Database of anti-ageing compounds launched

A database of anti-ageing compounds has been created by scientists at the University of Liverpool and the Biogerontology Research Foundation, a UK charity devoted to finding treatments for the diseases of ageing.

DrugAge includes data on 418 different drugs and compounds that have been found to extend healthy life.

The publicly accessible database has been compiled following scrutiny of published data from experiments involving 27 model organisms, including yeast, worms, flies and mice.

When the researchers analysed these data, they discovered that most age-related pathways have not been explored pharmacologically, which “suggests that there is still plenty of scope for the discovery of new lifespan-extending and healthspan-extending compounds”, they say.

The new database — which includes a profile of each compound including data on its biochemistry and bioactivity, its life-extending effects and current drug status — has been launched, 18 months after the academics highlighted the initiative in the journal Aging
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They said in September 2015 that they wanted to provide a “one-stop resource for researchers interested in anti-aging compounds, saving countless hours of data mining, literature review, and expert analysis”.

Launching the database on 14 March 2017, Franco Cortese, deputy director and trustee of the Biogerontology Research Foundation, described it is a “landmark resource”.

He said: “Analysis performed using the database has already revealed interesting trends, including a modest but statistically significant overlap between lifespan-extending drugs and known age-related genes, a strong correlation between average/median lifespan changes and maximum lifespan changes, a strong correlation between the lifespan-extending effects of compounds between males and females, and, perhaps most significantly, that most known age-related pathways have yet to be targeted pharmacologically.”