Research Perspective|Volume 5, Issue 8|pp 592—598

Rapamycin extends life- and health span because it slows aging

Mikhail V. Blagosklonny¹

¹Department of Cell Stress Biology, Roswell Park Cancer Institute, BLSC, L3-312, Elm and Carlton Streets, Buffalo, NY, 14263, USA

Received: August 4, 2013Accepted: August 10, 2013Published: August 11, 2013

Copyright: © 2013 Blagosklonny et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

Making headlines, a thought-provocative paper by Neff, Ehninger and coworkers claims that rapamycin extends life span but has limited effects on aging. How is that possibly possible? And what is aging if not an increase of the probability of death with age. I discuss that the JCI paper actually shows that rapamycin slows aging and also extends lifespan regardless of its direct anti-cancer activities. Aging is, in part, MTOR-driven: a purposeless continuation of developmental growth. Rapamycin affects the same processes in young and old animals: young animals' traits and phenotypes, which continuations become hyperfunctional, harmful and lethal later in life.