Starting from a certain age (you will be surprised how early) a person ages, his body deteriorates. With a certain, increasing probability, age-related diseases arise, and in the end he dies. From old age. At the moment there is a consensus on this: nothing can be done with aging, because it is a natural and inevitable process. Natural – of course, but let me, why should the inevitable? About 15 years ago, futurologists and visionaries spoke about the fact that aging can be prevented in principle; now venerable scientists are not ashamed to pose the same question.
The practical implementation of this task is already attracting business. Innovative companies have emerged, aiming to develop “drugs for old age.” Until recently, this segment was interested in rather extravagant private investors, but now they have started talking about it much more seriously.
What will happen if some company finally develops this technology?
Instead of treating the diseases of aging with thousands of different drugs, they will be prevented by one drug. If you really look at things, then perhaps not one, but a dozen. This is the market: competition will begin, the development of newer and more advanced versions. Based on the most general considerations, to be among the first in this market – this is the dream of any company, a representative of the “big pharma”. Imagine what, from a commercial point of view, is to release a drug against a disease that affects 100% of the adult population of the planet! And since it is already clear that the aging of a person starts very early – to be exactly 20 years old, then healthy, active, and therefore economically wealthy people will buy it.
There are examples of similar market successes in history. This principle is based on the multi-billion dollar industry of dietary supplements and vitamins consumed by generally healthy people. Accurate clinical studies of various dietary supplements and vitamins have shown that with a reasonable diet, their effectiveness is zero. And the whole industry is supported only by general considerations and marketing efforts.
A closer analogue can be considered the tremendous commercial success of statins – drugs to reduce the level of “bad” cholesterol in the blood. They can be assigned to a completely healthy person and then monitor the effectiveness of the reception, doing blood tests. As a result, the statins have become the best-selling drugs in the history of pharmaceuticals. Now imagine the scale of the market for a drug that not only slightly reduces the likelihood of cardiovascular diseases, but drastically slows down aging.
But what keeps serious investors from making immediate investments in such a promising business? The answer is simple: the problem is that there are no anti-aging drugs yet. And if a group of enthusiastic researchers believes that they can be developed, then pharmaceutical companies and venture funds have clear limitations that prevent them from investing in a project to create a cure for something that cannot be called a disease properly. Dead end? Wait a second, it’s not so bad.
If a drug interferes with the work of the aging program, it should be somehow useful in the fight against individual age-related diseases. And if your substance can somehow fight them, then in principle it is possible to make a cure for these specific diseases. Including incurable at the moment. But this is already a good bait for the industry. Especially if you can offer a proven and yet quite original mechanism of action for your drug. The team of such a project in partnership with pharma franchise company may well bring its drug to the market as a medicine for specific diseases. Since the drug market will be a drug that potentially stops aging.
One step remains: to transform it from potential to real. To do this, you need to gather information on the results of the mass use of this drug, to find out whether patients have become older more slowly. A method for estimating the rate of aging is yet to be developed, but there should be no particular problems at the current level of bioanalytical and digital technologies.