A new anti-ageing drug could prevent diseases associated with growing older

A DISCOVERY made in the basement of a university building could hold the secret to eternal youth. It’s being called an anti-ageing drug.

Is this the key to eternal youth?

A DISCOVERY made in the basement of a University of California building could hold the secret to eternal youth.

The breakthrough comes after a decade of research into slowing down the ageing process from scientist Irina Conboy and her colleagues, at the university, based in Berkeley, near San Francisco.

The latest finding is a small-molecule drug that effectively reversed brain and muscle tissues to youthful levels in ageing mice.

Ms Conboy said while the drug will not save humans from inevitable death, it could help prevent ageing-related diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and Parkinson’s.

“Ageing is a synonym with diseases,” she told Motherboard.

“When we are young, we don’t have these diseases. But when we are old, it doesn’t matter what background or gender or culture, we all have them.

“If we can better understand the ageing process, then we don’t need to have different hospitals, departments, and institutes that deal with each disease.”

The TGF-beta 1 (stained green) is barely present in the Microglia of the young brain, but is overpowering in the old brain.

The TGF-beta 1 (stained red) is barely present in young tissue but abundant in the old tissue.

Ms Conboy said the drug, known as Alk5 kinase inhibitor, interferes with the growth factor TGF-beta 1, which depresses the ability of various types of stem cells to renew tissue.

“The TGF-beta 1 pathway seemed to be one of the main culprits in multi-tissue ageing,” she said.

“That one protein, when unregulated, ages multiple stem cells in distinct organs, such as the brain, pancreas, heart and muscle.

“This is really the first demonstration that we can find a drug that makes the key TGF-beta 1 pathway, which is elevated by ageing, behave younger, thereby rejuvenating multiple organ systems.”

The treatment which has been delivered to mice with an injection into their bloodstream will be delivered to humans via the same method.

The research team are on the brink of conducting clinical trials of the drug with humans, but Ms Conboy said a lack of funding from the federal government had made the process difficult.

“Research for biomedicine right now is very scarce,” she said.

“If you want to have clinical trials or develop new medicine, there are very limited resources for that.”

More funding is needed to reverse the effects of ageing

Postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, Hanadie Yousef, was the lead author of a study into the drug and she said the discovery is very exciting.

“When I was starting graduate school five years ago, there was absolutely nothing known about how ageing actually happened,” she told Motherboard.

“The field is growing so rapidly that I would bet within the next decade we’ll see effective anti-ageing therapeutic methods.

“I look at it as more promising than anything.”

Ms Yousef said she believed the new drug would make death a much more graceful experience.

“The goals of my colleagues and I are not to live forever,” she said.

“Instead of becoming old and becoming a burden on society, we can age ourselves more with integrity.

“I hope we’ll just die in our sleep with no cancer or disease eating up our organs.”