Outrage over dog aging claim
Harvard longevity scientist sparks furor
Renowned Harvard University geneticist and longevity researcher David Sinclair recently made an astonishing assertion: Scientists had developed the first pill — well, a soft, beef-flavored chew — “proven to reverse aging” in dogs. Which miracle molecules delivered this supposed scientific breakthrough, he didn’t say. But he told his 438,000 followers on X where they could buy it: the website of Animal Bioscience, a veterinary supplement company he founded and which is headed by his brother, Nick Sinclair.
The claim in a company news release, followed by the tweet stating that the supplement was “proven to slow the effects of aging,” has sparked outrage from other scientists online, and the board of an international organization of top longevity researchers — which David Sinclair leads — was to discuss the matter at its meeting this week.
Despite his enthusiasm, there is no published scientific research that has yet demonstrated the compounds in Animal Bioscience’s supplements — which have been on the market for more than a year — reverse or even slow aging in dogs.
On social media, researchers in the longevity field swiftly pointed out that the data Sinclair referenced to support his claims, posted in a preprint study on Feb. 28, proved no such thing. At the most, the study, which has not been peer-reviewed, showed modest improvement in dogs’ cognitive function after three months of treatment — an effect that later disappeared. Other measures of aging, like activity level and mobility, were no different between the treatment and placebo groups.
“Nobody who is serious about science and informed believes this is a milestone,” posted Matt Kaeberlein, a biogerontologist who co-directs the Dog Aging Project and until recently headed the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute at the University of Washington.
It’s not the first time that Sinclair has used his platform, with all the credibility a tenured Harvard professorship comes with, to promote science in which he has a financial stake. But for Kaeberlein, this time it went too far. Over the weekend, he publicly renounced his membership in the Academy for Health and Lifespan Research,
“due to ongoing behavior by Academy President Dr. David Sinclair that I find both personally and professionally unacceptable,” he wrote on X.
AHLR is a prestigious group of about 60 researchers in the geroscience and longevity fields. It was launched in 2019 to be the first global nonprofit organization focused on accelerating breakthroughs in the extension of human healthspan. Sinclair, who is a founding member, has been president since last year.
His conduct was to be the subject of the monthly meeting of the AHLR board of directors, scheduled for Wednesday, according to founding board member Nir Barzilai.
Neither Sinclair nor Risa Starr, AHLR’s executive director, responded when asked about the proceedings of Wednesday’s board meeting.
Sinclair contends that this is all a bit of a misunderstanding. On Tuesday, he told STAT in an email that the PR company for Animal Bioscience accidentally released an earlier, draft version of the press release. He said Kaeberlein didn’t contact him before resigning.
After this story was published online, the PR company sent out a corrected release, which revised Sinclair’s quote to say that the supplement had been “shown to reverse the effects of age related decline in dogs.”
Sinclair and Kaeberlein have a somewhat acrimonious history, although it wasn’t always that way. The scientists first met in the ‘90s in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab of Leonard Guarente, where Kaeberlein was a PhD student and Sinclair a post-doc. Back then, Kaeberlein told STAT in an interview, he looked up to Sinclair, who was a mentor and a scientist whose star was on the rise in the study of life-extending molecules.
But the relationship began to sour after Sinclair started his own lab at Harvard focused on one such molecule, resveratrol, and founded a company called Sirtris to test its potential antiaging properties in humans. In a 2004 interview in Science, Sinclair declared it “as close to a miraculous molecule as you can find.”
But as other researchers tried to tease out how resveratrol worked, they failed to replicate Sinclair’s findings. Two groups, including one led by Kaeberlein, eventually discovered that it wasn’t a part of the resveratrol molecule that activated longevity-related pathways, but a fluorescent marker used in some of Sinclair’s early experiments in yeast.
GSK, which purchased Sirtris in 2008 for $720 million, halted the resveratrol research two years later because of underwhelming results with possible side effects.
In more recent years, Kaeberlein said there have been additional episodes in which he felt Sinclair used language that misrepresented the longevity field in a way that is damaging. In those instances, he said he’s either talked with Sinclair personally or commented on social media. But his latest declaration is the most openly confrontational.
“In this particular case, it’s a bit more egregious,” he said. “I personally don’t think that there is any justifiable way that you can look at the claims that were made in that press release as anything more than false claims being used to mislead people into buying a product.”
As someone who works extensively with companion animals as part of the Dog Aging Project and is a dog owner himself, this also felt more personal. “Emotionally, it bothered me a little more than other stuff that’s gone on,” said Kaeberlein, who recently left the University of Washington to start Optispan, a concierge longevity health care business.
Richard Miller, a longevity researcher at the University of Michigan, characterized the company’s and Sinclair’s claims to STAT as “95 percent hype.” He pointed out several issues with the study, including a failure to properly randomize the animals because the dogs in the three test groups didn’t start with the same average score on the cognition test.
Brennen McKenzie, a veterinarian and epidemiologist who writes the pet health blog SkeptVet, told STAT that if the Animal Bioscience supplement worked, you’d be able to see a dose effect — in which the higher-dose group saw bigger improvements over time than the dogs getting the lower dose, with both having more of an effect than the placebo group. “We don’t see that,” he said. “We see groups getting better and worse in a pattern that doesn’t form a meaningful story.”
McKenzie is also the director of veterinary medicine for Loyal, a company developing anti-aging drugs for dogs, but he emphasized that his views on this matter and what he shares on SkeptVet are his own.
“You want a solid foundation of preclinical research showing that a product has a high likelihood of working and being safe based on the biology before going into a clinical study,” McKenzie said. That’s hard to evaluate in this case because of the lack of information on the specific compounds the company is using. “There’s a bit of a gap there,” he added.
A spokesperson for Bostonbased Animal Bioscience was unable to provide a response or make an executive available for an interview.
Natasha Olby, a veterinarian and professor of neurology at NC State University who led the research, declined to speak with STAT until the paper has gone through the peer-review process. In the company’s press release, she described the outcomes of the trial, in particular the improvements in cognition, as “encouraging” and said they represent “a unique achievement.”