An Antiaging Medicine Could Already Exist. Nir Barzilai Is On A Mission To Find It
The geneticist has played an instrumental role in pushing the idea that existing drugs could be repurposed as longevity-boosting treatments.
Geneticist Nir Barzilai is spearheading a new frontier in medicine that aims to extend the "health span" of human life by targeting the biology of aging. Instead of focusing on treating individual diseases, his research suggests that drugs and lifestyle interventions could prevent multiple age-related conditions. Barzilai's decades of study on centenarians and "superagers" have revealed several genetic factors associated with healthy aging, including variations in genes linked to cholesterol and lipid metabolism.
He is now leading the SuperAgers Initiative, recruiting 10,000 people over 95 and their family members to identify additional genes that may slow aging and disease. Barzilai has also proposed testing existing drugs, such as metformin, for their potential to delay the onset and progression of age-related diseases like cardiovascular disease and cancer.
Additionally, he is working on finding reliable biomarkers for aging to evaluate the effectiveness of drugs and lifestyle changes in slowing the aging process. Barzilai emphasizes the importance of accurate language in this field, advocating for "geroscience" over the often-misused term "longevity." He heads the Albert Einstein College of Medicine's Institute of Geroscience in New York and serves as president of the Academy of Geroscience, both of which he has rebranded to reflect the scientific nature of his work.
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