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Doctors and scientists want drug regulators and research funding agencies to consider medicines that delay ageing-related disease as legitimate drugs. Such treatments have a physiological basis, researchers say, and could extend a person's healthy years by slowing down the processes that underlie common diseases of ageing — making them worthy of government approval. On 24 June, researchers will meet with regulators from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to make the case for a clinical trial designed to show the validity of the approach.
Current treatments for diseases related to ageing "just exchange one disease for another", says physician Nir Barzilai of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. That is because people treated for one age-related disease often go on to die from another relatively soon thereafter. "What we want to show is that if we delay ageing, that's the best way to delay disease."
takyon: The "pill" in question is the drug metformin, currently used to treat type 2 diabetes under the brand name Glucophage. People with type 2 diabetes will not be enrolled in the anti-aging trial.
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday June 19 2015, @07:27AM
If pharma companies are investing in drugs to treat aging, they have a vested interest in suppressing approaches that might compete with their treatments. The FDA represents the companies, because of the usual "revolving door" problem.
There are also other, less obvious, conflicts of interest. As an example, once upon a time there was a university lab that received major funding from a particular charity. The biggest donor to the charity was a pharma company. The professor in charge of that lab also chaired a review board that was responsible for approving drugs manufactured by the pharma company (and, of course, competing drugs from other sources). There was no way to prove anything, but it's pretty hard to believe that the professor didn't know who was ultimately buttering his bread.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.