Transplant drug helps mice live longer

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Editor

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An antibiotic pill originally developed to help prevent rejection in organ transplant patients helps mice live longer and might offer a route to fighting age-related disease in people, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

The drug, called rapamycin or sirolimus and marketed under the brand name Rapamune by Wyeth, suppresses the immune system but also fights inflammation, which underlies cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease and a range of other ills.

"Rapamycin may extend lifespan by postponing death from cancer, by retarding mechanisms of aging, or both," David Harrison of The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the journal Nature.

Overall, it extended the lives of adult female mice by 14 percent and males by 9 percent, they found.

"We believe this is the first convincing evidence that the aging process can be slowed and lifespan can be extended by a drug therapy starting at an advanced age," said Randy Strong, of the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, who worked on the study.

That does not mean people can start taking the powerful drug as an anti-aging pill, said Dr. Lynne Cox of Britain's University of Oxford.

"While the lab mice were protected from infection, that's simply impossible in the human population," Cox said in a statement.

Mice also live much shorter lives than human beings and do not always age in the same way biologically.