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| Metformin could offer incredible health gains |
THE WORLD'S first anti-ageing drug that could allow people to live healthily into their 120s is to be tested on humans.
Clinical trials on older people of cheap drug metformin have been given the green light by The Food and Drug Administration in America.
The pill's developers hope that it could one day wipe out diseases like Alzheimer's.
It is hoped that the clinical trials will show that you can slow down the ageing process in humans, making those in their 70s as healthy a 50-year-old.
There is every reason to believe it's possible
"If you target an ageing process and you slow down ageing then you slow down all the diseases and pathology of ageing as well", said ageing expert Prof Gordon Lithgow, of the Buck Institute for Research on Ageing in California, and one of the study advisers.
"That's revolutionary. That's never happened before," he said.
"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 thought inconceivable.
"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."
Researchers have already proven that the diabetes drug metformin extends the life of animals. Now experts want to see if the same effects can be replicated in humans.
Last year researchers at Cardiff University found that when patients with diabetes were given the drug they lived longer than others without the condition, even though they should have died eight years earlier on average.
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| The drug could mean the elderly stay healthier for longer |
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| A metformin molecule |
When Belgian researchers tested metformin on roundworms they aged slower and stayed healthier longer.
Other studies have shown that the drug reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease and cancer.
The experts behind the pill hope that it will delay some of the most debilitating diseases of old age.
Nir Barzilai, of the American Federation for Ageing Research, which funds the latest trial, said: "We are confident that once FDA becomes open to aging as an indication, more and better drugs will be rapidly developed.
"We believe that there is a great benefit for healthy lifespan, not only to the individual, but also for the society in the form of cost savings, which is often referred to as the longevity dividend."
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| One in three people born in 2013 will live to 100 |
He added: "If indeed metformin is a drug that can target the aging process, its administration should be associated with less age-related disease in general, rather than the decreased incidence of a single age-related disease."
Metformin is the world's most widely used diabetes drug and costs just 10p a day.
It has been widely and safely used for more than 60 years and has very few side effects.
It works by reducing oxidative stress and inflammation. The new clinical trials called Targeting Aging with Metformin, or TAME, will begin in the US next winter.
It will use 3,000 70 to 80-year-olds who have, or are at risk of, cancer, heart disease and dementia.
The trials are expected to take five to seven years. The drug will aim to attack the process of ageing, rather than individual diseases, one of the project's members, Prof Stuart Jay Olshansky, has explained.
"We lower the risk of heart disease, somebody lives long enough to get cancer," he said in an interview earlier this year.
"If we reduce the risk of cancer, somebody lives long enough to get Alzheimer's disease.
"We are suggesting that the time has arrived to attack them all by going after the biological process of aging."
One in three babies born in 2013 are expected to live until they are 100, according to the Office for National Statistics.
Britons will live to an average of 81.5, with 78.8 for men and 82.7 for women.
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