They haven't even shown that the mouses live longer. They just have shown that they can change mitrochondrial activity of a mouse to a state as if the mouse is longer.
This perplexed me when I was skimming the intro to a popular article. Are they really moving to humans trials based on nothing but 1 or 2 mouse studies based on biomarkers? But I was too busy at the time to bother looking up the original papers and jailbreak them if necessary.
Normally when you read a scientific paper they give you a confidence interval for the effect they investigated in their abstract. This Cell paper doesn't. If they could actually tell you how much years of life the mouse gained through the therapy they would put that into the abstract and force you to read the whole paper to get the number.
Are they really moving to humans trials based on nothing but 1 or 2 mouse studies based on biomarkers?
The biomarkers seems interesting. It's useful to know whether humans react the same way towards them. This is an ac...
This seems like an advance in understanding, even if it doesn't lead directly to a treatment.
News stories:
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/20/anti-ageing-human-trials?CMP=EMCNEWEML6619I2
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-25445748
Abstract of the paper, actual paper behind a paywall:
http://www.cell.com/retrieve/pii/S0092867413015213?cc=y
Relatively solid stories like this help raise my estimate that significant life extension is possible in our lifetimes. The likelihood seems to be that it won't be a "magic pill" but a combination of therapies.
If nothing else, it's another reason to eat healthy and stay in shape.