Sirtris Pharmaceuticals: Living Healthier, Longer Essay Example

a partnership with a few large pharmaceutical firms. They were considering (a) what it would mean for the organization to become tied to a pharmaceutical company at this stage of its development and (b) whether to postpone a deal until Sirtris had more clinical data. Was this the right point in the companys history to do a deal?

Nutraceuticals. Sinclair received a near-constant stream of emails and phone calls from the public requesting Sirtris's proprietary version of resveratrol, SRT501. For some time, he had contemplated selling SRT501 as a nutraceutical, an off-the-shelf health supplement that would not require FDA approval. This idea raised many questions about market opportunity, commercialization strategies, and the potential impact of a nutraceuticals offering on the Sirtris brand and the all-star group of scientists that had allied themselves with the organization.

Anti-Aging Science The quest for long life has spurred the imagination of people in virtually every era in human history. Ancient Greeks imagined immortal gods, the sixteenth century Spanish adventurer Ponce de Leon searched for the fountain of youth, and twenty- first-century scientists test rodents for lifeextending biological compounds. Until the 1990s, the only proven means of increasing life-span in any animal was to reduce its calorie intake. In 1935, Cornell University researchers discovered that reducing calorie intake in rodents by 40% increased their lifespan by an average of 30-40%.

Conventional wisdom became that calorie reduction (CR) activates an evolutionary adaptive process that lowers metabolism to help animals through periods of food hortages or droughts. Decades passed before scientists could shed light on the biological mechanism triggered by CR. When new information arrived in the 1980s and early 1990s, it

contradicted what had become the conventional wisdom. The new work indicated that instead of lowering metabolism, calorie reduction is a biological stressor that activates a defensive metabolic response.