Could this anti-aging dog pill lead to one for you too?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
As America marks 250 years, remember, we the people make a free press possible. Together, we hold the powerful to account with reporting for the public, funded by the public. At plus.npr.org. You're listening to Shortwave, from NPR. Forced. Forced.
Good boy.
Yeah.
This is Ross Anderson, a staff writer at The Atlantic. And as you heard, he has a dog, Forrest.
He's delighted to be on the show. Now he thinks that, like, I've called him over to play fetch.
Ross called Forrest over because he was the inspiration for Ross's reporting on a company called Loyal. They're working on a new drug to fight against every dog lover's greatest fear, inevitably losing their pet to time. The hope is this new pill will extend the lives of dogs. And the vision all started in the rural outskirts of Austin, Texas, where Loyal's founder, Celine Halawa, grew up. Her whole childhood, she was surrounded by animals, forming deep, loving bonds with a lot of them.
She told me her family had like 15 dogs and cats, and most of them were strays. And she fell in love, actually, with a horse that lived locally. He lived with a ratchet cowboy, is how she described it to me.
That bond with animals was on her mind as she went off to college.
She worked at a neuro-oncology lab and so got to kind of see just the horror, the cosmic horror, really, of brain cancer very close up. And it had a profound effect upon her.
Loyal's drug is still working through the FDA's approval process. But their preliminary results show it could extend your dog's life a year or even two. And just as importantly, their health.
no one wants to tack on another two years of those like kind of heartbreaking final months of a dog's life when they're struggling with, you know, the very worst health issues. This is intended to not only extend their lives, but also like make kind of the back half of their life much more pleasant for them kind of in a whole body way.
And as exciting as this pill is on its own for dog lovers, it also serves a much bigger purpose.
To be an important pit stop on the quest to eventually lengthen human lives because... We have certain things in common in our body plan, but also they age in many of the same ways that we do. They get the same cancers and are treated with the same chemotherapies.
So today on the show, why a boon for man's best friend may be a boon for humanity itself down the line. We get into how this pill works for dogs and why that same mechanism may be a blueprint for a pill for you one day. Plus, why scientists haven't gotten the job done for cats yet. I'm Regina Barber and you're listening to Shorewave, the science podcast from NPR.
Okay, Ross, you're here to tell us about a new pill that may make our dogs live longer and healthier, but this isn't the first time that science has successfully made organisms live longer. What are some other times or ways scientists have extended life?
Yeah, well, I'm sorry to report that it starts with worms. Starting in the 1990s, a brilliant scientist named Cynthia Kenyon lengthened, doubled the lifespan, actually, of C. elegans, the roundworm.
What is the new pill from Loyal aimed at improving for dogs?
Oh, I love C. elegans. All of my biology friends work on those.
Yeah, yeah. They're kind of like the classic sort of easy to mess with in the lab. And in this case, it really benefited them because they got their lifespan doubled.
Doubled. Wow. What is their normal lifespan?
Yeah, C. elegans, you know, it's not a long-lived animal, right? It only lives about two to three weeks. And so by doubling it, I think, you know, she got it up to a month, which is something.
Right. So, Ross, I'm interested in knowing, like, in this specific case with Loyal's pill for dogs, how does it work biologically?
Yeah, well, it actually goes at the metabolism, which may be counterintuitive, but there was a striking study done in the 1990s by Purina, the dog food company, where they took 50 Labrador puppies and they split them up and they fed half of them 25% less. Sorry to those dogs. Yeah.
How does Loyal's founder's background influence the development of the pill?
But in the end, they ended up living like a full 15% longer, just like a really, really dramatic result.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–3:36
2
What is the new pill from Loyal aimed at improving for dogs?
3:36–4:28
3
How does Loyal's founder's background influence the development of the pill?
4:28–8:05
4
What preliminary results suggest about the pill's effectiveness for dogs?
8:05–10:24
5
Why is extending a dog's life also significant for human longevity?
10:24–12:23
Speakers
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