Leave your feedback Share Copy URL https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/researchers-find-drug-that-mimics-effects-of-exercise Email Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Tumblr Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Transcript Scientists announced this week that they've found a chemical compound that allows mice to run 44 percent longer on a treadmill -- without doing any exercise. Lead researcher Ronald Evans discusses the results and what they could mean for humans. Read the Full Transcript Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors. JUDY WOODRUFF: It sounds too good to be true, but researchers say they believe they have found drugs that mimic the effects of exercise, even for those who prefer the couch to the Stairmaster.The work was done with mice. Scientists put sedentary mice on a treadmill and found that a drug helped the mice run for a substantially longer time than those who didn't get the drug. A second drug boosted the athletic endurance of mice who had been exercising, as well.Here to tell us more is the study's lead investigator, Ronald Evans. He is a professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.Dr. Evans, thank you very much for being with us. Just the sound of it is very appealing. Tell us what you found that this pill or these pills do. DR. RONALD EVANS, Salk Institute: Well, we found two different muscle-enhancing drugs. Both of these drugs acted very powerfully to stimulate endurance, I have to say, in mice. We now want to spur this towards people.And they kind of address one of the holy grails in our field, which is a pill that can promote fitness or endurance, especially for those who are unable to exercise. JUDY WOODRUFF: Now, they work differently. One, as we said, is with — works if the mouse was exercising, the other if the mouse wasn't exercising. Can you help us understand that? DR. RONALD EVANS: Well, that's exactly true. One pill is for people who are in good shape, basically, and who get regular exercise. We found that that pill particularly stimulates the quality of exercise, at least in mice that are getting exercise.It does not work at all if the mice are not exercising, so that remains a very important step, because that kind of medicine or pill could have a lot of benefit for many people, but this works particularly well with exercise.The second pill is sort of the couch-potato experiment, where the mice get no exercise, but the ones that get the pill can get up on a treadmill and behave as if they had several weeks of exercise.