Normally when you read a scientific paper they give you a confidence interval for the effect they investigated in their abstract. This Cell paper doesn’t. If they could actually tell you how much years of life the mouse gained through the therapy they would put that into the abstract and force you to read the whole paper to get the number.
Are they really moving to humans trials based on nothing but 1 or 2 mouse studies based on biomarkers?
The biomarkers seems interesting. It’s useful to know whether humans react the same way towards them. This is an acedemic group making an experiment in humans and not a big pharma company testing a prospective drug.
Given the drug to 5 humans and seeing whether their biomarkers react the same way the one of the mouse isn’t as expensive as the later trial phases.
From a pharmaceutical perspective the drug might be useful even if it doesn’t help to fight aging in the general population. There are probably some illnesses where it’s very important to upregulate mitrochondria.
Other things that might you doubt that the drug is useful for fighting human aging is that it works similarly to calorie restriction. Calorie restriction does increase mouse lifespan but last year we learned that it didn’t do well with the apes.
Given the cost of $50,000 a day for a human that the guardian article cites, a drug company would have to first focus on actually investigating related compounds and search for a compound that they can produce at a reasonable price before rushing to get a drug through the approval process.
Nitpick: years gained is rather optimistic for mice. Months is more likely.
With Googling you seem to be right that mouse lifespan extensions seem to be reported in months. I personally would still prefer to report results that are less than a year in years. Months have the annoying habit of having either 19, 28, 29, 30 or 31 days in length.
In at least one paper I’ve seen on this subject, month was fixed as a 30 day period. But even without that, as an approximation, months work pretty well for reporting the rough increase. The difference between 29 and 31 days will get swamped in the error margin for anything less than six months or so. And since most months are 30 or 31, and many alternate, in practice, this will be very close to 30.5 days, so the difference will be negligible.
Normally when you read a scientific paper they give you a confidence interval for the effect they investigated in their abstract. This Cell paper doesn’t. If they could actually tell you how much years of life the mouse gained through the therapy they would put that into the abstract and force you to read the whole paper to get the number.
The biomarkers seems interesting. It’s useful to know whether humans react the same way towards them. This is an acedemic group making an experiment in humans and not a big pharma company testing a prospective drug.
Given the drug to 5 humans and seeing whether their biomarkers react the same way the one of the mouse isn’t as expensive as the later trial phases.
From a pharmaceutical perspective the drug might be useful even if it doesn’t help to fight aging in the general population. There are probably some illnesses where it’s very important to upregulate mitrochondria.
Other things that might you doubt that the drug is useful for fighting human aging is that it works similarly to calorie restriction. Calorie restriction does increase mouse lifespan but last year we learned that it didn’t do well with the apes.
Given the cost of $50,000 a day for a human that the guardian article cites, a drug company would have to first focus on actually investigating related compounds and search for a compound that they can produce at a reasonable price before rushing to get a drug through the approval process.
Nitpick: years gained is rather optimistic for mice. Months is more likely.
With Googling you seem to be right that mouse lifespan extensions seem to be reported in months. I personally would still prefer to report results that are less than a year in years. Months have the annoying habit of having either 19, 28, 29, 30 or 31 days in length.
In at least one paper I’ve seen on this subject, month was fixed as a 30 day period. But even without that, as an approximation, months work pretty well for reporting the rough increase. The difference between 29 and 31 days will get swamped in the error margin for anything less than six months or so. And since most months are 30 or 31, and many alternate, in practice, this will be very close to 30.5 days, so the difference will be negligible.