The cocktail in question consists of three drugs that are currently available: growth hormone, DHEA, and metformin. In this small study that involved 9 older white men after taking the cocktail their biological markers of aging reversed and got younger on average by 2.5 years.
Already some are sounding warnings, as drugs have side effects, and suggest that the reality is we still haven’t found the secret to anti-aging, but it does have to do with DNA and our cells.
“Over time, the programming language in our cells, the DNA, becomes corrupted, and that corruption is just like how the software on your computer gets damaged. When that happens, your computer slows down and the same thing happens in our cells,” said Dr. Robert Hariri, CEO of Celularity, Inc.
This study published in the journal Aging Cell used a pharmaceutical approach to anti-aging to correct aging DNA code within the cells. The study began by using growth hormone to try and restore tissue in the thymus, but this drug can cause diabetes and other side effects, so two diabetes medications (metformin and DHEA) were added to counter those effects. As a result, the researchers discovered a reversal and/or improvements in a number of biological markers of aging making the cells biologically younger than their calendar age.
Warnings are being sounded because the long term use of these drugs and their side effects are not known. Hariri suggests that a better and safer approach would be to use stem cells, which his company is commercializing in an abundance sourced from human placentas which don’t carry the cellular markers that alert the immune system and lead to rejection.
This new finding may or may not be the drug cocktail for anti-aging, the findings were unexpected. Much more research is required to determine the long term effects, and if it really will safely and effectively work to lead to more youthful cells. Only time will tell, tick, tock, tick, tick, tick.
