A pill designed to extend the healthy lifespan of dogs by at least one year is being developed by Loyal, a biotech startup based in San Francisco. The drug, known as LOY-002, aims to reduce aging in canines by fending off age-related metabolic changes, such as insulin resistance, which can mitigate and reverse the effects of aging in dogs.
LOY-002 is a daily beef-flavored tablet intended to be easily accepted by dogs. "We are not going to make dogs immortal," said Celine Halioua, founder and CEO of Loyal, explaining that the company's goal is to extend health rather than lifespan alone. By targeting the biological mechanisms of aging, Loyal seeks to help dogs live longer in good health.
The development of LOY-002 garnered attention and investment. Loyal raised $125 million in funding from investors who initially sought to invest in human longevity projects but shifted focus to canine longevity due to the decades-long testing required for humans, according to Tiền Phong. The funding underscores the potential impact of extending healthy lifespan in dogs and its implications for human health.
Researchers believe that studying aging in dogs can provide valuable insights for humans. "Dogs also suffer from similar age-related diseases, and they share our environment and habits in ways that laboratory mice do not," stated Halioua, according to Vice News. By addressing age-related decline in dogs, scientists hope to pave the way for advancements in human longevity.
The Dog Aging Project, a large-scale longitudinal study investigating the aging process in dogs, is testing the effects of rapamycin on canine longevity with hopes of giving dogs an additional three years of healthy life. "Our study is decades ahead of anything that has been done on humans or can be done on humans," stated Daniel Promislow, co-founder of the Dog Aging Project and a UW biogerontologist.
Rapamycin, a cheap and easy-to-produce drug frequently used as an immunosuppressant for humans after organ transplant surgeries, repeatedly demonstrated that it increases lifespan and delays—or even reverses—many age-related conditions in mice. Although it is not approved for use as an anti-aging treatment in humans, many gerontologists see rapamycin as the best hope for pharmacologically slowing the aging process.
"Discovering how to prevent age-related decline in dogs is a good substitute for doing the same thing in humans," explained Halioua, "because dogs develop similar age-related diseases and share environments and habits with us in ways that laboratory mice do not." This similarity makes dogs an ideal model for aging research that can translate to human health benefits.
The research has been met with optimism in the scientific community. "The research is exciting," said Professor Tom Rando, director of the Broad Stem Cell Research Center at the University of California, according to Tiền Phong. He added, "This work is another piece of the puzzle that we hope will ultimately give us the full picture of human longevity."
However, challenges remain in translating these findings to human applications. "Without consensus among scientists on an official biomarker of aging in humans, scientists cannot test any drugs on humans, no matter how positive the results in other species," said Jamie Justice, a professor of gerontology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "Because we cannot conduct 40-year longevity tests in humans, we need a globally agreed-upon biomarker to show the effect of drugs on predictive factors of health problems that we agree are associated with aging," Justice stated.
Despite these challenges, researchers remain hopeful. "If we succeed with dogs, it could be a turning point to inform us how to give human populations additional healthy lifespan," said Promislow. The convergence of canine and human aging research opens new avenues for understanding and potentially extending healthy life in humans.
This article was written in collaboration with generative AI company Alchemiq