A few bits:
Professor João Pedro de Magalhães leads the Genomics of Ageing and Rejuvenation Lab) at the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing in the University of Birmingham. He is also CSO of YouthBio Therapeutics, a US-based biotech company that develops rejuvenation gene therapies based on partial reprogramming by Yamanaka factors. Last year, he co-authored The hoverfly and the wasp: A critique of the hallmarks of aging as a paradigm. Here, we discuss this critique and other fascinating geroscience-related topics.
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Rapamycin fits very well into that. It’s quite well-studied. It extends lifespan in mice quite robustly. It is one of the most promising longevity drugs. We have some mechanistic understanding of rapamycin, because, well, TOR, which is “target of rapamycin”, but TOR does quite a lot of things.
I don’t think we fully understand at the mechanistic level how we go from rapamycin inhibiting TOR to retarding aging. From a clinical applications perspective, the development of TOR inhibitors and rapalogs with fewer side effects is a very exciting area of study.
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When I started in the field, my PhD supervisor Olivier Toussaint, who sadly passed away a few years ago, asked me: do you really want to be going around telling everybody your goal is to cure aging? I said, yes, because that’s the goal. I could pretend not to, like some people do.
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Having said that, I don’t think we’re going to cure aging in my lifetime. After all, we don’t have anything that works yet.