Artificial intelligence has long been imagined as the future of medicine. The idea that AI will someday cure cancer is widespread enough that Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently posted that “saying that AI will cure cancer is more a cliché than it is inspiring,” while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed that curing cancer wouldn’t be “enough” and that “we should set our sights higher.”
Despite the hype, an AI-based miracle cure has yet to arise. But a different medical breakthrough may be on the horizon, courtesy of an AI-designed drug that early trials suggest could reverse the effects of aging.
The drug, called rentosertib, was created by Insilico Medicine, an AI-based company that designs and develops drugs. It developed the molecular structure for Rentosertib, for example, with assistance from AI.
Last year, researchers tested rentosertib in a clinical trial using so-called “aging clocks” to measure the drug’s effect on participants’ aging, and the results were published this week in Nature Biotechnology.
Aging clocks use AI technology to estimate how quickly a person’s body is aging (and how close they are to dying), using various biological, physiological, and psychological markers. The researchers used six different aging clocks to generate predicted ages for participants at the start and end of a 12-week trial period.
Though each aging clock completes a different analysis of a person’s biological markers, all six clocks predicted reduced ages for all 42 participants at the end of the trial, relative to their predicted ages before taking the drug. Those who received a placebo or no treatment, meanwhile, saw their predicted ages increase or stay the same.
Though biohacking is all the rage these days, the scientific community is split on the accuracy and usefulness of aging clocks. With no universally agreed-upon way to measure a person’s biological age, the study’s results should be taken with a grain of salt.
Rentosertib has also only been tested on a very small and specific sample of people. Insilico’s clinical trial was also testing the drug’s potential for treating a lung disease called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which all of the participants had, meaning the drug has yet to be tested on healthy patients.
Regardless of the drug’s efficacy, it’s still years away from regulatory approval. But if rentosertib really does reduce aging, we’ve got nothing but time on our hands.