I just returned from a doctors visit. I have discussed Rapamycin with him on a couple occasions. He told me tonight that he has a patient with prostate cancer that has been unresponsive to treatment and his PSA kept rising. The patient chose to add Rapamycin cycles to the other meds he was prescribed. Doc said every time he took Rapa the PSA numbers decreased and when he stopped they rose again. Seems he is becoming more open to the potential benefits.
11 Likes
Interesting, I have had the same experience, a documentable 20% decrease in PSA from a year ago. I have only been taking 2mg of rapa per week for about 3 months.
4 Likes
It is good to hear that you and others are seeing improvements. Sounds like this is something that deserves more attention and/or documentation.
1 Like
Thanks for sharing. I’ve had family members with breast cancer who added rapamycin to their protocol with great results. Though, in the cancer field we knew about adding rapalogs before it became a longevity thing. Everything first gets tested on cancer patients that have nothing to lose.
Anyways, it’s been extremely effective in overcoming resistance to AI inhibitors which is a huge poroblem. mTOR signaling is required for estrogen-induced breast tumor cell proliferation. So rapalogs (most commonly everolimus although my relatives take Rapamune) act synergistically with the AI inhibitor to inhibit proliferation and trigger apoptotic cell death. And most importantly ovecome resistance to AI inhibitors. The resistance to AI inhibitors occurs once the cancer gets used to lack of ER and starts using EGFR and mTOR for growth. When that happens, the cancer spreads so quick.
So a method of treatment is pause from the AI inhibitor so that the cancer gets dependent again on ER which then we cut off by re-introducing the AI inhibitor again. Then add a mTOR inhibitor.
It’s interesting to note that a rapalog called tem-sirolimus didn’t show any of those benefits in the study but the others did (everolimus and sirolimus). I posted a thread about this a while back somewhere in the forum.
It’s definitely worth considering in my opinion. The mTOR pathway, especially in cancer is one of the key pathways to inhibit so that you can stop rapid growth.
4 Likes
My PSA varies quite a bit. I would not necessarily see a single value of variation of 20% as significant although I may have an idea what I am doing to make the PSA vary.
This is interesting. I was not aware of AI resistance and modulation with rapalogs in breast cancer. Thanks for sharing this information.
1 Like