[MattW]

The Guardian:

Quote:

Australian and US researchers hope an anti-ageing compound could be trialled on humans as early as next year, following a key breakthrough that saw the ageing process reversed in mice.

The study, involving Harvard University and the University of NSW, discovered a way of restoring the efficiency of cells, completely reversing the ageing process in muscles.

Two-year-old mice were given a compound over a week, moving back the key indicators of ageing to that of a six-month-old mouse. Researchers said this was the equivalent of making a 60-year-old person feel like a 20-year-old.

Heartiste linked to this a few days ago, and I just saw another comment on it from Arnold Kling (an economist I follow online) who predicts that if it does end up working for humans it'll take less time for someone to figure out how to produce it cheaply than it will take for the FDA to approve it.

[Menace]

For those that don't know, NAD (nicotine adenine dinucleotide) is a naturally occurring co-enzyme. Producing it cheaply is not particularly relevant, since it is already commercially available (1 gram is $43): http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/catalog/prod...®ion=US

Link to paper in Cell: http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(13)01521-3

There is no indication in the reporting that I have seen what "injecting" means. I'm fairly sure that a compound like NAD cannot be systemically active (i.e. you just inject it IM/IV) due to metabolism in the liver. They may have injected it into organs and used the improvements in a particular organ system as a proxy for anti-aging.

The list of things that work in mice but fail to work in people is very very long. I wouldn't get my hopes up.