I want to make 0.1% Topical Rapamycin Cream. How do I go about doing this?
I know Dr greens formula, but I just want to make sur ei have everything 100% before I do it.
Can i use any ointment? Like vaseline? Do I literally just crush up the powder and mix it in the vaseline?
Say I had 30ml vaseline, how many tablets mg of sirolimus would I need to make 0.1%? I have heard someone using transcultol, but i have no idea how to use this or what it even is? Would me mixing the powder from the tablets in the vaseline be enough to make the 0.1% cream? Is it safe?
For a 0.1% solution with 30 ml of ointment you’d need to crush 30 mg of rapamycin. Personally I don’t believe using straight Vaseline or Aquaphor is very effective since these are thick petroleum based products that don’t have anything in them like Transcutol to help deliver it into the skin. Plus I don’t know how well the rapa dissolved in Transcutol would mix with the petroleum jelly. They would also be pretty greasy.
As for the percentage, why are you shooting for 0.1%? Last time I looked at Alan Green’s formula it was 0.045%. The only paper we have on topical rapa was the Drexel study which used a far lower percentage of 0.001%.
On the last batch I made, I went for slightly lower than Alan Green’s formula and made a 0.027% solution. To make it, I crushed up 16 mg of rapamycin and dissolved it in 10 ml Transcutol before stirring it into about 50 g of Cerave daily moisturizing cream.
here’s a helpful calculator for grams of solute into a volume of solution:
I have a skin condition where 0.1% + is recommended, although 0.1% seems safe and recommended. So I can literally get 30ml of some cream and mix the powder from 30mg sirolimus in? Can I use CeraVe Blue Moisturising Lotion? Thank you!
You could just put 30 mg into 30 ml of lotion to reach 0.1%, but there isn’t really anything in the lotion to dissolve the rapa into, so it’s unknown how effective it would be at getting any of the rapa into the skin. For that reason, those of us on the forum who’ve made topical solutions use Transcutol to first dissolve the crushed rapa tablets into first, and then mix that into whatever cream/lotion.
Here’s a table with solubility of rapa into different compounds:
Here’s a source of inexpensive Transcutol. It goes by a few different names, and Ethoxydiglycol is one of them:
Depending on how thick or thin you want to make it, you can play with the ratio of cream to Transcutol (with rapa crushed and dissolved). You could try:
20 g lotion + 10 g Transcutol (or ml, since the mass of lotion and Transcutol are all close to 1 g/ml) + 30 mg rapa dissolved, for a 0.1% solution. 0.1% is a fairly high concentration, so it will take a lot of rapa to make a large quantity.
When I made the 0.027% cream, I crushed 16 mg of rapa, dissolved it in 10 ml of Transcutol, and mixed it with about 50 g of CeraVe Moisturizing Cream and the consistency was basically the same as regular cream.
This is so so helpful- thank you so much! In terms of storage, is there any specific container I should store it in? And can I scale up in that ratio, eg 40g lotion, 20g transcutol, 60mg rapa? Thank you so much and sorry if this sounds stupid- i dont know anything about rapa/ making my own cream. Thanks.
I just put it back in the original container after mixing it in a kitchen bowl with a mixer (obviously you have to take a little of the cream out to make room for the rapamycin/transcutol mixture.
Any container will work, but it’s probably better for it not to be a clear container so as to protect the rapa from light. In my case, I bought the big tub of CeraVe, so weighed the 50 g into a smaller container like these and mixed in the transcutol + rapa mixture.
Thank you so much again both of you. Would you say that I should wash my hands after dealing with the cream? I am trying to use it for facial redness relief.
The amount of filler can fluctuate by brand, but my tablets are over 99% filler. So, even though 60mg of rapa will easily dissolve in 20g transcutol, with the filler included it might be harder. I think most of the posts I’ve seen on this site would translate to 30-120g of transcutol for 60mg of rapa. You might find 20g to be challenging to work with in a DIY setup.
