Would you be willing to put your dog on a drug that costs $50 or more per month, in order to eventually extend its life by a year or so? A drug company is betting Americans love their dog so much they will pay a double digit amount per month and give a drug to their dog for years on end, to modestly extend the dog’s life. There may be a market for such a drug — to some people, their dog is as precious and unique as their kid:
“When you adopt a dog, you’re adopting future heartbreak,” said Emilie Adams, a New Yorker who owns three Rhodesian Ridgebacks. “It’s worth it over time because you just have so much love between now and when they go. But their life spans are shorter than ours.”
In recent years, scientists have been chasing after drugs that might stave off this heartbreak by extending the lives of our canine companions. On Tuesday, the biotech company Loyal announced that it had moved one step closer to bringing one such drug to market. “The data you provided are sufficient to show that there is a reasonable expectation of effectiveness,” an official at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration informed the company in a recent letter….That means that the drug, which Loyal declined to identify for proprietary reasons, has met one of the requirements for “expanded conditional approval,” a fast-tracked authorization for animal drugs that fulfill unmet health needs and require difficult clinical trials. The drug is not available to pet owners yet, and the F.D.A. must still review the company’s safety and manufacturing data. But conditional approval, which Loyal hopes to receive in 2026, would allow the company to begin marketing the drug for canine life extension, even before a large clinical trial is complete.
“We’re going to be going for claiming at least one year of healthy life span extension,” said Celine Halioua, the founder and chief executive of Loyal.
Whether the drug will actually deliver on that promise is unknown. Although a small study suggests LOY-001 might blunt metabolic changes associated with aging, Loyal has not yet demonstrated that it lengthens dogs’ lives.
But the letter, which came after years of discussion between Loyal and the F.D.A., suggests that the agency is open to canine longevity drugs, Ms. Halioua said.
More drugs are in the pipeline. A team of academic researchers is currently conducting a canine clinical trial of rapamycin, which has been shown to extend the lives of lab mice. And Loyal is recruiting dogs for a clinical trial of another drug candidate, dubbed LOY-002.
Scientists have created longer-lived worms, flies and mice by tweaking key aging-related genes.
These findings have raised the tantalizing possibility that scientists might be able to find drugs that had the same life-extending effects in people. That remains an active area of research, but canine longevity has recently started to attract more attention, in part because dogs are good models for human aging and in part because many pet owners would love more time with their furry family members.
The drugs currently under investigation act in different ways. Rapamycin, which has also attracted intense interest as a potential longevity drug for humans, inhibits a protein known as mTOR, which regulates cell growth and metabolism.
So far, the worst side effect of LOY-001 has been mild and temporary gastrointestinal distress, Ms. Halioua said, although she acknowledged that the bar for safety would be “extremely, extremely, extremely high.”
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