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takyon writes:

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.

Original Submission