Medford MA, October 30, 2024 – PolyBio Research Foundation is excited to announce an $800,000 donation to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai to support a clinical trial of the drug rapamycin in patients with long COVID. The trial will be conducted at CoRE: a clinic directed by Dr. David Putrino and PolyBio’s Dr. Amy Proal.
“We are extremely motivated to run a clinical trial of an affordable, generic drug with the potential to help long COVID patients” says Dr. Proal, who serves as PolyBio’s President and Scientific Director of CoRE.
Blood samples will be collected from trial participants before, during and after taking the medication. The samples will be sent to Dr. Akiko Iwasaki’s laboratory at Yale University where analysis will determine how the use of rapamycin impacts parts of the immune response. Hormonal signaling will also be measured in participants.
The Optispan Podcast with Matt Kaeberlein recently touched on this topic and was eager to see a trial like this done. The combo treatment in the title is ketamine/rapamycin, but they were also discussing rapamycin and long covid.
I am of two minds regarding this study. Long Covid seems like an imprecise diagnosis, so how does one determine when it has been cured. Otoh, any study using Rapamycin will probably yield some useful data.
I agree, there is a lack of consensus as to whether it really exists outside of other underlying conditions in individuals who happened to get covid. Overall, I’ve seen enough people reasonably well before an episode of covid, then having real problems for months or years thereafter, so the temporal association seems significant. I’m worried if they are doing low dose and not monitoring levels. It’ll be a dataset that will simply show safety and possibly little efficacy. I’d be much more interested with more adequate doses and monitoring the effect on Long Covid. There naturally will be individuals in the study with other conditions that they feel are long covid.
A flozin + rapamycin would be my suggestion, maybe the flozin only in males. Just based off of my experience with one of these conditions is that I have worsened issues with blood glucose, some part could be because I can’t be very active but likely not just that.
I’m glad this is getting done, and I’m not surprised to see Dr. Iwasaki and Mt. Sinai being the ones involved. They’ve really done a lot for long covid (and vaccine).
As to whether long covid “exists” as it’s own unique singular condition, from what I can tell is most people seem to think there are subgroups within the condition. Obviously post covid (or vaccine) chronic illnesses exist, whether they arise from endogenous viruses, acute damage, viral persistence, or shared automimmunity to specific proteins, we don’t have the proper tools to determine this with certainty currently.
Personally I also think that for patients significantly unwell and properly selected, subjective improvements past a certain threshold are good enough data. If I were to participate in a study with infinite funding, you could measure things like joint inflammation directly and heart arrthymia count before/after treatment, but most of everyone has different symptoms, so I am guessing we’ll end up having to rely on subpar metrics like inflammatory markers in blood and reports from patients.
There were at least a couple markers of interest in long covid patients identified by Dr. Iwasaki’s team such as low cortisol they might watch for improvement.
Now that I think about it I tried to convince my mt sinai dr. over a year ago to let me trial rapa before getting it on my own