An American company working in the drug development sector using artificial intelligence discovered that the drug designed by its model to treat lung diseases is capable of reducing signs of biological aging, while the study conducted by the company and published in the British journal “Nature” describes it as a reversal of biological age.
The company “Insilico Medicine” had developed a special drug to treat idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, under the name “Rintosertib”, and conducted a group of clinical tests on the therapeutic ability of the new drug on a sample of 71 patients, and published the results of this study in 2025.
However, when the company re-studied the blood samples collected in the initial study and reviewed the resulting data, it discovered that the drug it initially designed to treat pulmonary fibrosis was able to reduce the effects of biological age and slow the effects of aging on the bodies of the study participants who agreed to re-examine their blood samples, who were about 43 participants, according to a report published by the American newspaper “The New York Times.”
The report stated that the results of the study, even if they are promising, are not sufficient to make a final judgment on their quality or even the quality and accuracy of the drugs that artificial intelligence was used in manufacturing, because there are several reservations related to the study and directly related to the company.
An improvement measured by the company alone
The Insilico trial relied directly on measuring the biological age of participants in its initial study using a set of statistical models that it had developed and trained in advance, according to the study.
The study indicates the use of 6 biological aging clocks, which includes 4 clocks trained to predict chronological age, aiming to guess the age of the participant based on his blood, with a strong correlation coefficient with the real age of up to 0.84.
The last two hours help predict the risk of death, so their correlation coefficient with the equivalent age is very low, at 0.16.
She then ran the six hours individually using a statistical software library she developed herself, with the results and values renormalized using standards derived from the UK Biobank, even though the study was conducted on patients in China.
The reservations then move to the mechanism of conducting the study itself. The study did not compare the biological age with the chronological age of each patient, but rather measured the difference in biological age among patients who received treatment before starting it and then how it changed afterward.
After that, they statistically tested how much the number in the groups that received the experimental treatment moved compared to those that received the placebo, to find an improvement in the biological age of those who received the treatment of up to about 4 years.
But the researchers admitted that they were unable to separate the therapeutic effect of their drug from the anti-aging effect, because treating pulmonary fibrosis necessarily means improving the vital indicators measured by aging clocks.
Harvard Medical School professor Gladyshev agreed with them, explaining that this study proves the possibility of reducing biological age, noting that the results of the study are not very conclusive, according to the New York Times report.
The report also indicated that the small sample size of study participants and the lack of participation of healthy people undermine the strength of its results.
What are the six hours of aging?
The differences in outcome measurements of aging hours represent a cornerstone of the results of the Insilico study and the conclusion that its drug had a positive effect on study participants, and this raises a pivotal question about what it is that the six hours of aging are primarily measuring.
The concept of aging hours can be simplified as being akin to an expert doctor looking at a blood sample and telling the patient that this blood resembles a person in his 60s or 50s, based on mathematical measurements and equations.
The construction of these watches depends directly on analyzing blood samples from tens of thousands of participants and measuring thousands of proteins, then searching for common factors between different blood samples and the proteins that appear in them.
Algorithms and equations can then discover which proteins increase in appearance with age and which disappear, and build an aging clock accordingly.
There is a famous and internationally approved 6-hour aging clock for measuring the biological age of patients based on the results of each patient’s blood tests.
Has artificial intelligence found a drug that cures aging?
The New York Times report indicates that scientists do not consider aging a disease that deserves direct treatment, and therefore there is no drug capable of treating what is not a disease in the first place.
The concept of aging hours itself faces many challenges and doubts from experts and doctors, and the National Institutes of Health report in the United States reveals a wide range of criticism directed at this concept.
However, this does not negate the importance of the discovery made by Insilico, as it remains true that it presented a drug designed with artificial intelligence and had positive effects in the study conducted by the company.