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Living for hundreds of years may sound like something straight out of a sci-fi film, but now a British scientist has revealed that drugs are in development that could extend life expectancy to the age of 200.
Dr Andrew Steele, a computational biologist and author of a new book Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old, recently opened up about recent advances in senolytics. These drugs destroy tissue-degrading cells and can extend the human lifespan.
Dr Steele told the MailOnline that there is no biological reason humans can't reach the age of 200.
He said: “I don't think there is any kind of absolute cap on how long we can live.
“Studies come out every few years that propose some kind of fundamental limit on human lifespan, but they're always missing one crucial piece: we've never tried treating the ageing process before.”
He added: “I can't see a physical or biological reason why people couldn't live to 200 — the challenge is whether we can develop the biomedical science to make it possible.”
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Other experts believe people could live to 150 naturally, including Dr Peter Fedichev, a Russian molecular physicist who runs a biomedical AI firm Gero.
Dr Fedichev raised his concerns about life extension without improving life quality, saying it would be pointless due to older adults being more prone to illness. This would result in even more drugs.
He said: "Such life extension would increase their lifespan past the end of their health span and thus reduce their quality of life.
"Only addressing the root causes of ageing may help bring humans closer to negligibly senescent animals, intercept ageing and increase our productive lifespan by a hundred years or more.
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"That is why we are calling on a refocusing of our attention from diseases to ageing, from incremental to more radical solutions using those slow-ageing animals as inspiration."
The news outlet noted that the pills are already in the human trial stage and could very well hit the market within the next ten years.
Dr Steele concluded: "We might get unlucky, and none of this works, but, if it does, every development gives us longer to make the next one, and the first 150-year-old could be someone who's reading this."
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