The study is so promising that the aging institute this week is strongly considering a repeat of the same experiment with rhesus monkeys, coming the closest to humans, after successful resveratrol experiments on yeast, worms, fruit flies and now mice, said institute director Dr. Richard Hodes.
Hodes cautions that it's too early for people to start taking non-regulated resveratrol supplements because safety issues haven't been addressed adequately. He pointed to past hyped medical treatments, such as estrogen, that turned out to cause more harm than good.
Sirtris Pharmaceuticals is working on a high-dose resveratrol pill that unlike unregulated supplements on the market now, would be used as a drug and require Food and Drug Administration approval, said company chief executive officer Dr. Christoph Westphal. And that development and federal approval is about five years away, he said.
Sinclair's results are so promising that he rushed the study into the science journal while the obese mice are still alive, not waiting several more weeks or months until they die. That raises some issues, including specific figures about mortality, but is understandable, said outside experts. The obese mice still lived past the median age for mice of their weight.
Even would-be competitors are praising the study.
"It's a fairly spectacular result," said University of Wisconsin medical professor Dr. Richard Weindruch, who co-founded another biotech company that looks at the genetics of aging and drugs that could expand life spans. "People will go to McDonald's and afterwards they'll do super-sized resveratrol."
"This is fantastic," said Brown University molecular biology professor Stephen Helfand, who was the first reviewer for the journal Nature and not part of the team. "This is a historic landmark contribution."
Helfand said he won't be taking red wine extract supplements — but he has put his elderly mother on them. He said he's waiting to see if there are long-term ill effects for humans. Mice, he said, are good initial test subjects for human drugs because their bodies function more similarly to humans than differently. However, he added that those differences can prove crucial.
