Breaking down the barriers to longevity clinical trials
Kitalys Institute’s founder calls for regulatory changes to allow geroscience innovation to flourish and enable true longevity trials.
“Preserve health, prevent disease, prolong healthspan,” begins the mission statement of the Kitalys Institute: I agree. Lofty goals indeed from the not-for-profit organisation behind the annual Targeting Metabesity conference and a range of initiatives to translate longevity science into genuine public health gains.
My take on this: The vast majority of companies developing therapeutics in the longevity field are adopting strategies that involve targeting specific indications rather than aging itself. And well they might, because there is currently no precedent for drugs targeting aging at regulatory bodies like the FDA. Kitalys wants to change that, and we caught up with the institute’s founder Dr Alexander “Zan” Fleming to find out more.
Fleming is credited with coining the term “metabesity” – describing “the constellation of age-related chronic diseases, cancer and the aging process itself – the slow decline and muscle function and mass and all the other organ systems that, in effect, deteriorate over time.”
The concept is that all these components of this “constellation” are driven, in part, by common root causes that can be targeted. The idea being not to target just one condition, but ultimately to show that many conditions can be improved with a single intervention. This is interesting as it has the potential of overcoming the metabesity challenge and getting approved longevity and geroscience therapies into the public domain.
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