- Researchers are testing the drug rapamycin to see if it can help old dogs live longer.
- If it works, the same treatment could be adapted for humans.
Every Wednesday morning for a full calendar year, Jake the golden retriever received a tasty glob of peanut butter with five tiny pills hidden inside it: Two blue, two white, one orange.
Dennis the greyhound currently has a different Wednesday morning routine. A tantalizing slice of string cheese with three tiny pills wedged inside: One blue, two white.
Nobody knows for sure yet, but it's possible these irresistible snacks — laced with mysterious pills — might be helping the old dogs live longer, healthier lives. And eventually, they could help humans live for longer too.
Dennis and Jake, both 10 years old, are participants in the Dog Aging Project, a multi-part, multi-year study of tens of thousands of dogs nationwide. Jake and Dennis are part of one tightly controlled study within the project testing whether the cancer and transplant drug rapamycin may help dogs live longer.
During the study, researchers will also be on the lookout for whether rapamycin can help dogs stay healthier and fitter as they age. If the research is successful, it could be a big deal for humans too. Researchers hope that rapamycin might be a kind of fountain of youth in pill form: an anti-aging drug that could help people — and their pets — live longer, healthier lives.
Dogs with more energy and less gray hair, or "Wishful thinking?"
So far, more than 85 dogs including Dennis and Jake are involved in the rapamycin study, formally called TRIAD (Test of Rapamycin in Aging Dogs.) The research includes teams of veterinarians working in at least 15 different trial sites nationwide, from New York to Texas, Colorado, and — soon — California. It's all being spearheaded by longevity researchers Daniel Promislow and Matt Kaeberlein at the University of Washington School of Medicine and veterinarian Kate Creevy at Texas A&M, who are hoping to enroll 580 dogs in the study by 2025, and finish the study by 2028.
"They take blood, urine, fecal samples, they do blood pressure," said Jake's owner, Timothy Cleary.
Jake "is getting more comprehensive physicals than I do," Cleary said, referencing the checkups the dog gets at the University of Georgia every six months, which can last for up to four hours.
The dogs, and their owners, as well as researchers conducting the study, have no way of knowing exactly what dose of medication the dogs are taking, or if they're even on any medication at all. The study is designed so that while some dogs get medicine, other dogs get placebo pills. That way, researchers hope to actually figure out the real effect of this drug on dog lifespan.
Cleary says it might be "wishful thinking" but he's convinced that after a few months on the pills, he started to notice a difference in his dog.
"We'd throw a little lacrosse ball in the backyard, I'd see him jumping off our rock wall," Cleary said, "He just seemed to have more energy."
Dennis's owner Veronica Munsey also said,"This could be totally wishful thinking," but she's almost certain her dog's hair, which had been going gray for some time, started to darken again after he began taking the weekly pills.
Man's best lab partner
Rapamycin has been used for decades in humans who've received a kidney transplant. More recently, drug developers have discovered it can also help with certain treatment-resistant cancers, by stopping cancer cells from reproducing. It helps suppress key parts of the immune system, slowing down things like tumor growth, and stimulating a cellular cleanup process in the body which is similar to fasting.
All of this appears to be good for immunity to viruses including the flu, and possibly COVID. Scientists have also shown that rapamycin works to increase the lifespan of fruit flies, worms, mice, and water fleas.
But the effects of rapamycin on aging dogs — and on aging people — is still being studied. And the drug is not without risk factors: Because rapamycin suppresses the immune system, patients on the drug sometimes develop mouth sores, and can have slower healing times for wounds and cuts.
That's why researchers are studying the drug on dogs first, before moving to more expansive human clinical trials.
Matt Kaeberlein, co-director of the Dog Aging Project, told Insider that dogs are a great animal to use for research because they share our environment.
Unlike yeast and flies, dogs don't live in laboratories; they roll around in the grass, sniff pollen and pollutants, and accompany us through the drive-thru, sometimes snagging bites of our food.
The fact that a dog's life "mirrors the human environment gives us some reason to be more confident that this will in fact work in people," Kaeberlein said.
A biotech startup is also testing aging pills for dogs — with one specifically formulated for larger breeds
Kaeberlein and the University of Washington team aren't the only ones testing anti-aging treatments on dogs.
Celine Halioua, founder and CEO of biotech startup Loyal, is similarly dedicated to helping dogs live longer and stay healthier, with an eventual eye towards helping humans do the same. Loyal recently received what Halioua believes is the very first Food and Drug Administration-supported longevity study design, for upcoming trials of two different drugs for aging dogs. No drug has ever been FDA approved for aging as a condition — in animals or in people — so if her trial is successful, it could be a watershed moment for a whole new area of drug development, discovering what scientists call geroprotectors, drugs that could help combat death.
"It's a very, very important milestone for the aging field, because if we want to have more aging drugs, we need to have a defined clinical path for a drug going from zero to market for aging," she told Insider.
Loyal is working on developing two different pills. The first, called LOY-001, is designed to help bigger dogs live longer, by minimizing factors that promote premature aging among bigger breeds. The second, LOY-002, is one that Halioua says works a lot like rapamycin but is a different compound. It also mimics fasting and improves a dog's metabolism, and it could be used in dogs of all sizes, if trials show it works.
Anti-aging drugs that don't break the bank
Halioua says that the anti-aging field often gets a bad reputation for being "associated with billionaires who wanna live forever," but what's great about developing drugs for dogs is it's exactly the opposite of that. Treatments need to be cheap, accessible, and super safe if dog owners are going to be willing to use them.
"Our drugs are gonna be cash pay," she said. "We're not betting on insurance for marketing our drugs. And so by definition, anything we're developing would have to be accessible if we want it to be marketable at all."
Eventually, the same model could be used for people, she suspects.
"My vision of what an aging drug should be is just a daily, cheap pill that the vast majority of the older US population is on to reduce the risk and severity of future age-related diseases," she said. "It's kind of the ultimate preventative medicine."
Kaeberlein, who isn't shy about admitting he's already tried rapamycin out on his own aging joints, agrees with Halioua that yes, it would be fantastic to have a cheap salve for age-related decline in people some day, especially one that costs just a few bucks per pill. But, even if that's not possible, he'd still be satisfied with research that enables his own dog, and other pooches, to stick around just a little while longer.
"If we can increase the healthy longevity of pet dogs, that would be fantastic," he said. "I'm a dog person and I can say I've achieved something important in my career if we have that impact."