Looks like scientists have come up with the secret of living a longer life. Scientists are aiming to start a innovational human trial using the medication for diabetes, metformin, as they believe that this drug can be the secret beneficial nectar for humans to live up to 120 years.
The world's first breakthrough drug will be tested on humans in 2016. Scientists believe that it may be possible to stop fast ageing process, while also helping people live a good, healthy life at the age of 110 or 120.
Dr Jay Olshansky, from the University of Illinois Chicago, USA said, “This would be the most important medical intervention in the modern era, an ability to slow ageing.”
While this may appear to be farfetched or similar to something we may watch on a Sci-Fi show, researchers have already established that metformin increases the life of animals. The Food and Drug Administration in the USA have now agreed to start the trial next year to examine whether the drug will have the same effect on humans.
If this experiment proves to be successful, a person in their 70s would probably have the same biological health as someone who is 50 years old.
This could also lead to a new period of “geroscience”, where doctors would be treating ageing, the implicit mechanism, rather than tackling individual conditions, such as dementia, cancer, or diabetes.
One of the research advisors, professor Gordon Lithgow of the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing, California, who is a Scottish ageing expert said, “If you target an ageing process and you slow down ageing then you slow down all the diseases and pathology of ageing as well. That's revolutionary. That's never happened before. I have been doing research into ageing for 25 years and the idea that we would be talking about a clinical trial in humans for an anti-ageing drug would have been though inconceivable.”
Professor Lithgow further stated, “But there is every reason to believe it's possible. The future is taking the biology that we've now developed and applying it to humans. 20 years ago ageing was a biological mystery. Now we are starting to understand what is going on.”
