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Coronavirus is the biggest public health and economic challenge of our time. The pandemic has been especially difficult for older people. People over 60 are at higher risk for infection, and once infected have substantially higher severity and lethality. When infected with COVID-19, people over 60 are more likely to have life-threatening diseases even if they are in good health. Although there are many treatments and vaccines currently in development to fight the virus, they are expected to be less effective in older people. This leaves 1 billion people over 60 in a vulnerable position especially if the virus returns. „Now is the time to develop innovative strategies for prevention and treatment of the virus in older people“, said Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov.

Dr. Zhavoronkov is chief scientist of the Biogerontology Research Foundation, the UK’s leading non-profit focused on Longevity and ageing research. The Foundation has supported multiple initiatives relating to advancing Healthy Longevity. The Foundation was also actively involved in the successful initiative to add a new extension code for “ageing-related diseases” accepted in 2018 by the World Health Organization during the last revisions of its International Classification of Diseases framework.

Dr. Zhavoronkov suggests calling COVID-19 and other infections that are more harmful to the elderly gerolavic infections. Gerolavic comes from the Greek words geros (old man) and epilavís (harmful). He proposes a strategy for repurposing known geroprotectors such as rapamycin, nicotinamide riboside, nicotinamide mononucleotide, metformin, and other drugs with a known safety profile for prevention of SARS-CoV-2 infection. He has analyzed the prior clinical studies of everolimus (RAD001) in healthy elderly people, and previous evidence showing paradoxical immunopotentiation effects of rapamycin and proposed additional clinical trials for these molecules in the healthy elderly population. Zhavoronkov also proposes the use of inexpensive and minimally-invasive deep aging clocks to track the efficacy of these preventative geroprotective interventions and to stratify the patients by predicted severity of COVID-19.

While vaccination reduces infection rates, and therapeutic interventions reduce the severity and lethality of infections, these interventions have limitations in the elderly population.

COVID-19 infection rates in China

Dr. Zhavoronkov is pursuing several strategies for drug discovery and repurposing using the latest advances in AI integrated into their battle-tested discovery platform. He hopes that this research will yield insights that will help with COVID-19 and also help prevent age-associated diseases. Furthermore, he believes that keeping older people healthy will re-ignite the economy and could potentially lead to unprecedented economic growth.

Previously, Dr. Zhavoronkov proposed that increases in productive longevity will substantially boost economic growth in developed countries. Testing low-dose rapamycin individually or in combination with metformin, and NAD+ boosters such as nicotinamide riboside (NR), or nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) may help protect the elderly from gerolavic infection today and may also enhance economic recovery when the global pandemic is over. Now is the time to develop innovative strategies for prevention and treatment of COVID-19 in older people.

Read Full Article/ published By Forbes/ MARCH 31, 2020