While immortality still remains impossible, it seems as if there may have been a new breakthrough which could have you living up to 120 years old. According to NZ Herald News, the world’s first anti-ageing drug will be tested on humans next year in trials which could see diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s consigned to distant memory. Scientists now believe that it is possible to actually stop people growing old as quickly and help them live in good health well into their 110’s and 120’s.
Although it might seem like science fiction, researchers have already proven that the diabetes drug Metformin extends the life of animals, and the Food and Drug Administration in the US has now given the go ahead for a trial to see if the same effects can be replicated in humans. If successful it will mean that a person in their 70s would be as biologically healthy as a 50 year old. It could usher in a new era of ‘geroscience’ where doctors would no longer fight individual conditions like cancer, diabetes and dementia, but instead treat the underlying mechanism – ageing.
“If you target an ageing process and you slow down ageing then you slow down all the diseases and pathology of ageing as well”, Professor Gordon Lithgow of the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing in California said.
He added: “I have been doing research into ageing for 25 years and the idea that we would be talking about a clinical trial in humans for an anti-ageing drug would have been thought inconceivable. But there is every reason to believe it’s possible. The future is taking the biology that we’ve now developed and applying it to humans.”
Metformin increases the number of oxygen molecules released into a cell and that apparently boosts strength and longevity. If the drug tests well on humans, life expectancy can increase up to 50%.