Brian Kennedy: "We are already treating ageing,"

"We are already treating ageing," said gerontologist Brian Kennedy at the International Symposium on Geroprotectors in Basel, Switzerland

Everyday remedies

And rapalogs are not the only game in town. The most commonly used medicine for type 2 diabetes, metformin, also seems to extend the lifespan of many small animals, including mice, by around 5 per cent.

There have been no trials of metformin as a longevity drug in people, but a recent study hinted that it might have a similar effect. The study was designed to compare metformin with another diabetes medicine, using records of 180,000 UK patients. To tease out the differences between the drugs, people who started taking them were compared with people without diabetes who had been closely matched for age and other health factors, and tracked over five years.

Surprisingly, diabetics taking metformin were not only less likely to die in that time than those on the other medicine but they were also about 15 per cent less likely to die than people without diabetes who took neither drug. "This shows we already have a drug that we can potentially use in humans," says Nir Barzilai, who heads the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.

Other familiar drugs might also fit the bill. Low-dose aspirin and statins are widely taken by healthy people to reduce their risk of heart disease. Both extend lifespan in animals and seem to have anti-inflammatory effects.

Inflammation is one of the proposed mechanisms behind ageing, so aspirin and statins could be effective heart drugs in part because they slow ageing, says Kennedy, who heads the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California.

The fact that common mechanisms seem to be behind the major diseases of ageing, like heart disease, stroke and dementia, is good news, as it suggests we should be able to extend our lifespan while also extending healthspan, according to many conference speakers. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine an effective longevity agent that worked without alleviating or delaying such conditions. Rapamycin, for instance, has been found to reduce the cognitive decline that accompanies ageing in animals.

Some researchers are already convinced and have started taking various combinations of drugs – including low-dose rapamycin. Blagosklonny is one such convert, and he's not alone: "I know many people at this meeting who are taking it," he said. No doctor would advise such a move, though, as rapamycin's potential for causing diabetes could well outweigh its anti-ageing effects.

Nevertheless, the fact that anti-ageing prescription drugs are being developed at all is a measure of how far the longevity field has come, says Zhavoronkov. "It's the first time pharma has embraced ageing."