Just how bad are we at treating age-related diseases?

This post was last updated in September 2024. I can’t promise this will be up-to-date when you come across it. Whether you believe in preventing damage (the core aim of the aging field - though that's not the focus of this post) or treating damage as it arises, our current best efforts in both treatment and mechanism selection haven’t yielded promising results. None of the approved drugs for age-related diseases reverse any damage. They don't even halt disease progression. The primary endpoints mainly assess whether the treatment causes a slightly slower rate of decline than would occur otherwise. In some cases, approved drugs show no objective functional benefit at all. So how did we get here? Geographic atrophy (GA) GA is a gradual loss of central vision due to the breakdown of the retinal cells responsible for detailed sight – retinal pigment epithelium and photoreceptors. TLDR: 2 approved drugs, Syfovre (pegcetacoplan) and Izervay (ACP) - both approved in 2023 Neither drug ha ... Read full article.