United States: According to a recent research conducted by biologists from the University of Southern California (USC), Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences made a revelation that famous drug, mifepristone, a drug more familiar as a tool to terminate early pregnancy, may also help people live longer.
The findings should lay the foundation for how anti-aging treatments might look in the future.
Recently, a new treatment known as Mifepristone, used for the treatment of Cushing’s disease and some cancers, has drawn the interest of researchers who want to discover how people can live longer and healthier.
More about the finding
Using fruit flies, John Tower, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts & Sciences, made a comparison between mifepristone and rapamycin, the use of which, he said, has been observed to extend the lifespan of different animals.
Quite surprisingly, coadministration of the two drugs does not provide any better values and a slightly longer or shortened lifespan, indicating that the two have similar mechanisms of action.
Scientists chose mitophagy as a target to find out how exactly both mifepristone and rapamycin influence longevity.
Cellular “clean up” process
Mitophagy seems similar to a cellular “trash disposal” in which unwanted and dysfunctional mitochondria — the cell powerhouses — are removed and brought to the cell recycle bin.
Dysregulated mitophagy has been associated with aging and age-related diseases, and enhanced mitophagy is thought to be a mechanism by which rapamycin extends its life span.
First-of-its-kind research
For the first time, the researchers could quantitatively assess of mitophagy in noninvasively fruit flies. They concluded that mifepristone greatly elevated mitophagy, similar to what was observed with rapamycin.
According to Tower, “The noninvasive in vivo mitophagy assay is novel, and our findings suggest that enhancing mitochondrial health could be central to how both drugs extend lifespan,” interestingengineering.com reported.
The fact that mifepristone, which is an FDA-approved drug useful in the management of several conditions, can enhance mitophagy underlines its possibility as an anti-aging drug, said Tower, whose earlier work has demonstrated the benefits of anti-aging.
When it is already approved, it is relatively easier to have mifepristone for anti-aging clinical trials that might quickly ramp up the value of several longevity therapies.
More research is therefore necessary to establish if such effects are valid in humans, as was observed in the fruit flies, pointed out Tower.
Therefore, mifepristone might help provide a relatively accessible and safe way to lower age-related cellular decline, paving the way for other related therapies that improve mitochondrial health and support longevity.