In 2025, Loyal, a biotech start-up, expects to start selling “a daily, beef-flavored pill” that “could give dogs a minimum of one extra year of healthy life,” reports The Guardian.
Why for dogs but not humans? Human longevity drugs would require decades-long trials before they could be sold, because of FDA regulations. But drugs for dogs don’t require such trials. So Loyal has raised $125 million in funding from firms that won’t invest in drugs to extend human lifespans because they would require lengthy trials.
But Celine Halioua, Loyal’s founder, believes the drug for dogs will eventually benefit humans. “Finding out how to prevent canine age-related decline is a really strong proxy for doing the same with humans because dogs get similar age-related diseases, and share our environments and habits in ways laboratory mice do not,” she says. Her firm is owned by Cellular Longevity, a biotech firm focused on the science of longevity.
The Guardian explains that the LOY-002 pill for dogs:
aims to blunt and reverse metabolic changes associated with ageing: reducing frailty by curbing ageing-related increases in insulin.“The way the drug extends lifespan…is by extending health and thus shortening the rate of ageing.”
The same goal is being sought in another laboratory almost 900 miles across America, where a team of academic researchers are feverishly testing the impact of rapamycin as part of the Dog Aging Project.
Rapamycin, a cheap, easily produced drug already commonly used as an immunosuppressant for humans after organ transplant operations, has repeatedly been shown to increase lifespan and delay – or even reverse – many age-related disorders in mice.
While the drug has not been approved for longevity use in humans, many gerontologists nevertheless see it as the best hope we have for pharmacologically slowing down the ageing process.
It takes much longer to get government approval to sell drugs for use by humans. The FDA can take many years to approve medical devices and drugs. The FDA didn’t approve a home test for HIV until 24 years after it first received an application. According to an FDA advisory committee, the test held “the potential to prevent the transmission of more than 4,000 new HIV infections in its first year of use alone.” That means thousands of people likely got infected with AIDS as a result of the delay in approving it. And at least a hundred thousand people died waiting years for the FDA to approve beta blockers.
