In the last month I’ve been to @TEDMED and seen Laura Deming talk about prolonging life. I’ve also been to #TEDxSydney and seen David Sinclair discuss his research in anti-aging drug development. Each week there seem to be new publications in the scientific journals and reaching the mainstream media. There has been success in animals and human trials are in progress.

I don’t need to tell you how obsessed the world is with aging and slowing it down. Even if we get past the issue of vanity the key metric of economic prosperity is probably not per capita GDP but the life expectancy of its’ citizens.

Let me propose that an actual treatment, and I assume it ill be a drug, that slows aging, will be a game changer for how the pharmaceutical industry functions.

If we look at the history of prolonging life expectancy we can really identify a few key transition points that include:
– basic sanitation and food and water security are probably the single most important things for prolonging life. Keeping clean and having regular access to safe food and drink is the starting point. Value adds include refrigeration, electricity (to support heating and cooling) and running potable water). The main impact of these ‘innovations’ is to reduce infectious disease.
– second order innovations include vaccination and antibiotics to fight infectious disease
– the third tier of innovations is prevention and treatment of diseases related to abundance i.e. heart disease, tobacco related illness and although it hasn’t been properly tackled yet, morbidity related to obesity.

I like to say to my patients that they didn’t die from infectious disease in childhood and their heart specialist kept them alive after their heart attack so they can live long enough to get cancer or dementia (or death from complications of frailty). Successful anti-aging drugs will need to not only prolong life but reduce the chances, or at least, not increase the chances of cancer or dementia, and do so in the context that the chronologically aging but not physically aging person is staying fully functional. This is a very important distinction: often doctors will refer to a ‘good 85 year-old’ versus the ‘poor 75 year-old’ as a reference to physiological age not chronological age.

So lets assume this ideal anti-aging drug can be developed and lets assume it is actually very successful i.e. it prolongs functional life in good health by a meaningful period of time….let’s say a decade. What does it mean for the pharmaceutical industry?

Well I think we need to look back at the other game changers in longevity promotion listed above. Access to food, water and sanitation is considered a basic human right. The second and third levels of innovation probably haven’t quite become universal human rights but only in the sense that they are contingent on the first innovation and the reality is that those without access to the 2nd and 3rd set of innovations often haven’t had their universal human rights fulfilled.

So I would make the case that should an anti-aging drug become available, and if it demonstrates tangible flow on health (an other benefits) then access to the drug will become a right rather than a privilege based on economic advantage. In this case there might not be the usual monopoly advantage that pharmaceutical giants usually exert as populations won’t accept it. And remember, it is more than likely the drugs will need to be taken forever, from what ever age is deemed acceptable.

Now it could play out that the usual pathway of drug access occurs and that actually by the time we are really understanding the pros- and cons- of these agents the patents are expiring but I don’t think this is really going to happen. These drugs, if they really meet the aims of prolonging life without complications, will be marketed like Viagra-on-steroids.

Clean water is a universal human right. Who would have thought that internet access would become a universal right but it is rapidly becoming so. A successful anti-aging medication would probably also become a universal right.

Addendum: people will argue we shouldn’t use such drugs because it isn’t how things are meant to be (i.e. we have a natural lifespan). We maybe so but this quite simply isn’t what humans do….we meddle with nature to try and make it (and ourselves) better…..there may be a philosophical argument but it will be trumped by reality.