Anti-ageing 'supermodel granny' drug extends life in mice by 25%

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cv2gr3x3xkno

by isaacfrond • 2 years ago

39 47 2 years ago

bbc.com

DolphinAsa• 2 years ago

Ah yes, the never ending reign of the boomers would be great. just great.

Though in seriousness, pretty amazing if this works in humans. Peptide therapy seems huge lately.

kylebenzle• 2 years ago

An antibody is not a peptide [1]. This drug is an antibody that targets the protein interleukin-11.

Peptides are very short amino acid sequences.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13601...

grishka5• 2 years ago

As an anti-aging intervention, this is useless because it still doesn't uncover the master organism development regulator, and it doesn't actually "fix" aging, it doesn't make the organism believe that it's younger. The aging process still happens and the organism still dies of the passage of time.

It might be useful as a lead to that master regulator, though. Or it might be not.

irdc3• 2 years ago

I’d still take it (or, something that does the same but is proven safe and effective in humans) while waiting for something that matches your desiderata. I’ve seen what ageing can do to people,…

wang_li• 2 years ago

All you need is something that extends your healthspan at slightly greater than the rate that new discoveries to extend your healthspan are made.

D-Coder2• 2 years ago

Fifteen to twenty extra years of lifespan is useless? With reduced odds of cancer?

(20-25% longer life x 80 year current lifespan.)

aiauthoritydev• 2 years ago

Steps to biological immortality would look exactly like these.

TeaBrain• 2 years ago

The Nature article this is based upon was posted yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40987224

abeppu• 2 years ago

However, he said there were still problems, including the lack of evidence in patients and the cost of making such drugs and "it is unthinkable to treat every 50-year-old for the rest of their life".

On the "lack of evidence in patients" ... does "testing" this in humans mean decades long trials? Given that the effects in their animal model was 25%, it seems like measuring if there was such an increase in humans (and beginning taking it in late middle age) it would be a generation before you had results.

On the "unthinkable to treat every 50-year-old" comment, I think we as a society would need to change as a function of our changed lifespans -- making all the middle-aged people live to 100+ would exacerbate issues around social benefits, housing stock, etc. But if we all had longer, more productive lives (i.e. worked longer, added our skills and expertise to the economy for longer), could that more than offset the costs? If a drug raised your life expectancy by 20 years, and most people worked another 15, that's still pretty good.

throwaway837te2• 2 years ago

I think you are right. If you get 20 extra years with the quality of an average 50 year old, I think it's a good thing.

Many countries are seeing the birth rate decline. If people could extend their life with 20 healthy and productive years it would change everything. Suddenly you could choose to change your career or make more long term financial choices.

marcusverus3• 2 years ago

Assuming the drug adds another 20 years of quality life, the impact on social program financing would be very good. As is, the average person spends, roughly ~56% of human life being net-productive (20 learning, 45 working, 15 retired). Add 20 healthy years, and most folks will keep working, which would raise the share of productive years to ~65%. If the treatment is expensive, then only net-productive individuals would be able to afford it, meaning we would gain the benefit of contributors contributing for longer, without net-recipients receiving for longer.

This would also allow folks another 20 years of planning/saving for retirement, which could greatly improve the quality of those years for the average retiree, but probably won't.

The biggest social impact of this drug, I think, would be its affect of the wealth gap. Another 20 years of compounding market returns would buoy the net worth of the 30% who make up the "upper class". An ever-increasing number of people would be able to achieve financial "escape velocity" by building nest-eggs which can sustain them indefinitely via 3% withdrawals, allowing them to retire "early" (i.e. before the new "standard" retirement age of 80). Folks who speed-run their careers and retire in their 40s-50s could enjoy 50 or 60 years of retirement! Inheritances would rise dramatically, but come later in life. This would also result in a backlash, of course. Envy is the oldest and most powerful organizing "principle", and politicians will happily use this new prosperity to generate enmity for their own purposes, just as they always have.

My main concern would be the dysgenic impact of such a thing. If it becomes generally available, it will no doubt encourage thinking folks delay having children even more, while also granting another decade of fertility to the "oops another baby" cohort. It seems clear that this would significantly accelerate our decline toward idiocracy.

aiilns2• 2 years ago

If the treatment is expensive, then only net-productive individuals would be able to afford it, meaning we would gain the benefit of contributors contributing for longer, without net-recipients receiving for longer.

Because rich people are "net-productive" and poor people are "net-recipients"?

This is wrong on so many levels. And even today rich people live on average longer. Can't see the benefit myself.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40987224

zaphod420• 2 years ago

Was expecting AI generated images of 'supermodel granny'... Was glad to see pictures of mice.

resonator3• 2 years ago

I'm very uneasy about us collectively seeking longer lifespans. Earth is already supporting more people than is sustainable. Living longer robs someone else of an opportunity to live, or a shorter life. Over many generations we may be able to lower our birthrate to compensate, but I worry about happens in the meantime.

shrimp_emoji3• 2 years ago

Over many generations we may be able to lower our birthrate to compensate

Already on it, boss!

JumpCrisscross7• 2 years ago

Over many generations we may be able to lower our birthrate to compensate

We’ve gone—globally—from 5.3 births per woman in 1963 to 2.3 in 2022 [1]. 2.1 is replacement [2]. In the rich world, where longevity treatments will first become available, it’s 1.6 [3]. (3.3 in 1960.)

There are arguments against longer lifespans. Population growth is not one of them.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15832599/

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINOED

resonator3• 2 years ago

I don't argue for a second that our birthrate isn't dropping; it is. But we either haven't dropped it enough, or it's being offset by higher consumption. The overshoot day is now the 1st of August [1]. Until we push that back out to to a sustainable level, we haven't done enough.

To achieve that, I can only see a few classes of solution. We could reduce our per-capita consumption, our lifespan, or our number.

I'm assuming that the overshoot day is roughly correct. The details of exactly how much our birthrate has dropped or by how much our consumption has increased isn't important to know that there is a massive discrepancy between where we are and what is sustainable. Doing anything that increases that discrepancy is probably going to make it worse.

[1] https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/

pedalpete• 2 years ago

What makes you think we're supporting more than is sustainable?

Though I don't think we desperately need to make more people, as some people think we do, I also don't think we need to restrict lifespan progression.

When I look at sustainability of the planet I consider 1) significant portions of the population are obese, and these numbers continue to trend higher. This suggests that we have an abundance of calories available to support more people. We have too much food.

2) water, and particularly fresh water is probably the most restrictive element we require. But I don't think we are restricted by a lack of water, we are restricted by a lack of clean water in the right geographic regions, and of course, the damage that we have caused to the supply. However, we are generating methods of creating fresh water.

3) energy may be the last resource, and particularly that major portions of our current energy needs are provided by damaging and non-sustainable methods. This doesn't mean we need to pause longevity potential, we need to find clean methods of producing energy, which is, and has been in development for a long time.

Is there something else big that I'm missing here?

cstrahan2• 2 years ago

Earth is already supporting more people than is sustainable.

By what metric? If it's a matter of available land, there's plenty to go around: open Google Maps, turn on satellite imagery, center the map on Arizona, USA and zoom in. Absolutely nothing but interstate roads and bushes. No buildings, no people, no nothing.

"There are over 11 million blocks in the U.S., and 47 percent of them are uninhabited."

https://www.fastcompany.com/3029826/mapping-all-the-places-i...

Our large, metropolitan cities may be more crowded than sustainable, but Earth != NYC.

Anti-ageing 'supermodel granny' drug extends life in mice by 25%

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