Insilico Medicine reported that its AI-designed drug rentosertib showed signs of reversing biological aging markers in a trial with 42 patients. The drug was originally developed for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a lung disease that scars lung tissue.
Researchers ran six independent AI aging clocks on blood samples from the trial, built by teams at Harvard, Oxford, Beijing, and Insilico itself. All six predicted a lower biological age for treated patients than for those on placebo, with one clock showing a drop of up to six years.
"What convinces me is not the size of the effect but the agreement, because these models share neither their features nor their training data," said Nobel laureate in chemistry Michael Levitt. The blood values might only look younger because the lungs work better and the body is under less overall strain.
The researchers also compared treated patients' blood proteins against more than 55,000 profiles from the UK Biobank, a database tracking protein changes with age. According to the company, rentosertib reversed exactly those changes. These correlations are no proof, obviously, but it shows the "potential," as the company puts it.
Even so, the study falls well short of settling the question. "This drug looks encouraging," cardiologist Eric Topol told the New York Times. "But we do not yet have a definitive trial to make the final judgment." Vadim Gladyshev of Harvard Medical School points to the small sample size and the fact that biological clocks aren't always reliable.
Insilico used two AI systems to develop the drug candidate. One combs through health data and scientific literature for disease-relevant proteins, while the other analyzes their structure and generates matching molecules. That's how Insilico landed on the protein TNIK as a target for both aging and pulmonary fibrosis.
Source: thedecoder
