“When you adopt a dog, you’re adopting future heartbreak,” said Emilie Adams, a New Yorker who owns three Rhodesian Ridgebacks.
In recent years, scientists have been chasing after drugs that might stave off this heartbreak by extending the lives of our canine companions. On [28 November 2023], the biotech company Loyal announced that it had moved one step closer to bringing one such drug to market.
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More are in the pipeline. A team of academic researchers is currently conducting a canine clinical trial of rapamycin, which has been shown to extend the lives of lab mice. And Loyal is recruiting dogs for a clinical trial of another drug candidate, dubbed LOY-002.
These developments are a sign of the accelerating pace of the science and the seriousness with which researchers and regulators are taking a field that once seemed like science fiction. They also raise questions about what it might mean to succeed, said Daniel Promislow, a biogerontologist at the University of Washington and a co-director of the Dog Aging Project, which is conducting the rapamycin trial.
“What if it works?” he said. “What are the implications?”
