Original story: Texas Public Radio
By: Bonnie Petrie
(August 24, 2025) — A recent review of two decades of research from the National Institute on Aging (NIA) highlighted 13 anti-aging medications that show promise in preclinical studies for significantly extending lifespan. More than that, they seem to improve the quality of those extra years.
There’s one problem, though. They don’t work for everyone, according to James Nelson, PhD.
“The vast majority of the drugs only work in males,” Nelson said. “There are only three that work in females, and of those three, two of them don’t work as well in females.”
Nelson is a professor in the Department of Cellular and Integrative Physiology and the Barshop Institute at The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, and Barshop is one of three sites in the United States that investigates potential anti-aging interventions for the NIA’s Interventions Testing Program (ITP).
“With all the success of the Interventions Testing Program, we’ve got one big problem,” Nelson explained. “That is to make these drugs equally effective in females as in males.”
There was one standout intervention in the ITP comprehensive review, on which a recent graduate from Nelson’s lab, Nisi Jiang, was the first author. It’s a drug called rapamycin. “It has the biggest impact on longevity in both males and females,” Nelson said. “Rapamycin works probably better in females than in males.”
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