Pharmaceutical interventions to slow human aging. Are we ready for cocktails?

Abstract

Slowing human aging with pharmaceuticals is now recognized as a feasible strategy. However, the design of clinical trials is still focused on single drug approaches. The process of aging has multiple pathways, which no current drug has been shown to effectively target. Therefore, it is of interest to study combinations, or cocktails, of drugs. A recently published article reported that a drug cocktail of rapamycin, acarbose and phenylbutyrate slowed aging in middle-aged mice treated for three months. The impact of this report is discussed, with the implications for determining endpoints in humans for testing drug cocktails as well as testing other drug combinations. Keywords: Healthy aging, drug cocktail, aging mice, rapamycin, acarbose, phenylbutyrate

Behavioral and neuropathological features of Alzheimer’s disease are attenuated in 5xFAD mice treated with intranasal GHK peptide

“…Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a complex disease and efforts to find effective treatments have met with limited success in part because the focus has been on testing drugs that target a specific pathogenic mechanism. The probability of effectively targeting several mechanistic pathways would be greatly increased by using a drug that individually targets more than one pathway (Ladiges, 2014;Rosenfeld and Ladiges, 2022). GHK (glycyl-L-histidyl-L-lysine) is a naturally occurring peptide released from secreted protein acidic and rich in cysteine (SPARC) during proteolytic breakdown (Lane et al, 1994).…”