A new anti-aging pill for dogs is one step closer to being on the market.
Loyal, a biotech startup company that develops drugs for dogs, announced on Wednesday, Feb. 26, that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has certified its new medication as having “reasonable expectation of efficacy.”
The anti-aging pill still needs to be certified by the FDA that it is safe for use and can be manufactured at a greater scale before it can start being prescribed by veterinarians. The company noted that it had “extensive data supporting both” and planned to earn conditional approval from the FDA by the end of 2025.
Loyal said it is currently pursuing FDA approval to use the anti-aging drug — which comes as a beef-flavored pill — for “dogs 10 years and older” that weigh “at least 14 lbs.” It noted that the pill seeks to bolster “metabolic health,” which declines in dogs as they age.
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The pill has certain limitations, though. The company noted that it could give canines a minimum of one extra year of healthy life.
“We’re not making immortal dogs,” Celine Halioua, Loyal’s founder and CEO, told The Guardian. “The way the drug extends lifespan, we hypothesize, is by extending health and thus shortening the rate of aging.”
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Loyal aren’t the only ones researching how to extend the lifespan of dogs. The Dog Aging Project is also taking a look at how rapamycin — a drug used in human organ transplants to help prevent organ rejection, per the NIH — could extend a dog’s lifespan by an extra three years by improving the animal’s heart and cognitive functions, according to The Guardian.
“Our study is light years ahead of anything that’s been done on humans or can be done on humans,” Daniel Promislow, a biogerontologist at the University of Washington and a co-director of the Dog Aging Project, told the U.K.-based outlet. “What we’re doing is the equivalent of a 40-year-long study on humans, testing the ability of a drug to increase healthy lifespan.”
The recent research done by Loyal and the Dog Aging Project could also have greater implications when it comes to the human body.
“If we’re successful with dogs, it could be a turning point in informing us how to give human populations extra healthy lifespan too,” Promislow added.
Tom Rando, director of the University of California’s Broad Stem Cell Research Center, told The Guardian that the research emerging on lengthening a species’ lifespan is “fascinating” and could provide a “piece in the puzzle” when it comes to learning more about “human longevity.”
“The more human the animal gets that we can test our longevity drugs on, the more confidence we can have that these drugs will work on humans too,” Rando said. “And having evidence of efficacy and safety in dogs gives us more confidence for doing human studies with these same drugs.”
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