One of the mice received the new anti-aging drug and the other did not. The second mouse showed signs of old age - its fur began to fall out and grow dull, its eyes dimmed. The first mouse remained the same vigorous, had a thick coat and normal vision.
According to scientists, the drug extended the life of the second mouse by 36%, that is, if there were a person instead of a mouse, he would have lived 30 years longer.
The researchers are currently conducting six tests of anti-aging drugs (known as senolytics), and will begin six more tests later. If successful, anti-aging drugs will hit the market in two years.
Research is being conducted at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, under the direction of Dr. James Kirkland, Geriatrics Specialist and Director of the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center for Aging.
And this effect has already been achieved in animals.
Cell aging is believed to be the main cause of diseases such as arthritis, cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease and others in humans. And, according to Kirkland, in old age, a person rarely suffers from any one disease, as a rule, he has a whole bunch of them.
This suggests the existence of some general mechanism that occurs during aging.
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And instead of treating each ailment separately, doctors are trying to create drugs with a wide range of actions that can "turn off" the process that causes senile diseases.
Kirkland compares such drugs to an antibiotic that can treat 25 infections at once and argues that it is better to heal a destroyed mechanism than to deal with the consequences of its destruction.
Senolytic drugs target aging cells of the body, that is, cells that have lost the ability to divide. These cells are still alive, but they no longer function as they should and do not disintegrate. And the accumulation of such cells in the body causes various kinds of inflammation or the release of substances harmful to the body.
Senescent cells accumulate throughout life, but become dangerous only when a certain critical threshold is reached. They have been found near patients with osteoporosis and arthritis of the joints and near the heart in patients who have survived heart attacks.
And if a young person is transplanted the organ of an older person during transplantation, then the young person's risk of various age-related diseases increases. And this is also the fault of aging cells.
Scientists took young mice and transplanted aging cells into them. After that, one group of mice was given a “cocktail” of a senolytic drug called Dasatinib, which has been used for more than 10 years to treat leukemia (blood cancer), and Quercitin, which is found in green tea, red wine and apples. The other group did not receive such a “cocktail”.
The experiment showed that the "cocktail" effectively killed the aging cells, and the mice, which were not given drugs, showed all the signs of aging with baldness, loss of visual acuity, etc.
Now it remains to test it in public. At the moment, six tests are being carried out on groups of elderly patients and six more are on the way.
One group included 14 patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which scar the lungs and makes breathing difficult. These people were given nine doses of the drug over three months and their walking speed and fatigue decreased.
Dr. Kirkland called these results very significant, especially since patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis usually do not get any better.
