A new medication has been shown in research to extend the life of lab mice by up to 25%. The results, according to researchers, raise the “tantalizing” possibility that the medications could have a comparable impact on elderly people.
They believe that by lowering frailty and age-related symptoms, their research may one day contribute to a longer period of healthy aging in humans. Compared to animals that were not treated, the treated mice had an average lifespan of 155 weeks as opposed to 120 weeks.
Researchers discovered that the therapy significantly decreased the number of cancer-related fatalities in the animals as well as the other illnesses brought on by poor metabolism and chronic inflammation, which are characteristics of aging.
The animals essentially had longer, healthier lives, and the results showed that there were very few negative effects. Researchers at Imperial College London and the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Medical Science discovered that inhibiting the IL-11 protein lengthened mice’s healthy lives. Human levels of this protein rise with age, and previous studies have connected it to several age-related illnesses including inflammation, metabolic problems, muscular atrophy, and frailty.
Co-corresponding author Professor Stuart Cook of Imperial College London, the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Medical Science (MRC LMS), and the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore stated: “These findings are very exciting. The treated mice had fewer cancers and were free from the usual signs of ageing and frailty, but we also saw reduced muscle wasting and improvement in muscle strength.
“In other words, the old mice receiving anti-IL-11 were healthier.”
“Previously proposed life-extending drugs and treatments have either had poor side-effect profiles, or don’t work in both sexes, or could extend life, but not healthy life, however, this does not appear to be the case for IL-11.
“While these findings are only in mice, it raises the tantalizing possibility that the drugs could have a similar effect in elderly humans.
“Anti-IL-11 treatments are currently in human clinical trials for other conditions, potentially providing exciting opportunities to study its effects in aging humans in the future.”
The scientists created mice with the gen-producing protein IL-11 (interleukin 11) removed to assess the impact of the protein. As a result, the animals lived longer by an average of more than 20%. Additionally, they administered an injection of an anti-IL-11 antibody, a medication that counteracts the effects of IL-11 in the body, to 75-week-old mice, which is around the age of 55 years in humans.
The mice administered the medication from 75 weeks of age until death showed an average lifetime increase of 22.4 percent in males and 25 percent in females, according to research published in Nature.
Co-corresponding author Assistant; Professor Anissa Widjaja of Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore stated: “Although our work was done in mice, we hope that these findings will be highly relevant to human health, given that we have seen similar effects in studies of human cells and tissues.
“This research is an important step toward better understanding ageing and we have demonstrated, in mice, a therapy that could potentially extend healthy ageing, by reducing frailty and the physiological manifestations of ageing.”
Although early-stage clinical trials are being conducted to further understand the effects of this medication on patients with fibrotic lung disease, the effects of IL-11 inhibition in people are still unknown.
