AGE Breakers

Dear Future Centenarian,

Advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) are a range of metabolic byproducts that gum up the works in your biochemistry, such as by sticking vital chemical compounds together so that they can't perform their role. The more AGEs in your system, the worse the damage they cause, directly contributing to age-related degeneration and disease:

A number of groups are at the stage of animal or early human trials with designed or discovered compounds, many focused on diabetes due to the increased level of AGEs associated with that condition, and the fact that regulatory agencies do not recognize aging as a disease - and thus will not approve a therapy designed to repair a cause of aging. For example, the AGE-breaker compound C36 has been evaluated on diabetic rats:

"Unfortunately, past evidence suggests that excitement over work in rodents should be muted at best - the history of ALT-711 or alagebrium demonstrates that different types of AGEs are important in shorter-lived mammals versus humans. So far, promising work in mice and rats has translated poorly into human therapies - in most cases, through trying to address the wrong AGEs."