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August 1, 2008 | 12:13 am

Skip the gym, pop a pill

Posted by Adam Wills

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Popping performance-enhancing pills will get athletes busted in the Olympics, but researchers at the Salk Institute in San Diego have found a combination of two drugs that boosted athletic performance, improved fat burning and maintained muscle mass in lazy, good-for-nothing mice.

One drug, known as Aicar, increased the mice’s endurance on a treadmill by 44 percent after just four weeks of treatment.

A second drug, GW1516, supercharged the mice to a 75 percent increase in endurance but had to be combined with exercise to have any effect.

“It’s a little bit like a free lunch without the calories,” said Dr. Ronald M. Evans, leader of the Salk group.

The chemicals involved are already available, and such muscle-enhancing drugs would also have obvious appeal to athletes seeking to gain an edge in performance. Dr. Evans said athletes often showed up at public lectures he had given and asked him about the drugs. (New York Times)

Oh, but not so fast Olympians. The scientists are already working on a test to screen blood and urine for minute traces of the two substances.

Plus, the results only worked in mice. There’s no evidence so far that the drug combination works in humans. 

It is unknown if the drug has any benefit for athletes who actually work out—or for any human, for that matter, since the research has so far only involved mice.

Though the chemical pathways that transform muscle cells appear to be the same in mice and humans, Michael Rennie, a physiologist at the University of Nottingham in England, said that AICAR did not activate human pathways at the doses research subjects received in a study he conducted of the drug’s potential to treat diabetes.

“Mice are not men,” Rennie said. “Rats and mice are much more metabolically unstable than human beings.” (LA Times)

If it does work in humans – and if it hasn’t already happened, it won’t be long before athletes turn themselves into guinea pigs – one of the drugs could have a disease-fighting component.

In addition to supercharging stamina, the drug, called AICAR, may also be useful in treating debilitating muscular disorders such as muscular dystrophy as well as metabolic diseases such as diabetes, because it also appears to help the body use and remove sugar from the blood more effectively. (Scientific American)

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Aicar works in a very similar fashion as does resveratrol, the red wine extract. Researchers at several universities in the US and Europe over the past year have published multiple peer-reviewed studies in which Transmax resveratrol, a concentrated form of resveratrol used by researchers and physicians to study the effects of red wine extract, has been found to literally double physical endurance when ingested by mice. In addition the compound has increased their life span by 31% in a Harvard study done by Dr. Sinclair.

Comment by bioresearcher on 8/01/08 at 8:12 am

AICAR licensed by Schering-Plough Corp. is currently studied in humans to help control bleeding during open-heart surgery. GW1516 used to be developed by
GlaxoSmithKline as a drug against dyslipidemia, a disorder affecting cholesterol. However, side effects of the drug, made the company give up producing it.

Now once the Dr Evans have started testing the drug at animal level we should be aware of the side effects it does carry along.Most of the times such reactions can affect the biological switches in human body. I’ll instead prefer Resveratrol which shows increase in physical endurance by 31% in Harvard study.

Comment by Mike on 8/01/08 at 1:21 pm

Aicar, and biotivia’s transmax resveratrol, a concentrated form of red wine extract, work in essentially the same way, through the activation of genetic alterations which cause beneficial changes to one’s cardio vascular system, mitochondrial function, muscle efficiency and a number of other physiological systems. This is why Glaxo recently bought Dr. Sinclair’s startup resveratrol development pharma for almost one billion dollars. The future of human performance lies very much in further development of these compounds and additional ones that target specific genes. They are not substitutes for exercise and a healthy lifestyle however.

Comment by Taylor on 8/02/08 at 7:59 am
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