What types of experiments are necessary to test life extension therapies?

What types of experiments are necessary to test life extension therapies?

Aubrey de Grey (Chairman, Methuselah Foundation) gives expert video advice on: What are 'life extension therapies'?; When did life extension studies first begin?; What is 'rejuvenation therapy'? and more...

The only way you are going to be able to figure out whether a particular therapy or combination of therapies make sense and actually works against aging is by taking an organism and trying it. Luckily we have organism that we can use in the laboratory that have much shorter lifespans than we ourselves do. Mice, for example, even pretty robust long-lived mice naturally live only for about 3 years. So it doesn't take very long to do an experiment and find out whether the therapies you have invented will actually extend the lifespan of mice. That is especially true for rejuvenation therapy, because in that case the mice are already middle-aged before you begin. So let's say you are looking at mice that normally are going to live to be 3 years old. You will take them when they are already 2 years old and you'll know within a year whether the therapies are working because most of your normal mice will be dead, and essentially if it works hardly any of your rejuvenating mice will be dead. That is not the whole story of course because mice, even though they are fairly similar to us, they are mammals and they have most the same organs and so on, they are not quite similar to us. There are big differences actually in the way they age and the way that we age. So after we got them working in mice we then have to work out what will work in other organisms and adapt those therapies somewhat so that they do work in other organisms. And there will be a great diversity of other organisms through the years at this point after the concept has been proved in mice. I imagine there will be a lot of work going on in dogs and cats and such, also of course in primates and monkeys. But I also expect that there will be highly risky but nonetheless important experimental work being done in humans even at that stage -- humans that are in the later stage of some aspect of aging at that point and don't have much to lose.