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IPFS News Link • Drugs and Medications

Does a Real Anti-Aging Pill Already Exist?

• http://www.bloomberg.com, by Bill Gifford

One afternoon in the early 1980s, Suren Sehgal brought a strange package home from work and stashed it in his family's freezer. Wedged beside the ice cream, it was wrapped in heavy plastic and marked, "DON'T EAT!" Inside were several small glass vials containing a white paste—all that remained of a rare bacterium that today is the foundation of the most promising anti-aging drug in decades. Sehgal had been studying it since 1972, when he'd first isolated it in a soil sample at Ayerst Laboratories, a pharmaceutical company in Montreal.

A Canadian medical expedition had collected the soil from beneath one of the mysterious stone heads on Easter Island, a speck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In the dirt, Sehgal had discovered Streptomyces hygroscopicus, a bacterium that secreted a potent antifungal compound. This intrigued him; he thought perhaps it could be made into a cream for athlete's foot or other fungal conditions. He purified the stuff and named it rapamycin, after Easter Island's native name, Rapa Nui.


www.universityofreason.com/a/29887/KWADzukm