A Discussion of What is Need to Speed the Pace at which Drugs to Treat Aging Arrive in the Clinic

Today I'll point out an opinion piece on how to get drugs to treat aging into the clinic as fast as possible. This is a moderately conservative viewpoint, focused on what will most rapidly produce the necessary regulatory changes to allow approval of new therapies specifically for the treatment of aging. At present regulators will only approve therapies to treat specific diseases of aging. The present focus of the industry is to produce treatments for specific age-related disease based on underlying technologies that target one or more mechanisms of aging, conforming to the present regulatory regime. The author makes the fair point that if one is focused on treating a given disease, then that is likely going to be at the expense of treating aging generally; that a therapy will be optimized to the specific disease rather than to the broader landscape of aging, and worse for it. That said, I think that the basically sensible outline of lobbying, regulatory change, and industry and patient advocate activities laid out in the opinion piece are only likely to happen at a rapid pace in the US (or EU) once some other jurisdiction is very publicly offering therapies that successfully treat aging in some clear, measurable way. That is typically how the FDA operates, in any case, as illustrated by the history of first generation stem cell therapies, which were widely available via medical tourism for years before the FDA finally relented somewhat under pressure. Thus the best th...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Politics and Legislation Source Type: blogs