Medicines offer a healthy life for over 100 years
CPC News - New drugs that can help people live healthily for 100 years or more may be available in as little as two years, an expert said yesterday.
The drugs have been developed as a result of research into age-related ailments such as heart disease, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer's.
To satisfy the requirements of drug regulators and the market they are billed as remedies for specific illnesses.
But in actual fact they tackle multiple causes of unhealthy aging, according to Professor Nir Barzilai, one of the world's leading age scientists.
Prof Barzilai's own work at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York has identified genetic variants that mark out people who live to a "ripe old age".
The new drugs build on these discoveries, which involve biological pathways affecting metabolism, cell-death, inflammation and cholesterol.
"Pharmaceutical companies are developing these drugs now," said Prof Barzilai, who joined other experts at the Royal Society in London yesterday for a discussion meeting on the science of aging.
A subsidiary of drug giant GlaxoSmithKline is examining sirtuins, a family of enzymes associated with a whole range of age-related diseases.
Another key drug target is an enzyme called cholesterol ester transfer protein (CETP) which affects levels of "good" cholesterol.
Drugs that inhibit CETP are being developed by two other pharmaceutical companies.
A small biotech company, Proteostasis, is investigating a third pathway involving the cell-growth chemical IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor-1).
Genes
Although the initial aim is to develop a drug that combats Alzheimer's, the same pathway is thought to play a role in Parkinson's, motor neurone disease and Huntington's.
Research has shown that a few lucky people naturally possess such defenses against the debilitating effects of aging programmed into their genes.
One individual who intrigued scientists was Jean Calment, a French woman who died at the age of 122 years, without suffering a trace of dementia, diabetes or cancer.
She took up fencing at 85, rode a bicycle at 100, and smoked until her age reached triple figures.
People blessed with anti-aging genes tend not to get seriously ill but die suddenly at the end of their lives, Prof Barzilai pointed out.
"The cost of treating 100-year-olds in their last two years of life is a third of what it costs to treat somebody aged 70 to 80.
"People who die between 70 and 80 are sick in the last few years of their life. Centenarians are dying healthy."
Studies had revealed a strong association between reaching 100 years of age and very high blood levels of HDL. Centenarians with this HDL profile were powerfully protected against Alzheimer's.
Prof Barzilai described his "vision" as a once-daily pill which staved off the effects of old age and would probably be taken when a person reached their 40s or 50s.
