Company Says New Drug May Help Reverse the Clock on Aging

The idea of an anti-aging pill has long been relegated to science fiction but a biotechnology firm says an AI-driven experimental lung disease drug shows promise in helping turn back the aging clock.The drug is called rentosertib and Insilico Medicine announced results Monday of a new study conducted in collaboration with scientists from Harvard, Stanford, and other universities that produced the promising results. Researchers evaluated biological age using six internationally recognized aging clocks. All six models consistently indicated a reduction in predicted biological age among a small study of 42 patients treated with rentosertib.Patients using the drug found approximately 3 to 4 years of reversal in their biological age and up to 6 years in one aging clock. Aging clocks estimate someone’s biological age by measuring how well their cells and tissues function.The study also showed promising reversal of declining lung function compared to placebo aligning with the aging clock age reversal.The experimental drug is far from going to market but shows promise that requires more studies.“This trial cannot yet separate slower aging from a treated lung, and the authors say so plainly. The experiment in healthy volunteers is the one I want to see next,” 2013 Nobel Prize laureate in Chemistry, Michael Levitt, said of the results.The study, published in Nature Biotechnology, represents the first clinical evaluation of a potentially first-in-class drug candidate featuring an AI-discovered target with relevance to aging and disease biology.Insilico Medicine’s founder and chief executive officer, Alex Zhavoronkov, will present the results Tuesday at the Nature conference at Paris. “The social and economic opportunity for drugs reversing biological age is vast – trillions of dollars and billions of life years,” Mr. Zhavoronkov said.“If you add just 3 extra years to everyone’s lifespan, that translates into roughly 25 billion life years on the global scale – at current life expectancy, that is roughly 340 million human lifetimes,” Mr. Zhavoronkov added.Insilico Medicine, a public company listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, says it has integrated AI to seek innovative drug solutions for unmet needs including fibrosis, oncology, immunology, pain, and obesity and metabolic disorders. The majority of the company’s more than 40 drug programs have a dual purpose targeting aging and disease in a broad range of areas.There is a growing movement in the pharmaceutical industry to study the possibility of repurposing existing medications for other conditions like anti-aging. The rise of GLP-1 drugs that have shown benefits beyond what they were developed to treat has increased interest in expanding research. A common diabetes drug since the 1950s, metformin, could be tested for possible anti-aging promise, Science Alert reported last week.

Company Says New Drug May Help Reverse the Clock on Aging

Company Says New Drug May Help Reverse the Clock on Aging

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