Why we age and succumb to age-related diseases is a complex question that is yet to be settled by science. Yet the quest to understand the mechanisms involved in life extension is being pursued by some of the best and brightest. One of the company’s at the vanguard of this endeavour is Longevica.
Longevica is a science-driven company with a mission to find mechanisms of life extension.
The life science company claims to have made a major breakthrough in extending lifespan after more than a decade of painstaking research.
“Two methods of life extensions found to this day are calorie restriction and rapamycin,” explained Ainar Abdrahmanov, CEO at Longevica, to Express.co.uk.
“The former might not even work on humans and doesn’t provide a reasonable quality of life. Rapamycin is a toxic antibiotic that would poison people trying to consume it daily.”
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To address these inadequacies, researchers at Longevica tested out a vast number of known drugs and pharmaceutical compounds to find their effect on the lifespan without prior hypotheses, explained Mr Abdrahmanov.
The culmination of this effort was the largest life extension study on long-lived mice in the history of science at the Jackson Laboratory in California, one of the largest centres for pharmaceutical studies.
Over the course of the study, 1033 pharmacological compounds were tested on 20,000 long-lived female mice (B6C3F1).
The team spent 11 years on the project, pouring $13 million of the founder’s personal money into researching the topic and analysing the results, and recently came to a potentially revolutionary conclusion.
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The study found five compounds that showed statistically significant life extensions by 16-22 percent: Inulin, Pentetic Acid, Clofibrate, Proscillaridin A, D-Valine.
“This is the first time we found a compound with such a significant effect since rapamycin,” explained Mr Abdrahmanov.
The team grouped all used compounds into 62 pharmacological classes and through big data analysis found two particular groups that showed statistically significant correlation with life extension.
Longevica then spent the following years specifically looking into those compounds, their applications and history of usage in medicine.
Just recently the team finally confirmed they had found two mechanisms for life extension in mice: removal of heavy metals and general improvement of the detoxification system.
“The same mechanisms are likely to be applicable in human beings,” said Mr Abdrahmanov.
He continued: “The life extension is achieved through the removal of negative factors affecting living beings throughout their lives, meaning mice and, potentially, humans are able to live longer until their own biological limit.
“It’s similar to smoking: we know that people who stop smoking before reaching 40 usually have the same survival curve as healthy people.
“Toxins like heavy metals are proven to affect lifespan in other studies.”
According to Mr Abdrahmanov, the same effect is likely to repeat in humans as it shouldn’t depend on the metabolic rate or our size.
Longevica continues to research these 62 classes and five particular compounds through additional experiments and combining them with a meta-analysis of existing research papers on biochemistry.
Its goal is to confirm the mechanism for this life extension found in mice and continuously test it on larger subjects if it proves to be correct.
“In the future it might extend our lifespan,” added Mr Abdrahmanov.
