Anti-aging promises have been around since Ponce de Leon went looking for the Fountain of Youth, but the latest promising news comes from an MIT researcher with five Nobel winning experts advising him.
Dr. Lenny Guarente is packing decades of anti-aging research from his Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab and other leading universities into a pill made from all-natural ingredients.
The natural approach will let Guarentee and his Elysium Health co-founders, Eric Marcotulli and Dan Alminana, speed their product to market. Using natural components means they can’t patent their pills, but lets the company bypass the years-long FDA approval process.
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The pills rely on sirtuins, a group of enzymes linked to metabolism that have been shown in research to extend lifespans of mice and other animals. It was Guarente’s Center for Scientific Aging Research at MIT that conducted some of the first groundbreaking research into sirtuins.
Harvard researchers expanded on his findings when they discovered one particular type of sirtuins, NAD, “reversed aging” in mice. In the
journal Cell they reported that tissue in two-year-old mice given NAD resembled that of six-month-old mice after just a week of treatment.
In humans, that would be like a 60-year-old suddenly sporting some of the same cells as a 20-year-old.
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Elysium’s supplement, called Basis, is aimed at replicating that effect in humans, though it’s never been fully tested on people yet.
Even so, more than 30 leading scientists in the field of aging have signed on as advisors for Elysium’s launch. Among them are five Nobel Prize winners including brain researcher Dr. Eric Kandel who won the Nobel for Medicine in 2000 and Stanford cellular physiologist Dr. Tom Sudhof who won it in 2013.
The FDA doesn’t recognize aging as a medical condition, but it does increase the risk for illnesses that can kill people, such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
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Guarente and his partners are taking an approach that does not focus on anti-aging or living longer — they see their supplement as a way for people to improve their health over a long lifetime.
Marcotulli told Fast Company, “For us this is about increasing healthspan, not lifespan.”
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