A drug makes people live longer in good health

A pill that slows ageing itself, rather than treating one disease, so that the people who take it live longer and stay well longer. Rapamycin does this in mice, even when started late in life, and several other drugs have followed it. None has been shown to do it in people, because a trial that could show it takes many years, and that gap between the animal result and the human one is exactly what the stage ladder is for. People already take rapamycin and metformin in the hope of it; hope is not a record.

What would count

A peer-reviewed, controlled trial in people reports that those taking the drug lived longer, or stayed free of age-related disease longer, than those taking a placebo, by a margin the trial was designed to detect. Swallowing the pill is not the upgrade; the extra healthy years are, so the first-human rung needs a human result, not a human volunteer.

Who settles it: The peer-reviewed trial report, and the regulator's approval record if it comes to that

Where it stands

Shown in animals. Reached on 8 July 2009, on the record of doi.org. Could move a stage within 5 to 20 years.

The last reading

Once a week every upgrade is read against the news, against what would count above. Open a line to see what that week held. Every reading of this upgrade is on this week's reading.

• 16 October 2026 Nothing new

  Nothing in the window. The metformin trial (TAME) is still unfunded in full and has no result, with primary results unlikely before 2027 or 2028; the rapamycin trials in people measure body composition and blood markers, not healthy years. No human result meets the test.

Notes

The record is the 2009 report from the National Institute on Aging's testing programme, in which rapamycin fed to mice from twenty months of age (old, for a mouse) extended their lives. Human trials exist: a year-long rapamycin trial in healthy adults published in April 2025 measured body composition and blood markers, not lifespan, and found little; the long-planned metformin trial (TAME), designed to measure time to age-related disease, had not enrolled anyone for lack of money when this was written. An earlier 2008 report from the same mouse programme found a smaller lifespan gain from two other compounds in male mice; the rapamycin result is linked because it is the one that settled the rung for both sexes. Either kind of result, if positive and controlled, would move this entry to first human. When more such drugs reach people this entry may split into one per drug.