AI-driven pharma company Insilico Medicine reports that one of its AI-designed drug candidates shows signs of reversing markers of biological aging.
The drug, rentosertib, was originally developed for patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF), a disease that scars lung tissue. A trial last year with 42 patients showed improved lung function, and the researchers collected blood samples for protein analysis along the way. That data now forms the basis of a new analysis published in Nature Biotechnology.
Six independent aging clocks point the same way
Aging clocks are AI models that predict a body's biological age from blood proteins. The researchers ran six of them on the patient data, built by independent teams at Harvard, Oxford, Beijing, and Insilico itself.
All six predicted a lower biological age for treated patients than for those on placebo. The strongest effect was a drop of three to four years by week 4, with one clock showing as much as six years. That doesn't mean patients actually got measurably younger, only that their blood protein patterns shifted in ways the models read as a younger biological age.
