Drug development with an eye on delaying the onset of age-related diseases is a growing focus of research and public health and poses a great challenge for biotech and pharmaceutical industry.
However, the successful development of drugs aimed at aging-related diseases needs to face the challenge posed by the lifespan of the available animal models-mammalian models for aging are relatively long-lived and aren't as easily studied as shorter-lived species.
Researchers from Lay Line Genomics, a company focused on neurodegenerative and ageing related diseases, used resveratrol - an organic compound naturally present in grapes-and particularly enriched in red wine, added resveratrol to daily fish food, and fed it to into a species of fish, developed to allow the easy isolation of new molecular targets controlling aging in vertebrates and for screening anti-aging compounds.
The researchers used this short-lived fish as an animal model to test the effects of resveratrol on aging-related physiological decay. They found that this treatment increased longevity and also retarded the onset of aging-related decays in memory and muscular performance.
Resveratrol appears to be the first molecule to consistently cause life extension across very different animal groups such as worms, insects, and fish, and it could become the starting molecule for the design of drugs for the prevention of human aging-related diseases.
The compound was previously shown to prolong lifespan in non-vertebrate model organisms such as yeast, the worm C. elegans, and the fruit fly Drosophila.
However, until now, life-long pharmacological trials were performed in the worm or fly model organisms because of their very small size, very short natural lifespan, and affordable cultivation costs.
Laboratory mice, on the other hand, live more than two years and are relatively expensive to maintain, making large-scale, life-long pharmacological trials in mice unaffordable.