A drug dreamed up by artificial intelligence just delivered a small but buzzy result: it appeared to make people "younger" on paper. In a Nature Biotechnology study, Insilico Medicine reports that its experimental pill, rentosertib, nudged down biological age markers in a 12-week trial of 42 people, while those on placebo or no treatment generally did not see the same shift, Gizmodo reports. The company uses AI to look for proteins associated with disease and to create new molecules that might counteract them, the New York Times reports. AI-generated rentosertib was envisioned to "halt or reverse fibrotic processes" in patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic lung disease.
The pill was shown to increase air capacity in the lungs of IPF patients, according to results released last year. As part of that same trial, Insilico used six different AI-powered "aging clocks" that draw on blood biomarkers and other health data to estimate biological age. As the company now reports, all six showed enough movement for researchers to say the drug may be altering several aspects of aging biology. But scientists still don't agree on how reliable these clocks are at measuring morbidity and mortality, leaving the results in doubt. Rentosertib now faces years of additional testing and regulatory scrutiny, the Times reports, noting that Insilico has yet to show any anti-aging effects in healthy patients.
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