Menu
Close
.svg)
My household is governed by a six-year-old cat named Vivi, although she is more commonly known as "Kubu," or, with the honorific her station apparently demands, The Kubu.
Her duties are considerable. She serves as our family alarm clock, meowing stridently and with escalating volume at approximately 5:02am to announce that breakfast is overdue. At around 6:30am, like a Hobbit, she occasionally returns to remind us that breakfast is traditionally followed by second breakfast. She is affectionate, energetic and mischievous, although her disposition can become distinctly Hobbesian when meals are delayed.
Amazon, meanwhile, provides the tribute. Tiki Stix and Churu treats arrive with such regularity that an examination of our account might suggest we operate a small feline catering establishment. They are deployed as bribes when claws require trimming or some other indignity must be inflicted upon Her Majesty.
I suspect I am not alone. On Teams calls with colleagues, I regularly discern cats ambling behind supposedly impenetrable virtual backgrounds, apparently determined to remind corporate America who actually works from home.
So recent reports that science might substantially extend feline lifespan have caught my attention.
In Japan, researchers at the Institute for AIM Medicine have developed an experimental treatment targeting chronic kidney disease, one of the great scourges of older cats. The institute filed for regulatory approval in April. Its approach centers on AIM, a protein involved in clearing cellular debris. In a small study of cats with kidney disease, survival among treated animals was dramatically higher than among untreated ones.
Elsewhere, longevity science is becoming positively zoological. Researchers are investigating rapamycin and other approaches in dogs. Loyal, a biotechnology company, is developing medicines intended to extend canine lifespan and healthspan. In cats, rapamycin -- a drug that has become something of a celebrity in human geroscience -- is already being investigated for chronic kidney disease, while a delayed-release formulation of sirolimus has received conditional FDA approval for managing ventricular hypertrophy in cats with subclinical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
One could be forgiven for imagining that feline longevity is on the cusp of a pharmaceutical revolution. Not quite.
For the more interesting question is not simply whether we can make cats live longer. It is the same question increasingly confronting the science of human longevity: what, exactly, will those additional years look like?
At six, Vivi is in splendid form. She runs. She jumps. She plays. She terrorizes her two canine sisters, a Bernadoodle named Lady and a pit bull mix named Felicity, with regular unprovoked ambushes. She patrols the house. She sleeps in improbable positions and wakes with an apparently undiminished conviction that nobody has fed her in weeks.
If biotechnology could give me another ten years of that Vivi, I would sign up tomorrow. But merely keeping her alive longer is another proposition altogether.
That distinction, between lifespan and healthspan, is becoming one of the defining concepts in geroscience. Human life expectancy has risen spectacularly, but much of that achievement reflects our ability to prevent premature death and better manage chronic disease rather than any fundamental slowing of biological aging. The emerging ambition is different: to postpone the deterioration that produces multiple diseases and thereby compress ill health towards the end of life.
The objective is not simply to reach 100. It is to reach 100 still recognizably oneself. Curiously, cats may help us understand how.
A fascinating study published this year in Biology Open assembled 3,754 observations spanning brain imaging, blood chemistry, disease and other measures to compare aging across species. The researchers found that cats and humans exhibit remarkably similar patterns of age-related brain atrophy. An 80-year-old human corresponds roughly to a 15-year-old cat.
Cats also develop some of the indignities familiar to aging humans: degenerative joint disease, cataracts and even cerebral plaques and tangles. Unlike mice, moreover, pet cats routinely reach the biological equivalent of advanced human old age.
This makes the animal curled up on your sofa unexpectedly interesting to geroscientists.
Cats live in our homes. They share our environment. They develop diseases naturally rather than having them experimentally induced. Their owners increasingly pay for sophisticated diagnostics, including MRI scans. In time, large veterinary datasets could turn companion animals into an intriguing real-world population for studying aging.
The translational arrow could therefore point both ways: we may develop longevity medicines for our pets, only to discover that our pets help us develop longevity medicines for ourselves.
There is, however, an awkward wrinkle for the pharmaceutical industry. A medicine is likely to be part of the answer. It is unlikely to be the complete answer.
A large UK study of feline mortality found that lifespan varies with sex, breed, neutering and body weight. Female cats outlived males; crossbred cats outlived purebreds; and deviations from ideal body weight were associated with shorter lives, although the relationship between weight and feline longevity is more nuanced than one might anticipate.
Environment matters too. Recent research suggests free-roaming cats live at least two to three years less than contained cats, courtesy of such decidedly non-molecular hazards as cars, fights, falls and infectious disease.
In other words, one potentially powerful feline longevity intervention already exists. It is called keeping the cat out of traffic.
Humans confront much the same paradox. The longevity industry understandably is gravitating towards molecules, biomarkers, AI-assisted drug discovery and exquisitely complicated biological mechanisms. Yet exercise, nutrition, sleep, social connection and environment remain formidable determinants of healthy aging. Geroscience increasingly encompasses pharmacology alongside nutrition, exercise physiology, chronobiology, environmental exposure and behavioral science.
Which means that if Vivi is serious about longevity, we may eventually need to discuss the treadmill.
She is, if one is being charitable, generously proportioned. Perhaps she should accompany her two canine sisters on walks. I have yet to broach this with her. Negotiations are expected to be difficult.
Years before Vivi assumed the throne, our family had a guinea pig named Zozo. She was purchased on my older daughter's whim during a trip to Petco and proceeded to live for roughly eight years -- extraordinary innings for a guinea pig. Indeed, Zozo lived so long that when we bought her she had black fur; by the time she passed, she was largely grey. Towards the end, all that seemed missing was a tiny pair of spectacles.
Zozo lived alongside our dogs, remained remarkably active and ate an enviable vegetarian diet. She was particularly partial to cilantro.
I am not proposing cilantro as the next blockbuster gerotherapeutic, nor, for that matter, a vegetarian diet. Zozo may simply have possessed excellent genes and magnificent luck.
But she illustrates something easily forgotten amid the excitement surrounding longevity biotechnology: organisms age inside ecosystems.
Genes matter. Medicines matter. But so do food, movement, stimulation, relationships, environment and happenstance. That may be the more consequential lesson for pharma.
Medicine has traditionally organized itself around diseases. Something goes wrong; we diagnose it; we develop a therapy to treat it. Geroscience poses a more audacious question: what if we could intervene earlier in the biological processes that make many things go wrong?
That shift, from treating the consequences of aging to modifying its underlying biology, could eventually redraw familiar boundaries between prevention and treatment, wellness and medicine, and even what constitutes a pharmaceutical endpoint.
But it also suggests that the future of longevity will probably not reside in a bottle. The winners may be those who learn to combine therapeutics and diagnostics with behavioral interventions and a more sophisticated understanding of what healthy aging actually means.
For cats. For dogs. And, eventually, for us.
I would certainly like Vivi to live longer. But what I really want is more mornings when she wakes me at 5:02am, more inexplicable sprints across the house, more bribery with Churu and, yes, probably even a few more acts of violence when breakfast arrives late.
That is the bargain longevity science ultimately needs to offer.
Not simply more life. More living.
