Since the World Health Organization included “old age” in diseases that can be prevented and treated, advanced countries have been competing to be the “first in class” in clinical trials to overcome aging.
However, a recent report said that Korea lags far behind advanced countries in aging-related research.
“It is a reality that the science of aging has already been pushed back in priorities by urgent issues, including infectious diseases and other diseases,” said a policy research center at the Korea Research Institute for Bioscience & Biotechnology (KRIBB) in a report, “The R&D situation of aging science in response to super-aging.”
The report noted that the aging-related research funds have increased in keeping with the growth of national R&D spending but still fall far short of matching those at major foreign institutions. The research workforce is also small and dispersed at various agencies.
According to the “World Population Prospects: 2019 Revision,” one in every 11 people (9 percent) in the world was an older adult in 2019, and in every six people (16) percent will be elderly by 2050. Combined with a low birthrate and a fall in the working-age population, the elderly support ratio will also rise steeply.
Accordingly, studies are being conducted in the global healthcare market based on various aging-control strategies, including reverse-aging factors in the blood, elimination of aging cells, multiomics-based aging prediction and disease diagnosis, intestinal microorganisms, and longevity.
On the other hand, the number of tasks in the aging field is increasing, but most tasks are not new ones but the continuity of old ones. Most R&D projects are also conducted as basic research to discover the original technology, and the report said those focused on targeted drug development do not account for a large share yet.
“Research in the basic field of securing original technology is still being conducted in a small number of government-funded research institutes and universities,” it noted. “Technology transfer is also concentrated on natural substances. To practically treat aging, it is urgent to identify common and standard markers for aging, along with the development of treatments.”
The report added that it is direly needed that the industry tracks the changes in genomes, transcriptomes, proteins, and metabolites that occur in natural aging situations by establishing an organic cooperative system between academics, researchers, and hospitals and turns them into databased to build the domestic aging research infrastructure.
Medicine and pharmacy take the lion’s share in aging-related research conducted in Korea, focusing on degenerative diseases, such as arthritis and high blood pressure, and senile diseases like cancer.
In the global market, however, aging has become a disease that can be directly prevented and treated since the WHO gave the disease code to aging and an environment was created where researchers could develop drugs to control aging directly, it said, adding that the domestic situation remains relatively short-sighted.
“Since aging treatments derived from cancer chemotherapies are highly likely to affect normal cells’ function, they have clear limitations to being used as treatments for natural aging that are not grave disease situations like cancer,” it said. “Korea needs to establish a structure to develop old age-specific treatments, different from chemical cancer treatments.”