One expert said that a pill that could help a person reverse the effects of aging could be on the market in the next five years.
It was revealed that Sam Altman, 37, funded biotech startup Retro BioScience with $180 million last month. He’s the latest in a long line of Silicon Valley billionaires throwing their vast fortunes behind gerontology.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has reportedly invested $3 billion in life-extending startup Altos Labs. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has invested in the Methuselah Foundation, which aims to make the “new 90 fifty”.
With all of these resources being thrown around in anti-aging, Andrew Steele, author of the 2020 book Ageless: The New Science of Getting Ageless Without Ageing, thinks an anti-aging pill could be on drugstore shelves within five years.
He points to existing drugs — such as diabetes tablets metformin — that could be retooled as anti-aging therapies in the very near term.
Sam Altman (left), founder of OpenAI creator of ChatGPT, has invested in life-extending biotechnology. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (right) funded Atlos Labs and its life extension research for $3 billion.
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel has invested in the Methuselah Foundation, hoping it will far outstrip the average person’s lifespan.
‘With these billionaires, I’m sure some of them do it purely for personal gain – they have all this money and they just can’t spend it in one human life,’ Steele said.
But…if you are a smart investor, you can see that anti-aging drugs are a huge business opportunity because the potential market is every human being alive.
“I think it will be the biggest revolution in medicine since the discovery of antibiotics — and as a savvy businessman, you want to be at the forefront of that revolution.”
While aging does not directly kill people, the elderly are at risk of developing several deadly diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, heart disease, and cancer.
According to the World Health Organization, about 100,000 people die from diseases related to aging every day.
Mr Steele says: “Aging is the greatest human challenge of all time.
He explained that there are “20 to 30” companies developing new drugs known as “senolytics” that kill aging cells in the body.
In mice, these drugs cause elderly animals to suddenly become energetic and healthy.
“Many of these are drugs that we already understand and use for different purposes, so we don’t have to develop new ones,” Steele said.
An example of a mucolytic is the combination of datasinib, used in chemotherapy, and quercetin, a molecule found in fruits and vegetables.
Used together, they remove the “senescent” cells responsible for many of the problems associated with aging.
Another potential anti-aging drug is metformin. First approved in 1994 for type 2 diabetes, the drug has shown promise for extending life by improving the health of blood vessels.
“Some of these companies are trying to develop new, more effective drugs that can do the same thing better,” the author said.
That’s the kind of thing that’s very, very close to clinical realization. And I would be shocked if in five years we wouldn’t have some geriatric medicine in the clinic.
It probably won’t be aging at first. It will be for a specific disease – and maybe in 10 years, we’ll be using it for aging.
“These things are very, very close in range.”
Steel believes Jeff Bezos’ investment in Altos Labs – the largest biotech company ever – is a longer term opportunity.
Dr. Andrew Still is the author of Ageless, a new book on life extension (Tran Nguyen)
The company specializes in finding and developing cell therapies that can stop and ultimately reverse the aging process.
This is based on a process called cellular reprogramming, Steele says. It’s been shown to work on cells in a dish, and there’s some evidence that it works in mice — but it’s an incredibly complex piece of science.
“It’s like science that seems to have fallen through a wormhole from the future – and even if it works, do we have the applied biological understanding in 2020 to turn that into a practical treatment?”
When Altos Labs was announced, Elon Musk quipped on Twitter about the Amazon mogul: “If it doesn’t work out, he’ll sue to death!”
With labs launched in America and Cambridge, the company is known for paying scientists caught from the best universities in the world up to $1 million annually.
Realistically, Steele says, the treatments we’re likely to see in the near term will extend the “healthy period” by dealing with age-related ailments — delaying the onset of problems like dementia.
“The aim is to increase the number of healthy years of life rather than to lengthen the later life of poor health,” agrees Dr. Kathy Slack, a biologist at Aston University in the UK, telling DailyMail.com.
She said there are now “many” studies published that show genetic or environmental changes can extend a healthy lifespan.
‘Many of the biological systems that have been shown to play a role in healthy aging in these animal models are also present in humans and perform similar functions – so there is every reason to believe that these same processes influence human aging,’ she says. .
“The ultimate goal is really to try to manipulate these systems during human aging to maintain health and quality of life.”
Dr. Slack believes that successful treatments are likely to be a combination of medication and lifestyle changes – looking comprehensively at all diseases that affect people later in life.
‘Historically, we’ve viewed the various diseases associated with aging as distinct entities – so research tends to focus on each of them rather than looking at them together more holistically as a direct consequence of biological aging,’ she says.
We already know that there are lifestyle changes that can help maintain multiple aspects of health during aging.
Exercise, for example. But supplementation with drugs that target multiple physiological parameters of aging can have a significant impact on quality of life for older adults.
