A Tour of Longevity Industry Therapies Presently in Clinical Trials

The longevity industry is presently still quite young, a hundred and something companies that are largely still at the preclinical stage of development, most founded in the last couple of years. Even if we want to be broadly generous as to which companies and projects are to be included in our definition of the industry, no newly developed therapies to treat the mechanisms of aging have yet been approved by the FDA, although a few have made it to phase 3 clinical trials. This is just a matter of time, however; it can take a decade of hard work to go from an idea to an approved therapy, and very few longevity industry companies are even half that age. Of perhaps more immediate interest are existing approved drugs that appear to have a meaningful effect on mechanisms of aging. The most important of these are widely used chemotherapeutics that have been found to selectively kill senescent cells, and thereby produce rejuvenation in mice. No-one noticed this potential for intervention in the aging process while such drugs were being developed in animal models of cancer and used in cancer patients, for all the obvious reasons. The dosing was quite different, the lifespans of the animals and patients largely quite short, and the disruptions of cancer and high dose chemotherapy masked the benefits that can be obtained via a different approach to usage. Back to the new therapies under development and the rapidly growing longevity industry, there is more than enough work ...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Longevity Industry Source Type: blogs