FORT WAYNE, Ind. (WOWO) — An experimental drug being developed to treat a serious lung disease may have an unexpected benefit: It could potentially slow some measures of biological aging.

Researchers studying rentosertib found that patients taking the drug experienced changes in blood proteins that made them appear biologically younger on several established measures of aging.

The findings came from a small clinical study involving patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, or IPF, a serious disease that causes scarring of the lungs.

Researchers estimated that some patients appeared to be biologically about three to four years younger following treatment. In one case, the difference was as much as six years.

Alex Zhavoronkov, Ph.D., the study’s first author and founder and co-CEO of Insilico Medicine, told Fox News Digital that the apparent age-related effect was an unexpected finding during the company’s work on the lung disease treatment.

“There is a promising trend in age reversal in addition to treating the disease, and it came as a bonus for disease treatment,” Zhavoronkov said.

He cautioned that the results do not mean researchers have discovered a drug that can actually reverse aging or extend people’s lives.

“It basically means that you are predicted to be younger using a validated set of aging clocks. We don’t know what that means yet,” Zhavoronkov said.

The findings were published in Nature Biotechnology and presented at a Nature conference at Sorbonne University in Paris.

Rentosertib is an experimental medication developed with the help of artificial intelligence and is being studied as a potential treatment for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

IPF causes progressive scarring of lung tissue, making it increasingly difficult for patients to breathe.

Researchers examined blood-protein patterns in people receiving rentosertib and found changes that generally moved in the opposite direction of patterns associated with normal aging.

Six different biological-aging tests showed a similar trend, with patients taking rentosertib registering as biologically younger than those receiving a placebo.

The strongest effect was observed after four weeks among patients taking 30 milligrams of the drug twice a day.

Researchers also compared the findings with information from more than 55,000 people in the UK Biobank. That analysis found that several proteins affected by the drug changed in ways opposite to the patterns typically associated with aging.

The researchers found additional indications that rentosertib could influence processes at the cellular level, including biological functions involved in how cells operate and respond to damage.

But the researchers emphasize that those findings remain preliminary.

“This is a pilot,” Zhavoronkov said. “It is early [and] exploratory.”

Only 42 patients were included in the analysis, and they were followed for 12 weeks.

Another major limitation is that all of the participants had IPF.

Because the disease itself can alter many of the same blood proteins used to estimate biological age, researchers cannot yet determine whether the changes were caused by a direct effect on aging or were instead related to improvements in the patients’ lung disease.

The study also did not establish whether the changes in biological-aging measurements translate into better overall health, longer lives or a slower rate of aging.

Researchers say larger and longer clinical trials will be needed to answer those questions. Studies involving healthy older adults and people without IPF could be especially important in determining whether rentosertib has effects beyond treating the lung disease.

The drug also remains investigational and is not approved as an anti-aging treatment.

Insilico Medicine executive Dr. Carol Ann Satler said the side effects observed so far have been considered manageable.

Potential side effects included mild diarrhea, slightly reduced potassium levels in the blood and temporary increases in liver enzymes.

“Once you stop the drug, essentially, they return to normal,” Satler told Fox News Digital.

She said researchers plan to consider the side-effect profile when determining dosing in future studies, with the goal of allowing patients to remain on treatment longer if the drug continues to show promise.

Rentosertib has now advanced into a year-long Phase 3 clinical trial involving more than 300 patients in China, according to Insilico Medicine.

The larger study could provide a clearer picture of the drug’s safety and effectiveness for IPF while potentially offering more information about the biological-aging changes observed in the earlier research.

For now, researchers stress that the findings should not be interpreted as evidence that rentosertib can make people younger or extend human lifespan.

The apparent age-related changes were based on biological markers, particularly proteins measured in blood, rather than demonstrated changes in a person’s actual lifespan or overall aging process.

Zhavoronkov said the early results nonetheless reinforce his interest in developing medicines that could potentially target both age-related diseases and biological processes associated with aging.

“Everybody agrees that living longer should be a fundamental human right for everyone,” he said.