New Research Points Way to a Reverse Aging. But Don’t Expect a Miracle Drug Anytime Soon

“We think the various causes of aging may be addressable with a single treatment to reset the cell,” said Harvard scientist David Sinclair, the paper’s senior author. “So in the future, we could get one treatment — it could be a pill, it could be an injection — to go back 10 years [in cellular life], and then we’ll repeat that process every 10 years.” That kind of miracle drug won’t be developed overnight. The paper’s authors detail experiments with mice that would have to be replicated in humans before Sinclair’s vision could be realized. Scientists would also have to overcome potential safety and regulatory hurdles. But the paper supports what Sinclair, a genetics professor at Harvard’s Blavatnik Institute and codirector of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, calls the “information theory of aging” that identifies the epigenome as the primary culprit in the aging process.