San Francisco startup Loyal has an interesting idea: What if we found a way to improve and extend the lives of dogs? Better yet, what if doing so taught us how to extend our own lives?
This radical idea was attractive to investors, who captured headlines by pouring $27 million into the company by 2021, per TechCrunch. Today, that investment number is $65 million, and the interest in extending dog lifespan has only grown. At this year’s SXSW conference, Loyal founder Celine Halioua joined The Atlantic’s Andrea Valdez and health longevity CEO Matt Kaeberlein of Optispan, Inc. to discuss work in the field and where studies are currently showing promise.
For background, per Loyal’s website, only one of its proposed treatment plans, LOY-002, has reached the stage of having a companion dog clinical study. That said, “an official at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration informed the company in a recent letter” that “‘the data you provided are sufficient to show that there is a reasonable expectation of effectiveness’” of one of their drugs, per the New York Times.
According to Halioua, this and other efforts from the company are big steps—and ones that will soon allow them to begin marketing the drug once certain safety and manufacturing metrics have been met.
”If it’s approved, it will be $50 to $70 per month,” Halioua said. She further noted that, following five years of sales, the company will be made to participate in additional studies that prove the drugs’ effectiveness.
As for what this has to do with humans, Kaeberlein said that studying dog aging is important for both scientific and social reasons. To start, the timespan of a dog’s life is reasonable for study. Whereas the average lifespan of a human is over 70 years, dogs tend to live between 10 to 13 years, making their lives easier to measure. Second, dogs share a human environment, which may provide key details about how the human environment affects aging. Finally, using a friendly image like a dog opens up the conversation of average people about healthspan and lifespan extension.
“Dogs are family members, so there’s a huge intrinsic value in improving lifespan and healthspan in dogs,” he summarized.
The success of anti-aging drugs in dogs may open the gateway for the FDA to allow for further studies of drugs explicitly designed for anti-aging, rather than combating specific ailments. Kaeberlein referenced the mTOR inhibitor Rapamycin as a possible candidate for new anti-aging drugs, citing animal studies and anecdotes from humans who have taken the drug before noting that further studies must be performed.
Above all, the panel stressed that the goal was not simply to extend the life of a dog or human. Instead, the intent is to encourage longer lifespans and reduce the proportion of the lifespan that is spent dealing with common aging issues.
As far as what is being done today in this field, there are currently several studies measuring dog aging, both with and without proposed life-extending drugs. Loyal is currently performing a 1,000-dog study of its drugs in 55 clinical sites across the U.S., while the Dog Aging Project is undergoing an observational study of 50,000 dogs to better understand how dogs age.
Naturally, there are issues trying to convert any results of these trials to something that the FDA would be ready to test on humans.
”I still don’t know how we get there in humans,” Kaeberlein said. He explains that it may require a change in FDA, but in general, “people have just got to get more creative.”