Lecture, Conference Presentation
Extending Human Lifespan
- Direct targeting of aging mechanisms is projected to extend human healthspan by approximately 30 years, whereas curing individual chronic diseases like cancer or heart disease alone would add only 4 to 5 years to the average US woman's lifespan.
- Interventions that extend mouse lifespan by 20% to 30% could theoretically translate to a human lifespan of 113 years, with no identified hard biological limit on maximum human longevity.
- Current therapies, including senescence-targeting drugs, metformin, and rapamycin, are in clinical use and may collectively add 10 to 20 years of healthy life.
- Rapamycin has demonstrated a 14% average lifespan extension in mice started from middle age and, in Phase 2b human data, reduced respiratory infections by 30% in the immunosenescent population, with Restore Bio currently translating these findings into treatments.
- BioAge is developing a platform to enumerate causal blood factors affecting aging, having identified a specific protein that, when injected into aged mice, improves health; the company aims to drug this protein and validate factors in vivo.
- Unity Biotechnology has initiated Phase 1 studies for senolytic therapies in osteoarthritis, based on the hypothesis that deleting senescent cells can boost animal lifespan by up to 30%.
- Research strategies include analyzing supercentenarian genetics and repurposing existing drugs via electronic health records to identify longevity modulators.
- The field is transitioning into a human era of translational research, though aging science remains young with the NIH allocating only 1% of its $37 billion annual budget to basic aging mechanisms.
- A new science of aging is expected to translate into tangible human health benefits in the near future, despite being feasible to study for only a few years.