The figure that matters: $30 million to $50 million. That is what STAT reported a trial of the size Nir Barzilai wants would cost, and it is the reason his TAME study, short for Targeting Aging with Metformin, has been described as long delayed. The National Institutes of Health put up about $9 million, aimed at screening for biomarkers of aging. The rest was supposed to come from philanthropists.
Barzilai runs the aging research institute at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He is also scientific director at AFAR, the federation that backs aging research. Medical News Today wrote in September 2026 that the trial would go ahead only “if it manages to secure funding.”
What the trial would test
The design is plain. Medical News Today described 3,000 participants, aged 65 to 79 and free of diabetes, at 14 research institutions across the United States. Half would take metformin at 1,500 mg a day, the other half a matching placebo, and neither side would know which. The goal is to see whether one cheap, common diabetes drug can delay several age-related illnesses at once. Total run time: 6 years.
Metformin has real appeal on paper. It was approved in the ’90s for diabetes, has few and generally mild side effects, and costs about six cents a dose. Barzilai is blunt about the science. “There’s nothing in that clinical trial that hasn’t already been shown before with metformin,” he told STAT. The point is packaging: label the outcome aging so that regulators will sign off on a drug for it.
Years of negotiation, no start date
The regulatory hurdle was the first one. The FDA works on a model of one drug per disease and does not recognise aging as a disease. A study of lifespan itself would take decades. In 2013 Barzilai and two colleagues won a grant from the National Institute on Aging to map a path. In 2015 he took a group of scholars from over twelve universities to meet the agency, which, to many people’s surprise, agreed to the approach.
Then came money. Metformin is generic, so no drug company stands to profit, and AFAR became the sponsor. Adam Neumann, the Israeli American businessman, once offered to pay for all of it, Barzilai said, before the WeWork empire evaporated. Funds never arrived. Barzilai’s explanation was that billionaires want moonshots. “TAME is not a moonshot,” he said.
By August 2022 James Peyer, chief executive of Cambrian Biopharma, said of the trial: “It should almost be done by now.” Barzilai had been courting newly rich crypto investors and talking to Hevolution, a Saudi-backed nonprofit, though a Hevolution spokesperson said it had made no decisions on funding specific projects. “I’m on the record saying I’m pretty sure it will start this year, for the last seven years,” Barzilai said. “I have no credibility anymore.”
Experts quoted by Medical News Today say it is too early for healthy people to take metformin for longevity, and that it is not FDA approved for that purpose.
Sources
- As billionaires fund anti-aging projects, a long-delayed study is overlooked – STAT
- The TAME trial: Can a common diabetes drug extend human life span? – Medical News Today via AOL
