Many people want to stop the ticking clock of their age and add more healthy years in their life. And if any drug successfully makes it happen, then it would be the biggest breakthrough of science. Many medical researchers and biogerontologists are working towards anti-aging drugs that would reverse or tap brakes on the aging process of a human body. But the research regarding anti-aging is hard to achieve and is laborious and costly. Until now. The good news is, anti-aging drugs are under clinical tests now and after passing those tests successfully, they will be available in the market. Also, Anti-aging drugs were already listed as the top 10 breakthrough technologies by MIT that are expected to make a difference and solve important problems.
In recent years, biogerontologists at Paul F. Glenn Center for Aging research have made significant progress towards unlocking the secret of longevity. Their efforts and work are a ray of hope in this research. Richard Miller, the director of the Glenn Center says that they have documented 4 different drugs that work in mice decelerate aging in mice and postpone the diseases and disabilities which make aging difficult. Miller’s laboratory results show that the anti-aging drugs have shown to increase the mice’s lifespan by 15- 25%.
Other companies also have started working on anti-aging drugs. The wave of a new class of anti-aging drugs has begun human testing. These drugs will not increase your life but will aim to treat specific ailments by reversing the process of aging. The drugs are called senolytics. These types of drugs work by removing cells that accumulate as we age. And those types of cells are known as ‘senescent’. The senescent cells create low-level inflammation that suppresses the normal mechanism of cellular repair.
San-Francisco based Unity Biotechnology reported initial results in patients with mild to severe osteoarthritis of the knee. Results from larger clinical trials are expected in the second half of 2020. The company is also developing a similar kind of drug to treat age-related ailments of eyes and lungs. Senolytics are in human tests, along with the number of promising approaches targeting biological processes that are the root cause of aging and other diseases.
There is also a company Alkahest that injects patients with components found in young people’s blood. They say by doing this they are trying to stop the cognitive and functional decline in patients suffering from mild to moderate Alzheimers.
Researchers at Drexel University College of Medicine even tried to see if a cream including the immune-suppressing drug rapamycin could slow aging in humans. The tests reflect researchers to increase their efforts to learn if many diseases associated with aging such as heart diseases, arthritis, cancer, etc can be hacked to delay.
So there are many researchers, scientists, companies working on developing anti-aging drugs that can prevent humans from diseases that are caused due to aging. The drugs might not increase longevity but they would surely add healthy years to your life span. Now let’s wait and watch for human trials and their results to unfold.
