If you target an ageing process and you slow down ageing then you slow down all the diseases and pathology of ageing as well. That’s revolutionary. That’s never happened before.

I have been doing research into ageing for 25 years and the idea that we would be talking about a clinical trial in humans for an anti-ageing drug would have been though inconceivable.

But there is every reason to believe it’s possible. The future is taking the biology that we’ve now developed and applying it to humans. 20 years ago ageing was a biological mystery. Now we are starting to understand what is going on.

It is argued that aging is not an inevitable part of life – some marine creatures do not age. All cells contain a DNA blueprint which could keep a body functioning properly. However, over a person’s lifetime, billions of cell divisions occur in order to keep the body functioning properly, but the more cell division, the more room there is for error.

In the case of cancer, cells no longer have the ability to get rid of mutations, and tumours grow. In Alzheimer’s the brain stops clearing out sticky plaques, and dementia develops.

At R4.30 a day, the world’s most widely used drug for diabetes, metformin, is the current answer as it increases the number of oxygen molecules released into a cell, which appears to boost robustness and longevity.

[source: telegraph]