The quest for eternal youth may be as old as human life itself, but the latest elixir to promise longer life—a molecule found in red wine—continues to surprise skeptics who can’t believe it could actually work. In the past five years, that compound, resveratrol, has been shown to slow aging in worms, flies, and mice. Other man-made compounds that work through the same mechanism, affecting a group of proteins called sirtuins, show similar promise.
One true believer is GlaxoSmithKline. Last spring the company paid $720 million for Sirtris, a biotech start-up that has developed a family of resveratrol-mimicking compounds. “GSK is betting that we have discovered a whole new class of drugs that will treat all or many diseases of aging at once,” says Christoph Westphal, CEO and cofounder of Sirtris. Westphal believes these drugs will stave off ailments from cancer to heart disease and says they may be available ...
