Geneticist Nir Barzilai’s work has helped drive a new approach to medicine. Instead of treating individual diseases, his research has supported the idea that targeting the biology of aging with drugs and lifestyle interventions could more broadly extend “health span,” the healthy years of a person’s life. Researchers are now exploring whether they can create drugs that mimic these so-called longevity genes, and Barzilai is co-leading an ambitious project, the SuperAgers Initiative, in search of more genes that help slow aging and disease.
The project aims to recruit 10,000 people over the age of 95 and their family members for study. He designed a clinical trial testing whether metformin, a diabetes drug, could delay the onset and progression of age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. That trial has yet to launch, but Barzilai says the study design could be adapted by other groups looking to test whether drugs such as GLP-1 medications could be used not just to treat a single disease but to prevent multiple age-related conditions.
Barzilai is also helping lead a project aimed at finding reliable biomarkers for aging that could be used to test whether drugs and lifestyle improvements, such as exercise and sleep, actually slow someone’s aging. This all has massive implications for how we could live and age, and Barzilai is eager to persuade the world just how transformative longevity science could be. He even eschews the term that often accompanies his title; “longevity” has been sullied by too much hype and misinformation, he says.
Instead, he favors “geroscience,” the study of how biological processes of aging contribute to disease. Geroscience is the mechanism,” he says. For Barzilai, changing the language is part of transforming the field.
He heads the Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Institute of Geroscience in New York and is president of the Academy of Geroscience, a coalition of scientists aimed at advancing research on the biology of aging. Both organizations recently changed their names under his leadership.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
