Nir Barzilai

At a glance

• Nir Barzilai is an Israeli-American physician and geneticist. He directs the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
• Through the Longevity Genes Project and the LonGenity study he follows Ashkenazi Jewish centenarians and their children, looking for genetic variants linked to a long and healthy life.
• His team found, among other things, variants associated with favourable cholesterol profiles. Strikingly, many centenarians did not live particularly healthily, pointing to protective genes.
• He is the driving force behind the design of the TAME trial (Targeting Aging with Metformin), which aims to test whether the diabetes drug metformin delays the onset of several age-related diseases together.
• TAME also has a regulatory aim: getting ageing recognised as something drugs can be tested against. He wrote the book Age Later (2020).
• For longevity, his work links the genetics of exceptionally old people to potential medicines.
• Takeaway: metformin is not proven as a longevity drug in healthy people; take it only on prescription.