Humans Can Start Living Longer—Once the FDA Does This
If the FDA classifies aging as a disease, drug companies can take a new approach to curing death.
Scientists are already targeting proteins in cells to keep them from degenerating.
The World Health Organization supports the growing trend of calling aging a disease.
Curing death may require a little help from governmental classifications. Right now, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) believes aging is a natural process. But if the agency changes that distinction and calls aging a disease, then scientists could approach the reversal of aging quite differently.
As chronicled in The Hill, under current regulatory rules, drug companies cannot produce products aimed at slowing or reversing aging—instead, they can only create drugs meant to target specific diseases. For decades, researchers have looked at curing symptoms of aging instead of the root causes. By changing the classification of aging to a disease under FDA rules, that opens the possibilities for researchers to really take a novel approach to the concept of slowing human cell degeneration.
Scientists have long focused on understanding how our aging, deteriorating bodies lead to death. Slowing—or outright stopping—that process appears to lie within proteins inside our cells, a concept that we continue to better understood the longer we study it. We’ve come far enough that researchers now believe they can create drugs that treat aged cells by removing them, as WIRED reports. In 2018, this technique give mice a longer and healthier life, as they showed fewer signs of cancer, exercised more vigorously, and had healthier fur.
The notion of reversing aging, curing death, and helping humans live forever comes with a major business proposition—along with the obvious improvements in quality of life for an entire world—and WIRED reports that more than two dozen companies are already working on eliminating these aging cells, dubbed senescent cells, with the backing of billionaires like Jeff Bezos and organizations like the Mayo Clinic.
The World Health Organization (WHO) is on board—at least from the classification front—and it expects an eager research community to keep digging into how proteins act within cells. This could all lead the FDA down the path of just how it approaches the discussion of aging. If new treatment options clear regulatory hurdles, it could provide a fresh pathway toward the scientific community’s ultimate goal of reversing aging and curing death.
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