Research on Long-Lasting Drugs Could Be Speeded Up by Testing Ovaries Instead of Mice

• Scientists have created an “atlas” of ovarian aging.
• The atlas suggests that ovaries are an untapped, rapid way to study longevity treatments in humans.
• A researcher is testing anti-aging drugs on the ovaries and says the next step could be supplementation.

A. to work Published Friday in the journal Nature Aging, it reveals a revolutionary new way to quickly test potential anti aging drugs: Give these to women.

Or more specifically, test them in well-controlled human studies on aging ovaries in mice or in donor tissue samples.

This finding could supposedly speed up the process geroprotective (aka long-lasting) medications is evaluated and ultimately introduced to the marketBy making it easier for researchers to evaluate how well potential aging drugs work. Researchers can measure the health of ovaries given different medications and supplements In a matter of months, rather than waiting years or decades to see what works.

“Yeasts, worms, flies, and mice; we already know how to make them live longer and healthier,” Columbia University professor and geneticist Yousin Suh, lead author of the new study, told Business Insider. “Since aging occurs much more rapidly in the ovaries, why don’t we use the ovaries as a very rapid testing platform for geroprotectors?”

Ovary may be excellent testing ground for slowing aging

For years, longevity scientists have known that the ovary is the fastest-aging organ in the body.

Suh’s new work goes even deeper. It shows that ovarian aging is a major indicator of overall human aging at the molecular level; ovarian aging occurs only a few decades ago and very rapidly.

“This is the first time you’ve seen a really robust study by a leading aging researcher showing that a very highly conserved pathway that drives aging occurs in the ovary,” said Francesca Duncan, professor of reproductive science at Northwestern. The university told BI.

For many years, aging researchers hesitated to consider changes in the ovaries as a true aging phenomenon because these changes occurred when women were relatively young, Duncan said.

“We don’t see women in their 30s and 50s in the ‘old’ category,” she said. “But I think that trend has changed because we know that it’s an aging process and it has important clinical and societal consequences. So more and more people are paying attention to this concept of ovarian aging and seeing it as a true aging process.”

For the study, Suh’s team evaluated human ovarian tissue samples from four young women (ages 23-29) and four women of “reproductive age” (49-54) to create an “atlas” of aging in each cell type in the ovary.

His work reveals in cellular and molecular detail how human ovaries age and how genetics influence this process. Suh said mTOR signaling, one of the critical hallmarks of aging, was “screaming loudly” across all cell types in the ovaries of middle-aged women. This suggests that 50-year-old ovaries could be a great model for studying aging and for quickly testing drugs that scientists think could extend human lifespan and healthspan.

“People don’t get the message,” Suh said. “‘Oh, who wants a baby until they’re 60? Or who wants to have their period until they’re 60 or 70?’ That’s not the important thing, they think. slow down aging“

Changes in ovarian aging can also be monitored with rapid, specific, and widely available tools, such as common blood tests that measure a woman’s ovarian reserve or inflammatory markers.

“If there is something in the ovary that works in terms of anti-aging, it would most likely be a geroprotector of the whole body,” Suh said. “It’s not just reproduction; the ovary coordinates and regulates health.”

But Duncan warned that although the idea of ​​using ovaries as an indicator of whole-body aging was “promising,” more research would be needed to validate the technique.

“How do these changes occur in the ovary, and how do they translate directly into changes in overall health?” he said.

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Warm antiaging supplements and medications like metformin and NMN may be tested faster in ovaries

Corbis News via Getty Images

To date, there are no drugs approved to treat aging in the United States.

Instead there is a patchwork of influencers, clinicsand high-end spas all promise to help people feel younger as they age. They promote treatments such as metformin — a diabetes drug repurposed for anti-aging and weight loss — or similar supplements NAD+ boostersCoQ10 and resveratrol.

It is difficult to evaluate how well each of these personalized (and often expensive) treatments actually works. Hard science on human health outcomes is still limited because it takes years to assess traditional signs of aging by measuring things like brain or heart health.

Suh imagines that future studies could try these pills in female mice or women, focusing researchers’ attention on how well their ovaries are doing over the next few months.

In fact, Suh is already trying this: he’s one of the first people Testing potential anti-aging drugs about middle-aged women.

She is leading an ongoing study of several dozen women in perimenopause who are taking small doses of the drug. rapamycinLongevity is an immune-suppressing cancer drug that researchers think could be repurposed for healthy aging. The study will measure how the subjects’ ovarian reserve levels change during the three months of treatment and for several months afterwards.

Although full results aren’t ready yet, Suh says he sees clear trend lines in the data, suggesting the experiment could be successful.

“I think this is really exciting because the results on the ovaries will be very, very rapid,” she said.