GLP-1 drugs like semaglutide (Ozempic and Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro and Zepbound) are reliably helping people lose weight and control their blood sugar. They may also be slowing biological aging, recent research suggests.

Scientists with Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, the two biggest current GLP-1 makers, revealed intriguing data this past week at an anti-aging conference. Both teams found that their drugs respectively can slow down the molecular aging clocks of users by several years compared to a placebo. Though this research is still preliminary, GLP-1s could very well be valuable anti-aging drugs, the researchers say.

“All the clocks are telling a consistent story that we’re seeing a reduction in age,” Kevin Duffin, vice president for aging research at Eli Lilly, reportedly said during the conference, according to MIT Technology Review. “It’s not like we’re going to reverse age by 30 years or something, but it’s a significant reduction.”

The companies presented their data last weekend at the 13th annual Aging Research & Drug Discovery (ARDD) conference.

Novo Nordisk scientists analyzed existing clinical trial data to determine how their drug semaglutide affected the accumulation of biomarkers and other changes associated with aging—measurements that are commonly referred to as molecular clocks.

Semaglutide users consistently showed a reduction in these markers compared to people in the placebo group, they found, though there were differences in the amount of reduction depending on the clock used for comparison and the specific organs they looked at. While most clocks showed a slowdown of two to three years in aging for the average semaglutide user, for instance, one clock based on heart-related proteins showed a slowdown of roughly 4 years, according to the researchers.

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