I am not sure this is a quicker path to anti-aging drugs or off-label drugs. I think there is a basic problem when it comes to testing synergistic effects. I don’t think that can be done by large scale trials. Safety testing can be done on a large scale for individual interventions. However, combinations need detailed monitoring.
Most lacking in the gero world are controlled studies with meaningful end-points having large enough sample sizes to permit the internal analyses that will be essential to ensuring generalizability. Irrespective of design strength or weakness, too many contemporary end points stand behind someone’s theoretical model of aging.
These things come up against a number of problems:
a) If you have combinations of dosing and interventions each time the dose and frequency of dose changes you add a further complication, but when you have multiple interventions that multiplies the number of trials that are needed.
b) Some interventions are cyclical (Rapamycin is one) and the cycles may vary between individuals.
Hence although there is a problem with the placebo effect simply designing trials that act primarily to exclude that makes progress hard to achieve.
We see that with Brad Stanfield’s RAPA-EX-01 trial and the PEARL trial, perhaps moreso with PEARL which was damaged in its merit by needing a placebo. We did not really learn anything from either of those trials although Brad Stanfield’s did confirm the expected result that rapamyin slightly undermines the anabolic part of the cycle.