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Elysium Health is selling an anti-aging pill for roughly $60/month:
Basis and the other pills that will likely follow it in the next five to ten years are the fruits of a scientific backwater that has been working toward this moment for a quarter-century. These drugs and supplements are aimed to be a hack of the heretofore most intractable condition of human existence, the invisible countdown clock with which evolution has equipped our bodies. They just might postpone the onset of the most common afflictions of our dotage, from cancer to heart disease to diabetes to Alzheimer's. We won't necessarily enjoy longer maximum life spans (though that's a possibility), but we very well might enjoy longer health spans, meaning the vital, productive chunk of our lives before degeneration kicks in.
[...] [Any] qualms I might have had about whether this was simply next-generation snake oil faded in the halo of the six Nobel Prize winners who sit on Elysium's scientific advisory board. Most impressively, the company's co-founder is Leonard Guarente, who heads MIT's aging center and is one of the pioneers of aging science, a contender for the Nobel Prize should geroscience ever get a nod from the Swedish academy.
[...] The theory behind Basis is in part an evolution of the theory behind drinking red wine: One of its main ingredients, pterostilbene, is considered a more powerful version of resveratrol, with a more convincing track record in the lab. As for NR [nicotinamide riboside], by increasing NAD [nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide] levels in our cells, it in turn appears to reverse mitochondrial decay. In a 2013 scientific paper, Sinclair announced that a single week of injections of an NAD precursor into elderly mice had made their muscles look young again, though without restoring their strength. Both compounds aim to activate sirtuins, and the hope is that together they might amplify what each does individually.
Here's an older article about the NAD booster approach, as well as the 2013 study (open, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2013.11.037) (DX) by David Sinclair and colleagues published in Cell. Pterostilbene at Wikipedia.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bobs on Friday August 26 2016, @11:49AM
If it works, and is so great, where is the double-blind study showing positive, reproducible results?
If it ain't reproducible it ain't "science".
On the one hand, you can say they are making it affordable and working to get it out there for everybody, not just charging a fortune and reserving it for the hyper-rich elite.
On the other hand, snake oil benefits from a mass-market. There is a larger pool of marks who can and will afford to pay $60/month vs $600. It all depends upon the elasticity of demand. If they can pull off 100k or 1,000,000 subscribers at $60/month? $720 is noticible expense for many people, almost $1,500 for a couple.
He is making the right noises - says they are running a human trial:
From the article:
"...conducting a human trial (currently 120 people between the ages of 60 and 80 are participating).
But the primary way in which Elysium distinguishes itself from the retail supplements business is Guarente himself, who is in a very real sense monetizing his reputation. “I’m there to really keep a lot of pressure on the company to do human trials and testing,” he told me. “Never, ever, make a claim that’s not substantiated by evidence.” "
But committing physically and financially to a daily and never-ending supplement that has not been tested seems like a big deal to me.
My conclusions:
(Score: 1) by godshatter on Friday August 26 2016, @08:42PM
Prepare to be patient. Experiments designed to determine what affect a pill has on aging will likely have to run a long time before we can expect to see results.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @11:17AM
I'm quite happy to wait 5 years or so. That should be long enough to show that it does what they think it does, and any significant side effects will show up in that time. I wouldn't count on it having the long-term effects they expect it to, but it if slows down one facet of aging without side effects, I think I would pay the price.
However, the solution to living indefinitely really has to come from actually reversing the effects of aging, and not just slowing it down.