When it comes to longevity medicine, Dr. Eric Verdin, Chief Executive Officer of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, believes physicians stand at a crossroads. Once considered the final word by their patients, doctors now face a general public prescribing longevity drugs and regimens for themselves. The most clear example of this is GLP-1s, which people can procure through online pharmacies willing to dole them out to anyone who can pay. Rapamycin – shown to slow aging in yeast, worms, and mice, but unproven in human trials, is easily accessible through online stores.
If patients ask about certain drugs, a doctor would typically make an assessment based on their full medical history. But today patients shop for the answer they want, visiting clinic after clinic, feeling very comfortable to self-experiment and self-prescribe.
“Frankly, many people are not waiting for our advice,” he says. “[And] if they’re turned down, they’re going to go where you can buy Rapamycin online or GLP-1.”
Verdin says this shift requires a new approach to longevity medicine that deviates from traditional medicine, where doctors approve a drug for a patient based on long-term proof and studies. Instead, he says physicians need to be more open as patients look for ways to apply this research to themselves.
‘We’re going to be living at that interface where the informed patients and the educated patients are coming, and demanding these drugs,” he says.
You can hear more from Dr. Verdin in the video from his talk during the DOC 2025 session, “Longevity: Signal, Noise and Snake Oil,” at DOC 2025, or read our lightly edited transcript below.
TRANSCRIPT:
Dr. Eric Verdin
Delighted to be here and see you all. I just wanted to give you the perspective from the basic science, in some way trying to answer the question, why are we here today talking about longevity in medicine?
And the reason is that about 25 years ago, actually 30 years ago, a whole series of labs, three major labs, Tom Johnson, Gary Rifkin, Leonard Guarente identified mutations that could control the aging process. Those were, at the time, completely unexpected. The idea that you can make a single point mutation in an animal model and in some cases, double its lifespan, just went against everything that people had postulated aging was made of.
But it also highlighted the possibility that if you can modify a single gene and increase lifespan, that you could actually identify a drug in the future that would do the same thing. That really is why we are here today, 30 years later. That also speaks about the speed at which, basic discoveries get to be translated into the clinic.
What was thought initially to be an anomaly or an aberration, distrusted by many people actually in the field has really been validated. They are now, in some animal species, more than 700 genes that you can target that will result in an increase in lifespan. And obviously, the this brings the question, what does this mean for humanity, for us, for our own lifespan?
Are these applications going to be, translatable to the clinic? In some way, this meeting is a representation of that conflict, that, tension between the pace of discovery, what we can do in the laboratory setting and its relevance to the clinic. It’s actually getting pretty extraordinary. I know many of you who know me know that I’ve positioned the Buck Institute as a sort of the voice of reason, as an organization that really stands by the principles that have led us to where we are today, which is an evidence based, reproducible, safe, and so on. But it’s hard when working in this field not to become truly excited. I’m going to play a little bit of the advocate of what’s to come and why this debate is actually incredibly important.
If I can have my first slide, several of us here in this audience attended a meeting, which is the merge is one of the biggest meeting in the longevity space that integrates the clinic, the laboratories, the pharma and so on. And this is called ARDD. It takes place in Copenhagen. And for the first time, there was a heavy big pharma presence.
Typically big pharma stayed away from the field for a number of reasons. They view it as sort of hyperbol. But this year, pretty much every big pharma was there and as you can see from the title, two of them embraced GLP-1 agonist, Ozempic. Many of these drugs that we hear nonstop, they embraced them as longevity drugs.
I think this was truly extraordinary to watch. The two who gave the very visible talks were from Novo Nordisk. She’s one of the key architects of that whole program, Semaglutide as a proven longevity medicine.
Dr. Andrew Adams, who’s the CSO at Eli Lilly, asked the question, are GLP-1s the first longevity, drugs. And I think if you look at the data, there is a lot of evidence that points to the fact that these drugs are globally protective. They have not been globally protective against kidney aging, heart aging, Alzheimer’s. There are now clinical trials looking at the prevention of Alzheimer’s disease by these drugs.
Obviously, this is not all proven, but we also live in a world where these drugs are available, approved. What are you supposed to do as a longevity physician? If someone comes to see you and says, I have a heavy family history, the risks are minimal. Should I take the drug according to the most rigorous standards, you would say, no, you should not go on this drugs.
But frankly, many people are not waiting for our advice. They’re finding doctors who will prescribe these drugs. And I think we’re going to be living at that, interface where the informed patients and the educated patients are coming and they’re demanding these drugs. Rapamycin is another really good example approved drug that you can go on today. How are we supposed to be positioned?
Frankly, the fear from my standpoint is that many of these patients go first to the serious clinics. If they’re turned down, they’re going to go where you can buy actually rapamycin online or GLP-1. So we see a proliferation of all these companies.
My recommendation would be that the longevity is serious. Longevity clinics should adopt a sort of a a different stance from the traditional medicine, which is to only approve it things that have been proven and to be open to a company, to patients. There are self-experimentations if this was not enough.
I just want to give you a hint of what’s to come.There’s a program run by the NIH called ITP Intervention Testing Program, where any scientist can nominate a drug to be tested in a cohort of mice for lifespan extension. This tested close to 70 different drugs, 11 of them increased lifespan. I’ve highlighted here in red all of the ones that are actually approved drugs that are available today. I can tell you that a lot of people are not waiting their funding their doctors to prescribe these drugs and experiment again, the same tension. If this was not bad enough or not exciting enough, three days ago, a paper came out in Cell that documented for the first time its five year rejuvenation of all the macaques using, stem cell, preparation.
They published in the top journal showing five year of rejuvenation, and using human cells transplanted. It’s heart to see these types of results without being incredibly excited. I can guarantee you some of the clinicians are going to have people knocking on your door within the next two weeks with that paper and saying, what do I do about this? I just wanted to throw in the excitement from the basic science, but also all the important questions that this brings to us as a field. Thank you.