The Controversial Age Reversal Pill: A Dog's Journey

Watch the video on TikTok

Transcript

Okay, this is a weird one. A pharmaceutical company that's trialing a new groundbreaking age reversal pill had such good results that the local news wanted to run a story on them. Not quite. You'll see. And if you're a dog lover, you might not want to watch this whole video. Before they even could publish the video, the chairman and CEO died. Hopefully unrelated. See, six months ago, this 12-year-old German Shepherd was near death. He had terminal cancer, was operated on, and his prognosis wasn't looking good. The dog's caretaker knew that an age reversal trial was being done. conducted on dogs. And so she asked if Zeus could be a part of it due to his dire situation. And there's what got the news interested, a dog with cancer, which is already very different from just an anti-aging situation. The pill's aim is to lengthen telomere caps on human stem cells because as part of the aging process are telomeres shorten, which increases the chance of age-related diseases and of course death. If you can increase telomeres, you can reproduce stem cells and keep repairing things so that you can get literally younger. Not quite. The tumors do shorten with age, and we used to think that this was the main cause of aging, but more recent research seems to show that it's more a sign of aging than an actual cause of it. This study found that naked mole rats go their whole lives with pretty much the same length telomeres, but they still do age and die. Telomeres also behave differently in cancer cells, like Zeus had. But more on that later. They said that in their drugs preclinical data from a previous in vitro human cell study, it showed that the medication lengthened telomeres by almost 200%. Petri dish. Zeus was granted access to the medication in April, and his caretaker said that she saw results almost immediately. He's doing marvelously. He goes out to our pool and he swims and he has fun and he plays with the tennis ball. A recent scan showed that the cancer in his body had completely disappeared, and the results were so remarkable that she asked for more to give another 12-year-old dog that could hardly walk due to arthritis. And just last week, she said that he started galloping and running again. Did you hear anything there about trial? results for a groundbreaking anti-aging pill? I didn't. Just two dogs given it for compassionate use, one who took it after his cancer had been operated on, and the other for osteoarthritis. And Dylan clearly got the language from the news article. If only we could trust them to do a better job in science reporting. But anything to do with anti-aging tingles my synapses, so I did some digging. First, the medical journals, there's nothing published on this compound, then their website, then I read their SEC filings because they're a publicly traded company, and still more online iron and copper to make all sorts of enzymes that we need for everyday life. But those metals can also react with oxygen in our bodies to form reactive oxygen species, which cause all sorts of damage to our fats, proteins, and telomeres, which normally also shorten every time the cell divides. Except for some cancer cells where that's a very bad thing because we want them to stop dividing. The drug called telomere 1 is a modified version of an alkaloid taken from tobacco. It binds to metals like iron, copper, and zinc, and helps to modulate a pro-inflammatory cytokine called the interleukin 17. specifically targeting osteoarthritis and post-chemotherapy recovery for the main use of this drug, rather than aging in general, because annoyingly, aging is not actually classified as a disease that we can study and so you can't register a trial to stop aging. They presented this poster back in March, which showed their results of using the telomere 1 to lengthen telomeres in human cells in a petri dish. But petri dishes are magical worlds where we cure cancer every few weeks, so the next step was animal, Back in May, they started safety trials with five beagle dogs, four in the active group and one control. And it seems to have gone well. But the effectiveness trial with 12 beagles is still ongoing. No results yet. They took the 12 beagles, surgically damaged their legs to induce osteoarthritis, and are giving them telomere one for around five and a half months, all the while monitoring them and taking all sorts of medical imaging. Then at the end, they'll put them down so that they can go and examine the details of their cartilage under a microscope. So much for anti-aging from the dog's perspective. at least. Maybe if aging were treated as a disease, we could register trials to just make them feel better and present as younger rather than having to kill them to measure the osteoarthritis symptoms. But on a somewhat brighter note, they've also been testing the drug on mice where they've seen a tenfold increase in telomere count after just ten days of treatment. This is an older mouse who's walking around in circles on his arthritic leg, and this is the same mouse ten days later where he's looking and acting much younger, and they've done this with over forty mice so far. But is this effect specifically because of the telomere lengthening or due to some other climatory process triggered by the drug or some other thing that we don't even understand at all? It's hard to say at this stage, but this is an area where I care a lot more about the what, the anti-aging, rather than the how, so I'm tentatively hopeful. If all goes well, they aim to start human trials by next year. I'll keep you guys updated.

Additional notes

The source caption frames the drug as promising but not yet “groundbreaking,” discusses telomerase/cancer caveats, notes that a cited stroke study did not mention telomeres, and lists telomere-aging references.

References