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 The researchers said their aim is not to find the secret of eternal
life, but to figure out the mechanism of the aging process to find
ways to help people stay healthy for longer.
"We are not trying to cheat death, but help people be healthy and
disease-free in their final years," said Linda Partridge, a
professor at University College London's Institute of Healthy Aging
and the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Aging who co-led the
work.
The three drugs - the mood stabilizer lithium, a cancer treatment
called trametinib and an immune regulator called rapamycin - target
different cellular processes and had a "quite remarkable" impact on
the flies' lifespans, the scientists said.
And since the three drugs are all already in use as medical
treatments, they are known to be safe to use in people, we have
found that a combination drug treatment ... may be an effective way
to slow down the aging process," said Jorge Castillo-Quan, who
co-led the research.
Partridge said the findings add to growing evidence that so-called
polypills – pills that combine low doses of multiple drugs – could
one day help prevent age-related diseases.
"This may be possible by combining the drugs we're investigating
with other promising drugs, but there is a long way to go," she
said.
This research adds to previous studies finding that individually,
lithium, trametinib and rapamycin can each extend lifespan in fruit
flies. That evidence has also been supported by further studies in
mice and worms, the scientists said.
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In this study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences journal, Castillo-Quan's team gave fruit flies doses of the
three drugs separately and in combination.
Each drug individually extended lifespan by an average of 11%, they
found, and pairing two drugs extended lifespan by around 30%. But
when all three were combined, the fruit flies lived 48% longer than
flies that did not get the treatment.
"We found it was quite remarkable that this drug combination enabled
them to live 48% longer," said Castillo-Quan, who now works at
Harvard Medical School in the United States.
The researchers said they plan to conduct more studies to try to
decipher exactly how the drugs work in combination with each other.
They hope to move on to experiments in more complex animals, such as
mice, to gauge the effects on the entire body before eventually
progressing to human trials.
(This story has been refiled to remove extraneous word in first
paragraph).
(Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Louise Heavens)
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