Hacker News Reader

> I don't see how that is a significant barrier to an anti-aging drug that actually works. Pick any one of the many recognized medical conditions that is strongly correlated with old age, like osteoporosis. Prove that your anti-aging drug effectively and safely treats osteoporosis in the elderly. The FDA will approve it.

That’s exactly what’s being done to work around the problem. However there might be some treatments that work well in advance of a disease and aren’t effective after the disease is present. It’s as if fire extinguishers can be funded but not flame resistant building materials.

> Prove that your anti-aging drug effectively and safely treats osteoporosis in the elderly. The FDA will approve it.

There are chemoterapies etc for cancer treatment approved by FDA (and its analogs in other relevant countries), which kill a ton of healthy cells along the way, and why is it considered safe? And there are many other approved drugs with severe adverse effects, why are they considered safe? While the only adverse effect for Yamanaka factors is cancer, which manifests with a long enough (month(s)) treatment to reverse cells the whole way back to pluripotency. And when Yamanaka genes are applied for a short time (~2 weeks), there are literally no adverse effects in mice.

By waiting for osteoporosis to manifest to have an approved reason to begin an approved treatment, you violate the Hippocrates oath, which states that prevention is better than a subsequent cure.

Except when your doctor won't prescribe it you offlabel because you don't have a condition they were taught about in med school