Aging is surprisingly dichotomous. Genetic studies suggest that in fruit flies and mice, the gene sets that affect male and female longevity are mostly distinct. And a lopsided amount of what’s known about aging comes from the study of – wait for it – males. Read part three of BioWorld’s multipart series on extending the human lifespan.
The U.S. NIH’s National Institute on Aging’s Intervention Testing Program has been searching for ways to extend lifespan for more than two decades by now. And in its animal studies, it has been successful multiple times. There are half a dozen drugs, and a few lifestyle interventions, that reliably extend lifespan in one or both sexes by up to 30%. Read more in part four and five of BioWorld’s multipart series on extending the human lifespan.
Remarkably, the U.S. NIH’s National Institute on Aging’s Intervention Testing Program (ITP) has achieved its success rate while keeping to the highest standards of scientific rigor. Any researcher can suggest drugs that the ITP might test. The program can only test a fraction of the suggestions in gets, though, so proposals go through a rigorous vetting process.
A lot of what goes on during aging remains too poorly understood for straightforward translation. There are hallmarks of aging, and researchers are getting a handle on its biological mechanisms. But in a basic sense, “we still don’t have much of an idea what causes aging,” said Björn van Eyss of the Leibniz Institute for Aging Research. Part six of BioWorld’s multipart series on extending the human lifespan explores the moonshot attracting the most attention: in vivo partial reprogramming.
In the biopharma industry, the sirtuins have been a cautionary tale of some of the challenges in translating aging research. Research in the early aughts suggested that activating them could extend lifespan, and the spectacular rise of sirtuin activators crested in 2008, when GSK plc bought preclinical startup Sirtris Pharmaceuticals Inc. to the tune of $720 million, only to shutter it a few years later. But the hopes attached to sirtuin activators have not panned out. Read more in part seven of BioWorld’s multipart series on extending the human lifespan.
If anti-aging drugs are to become widely available and adopted, especially in the U.S., they have some serious hurdles to overcome. And those hurdles aren’t all in the lab or clinic. With classes of anti-aging drugs already in the pipeline, “the biggest hurdle is FDA approval. Then reimbursement,” said George Kuchel, a professor and director of the UConn Center on Aging at the University of Connecticut. Read the final installment of BioWorld’s multipart series on extending the human lifespan.
Age is the biggest risk factor for just about every common disease in high-income countries, which suggests that slowing down cellular aging would have massive effects on individual and public health. Delaying the average onset of Alzheimer’s disease by five years, for example, would roughly halve its prevalence. But in practice, there are no approved anti-aging medications.
Biotechs that tackle the effects of aging are beginning to make headlines: in January Altos Labs Inc. launched with a reported investment from Jeff Bezos. With Bezos getting involved with San Francisco-based Altos, the immediate reaction was that anti-aging biotechs would be there for the benefit of billionaires searching for eternal life.
Not so, according to London U.K.-based Genflow Biosciences plc, which hopes to show that fighting aging is really about improving health as people age.
Apollo Health Ventures raised $180 million for a new venture capital fund focused on biotechnology companies developing therapies for age-related diseases. It may also invest in healthtech and digital health opportunities, but the latter constitute a minority pursuit for an investment team that is building up capabilities and expertise in disease biology.
When James Peyer, Cambrian Biopharma Inc.’s CEO, watched his grandfather fail every cancer treatment and eventually pass away, he came to a realization that now forms the backbone of his company. “The more I learned about cancer, the more convinced I became that we were approaching cancer as a disease in the wrong way,” Peyer told BioWorld. “We were waiting until people were sick and only then doing something about it.” Cambrian just closed on an oversubscribed series C that brought in $100 million to develop a pipeline of therapies designed to treat and prevent age-related diseases.
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