Forever Young? GSK Bets $720M on Sirtris's Anti-Aging Research

It looks like the big headline is GlaxoSmithKline’s (GSK) offer for Sirtris (SIRT): $720 million, which is a hefty premium (84%!) to what the company was trading for previously. Reckless waste of money or canny deal?

I lean toward the latter, but I’ve long had a place in my heart for sirtuin research and its potential. It’s still a long shot, but it’s one of the most intriguing ones in the history of medicine. Actually, from one perspective, you wonder how long a shot it is: a biochemical pathway that seems to extend healthy life in yeast, roundworms, flies, and mice would appear to have some odds of doing the same thing in humans. A lot of drug programs have been started with a lot less information backing them up, albeit for rather less earth-shattering indications.

Of course, Sirtris hasn’t officially been targeting life extension drugs, at least not in the near term. A number of these potential life-extending biochemical pathways are tied up with insulin signaling, which makes sirtuin-targeted drugs a natural for diabetic therapy as well. Sirtris has reported encouraging data for just that indication. If a sirtuin-based drug is going to make it to market, that’s a good bet for how it’ll do it.

I note, though, that the company has also applied for orphan-drug status for resveratrol, a drug for a rare muscle disorder. But it doesn’t own that parent compound, just its use in this case – the diabetes work is being carried on with second- and third-generation analogs that address some of resveratrol’s problems. (It’s not a particularly stable compound, for one thing).

Once one of these drugs is approved, it’ll have the biggest, strangest potential for off-label use that anyone has ever seen. That’s going to be something to watch. GSK is well aware of this – I’m not saying that it’s part of the company's business plan, but when you see the head of drug discovery talking to Forbes and tossing the word “transformational” around, you know that it has thought beyond a replacement for Avandia. The Wall Street Journal headlines it like it is: “Glaxo to Buy Sirtris in Bet on Antiaging Research”.

That’s the truth, all right, and it’s going to be fascinating to watch things develop. As I was saying here the other day, a drug for aging is a perfect example of something the FDA has absolutely no idea of how to approach.

Well, it’s not just the FDA, come to think of it: how on earth would you design a Phase II trial for life extension? How long would it take? What’s your clinical endpoint? And further on, how long will you want to monitor your Phase III patients (recall Pfizer’s recent follow-up of Exubera trial participants? How long will it take before you could be sure that some horrible bargain wasn’t struck along the way?

That’s the lurking fear behind all this research, fit to give Leon Kass the shakes. Life extension tends to give some people the same “Things Man Was Not Meant to Know” shivers as (for example) germ-line genetic manipulation. I’m tempted to cue the theramin music in the background, but I can’t really make fun of this attitude, since I understand where the uneasiness is coming from.

In all these cases, we’re looking at real alterations of what we think of as human. Personally, I think there’s room for improvement in what we think of as human, but I agree that we should reach for those improvements carefully. And I can see how the very thought could strike some people as coming close to crazy.

But we’re going to find out. That’s the real import of the GSK news: the money is there to find out what’s possible in this field. I’m happy to hear it. But then, I was a bit euphoric back in 2003 when this news started breaking, and I’ve never really lost that feeling. We shall see.

Comments

[AmesTiedeman]

That is a big bet. Let us hope it pays off.