Worms are very different from people, of course. But 7% of the drugs in the DrugAge database that were reported to extend life in worms were also tested in mice and found to extend life in mice.
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There's unpublished data I've been told about from a very large mouse lifespan study finding again that 5% of drugs tested on mice significantly extended lifespan. (Small sample sizes in each drug group, and fairly small effect sizes, but still remarkable.)
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I think aging-modifying drugs are out there. It's just a matter of finding them. Which means industrializing drug discovery -- WITHOUT falling prey to Goodhart's Law. We need fast, cheap experiments at scale that have good predictive validity for the effects of drugs in mammals.
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IMO that means screening for lifespan, in *multiple* short-lived model organisms, with automation & machine learning to reduce the cost per experiment (e.g. monitoring with cameras instead of by eye).
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That's what we're doing at Daphnia Labs: big phenotypic screens on the small crustacean Daphnia magna. (Currently we're at the prototype stage.)
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In principle, gene therapies can be much more flexible and powerful tools than small molecules, and I'm impressed by some of the results so far (e.g. Oisin's DNA-targeting senolytics.) But small molecules can be tested faster, and some of them are already FDA-approved.
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Just curious: how much have we progressed in simulating organisms for testing drugs? Is it possible to perhaps to filter out the least promising drugs by means of a simulation? Is any work even being done in this direction
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we're really not there yet. protein binding simulations are ok but not yet a substitute for experiment; organism simulations are totally not ready.
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Isn't 5% exactly the number that you'd expect to be significant with a null hypothesis rejection criteria of p < 0.05?
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Curious if you've seen interesting research on BCAAs as they relate to longevity? Seeing some tell-tale signs of improving insulin sensitivity, inflammation, apoptosis, etc from reducing their intake or blood serum levels after the fact.
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