Photo by Jana Leon
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Living Longer: The Future
By Joe Treen, September & October 2006
Scientists are close to developing drugs that will treat and possibly cure age-related diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and Lou Gehrig’s disease. Is a longevity pill far behind?
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Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn, had an eye for good-looking men and a unique way of winning them over. One day she simply kidnapped two beautiful Trojan youths, Ganymede and Tithonus, so they could be her lovers.
Unfortunately for her, Zeus stole Ganymede for himself, made him his personal cupbearer, and gave him eternal youth. To placate an angry Eos, Zeus struck a deal. In return for Ganymede, he would grant her one wish. She agreed, asking that Tithonus be made immortal.
But in a colossal oversight, she failed to ask for eternal youth. So while Tithonus did live forever, he steadily shriveled away, becoming weak, demented, and racked with pain. In one version of the story, Eos leaves him locked in a room to get old by himself. In another, she turns him into a grasshopper, perpetually alive but begging for death.
Biologist Steven Austad, Ph.D., of the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, sees the "Tithonus-Ganymede continuum" as an allegory for how longevity research in the 21st century could play out. "In the nightmare Tithonus scenario we become better and better at keeping people alive solely by better management of life-threatening diseases," he writes in an essay in Enduring Questions and Changing Perspectives in Gerontology (Springer, 2005). "[The Ganymede] scenario promises not only more life but a more pleasant life, or, as the cliché goes, adds life to years as well as years to life."
Scientists may never be able to entirely deliver the Ganymede scenario of eternal youth, but they're working hard to ensure people avoid Tithonus' fate. "The potential here is not just to make people live longer. That's not the goal, even," says molecular biologist Lenny Guarente, Ph.D., of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The goal is to find ways to significantly mitigate the major diseases of aging. And that would include cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, neurodegenerative disease."
To that end, Guarente and his former student David Sinclair, Ph.D., now at Harvard Medical School, cofounded (with other well-respected scientists) rival pharmaceutical companies—Elixir Pharmaceuticals and Sirtris Pharmaceuticals. The two Cambridge-based companies are now racing each other to develop small-molecule drugs (medicine that can be taken orally, rather than injected) that would activate a family of genes known as sirtuins, which can prevent the development of certain diseases. "We know the sirtuins play a key role in metabolic diseases [such as type 2 diabetes] and neurological diseases [such as Lou Gehrig's disease], because we have taken small-molecule drugs and cured or treated those diseases in animal models," says Christoph Westphal, M.D., Ph.D., the CEO of Sirtris.
‘The goal is to find ways to significantly mitigate the major diseases of aging.’
In June, Sirtris took the first step toward making those drugs available for people when it began safety tests of a drug that would treat type 2 diabetes. If the tests are successful (i.e., the drug is effective and side effects are manageable), the company will move into full-blown clinical trials, Westphal says. That process could take six or seven years.
So why aren't scientists attempting to develop a true longevity pill? For starters, the Food and Drug Administration, which approves prescription drugs for safety and effectiveness, doesn't recognize aging as a disease. Therefore, the agency will not consider a pill that simply extends life. And being realistic, says Peter DiStefano, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Elixir, "it's not like we're going to run out and find you a pill that you can pop and look ten years younger in a few months."
Perhaps most important of all: not everyone wants to live forever. "If you go out and interview a bunch of 90-year-olds, you don't find a whole lot that want to live another 50 years," says Richard Sprott, Ph.D., director of the Ellison Medical Foundation, which funds longevity research. "It's 50-year-olds who want to do that."
Joe Treen, a former editor at People and Discover, was named "2006 Magazine Professional of the Year" by the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication.
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