Resveratrol and Clinical Trials (2013)

It is pointless to spend so much time and money on sirtuins, resveratrol, and the like from the point of view of producing therapies. There is no conceivable way that the outcome will be anywhere near as good as either eating less or moderate regular exercising. That became clear from the research results quite early on. Just isn't going to happen, and the cost of everyone else coming around to figure that out runs into the billions for each such drug target and the few pathetic drug candidates that result.

https://www.google.com/search?q=resveratrol%20site%3Afightag...

The people backing Sirtris made out just fine of course. Not sure that the incentives are aligned here.

I've come to the conclusion that the best way to look at most drug development for slowing aging is to assume that those involved have found a new and apparently effective way to raise funding to achieve their actual, original goal, which is to map the entirety of human cellular biochemistry and all of its alterations that occur over a lifetime. Every change, every protein, every process, all in a map with an additional dimension of time and response to damage. That is worth chasing as a pure science project, but funding sources tend to insist on practical goals - even if those practical goals are evidently marginal.

This is the rut that aging research has to be kicked out of by the likes of Aubrey de Grey and the SENS research programs. We need better approaches, better biotechnologies, and an end to haphazardly mining the natural world and the back catalog of approved drugs for things that achieve very little when deployed as therapies. Enough is known to work seriously now, today, and at any time in the last fifteen years, on actually deliberately repairing the causes of degeneration aging with new, designed, targeted biotechnologies. Instead billions are spent on messing around with penny-ante adjustments to metabolism and on drug development that will never go anywhere.

But that all makes a lot of sense if the real goal is the grand map of metabolism rather than treatments.

Meat of the Conclusions section:

>To date and according to the clinical trials conducted so far, it is becoming evident that RES exerts cardioprotective benefits through the improvement of inflammatory markers, atherogenic profile, glucose metabolism and endothelial function (Table ​22). These effects have been observed using both high and low doses of RES and both in healthy volunteers and medicated patients. However, the specific mechanisms by which this may occur are not yet clear. More trials are needed to confirm these and other possible effects and mechanisms. The promising neurodegenerative and cancer chemopreventive effects of RES in animal models have not been yet confirmed in humans.

There follows quite about about what is not known, esp. about mechanisms.