Scientists Explore Longevity Drugs For Dogs That Could Also 'Extend Human Life' (theguardian.com)
- Reference: 0175767669
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/12/26/1824221/scientists-explore-longevity-drugs-for-dogs-that-could-also-extend-human-life
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/26/scientists-explore-longevity-drugs-for-dogs-that-could-also-extend-human-life
Simultaneously, the Dog Aging Project is studying rapamycin, an immunosuppressant drug, which preliminary research suggests [1]could add three years to dogs' lives . Researchers believe these canine studies could accelerate human longevity research, though experts note the lack of standardized aging biomarkers remains a significant hurdle for human trials.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/dec/26/scientists-explore-longevity-drugs-for-dogs-that-could-also-extend-human-life
DOGE (Score:5, Interesting)
I for one, welcome our new immortal canine overlords.
Time Travel Too? (Score:5, Funny)
"U.S. biotech startup Loyal plans to launch a lifespan-extending drug for dogs in early 2024 ". Looks like they've already been successful and the secret is time travel.
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You beat me to it, and I just noticed after posting below.
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lazarus, maybe you're taking the drug?
On the... upside? (Score:5, Funny)
You'll also have a strong desire to chase balls and squirrels and walk around in a circle before lying down.
Re:On the... upside? (Score:5, Funny)
If it would allow me to lick my balls, they'll have a guaranteed customer.
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> If it would allow me to lick my balls, they'll have a guaranteed customer.
Before or after you're neutered? 'Cause in the latter, you can also play fetch w/them.
Re:On the... upside? (Score:4, Informative)
Google "neuticles". Yes, they make prosthetic testicles for dogs, so they can lick their own balls even after they are neutered... it just isn't as much fun. (You learn weird things from having a sister that is a veterinarian.)
Re: On the... upside? (Score:2)
They make them for humans too. I know someone who lost a testicle in a bicycling accident as a child. Got to take his word for it that he has a plastic nut, though
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The pill will be administered to people by hiding it in some hamburger.
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> The pill will be administered to people by hiding it in some hamburger.
Ha! Nice.
That's not all it'll do (Score:2)
From TFS:
> U.S. biotech startup Loyal plans to launch a lifespan-extending drug for dogs in early 2024
It appears their drug can take you back in time also.
There's a catch: (Score:1)
The drugs only add 3 dog years.
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That’s 21 human years! Can I start taking it now?
Can we cure dementia first (Score:5, Insightful)
....before trying to extend the lives of humans?
(Probably also worth fixing up the general collapsing of the human body from the mid-forties on too, but dementia seems probably the greatest "What the fuck's the point if" bullet point that needs fixing.)
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Canada has a program called MAID where you can get a legal assisted suicide. The issue is that you must be of sound mind from the time you request it, through the approval process, right up until you get the fatal injection.
This really sucks for dementia. If I'm of sound mind... I want to keep living. It's once I'm confused, scared, and shitting myself that I want to die, but that's not allowed. At that point, you can no longer consent.
I think curing the various causes of dementia is a long way off. Fo
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Sadly, in the case of Alzheimer's, a big study where the scientists overstated/faked their findings resulted in companies going down the wrong rabbit hole in seeking to treat it.
Given that I lost my grandfather to Alzheimer's well before he died, well, I'm still pissed.
Re:Can we cure dementia first (Score:4, Interesting)
One weird thing they just discovered: lifelong taxi drivers don't get Alzheimer's dementia. Navigating around complicated cities changes the hippocampus, which is the first part of the brain affected by Alzheimer's. I'm worried because I use Google Navigator for literally every trip...
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Nuns tend to not get it as well. From what they can tell, using the brain meats tends to help protect against it.
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There is a very old result (around 1960 or so, I think): Secretaries that regularly used typewriters did not get dementia or got it a lot later. The explanation is that typing needs a lot of muscle coordination. Something like this probably applies here as well.
Well, wo would have thought that not using your brain does rot it.
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I can understand that. This type of scientific misconduct should result in significant prison time for the authors (all of them) and the reviewers that let this through should be looked at closely as well. Lying to make yourself look good when lives are at stake is the height of unethical behavior.
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> The issue is that you must be of sound mind from the time you request it
Not really. [1]Someone on a day pass from a mental institution just got MAID [www.cbc.ca].
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/mental-physical-medical-assisted-death-1.7412923
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It was planned far in advance, it's not like they just left the hospital and requested it. So it's news, but not much of a story. There are a number of court cases of families trying to override their loved ones wishes. I feel bad for them, but I prefer people control their own decisions. There are already mechanisms in place if you wish to cede that control to others.
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I am surprised you are not worried that a bureaucratic system that is a government monopoly on healthcare is offering suicide assistance. This creates catastrophic perverse incentives - every MAID saves government a lot of money.
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> I am surprised you are not worried that a bureaucratic system that is a government monopoly on healthcare is offering suicide assistance. This creates catastrophic perverse incentives - every MAID saves government a lot of money.
That would be a government problem, not a MAID problem, and I have no reason at all to believe a private for-profit system would somehow be safer in that regard anyway.
If there are problems with the current system they should be fixed. The concept of individual autonomy over their death remains an inalienable right within that system.
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As opposed to the private insurance that just decides for itself without your input that it'll be cheaper if you die.
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Yeah I wish they would set aside the controversial expansion of MAID for mental illness (I'm on the fence on that one) and get the advanced consent out of the way first. In any case, I think it will eventually be part of the next evolution of our MAID law, but these things take time. So perhaps not soon, but hopefully soon enough for me.
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Well. If you are smart, you can just research how to off yourself reliably and with low risk of permanent bad effects (like not being able to try again) if you fail. There are a number of reliable ways that can be accomplished, depending on your personality and means. If you are not so smart, then you are screwed. But what else is new?
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I think everyone can agree that as we age, the risk of various forms of dementia increases. But what is not as clear is whether that risk is correlated to chronological age, or whether senescence and dementia are merely the consequences of underlying inflammatory and/or epigenetic processes that can be modified.
In plain English, we have to distinguish between associations versus cause and effect. Age and dementia are associated. But maybe old age is not a CAUSE of dementia. It's possible that if we find
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There seems to be a correlation between amaloid plaque and Alzheimer's. But nobody has proven whether it is a cause or an effect, and no cures based on reducing the plaque seem to work.
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> There seems to be a correlation between amaloid plaque and Alzheimer's. But nobody has proven whether it is a cause or an effect, and no cures based on reducing the plaque seem to work.
If my memory is right, the severity of symptoms for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc. are not proportional to the amount of plaque made up from mis-folded proteins, but rather proportional to how much correctly folded protein is present in the brain. This suggests that the brain is getting starved of critical proteins by prions that cause those proteins to mis-fold.
Clearing out the plaque might reduce the rate of conversion from usable proteins to worthless prions if you could get enough of it out, but that's
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Check these papers out...
Infectious origin of Alzheimer’s disease: Amyloid beta as a component of brain antimicrobial immunity
[1]https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a... [nih.gov]
> " Importantly, the infectious hypothesis leads to testable predictions. Targeting amyloid beta should be ineffective, unless the triggering pathogen and inflammatory response are addressed as well. Meticulous control of selected infections might be the best near-term strategy for AD prevention."
Multi-pathogen infections and Alzheimer’s disease
[2]https://microbialcellfactories... [biomedcentral.com]
> "The recent discovery that the amyloid- peptide has antimicrobial activities supports the possibility of an infectious aetiology of AD and suggests that amyloid- plaque formation might be induced by infection." ...
> "Two recent population studies conducted in Taiwan showed that antiviral treatment could help prevent dementia in patients with viral infections."
> "Another interesting case is that of two siblings with chromosomally-integrated HHV-6A who suffered from cognitive difficulties. Several repeated courses of treatment with valganciclovir led to a near-complete clinical resolution in both patients "
The two testable predictions in the first paper seem to have borne fruit. Targeting amyloid beta has been ineffective so far. And antiviral treatment has improved the prospects for several patient populations.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9671327/
[2] https://microbialcellfactories.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12934-021-01520-7
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But I'm not addressing the amyloid hypothesis or even Alzheimer's dementia specifically. Rather, I'm speaking more broadly about the relationship between the biological aging process, chronological age, and diseases associated with these.
You are correct that, despite the likely validity of the amyloid hypothesis, treatments that target amyloid burden do not stop disease progression, and at best seem to only buy a little more time. Such drugs were approved under questionable circumstances (notably, Biogen'
Eating dog food (Score:2)
Old ladies eating dog food just got entire new meaning.
Chemical structure of LOY-002 (Score:2)
Can anyone tell me the chemical structure of LOY-002? Is it related to Rapamycin?
nope. (Score:1)
This sounds great to people who have never had an old dog. Old dogs donâ(TM)t die because they get old. They die because they either have cancer or some horrible debilitating condition that makes it impossible for them to stand up and poop. As someone with a fifteen year old dog that needs custom made leg braces to walk, no thanks .
The question remains (Score:2)
Do these even OLDER dogs learn new tricks?
in the future... (Score:2)
...there's a machine that provides food for all, a man, and a dog ...the man's job is to feed the dog ...the dog's job is to make sure the man never, ever touches the machine
Never ever ever (Score:2, Insightful)
In case you weren't wise enough to stop reading at "san francisco-based," it messes with your immune system and metabolism so you're tired, cold, and sick all the time. What a great idea! That will be really popular and get FDA approved.
Re:Never ever ever (Score:4, Interesting)
mTOR inhibitors like rapamycin have been looked at for anti cancer and general wellbeing for quite some time. The first thing is to search google images for "mTOR" and get an idea of how it relates to other pathways in the cell. The drug rapamycin targets the "mammalian target of rapamycin." You might think it is strange that such an important protein that acts as a signalling aggregator for anabolic processes is named after the drug that targeted it. Its because the discoverers didn't know what it did at the time of discovery, other than it it was the target of an anti cancer drug. Elucidated in time was mTOR (its actually 2 units mTORc1 and mTORc2). Its understood to aggregate anabolic signals. If you're into building muscle, you might like your muscles to be anabolic, and thus activate mTOR. If you're suffering from cancer, you might have mTOR that fails to deactivate. You'll see RHEB connected to it, that's an amino acid sensor for leucine. If you don't take a protein shake, or at least have any protein after working out, this input will fail to phosphorylate. There are tumor suppressors connected to it, TSC1/2. The list goes on but one of the most important connected pathways is AMPK, which activates in response to an inability to keep up the ADP to ATP conversion. If you run too fast and are out of shape and breathing too heavy, systems activate to help you. Sort of like a turbo button. This switches off anabolic signaling, in order to get the system back under control. It also does a number of other things to aid in that. Google images again is a great resource for understanding what AMPK does. Adelfo on his suppversity blog wrote a decent introduction to these opposing pathways [1]https://suppversity.blogspot.c... [blogspot.com]
These biomechanical pathway are so important to our lives that understanding them will improve people's lives. Understanding pushing yourself to the limit in exercise activates AMPK, could be a life saving habit. It lets you better manage and run your body. Recommend everyone have a never ending desire to understand their body's system in an ever better manner.
[1] https://suppversity.blogspot.com/2011/09/intermittent-thoughts-on-intermittent_25.html
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Sounds great. Now the rich assholes can get what they deserve when they start taking this.
Alternatives (Score:2)
If they're using Rapamycin they are probably targeting senescent cells, and there are other options such as Quercetin and Berberine which when used together may have similar effects.
Both those alternatives are available over the counter as supplements whereas Rapamycin is a serious prescription anti-cancer drug. If I was experimenting I know which option I'd try first.
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> If they're using Rapamycin they are probably targeting senescent cells, and there are other options such as Quercetin and Berberine which when used together may have similar effects.
> Both those alternatives are available over the counter as supplements whereas Rapamycin is a serious prescription anti-cancer drug. If I was experimenting I know which option I'd try first.
Or instead of the Berberine, if you're taking Metformin for Diabetes, you're good to go on half of your "formula":
[1]https://www.lifeextension.com/... [lifeextension.com]
[1] https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2015/2/major-advance-in-slowing-aging
quality of evidence? (Score:2)
a press release says they started a trial in 2024. so there isn't sufficient evidence yet?
Iâ(TM)d volunteer for the human trial but (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)d be afraid of the antisocial side effects including chasing cars, pissing on fire hydrants, and biting mailmen. My leg-humping issues already case enough trouble.
Lessons learned ... (Score:2)
... from dogs: Take lots of naps.
AGE Busters (Score:2)
Novartis had an advanced glycation endproduct drug on patent and for prescription veterinary but they let the human trial lapse and a prominent human antiaging researcher has the last known samples of the drug in his lab.
Now that the patent is lapsed FDA will not allow any human trials that could be paid for.
A free market seems likely to develop. The Death Eaters will call it a black market.
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> Novartis had an advanced glycation endproduct drug on patent and for prescription veterinary but they let the human trial lapse and a prominent human antiaging researcher has the last known samples of the drug in his lab.
> Now that the patent is lapsed FDA will not allow any human trials that could be paid for.
> A free market seems likely to develop. The Death Eaters will call it a black market.
There are other countries, countries that are not beholden to the FDA; why no continuing research outside the USA?
OK (Score:3)
So my dog dies at 13 rather than 12. How do I know it was 13 years of this expensive pill that allowed for this extra year?
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I rather expect that's the point - you can't, so you can't sue.
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Yeah, I have no idea how they would determine the pill is actually doing anything. There are TONS of factors that can/will affect how long an animal will live. How are they going to control for all of them? It would require a HUGE population being tested over a very long time, and independently repeated several times, and even then be suspect. Even if the average were longer, what if it had negative side effects that made some animals' lives shorter or lower-quality while not affecting the average enoug
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People who conduct clinical trials on drugs are aware of all of these factors. Without looking further than TFS, I would assume they have been considered. But this is a medication for dogs (not humans) so at this point, maybe the standards to overcome before going on the market are less rigorous.
The work done on Rapamycin by the Dog Aging Project appears to be doing such trials. From TFA:
> The Dog Aging Project, the first large-scale, longitudinal study of large animals in a natural environment, suggests that low doses of rapamycin could increase dogs’ lifespan, improving both their heart and cognitive functions by regulating cell growth and metabolism.
> “Our study is light years ahead of anything that’s been done on humans or can be done on humans,” said Daniel Promislow, a biogerontologist at the University of Washington and a co-director of the project. “What we’re doing is the equivalent of a 40-year-long study on humans, testing the ability of a drug to increase healthy lifespan.”
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Google is telling me the trials are "expected to last 4 years", implying they have not been completed. I would expect a good trial to take 15-20 years.
Re:OK (Score:4, Insightful)
> Google is telling me the trials are "expected to last 4 years", implying they have not been completed. I would expect a good trial to take 15-20 years.
Maybe not for dogs? Their metabolisms run more quickly.
Lots of drug studies are conducted on animals prior to human trials. They don't take 15-20 years.
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Dogs would be in many ways an ideal model for this, they live comparably much longer than other lab animals, exhibit lots of human concerns like aging joints, gray hair, issues with teeth, and even cancer. That dogs in the West get better medical care than many humans will also help get some useful data out of this.
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> People who conduct clinical trials on drugs are aware of all of these factors. Without looking further than TFS, I would assume they have been considered. But this is a medication for dogs (not humans) so at this point, maybe the standards to overcome before going on the market are less rigorous.
> The work done on Rapamycin by the Dog Aging Project appears to be doing such trials. From TFA:
>> The Dog Aging Project, the first large-scale, longitudinal study of large animals in a natural environment, suggests that low doses of rapamycin could increase dogs’ lifespan, improving both their heart and cognitive functions by regulating cell growth and metabolism.
>> “Our study is light years ahead of anything that’s been done on humans or can be done on humans,” said Daniel Promislow, a biogerontologist at the University of Washington and a co-director of the project. “What we’re doing is the equivalent of a 40-year-long study on humans, testing the ability of a drug to increase healthy lifespan.”
Rapamycin (and some related compounds) are already showing some anecdotal promise in humans, too. . .
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Dog is hit by a car at 10, now you just wasted all that money.
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Kristi Noem doesn't understand the need for this drug...
Re:OK (Score:5, Insightful)
There are chemical changes that take place as ANY creature ages. In humans, it seems to be in the mid-40s and mid-60s where these major changes take place. Now, if by taking these drugs it prevents hip and leg mobility issues as a dog gets older, those are things that will clearly be an improvement, no matter if it changes how long the dog lives. Quality of live improvements are important.
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> How do I know it was 13 years of this expensive pill that allowed for this extra year?
Confirmation bias?
You could try using science (Score:2)
Or at leadt try not assuming you're smarter than everyone else.
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If you are a rich asshole, you may pay for it just on the possibility. And for your own life. Rich assholes are generally not very smart people.