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For most dog owners, the hardest part of loving a pet is knowing from the start how it ends. <\/p>\n
A San Francisco startup called Loyal wants to give you a few more precious moments with your loyal companion, and their results are promising.<\/p>\n
Loyal is developing a daily prescription pill for senior dogs that the company believes can extend your loyal companion\u2019s healthy lifespan by targeting one of aging\u2019s most fundamental drivers: metabolic dysfunction. <\/p>\n
\u201cArthritis and cancer and cognitive dysfunction are all different things,\u201d said Dr. Brennen McKenzie, Loyal\u2019s director of veterinary medicine, \u201cbut really, aging and metabolic health is one aspect of that that drives all these different things.\u201d<\/p>\n
The idea, he told Fortune, is to attack the root cause rather than play defense against each disease as it surfaces. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf we can pick off the underlying driver for all of these things, we can have a much greater impact on health and welfare and wellbeing than just working on each individual disease as it pops up,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The drug, LOY-002, works essentially as a caloric restriction mimetic, achieving some of the same benefits as a severely reduced-calorie diet, but without the pain and suffering\u2014or for beagle owners out there, the sheer physical strength\u2014of refusing food to your four-legged friend. <\/p>\n
\u201cPart of the genius of the idea of LOY-002 is that it achieves some of the same goals biologically as caloric restriction without the hardship and the risks of doing that,\u201d McKenzie said, referencing a landmark Purina study that found calorie-restricted dogs lived roughly two years longer on average. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t require restricting calories, and it doesn\u2019t cause them to lose weight.\u201d<\/p>\n
Loyal said the STAY study is the largest clinical trial ever conducted in veterinary medicine, which has seen an enrollment of 1,300 dogs across 72 veterinary clinics nationwide in a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled design. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re putting them on either the drug or a placebo, and monitoring them incredibly closely, collecting just a mountain of really interesting data,\u201d McKenzie said. \u201cAt the end of that, we will hopefully see that the dogs on the drug are living longer, they have less frailty, they have a better quality of life, hopefully they have less age-related disease.\u201d The study, now about two and a half years in, will run a minimum of four years.<\/p>\n
Crucially, LOY-002 could reach the market before the STAY study concludes. Loyal is pursuing a conditional approval pathway from the FDA, a mechanism designed for exactly this kind of situation, where the drug has passed safety requirements but still needs more time to cook in the study. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe FDA recognizes that studies like this are long. They take years and years to run,\u201d McKenzie said. \u201cIn the meantime, there is no drug that solves this problem. There\u2019s nothing available to try to target aging and help dogs live longer. So if we can show that it\u2019s safe and that it\u2019s likely to work, we can bring it to dog owners and veterinarians sooner.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for how many years the drug might add, McKenzie was careful: \u201cNumbers are always tricky, because we tend to fixate on them and think they\u2019re more reliable than they are.\u201d <\/p>\n
So far in the STAY study, McKenzie noted they were able to detect at least a one-year difference between the treated and placebo groups at minimum. <\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s any way we can say you\u2019re going to get X number of years or months more with your dog,\u201d McKenzie added. \u201cI think if we can show that overall it\u2019s more, and enough to matter, I think that\u2019s what we\u2019re hoping for.\u201d<\/p>\n
The real-world scope of the trial was itself a statement of intent. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we said we\u2019re going to enroll 1,000 dogs, everybody said, \u2018You\u2019re nuts. There\u2019s never been a study that size. It won\u2019t happen,’\u201d McKenzie said. In the end, over 12,000 people emailed Loyal wanting to be involved. \u201cA lot of them say, \u2018I know this may not be helpful for my dog, but the idea that I can contribute to having something that will give my future dogs and other people\u2019s dogs more time is really motivating.’\u201d<\/p>\n
As for humans, McKenzie was careful to frame the drug not as a biohack or a longevity shortcut, but as something more straightforward: better preventive medicine. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a hack. It\u2019s not a quick trick,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just taking a basic, foundational understanding of how aging and biology works, and doing better preventive medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n
If it works in dogs, he believes it does now give some hope for similar drugs for humans as well. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf we get approval for this drug, it\u2019ll be the first time any aging drug, any lifespan drug, has been approved for any species,\u201d he said. \u201cI hope it\u2019ll open some doors scientifically. It\u2019ll show that here\u2019s a way that we can actually prove that this works.\u201d<\/p>\n
#Mans #friend #live #bit #longer #pill #promising #extend #pups #lifespan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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