“Early next year, Loyal, a US biotech start-up, is confident that it will bring LOY-002, a daily, beef-flavoured pill, to market that could give dogs a minimum of one extra year of healthy life.

The San Francisco-based firm has raised $125m (£100m) in funding from companies who have held back from investing in human longevity projects because of the decades those trials would take.

But Celine Halioua, founder and chief executive of Loyal – which is part of Cellular Longevity, a biotech firm researching the science of longevity – believes their work will benefit humans.

‘Finding out how to prevent canine age-related decline is a really strong proxy for doing the same with humans because dogs get similar age-related diseases, and share our environments and habits in ways laboratory mice do not,’ she said.”

From The Guardian.