An Antiaging Medicine Could Already Exist. Nir Barzilai Is On A Mission To Find It

Geneticist Nir Barzilai’s work has helped drive a new approach to medicine. Instead of treating individual diseases, his research has supported the idea that targeting the biology of aging with drugs and lifestyle interventions could more broadly extend “health span,” the healthy years of a person’s life. 

“Right now, our maximum lifespan is 115, and about half of us die at around the age of 80,” Barzilai says. “I don’t know if we’ll ever break the 115-year mark, but we should get decades more of life and good health.”

Over decades studying centenarians and “superagers,” people who live past the age of 95 in good health, and the biological and genetic factors that help them defy disease and delay aging, Barzilai and his collaborators have found several factors associated with healthy longevity, including variations in genes linked to cholesterol and lipid metabolism. Researchers are now exploring whether they can create drugs that mimic these so-called longevity genes, and Barzilai is co-leading an ambitious project, the SuperAgers Initiative, in search of more genes that help slow aging and disease. The project aims to recruit 10,000 people over the age of 95 and their family members for study. “People don’t get over the age of 100 without some genetic explanation, so we’re trying to understand the biology behind that,” he says. “That knowledge will help us develop more drugs.” 

Barzilai has played an instrumental role in pushing the idea that existing drugs could be repurposed as longevity-boosting treatments. He designed a clinical trial testing whether metformin, a diabetes drug, could delay the onset and progression of age-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer. That trial has yet to launch, but Barzilai says the study design could be adapted by other groups looking to test whether drugs such as GLP-1 medications could be used not just to treat a single disease but to prevent multiple age-related conditions. 

Barzilai is also helping lead a project aimed at finding reliable biomarkers for aging that could be used to test whether drugs and lifestyle improvements, such as exercise and sleep, actually slow someone’s aging. 

This all has massive implications for how we could live and age, and Barzilai is eager to persuade the world just how transformative longevity science could be. “There’s a lot of junk out there,” he says—and that junk sometimes obscures what he sees as truly revolutionary research. He even eschews the term that often accompanies his title; “longevity” has been sullied by too much hype and misinformation, he says. Instead, he favors “geroscience,” the study of how biological processes of aging contribute to disease. “Longevity is the outcome. Geroscience is the mechanism,” he says. 

For Barzilai, changing the language is part of transforming the field. He heads the Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Institute of Geroscience in New York and is president of the Academy of Geroscience, a coalition of scientists aimed at advancing research on the biology of aging. Both organizations recently changed their names under his leadership. “We need to distinguish ourselves from all the noise,” Barzilai says. “It’s become important to have the word ‘science’ in there.”