‘Anti-ageing pill’ metformin to be tested in human trials
Anti-ageing pills, once the stuff of science fiction, are coming a step closer to reality with plans for clinical trials.
Anti-ageing pills, once the stuff of science fiction, are coming a step closer to reality with plans for the first clinical trials of a drug designed to give people a longer and healthier life.
Scientists plan to test metformin, a drug already widely used for diabetes. Metformin is already known to prolong life in animals, and last year researchers at Cardiff University reported that patients with type 2 diabetes who took it lived, on average, more than 15 per cent longer than a group of comparable healthy people. The drug appeared to reduce the risk of cancer, heart disease and cognitive decline.
It is unheard of for a single drug to sharply reduce the risk of such a wide range of conditions, so the findings provoked wide interest.
Now Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Ageing Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, wants to take the research a step further by giving it to 3000 people who are not diabetic to see if it prolongs their lives too. He has argued that current treatments for age-related illness simply see patients “exchange one disease for another”. Dr Barzilai suggests that the best way to prevent those diseases is to slow the underlying ageing process that causes them — using drugs such as metformin.
In a co-authored paper he said: “Evidence from animal models and in-vitro studies suggests that metformin changes metabolic and cellular processes associated with age-related conditions.”
Anti-ageing research used to be seen as offbeat, but scientists have shown that life can be prolonged in animals, for example by putting them on near-starvation diets or giving them novel drugs. This has established the principle that altering certain physiological pathways can extend life.
Dr Barzilai and his colleagues are talking to the US Food and Drug Administration about the proposed trial, with the first hurdles being to persuade the agency to recognise ageing as a disease that can be treated, rather than a natural unstoppable process.
Another is the $62.5 million estimated cost of a trial, which would need to enrol 3000 patients, aged 70-80, at 15 separate centres and then follow them for seven years.
The Sunday Times