Simple monthly injection helps mice live 25% longer, disease-free | Science

It sounds too good to be true, but biochemist Jesús Gil enthuses from his lab in London. “There’s no reason to think that what we’ve seen in mice won’t work in humans,” he says. What they’ve seen in the rodents is almost miraculous. The team injected mice with a simple antibody every month when they were almost a year and a half old, the equivalent of 55 human years. The animals lived 25% longer than their peers and were healthy: less cancer, less cholesterol, more muscle strength. It’s as if human life expectancy had skyrocketed to 104 years, instead of the current 83 in Spain.

The results are visible to the naked eye, explains cardiologist Stuart Cook, co-leader of the study at the London Health Sciences Laboratory. “The mice that received the antibodies are proteins that circulate in the blood, protecting the body from foreign substances such as viruses and bacteria. In the case of X203, it is designed to block another natural protein that has a powerful effect on ageing: interleukin 11, which increases with age, causing cells to stop multiplying, storing and releasing harmful substances that cause inflammation and damage to nearby cells.

Cook points out that there are already experimental human trials of interleukin 11 treatments, but they are not aimed at studying aging over years or decades. He founded a company called Enleofen, which is collaborating with the German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim on the first trials of a similar antibody in healthy volunteers. Two other companies, the U.S.-based Lassen and China’s Mabwell, have also launched similar projects to treat pulmonary fibrosis and other age-related diseases.

“We didn’t see any adverse effects in the mice. Extending lifespan and extending healthy lifespan is the opposite of an adverse effect,” Cook says. The cardiologist emphasizes that Lassen’s early results in humans also show an “excellent safety profile.” In mice, the puncture is made directly into the abdomen for 25 weeks before euthanasia, which is equivalent to administering it to humans for nearly two decades. In humans, the injections are intravenous.

“We’ve seen complete equivalence between what IL-11 does in mice and what it does in humans. In terms of longevity, mice die primarily of cancer, and humans die primarily of heart disease and cancer. We’d expect that with this therapy, humans would have fewer tumors, just as we’ve seen in mice,” says Cook. “In terms of heart disease, we’re not so sure, but the IL-11-blocking treatment improved metabolism and cholesterol levels in mice, so it may also have an effect on heart disease in humans. We’ll only know if there are clinical trials that focus on aging,” cautions Cook, who co-directed the work with biologist Anissa Widjaja of the Duke School of Medicine at the National University of Singapore.

Jesús Gil was born in Zaragoza 50 years ago but grew up in Logroño. He has lived in London for half his life and runs his own group at the Health Sciences Laboratory, a national centre for the UK Medical Research Council. His team studies aging, a condition in which cells stop reproducing but do not die, and accumulate to contribute to inflammation, aging and cancer. “Inhibiting interleukin 11 can slow down aging,” says Gil, who has also carried out experiments on human cells. Their results are published Wednesday in the journal Natureram of the best world science.

Spanish biologist Rafael de Cabo, head of the Translational Gerontology Unit at the US National Institute on Aging, applauds the new work, which he did not participate in. “The scale of the life extension in mice is very impressive,” says De Cabo, who was born in Cordoba 56 years ago. The biologist is cautious, however. “The data are very robust, but there are details that could call the interpretation into question. For example, they only use one genetic strain of mice: C57BLACK6, which is very common. To do longevity studies, you have to use several strains of mice in several places so that it is not a one-off observation, as has happened in thousands of cases,” he warns.

De Cabo, however, is optimistic. “It’s clear that playing with interleukin 11 inhibition has a beneficial effect on the health of mice. The accumulation of data from this and other studies suggests that it could probably be used to treat specific types of diseases in humans,” he says. “The problem we have in aging research right now is that everyone wants to live much longer, but no one has the patience to do the research well. We’ll have to do long-term studies in humans because they’re not done yet,” he emphasizes.

The global scientific community is working on several promising strategies to extend healthy life, such as rapamycin and metformin, and even to reverse aging, which is the ambitious goal of Altos Labs, an American company created in 2022 with a huge budget of 2.7 billion euros. As for Rafael de Cabo, there is still uncertainty. “People still do not have enough data to predict positive changes in health with any of the interventions we have done. The most reliable are calorie restriction and increased physical activity,” he notes. Eat less and move more without the need for injections.

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