It will take a long time to wait
When will anti-aging drugs appear
Maxim Skulachev, Forbes, 13.03.2019
Photo by Alexander Karnyukhin for Forbes
Starting from some age (you will be surprised how early) a person ages, his body deteriorates. With a certain, ever-increasing probability, age-dependent diseases arise, and eventually he dies. From old age. At the moment, there is a consensus on this: nothing can be done about aging, because it is a natural and inevitable process. Natural, of course, but, excuse me, why should it be inevitable? About 15 years ago, futurologists and visionaries said that aging can be prevented in principle, and now venerable scientists do not hesitate to put this question. In 2017, Academician Vladimir Skulachev (by a curious coincidence, my father) argued that the victory over aging had turned from a purely speculative and theoretical problem into a completely solvable technological problem. According to this point of view, human aging occurs as a result of the launch of a special genetic program and the work of this program can be disrupted by methods of pharmacological intervention.
The practical implementation of this task is already attracting business. Innovative companies have emerged with the goal of developing "medicines for old age". Until recently, this segment was more interested in extravagant private investors, but now they began to talk about it much more seriously.
What will happen if some company finally develops such a technology? Instead of treating the diseases of aging with a thousand different drugs, they will be prevented with one drug. If you really look at things, then maybe not one, but a dozen. This is the same market: competition will begin, the development of newer and more advanced versions. Based on the most general considerations, being among the first in this market is the dream of any company, a representative of Big Pharma. Imagine what it means from a commercial point of view to release a drug against a disease that affects 100% of the adult population of the planet! And since it is already clear that human aging starts very early – exactly before the age of 20, then healthy, active, and therefore economically wealthy people will buy it.
There are examples of such market successes in history. The multibillion-dollar industry of dietary supplements and vitamins consumed by generally healthy people is based on this principle. Careful clinical studies of various dietary supplements and vitamins have shown that with a reasonable diet, their effectiveness is zero. And this whole industry is supported only by general considerations and marketing efforts.
A closer analogue can be considered the grandiose commercial success of statins – drugs for reducing the level of "bad" cholesterol in the blood. They can be prescribed to a completely healthy person and then monitor the effectiveness of the reception by doing blood tests. As a result, statins have become the best-selling drugs in the history of pharmaceuticals. And now imagine the scale of the market for a drug that not only slightly reduces the likelihood of cardiovascular diseases, but dramatically slows down aging.
But what keeps serious investors (and first of all "big pharma") from immediate investments in such a promising business? The answer is simple: the problem is that there are no anti-aging drugs yet. And if some group of enthusiastic researchers believes that they can be developed, then pharmaceutical companies and venture funds have clear restrictions that do not allow them to invest in a project to create a cure for something that cannot really be called a disease. A dead end? Wait a second, it's not that bad.
If some drug interferes with the work of the aging program of the body, then it should be somehow useful in the fight against certain age-dependent diseases. And if your substance somehow knows how to deal with them, then in principle it can be used to make a cure for these specific diseases. Including incurable ones at the moment. But this is already a good bait for the industry. Especially if you can offer a proven and at the same time quite original mechanism of action for your drug. The team of such a project, in partnership with Pharma, may well bring its drug to the market in the form of a cure for specific diseases. So there will be a drug on the drug market that potentially stops aging.
One step remains: to turn it from potential to real. To do this, you need to collect information on the results of mass use of this drug to find out whether patients have become older more slowly. A method for assessing the rate of aging has yet to be developed, but at the current level of bioanalytical and digital technologies, no special problems should arise. The investor who decides on this final step will turn his drug into a "disruptive" (in the terminology of Clayton Christensen) technology – a product that radically rebuilds the pharmaceutical market, up to a complete change of its segments and players.
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