This afternoon I swung by the Bay Area Aging Meeting, which was taking place at UC Berkeley. It was an overflow crowd, and standing room only inside. The general structure of the day was auditorium presentations from geroscience research groups all day, then snacks and drinks outside at 4pm with a chance to talk to a bunch of Poster presenters.
As they state on the Bay Area Aging Meeting website:
Bay Area Aging Meetings are sponsored by the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research. The symposia rotate across host institutions, including Gladstone Institutes/UC San Francisco, Stanford University, UC Berkeley and the Buck Institute for Aging Research. Meetings are open to the public.
Representative faculty members from each institution, who are experts in the aging field, organize the meetings. These one-day gatherings consist of oral and poster presentations by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from universities and institutes in the Bay Area, who are conducting research on the biology of aging and age-related disease.
While there were a lot of interesting papers presented, my specific interest is more on what might be called “translational geroscience”; the compounds and/or services targeting key aspects of aging that are either already becoming available for people, or which might become available in the very near future. In other words, things that we can take action on today, or very soon.
GlyLo
The only paper/research discussion that I saw where the product is immediately available was a presentation and poster session by the Buck Institute, focused on a supplement combination they called “GLYLO”. The compound (its a mixture that is in the process of being patented by the Buck Institute) has, in mice, seems to extend lifespan, and also help reduce Advanced Glycation End-products (AGEs), reduce weight, improve insulin sensitivity. It seems to be utilizing a new pathway that is not the same pathway seen in caloric restriction, etc. The compound has been licensed to a company called Juvify Bio, and the product is already available on Amazon - see here: GLYLO Healthy Aging & Weight Management Pill.
The company’s web site describes GLYLO as a patented mixture of “generally recognised as safe” micronutrients. Specifically these: 150mg alpha-lipoic acid, 200mg nicotinamide, 15mg piperine, 50mg Vitamin B6 and 100mg Vitamin B1/thiamine (so its pretty easy to purchase these compounds individually if the price for the GLYLO combination product is too high).
Meclizine, Approx 15% Lifespan Increase, mTORC1 Inhibitor
The second presentation of interest was on focused on a novel mTORC1 inhibitor which in the class of drugs called Piperazines. The drug, called Meclizine, (e.g. brand name Dramamine II) is a common over the counter (available for purchase without prescription) drug for motion sickness.
Apparently this drug is an mTORC1 inhibitor that they identified and tested, and which in the NIA ITP program has been revealed to increased mice lifespans by approximately 15% (median lifespan) based on the preliminary data shown with about 75% of the mice deceased (note, this data may be from just one of the 3 ITP sites). The lifespan study is/was being done by Richard Miller and his groups in the ITP program, and the full results have not yet been published or announced.
The results with Meclizine have been good, but they are looking for other drug targets within that general class of mTORC1 inhibitors for something that has a better binding affinity than Meclizine (binding affinity is a key measure of a drug’s ability to target a specific area, the tighter the binding, the fewer “off-target” effects).
Note: In the ITP 2019 study they have been testing 800 ppm in mice). My quick and dirty calculations suggest that 800ppm in mice equates to something like a dose of 300mg/day for a 72kg/160lb human. The key side effect of dramamine is “drowsiness”, so its generally considered a much more benign drug than rapamycin (which can have many negative side effects at high daily doses used in organ transplant and cancer patients).
Another person gave me this dosing calculation (from Louis:
My calculation shows that the ITP fed the mice a human equivalent dose of about 730mg of Dramamine per day for a 70kg person.
Here is the math: The ITP used 800ppm in food (see attached photo). And 800ppm is 0.08%. A typical mouse weighs about 0.025kg and eats about 4g of food per day, so 0.08% is 3.2mg of Dramamine for the mouse per day. That is a dose of 3.2mg/0.025kg=128mg/kg. Divide by 12.3 to allometrically scale to humans, to get a human equivalent dose of (128mg/kg)/12.3=10.4mg/kg. So for a 70kg human, that would be 728mg of Dramamine per day.
So Meclizine looks to be another drug for longevity that people may want to research. If Meclizine has no impact on mTORC2 in long term administration (it showed no mTORC2 inhibition in a short-term assay), it seems that a dosing strategy in humans that might be evaluated would be some sort of dosing combination of rapamycin and Meclizine. Since people only dose rapamycin for anti-aging once every week or two, perhaps there is a dosing strategy where Meclizine is dosed on some of the days that rapamycin is not taken, that would further increase lifespan and healthspan. This seems to be an area ripe for additional research and/or personal experimentation.
Note: Dr. Richard Miller mentioned the Meclizine studies they are doing in this recent podcast interview with him - I’ve queued up the video for where he discusses this at this link here.
Click on this link for details: BAAM Presentations - GLYLO and mTORC1 Inhibitor