Could ageing soon be old news?

Ageing is inevitable, there are factors in your life you can change to help to slow the ageing process, but currently there is no way of stopping it completely.

However, this could be about to change.

Rapamycin is currently the most promising anti-ageing drug, known for having positive effects on health and life span in experimental studies with laboratory animals.

To obtain the maximum benefits of the drug, test subjects will be given a lifelong dose.

Subjects have been known to suffer from side effects of the drug, even at low doses used in prevention for age related decline.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, have displayed in animal tests that brief exposure to rapamycin has the same positive effects as a lifelong treatment.

This has the potential to open doors for application in humans.

Rapamycin is a cell growth inhibitor and immunosuppressant that is usually used in cancer therapy after organ transplantations. 

Dr Paula Juricic, lead investigator of the study says: “At the doses used clinically, rapamycin can have undesirable side-effects, but for the use of the drug in the prevention of age-related decline, these need to be absent or minimal. 

“Therefore, we wanted to find out when and how long we need to give rapamycin in order to achieve the same effects as lifelong treatment”

The researchers have experimented with short-term application of the drug in fruit flies in different time windows.

The team discovered that a brief window of 2 weeks of rapamycin treatment in young adult flies protected them against age-related pathology in the intestine and extended their lives.

Young adult mice, who had 3 months of treatment starting at 3 months of age, had similar beneficial effects on the health of the intestine when they were middle aged.

Dr Thomas Leech, co-author of the study says: “These brief drug treatments in early adulthood produced just as strong protection as continuous treatment started at the same time. 

“We also found that the rapamycin treatment had the strongest and best effects when given in early life as compared to middle age. 

“When the flies were treated with rapamycin in late life, on the other hand, it had no effects at all. 

“So, the rapamycin memory is activated primarily in early adulthood.”

Dr Yu-Xuan, also co-author of the study says: “We have found a way to circumvent the need for chronic, long-term rapamycin intake, so it could be more practical to apply in humans.”

Professor Linda Partridge, senior author says: “It will be important to discover whether it is possible to achieve the geroprotective effects of rapamycin in mice and in humans with treatment starting later in life.

“Since ideally the period of treatment should be minimised. It may be possible also to use intermittent dosing. 

“This study has opened new doors, but also raised many new questions”.