Given the evidence that diabetics taking the drug metformin may live longer than people

who don't even have diabetes suggests metformin has an anti-aging effect, slowing the diseases

of aging, and in doing so, extending both health and lifespans.

But you don't know until you put it to the test.

There are a few small, brief trials of metformin on healthy volunteers.

For example, randomizing a dozen or so individuals to metformin or placebo for a few weeks,

comparing the effects of muscle and fat biopsies.

Beneficial changes in gene expression and various aging pathways were noted, along with

objective improvements in risk factors such as LDL cholesterol and triglycerides.

But what we really like are hard endpoints, like disease outcomes and death.

Enter the tame trial trial, targeting aging

with metformin. Spearheaded by the nonprofit American Federation for Aging Research,

Tame has the ambitious goal of randomizing 3,000 non-diabetic individuals, aged 65 through 79,

to metformin or placebo over a period

of six years, to assess the effect on age-related conditions such as heart attacks, stroke,

cancer, dementia, and death.

Current treatments just exchange one disease for another, railed the principal investigator, someone cured of cancer, may just drop dead the next year

from a heart attack.

What we want to show is that if we delay aging, that's the best way to delay disease.

Sadly, though the Tame trial received FDA approval in 2015, it has yet to get off the ground.

You can guess why.

As the editor-in-chief of an anti-aging journal put it, there is no way in hell to make money

...