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It has been shown that a cocktail of drugs doubles the shelf life – but until now, it only works for flies and worms.
A Singapore research team wants to extend human life through pharmacological means. It is an ambitious goal, but the results are already happening. In a new study, the team said it was able to increase the healthy life span and delay the aging rate of a tiny worm known as Caenorhabditis elegans. The study is the fruit of a collaboration between Yale-NUS College and the National University of Singapore (NUS).
A longer life for a simple life
"Many countries around the world, including Singapore, are facing the challenges of an aging population," said Dr. Gruber, an assistant professor of biochemistry at Yale-NUS College, who leads the research.
"If we can find a way to prolong the healthy life span and delay the aging of the population, we will be able to counter the negative effects of an aging population, by offering countries not only medical and economic benefits, but also a better quality of life for their populations.
Some widely used drugs have quite interesting effects beyond their main indented use. For example, rapamycin / sirolimus, a drug administered after organ transplantation to prevent organ rejection, has been shown to increase the lifespan of several simple (non-human) species. Gruber's team wanted to see if cocktails of such life-prolonging drugs could be more effective at avoiding old age than the sum of their individual components. They tested combinations of two or three compounds at a time. The drugs in each mix were selected to target a different metabolic pathway related to aging in C. elegans, round worm living freely, up to about 1 mm (0.03 in) long.
The first positive sign is that the drugs had no negative impact on worms' health. The second good sign was that the cocktails were much more effective than the individual compounds. For example, three-drug cocktails have almost doubled the average lifespan of worms. It goes without saying that it's quite a feat: no other drug intervention has ever had such an effect on the lifespan of adult animals, the team reports.
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The third and perhaps most exciting discovery is that treated worms were healthier and spent a good part of their lives in good health at all ages. Thus, not only did they live longer, but they lived better for a greater part of their lives than untreated worms. In collaboration with Associate Professor Nicholas Tolwinski (also from Yale-NUS), researchers found that common fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) treated with drug cocktails also significantly increased the shelf life.
The fact that the drugs act on two organisms with distinct evolutionary antecedents suggests that they act on older pathways related to aging. It is therefore likely that they work the same way in humans.
"We would benefit not only in prolonging our lives, but also in spending more time without age-related diseases, such as arthritis, cardiovascular disease, cancer or Alzheimer's disease," said Dr. Gruber . "These diseases currently require very expensive treatments, so the economic benefits of being healthier longer would be enormous."
Dr. Gruber says that research is just a proof of principle. The point is to show that the approach is viable, that a multi-drug approach could be used to extend the healthy life span of adult animals – perhaps even humans.
In the future, the team plans to expand its research into three key areas. First, they want to develop even more effective drugs and drug mixes than those used in this study. They also want to accurately determine how each compound delays aging, to create computer models that can quickly test many other drug combinations. In the end, they want to try to apply the results of the slowing down of aging in humans.
The document "Synergy of drugs slows down aging and improves Healthspan through the lipid signaling of IGF and SREBP" was published in the journal Developmental cell.
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