Eric Topol is one of the leaders at the intersection of technology and medicine. So he comes to the discussion with a deep understanding both of medicine and tech, and for for this reason he’s worth a listen. Peter mentions that about 5% of his patients take rapamycin.
Eric Topol has a substack newsletter here: Archive - Ground Truths
The Podcast and transcript of the discussion is here: Peter Attia: Our conversation about his hit book OUTLIVE, Medicine 3.0, promoting healthspan, GLP-1 drugs and more
Eric Topol (21:08):
Now, one of the drugs that is out there as to potentially improving longevity, which has in every animal species tested, is rapamycin, which you’ve acknowledged of course could be trouble because of immune suppression, but it’s a candidate drug even we’re trying to look at it potentially for long, covid has a lot of good for mitochondrial function as well as potentially for people with activated immune systems. But what do you think about, I guess you take rapamycin and advocate for patients?
Peter Attia (21:50):
I do. Yeah. I mean, probably 5% of our patients take it. So I wouldn’t say that we certainly don’t use it in the way we would use, say, lipid lowering drugs where we have a very strong position that’s much more clear. But look, rapamycin is a drug I’ve been studying for probably 10 years now, maybe a little over 10 years actually. And look, I think it’s, as you said, it’s the most successful molecule that’s ever been tested from a Gero-protective perspective in the field of science and medicine. So there is no other molecule that has so repeatedly demonstrated a survival advantage across all species. And these are, again, it’s important to understand this is all species that span a billion years of evolution. So if you go back and look at the effective mTOR inhibition on yeast, on worms, on flies, and of course more recently on all types of mammals and also important models of mammals. So not just like the B six mouse, but some of the more representative mouse models, of course, Matt Kaberlein is now testing this in companion dogs. We’ve got some small primate studies. All of these things are basically showing the exact same effect.
