. Regulation-wise, there’s no clear path forward, as aging hasn’t generally been recognized as a disease you can treat.Brian Kennedy, who researches aging at the Buck Institute, says the Novartis study was “groundbreaking” because of how it found a way to address the drug’s impact on the effects of age. “No one has the stomach to do longevity studies,” he said in an interview last year. “Or you can do what Novartis did, which is to choose a property of aging and see if you can slow it down.”Rapamycin acts on what is called the mTOR complex, a set of genes that play a basic role in regulating the metabolism of cells. When mTOR is blocked, it can push cells into a life-extending survival mode. So can a variety of other tricks, including feeding animals a very low-calorie diet. “But this happens to be one mechanism that is actionable with a drug and not, say, calorie restriction,” says Bolen. “I think this is a practical way to go about the modulation. What the biology tells you is that what was observed in many other species looks as though it is going to hold in humans.”
