The academic community is catching up to the biohackers… a new paper:
Slowing human aging with pharmaceuticals is now recognized as a feasible strategy. However, the design of clinical trials is still focused on single drug approaches. The process of aging has multiple pathways, which no current drug has been shown to effectively target. Therefore, it is of interest to study combinations, or cocktails, of drugs. A recently published article reported that a drug cocktail of rapamycin, acarbose and phenylbutyrate slowed aging in middle-aged mice treated for three months. The impact of this report is discussed, with the implications for determining endpoints in humans for testing drug cocktails as well as testing other drug combinations.
Jiang et al . [5] published a study in middle-aged mice treated for three months with a combination of rapamycin, acarbose, and phenylbutyrate and showed the cocktail to be superior to any of the individual drugs in slowing aging as defined by decreased age-related lesion severity as well as increased physiological performance. The drug cocktail targets multiple pathways of aging.
These results are very promising and demonstrate the effectiveness of a drug cocktail over a single drug in slowing aging. The cocktail serves as an excellent prototype, but is it the ultimate pharmaceutical combination to enhance healthy aging? Most likely not, as each of the three drugs did not contribute equally to the overall effects of the cocktail, with rapamycin seemingly contributing the most. Therefore, several of the drugs could be replaced by other drugs, or additional drugs could be added, and tested in the same mouse model system.
Very interesting to see that steps are been taking on that direction but on the same time everything gets even more complex when we don’t have good way to measure different total doses on biological mechanism such as mTOR, AMPK, autophagy etc. But step by step things are going forward.
This goes also little bit in to a thing i pointed out that it’s most likely more important to take into account the total overall mTOR inhibition dose instead of just focusing on what the dose of rapamycin is.
But that thread I wrote is just looking on the overall dose of mTOR. We need to look at total dose level of different specific biological mechanistic pathways such as mTOR, AMPK, Autophagy etc. That way we can take the longevity journey to the next level
@Krister_Kauppi - Agree with your thoughts! Understanding a model that already works with mTOR would be the mechanism of Youth vs. Older. It would not be complete because optimal mTOR regulation may be mean using therapeutics at supra-physiologic levels above what Youth mTOR regulation can achieve.
