News about Resveratrol

Red wine is "exercise in a bottle," study suggests...more

Red wine may help impede cancer  United Press International UPI  Feb. 2010
NEW YORK, Feb. 26 (UPI) -- Derivatives of resveratrol-- found in red wine grapes -- may impede cancer cell development, U.S. researchers said.
The National Cancer Institute has teamed with a biotech firm to examine the potential benefit of resveratrol among cancer patients.
Dr. Bryan C. Donohue of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Shadyside Hospital, says early-stage clinical trials now under way are examining resveratrol's effectiveness among patients with heart disease, cancer, dementia and a host of other modern illnesses.
In the meanwhile, some people simply looking for greater energy, enhanced clarity of thought and advanced overall well being are already benefiting from resveratrol supplementation, Donohue said.

Resveratrol prolongs lifespan and delays onset of aging-related traits in a short-lived vertebrate

By studying a particularly short-lived fish species, researchers have been able to show that a natural compound previously shown to extend lifespan in non-vertebrate organisms can also do so in at least one vertebrate species. The findings, reported by Alessandro Cellerino of the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, and colleagues, support the potential utility of the compound in human aging research.

The development of drugs able to retard the onset of aging-related diseases and improve quality of life in the elderly is a growing focus of aging research and public health in modern society. But 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.

Resveratrol is an organic compound naturally present in grapes--and particularly enriched in red wine--and 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.

Recently, a small fish species with a captive lifespan of only three months was described by Cellerino and colleagues. In the new work, the researchers used this short-lived fish to test the effects of resveratrol on aging-related physiological decay. The researchers added resveratrol to daily fish food and 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 drugs for the prevention of human aging-related diseases.
 Scientific paper in Current Biology
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Great! So I'll live to 250? 
No. And four more clear answers to obvious questions about anti-aging drugs. 
By David Stipp, Fortune

(Fortune Magazine) -- How long would these drugs let us live? 

One clue comes from studies on calorie restriction, or CR. If a drug that mimics CR's effects gave us the same life span boost that rats get from CR, our average life span might increase to about 110. (Life expectancy for U.S. males born in 2003 is 74.8, and it's 80.1 for U.S. females born that year.) 

Still, many experts believe that drugs are on the horizon which could extend average life span by perhaps five to ten years. That may seem unimpressive. But their boost to life expectancy would "far exceed" that from totally eliminating cancer, says S. Jay Olshansky, a University of Illinois expert on the demographics of aging. That's because the risk of many deadly diseases skyrockets as we age, so even if one were vanquished, the others would soon get us, limiting the gain in average life span. 

Can red wine help you live forever? 
In contrast, an anti-aging drug, almost by definition, would retard all major diseases of aging at once. Drugs that boost life span might also abbreviate late-life disability - we'd stay fairly vigorous until the very end. That sunny view is supported by the fact that very old animals on CR tend to be remarkably lively until shortly before they die. Surprisingly, good health is also often seen in people over 100, whose durability resembles that induced by CR. 

When will these anti-aging meds arrive? 
http://money.cnn.com:80/2007/01/30/magazines/fortune/anti-aging_drugs.fortune/

In 2005 the Rand Corp. consulted medical experts on this question and reported that they believe there's a 50 percent chance that anti-aging drugs will be available within 20 years. Some researchers on aging, such as Harvard's David Sinclair, believe that medicines like those will come along much sooner - perhaps within a decade. 

The optimists cite the fact that researchers have discovered dozens of gene mutations over the past 15 years that slow aging in mice, fruit flies, roundworms and yeast cells. That has revealed many molecular targets in the body that might be tweaked by drugs to mimic the effects of such mutations. 

Anything besides resveratrol on the horizon? 

Several substances have shown tantalizing hints of anti-aging effects in animal and test-tube studies. A diabetes drug called metformin, for example, mimics many of the gene-activity changes that CR does. A metformin-like drug, called phenformin, appears to modestly extend rodent life span. Another compound, called 2DG, has been shown to mimic key effects of CR by blocking glucose metabolism. 

But all these cause side effects that rule them out as anti-aging drugs. At this point resveratrol, or drugs that function like it, shows the most promise as an anti-aging medicine. Found to boost life span in diverse animal species, resveratrol appears to be safe to take at modest doses. But whether such doses extend human life span isn't known - and may never be because of the long clinical trials needed to prove it. 

How large would the market be for these drugs? 

Assume that the medicine is priced about the same as low-end cholesterol-lowering drugs - say, $1 a pill. That would make the yearly per capita cost $365. Now multiply that amount times the number of rapidly biodegrading baby-boomers, about 70 million. Ballpark answer: around $25 billion.