There is a lot of discussion here about some rather exotic compounds or other treatments. While I generally recommend extreme caution with medication – I’ve seen plenty of people, not excluding myself, go off the deep end – I also don’t think mere access should be an insurmountable bottleneck. What have people here looked into, seriously or speculatively, but abandoned due to sourcing issues? Small molecules? Gene therapy? Just curious.
I have my own short list of things I can’t justify funding the manufacture/import/testing of myself, but I’ll leave this up for a while before adding anything further.
A while back I started researching for a book about aging. I was hoping to put together a guide of all of the most up to date treatments and compounds available. I may still finish it at some point. I was curious to see what the most cutting edge treatments might be available to the public, but I came to realize that despite the hype, there’s not really a lot of strong evidence for most of it. If you have enough money and you’re brave or reckless enough you can access it. This is probably fine if you have money to burn. I had seriously considered mesenchymal stem cells for a persistent joint injury and spoke the Stem Cell Institute in Panama, but the high price-25k tag put me off. I also looked into Exosomes, GDF11, Gene therapy and Plasmapheresis. The biggest barrier wasn’t so much sourcing materials as the cost. If you have 100k lying around you can have gene therapies for KIotho and Follistatin. Plasmapheresis costs about 5k per treatment, but one isn’t enough and it’s tell early to tell if it offers any long term benefits. Exosomes, which might have some promise you can find for about 7k a treatment, but then there’s the question of where they’ve been sourced from.
Yes, the real problem of course is that, even in animal models, nothing has been proven to work. Nonetheless, here are a few ideas:
Galactose conjugated navitoclax – Dasatinib is the only proven usable senolytic in humans, and even it has toxicity problems. Navitoclax has advantages but is far too toxic. Changing to the galactose prodrug should improve safety by a huge margin, probably at the cost of reduced central effect. The synthesis of this compound is published, but it is not available off the shelf.
Fasudil – Poking at the cytosketleton, and its interactions with the aging ecm – is an interesting strategy. Rejuvenation was recently demonstrated with CASIN, but that drug has no human safety data. Fasudil shows promise on several fronts and has a history of human use, but is not available in quantity.
Ibudilast – an interesting drug that used to be available from US vendors. Pharma product is available from Japan, with some difficulty and at high cost.
Thymus targeted FOXN1 fusion proteins, like demonstrated here. Regrowing the thymus is, IMO, essential, but the pathways are limited, so I’ll put this down as the most effective option, though I worry about immune response to the weird protein. Note that recombinant proteins are not an entirely turn-key tech, and so they are very expensive.