The Search for the Anti-aging Pill

In government laboratories and elsewhere, scientists are seeking a drug able to prolong life and youthful vigor. Studies of caloric restriction are showing the way

As researchers on aging noted recently, no treatment on the market today has been proved to slow human aging - the build-up of molecular and cellular damage that increases vulnerability to infirmity as we grow older. But one intervention, consumption of a low-calorie*yet nutritionally balanced diet, works incredibly well in a broad range of animals, increasing longevity and prolonging good health. Those findings suggest that caloric restriction could delay aging and increase longevity in humans, too.

Unfortunately, for maximum benefit, people would probably have to reduce their caloric intake by roughly thirty per cent, equivalent to dropping from 2,500 calories a day to 1,750. Few mortals could stick to that harsh a regimen, especially for years on end. But what if someone could create a pill that mimicked the physiological effects of eating less without actually forcing people to eat less? Could such a ’caloric-restriction mimetic’, as we call it, enable people to stay healthy longer, postponing age-related disorders (such as diabetes, arteriosclerosis, heart disease and cancer) until very late in life? Scientists first posed this question in the mid-1990s, after researchers came upon a chemical agent that in rodents seemed to reproduce many of caloric restriction’s benefits. No compound that would safely achieve the same feat in people has been found yet, but the search has been informative and has fanned hope that caloric-restriction (CR) mimetics can indeed be developed eventually.

The benefits of caloric restriction

The hunt for CR mimetics grew out of a desire to better understand caloric restriction’s many effects on the body. Scientists first recognized the value of the practice more than 60 years ago, when they found that rats fed a low-calorie diet lived longer on average than free-feeding rats and also had a reduced incidence of conditions that become increasingly common in old age. What is more, some of the treated animals survived longer than the oldest-living animals in the control group, which means that the maximum lifespan (the oldest attainable age), not merely the normal lifespan, increased. Various interventions, such as infection-fighting drugs, can increase a population’s average survival time, but only approaches that slow the body’s rate of aging will increase the maximum lifespan.