Often, we wish our dogs would live forever. It’s a sad fact that a dog’s lifespan is simply not as long as ours, with most dogs reaching their pre-teen or early teenage years when humans are often making it to their eighties, nineties, and beyond.
But, could we be able to extend the lives of our dogs? Loyal, a San Francisco-based biotech startup, is currently developing a pill to help us do just that.
The pill, referred to as LOY-002, aims to reduce aging in dogs by combating the metabolic changes that can arise with age, such as diabetes mellitus (insulin resistance). It’s a beef-flavored tablet that should be taken once a day, and is designed to be easily accepted by dogs.
Celine Halioua, the founder and CEO of Loyal, has explained that the company’s work won’t make dogs immortal, with the idea being to improve health and slow aging in dogs rather than solely focus on lifespan. However, Halioua and her team are hoping to help dogs to live longer in good health.
Loyal raised $125 million in funding from investors – originally, it was going to focus on human longevity, but changed strategy due to the decades-long testing needed to work on humans. However, this research on dogs could have implications for human health, too.
As Halioua told The Guardian, “Finding out how to prevent canine age-related decline is a really strong proxy for doing the same with humans because dogs get similar age-related diseases, and share our environments and habits in ways laboratory mice do not.”
Meanwhile, the Dog Aging Project, a longitudinal study investigating the aging process in dogs, is analyzing the effects of rapamycin – a drug that’s sometimes used in cancer therapies and to prevent organ transplant rejection – on longevity, with hopes that it can help give dogs an extra three years of healthy life. You can convert dog years to human years here, too, to work out how old your dog could be after an additional three years.
Biogerontoloigsist Daniel Promislow, a professor at the University of Washington and co-founder of the Dog Aging Project, said, “Our study is decades ahead of anything that has been done on humans or can be done on humans.”
While it’s important to remember that scientists can’t test any drugs on humans without a consensus among the scientific community on a human biomarker of aging, there’s no guarantee that the research being done will be able to help us extend the lives of humans in the short term.
However, it might be able to allow us more time with our dogs. Though it may sound like something from a science fiction movie, it could become reality. In the meantime, why not take a look at some of the oldest dogs ever to have lived? Or to keep your older dog feeling young, check out the best joint supplements for dogs.
