Disappointing results from the first rapamycin-plus-exercise trial
Buried in the detail of this report is a study model that deserves attention.
That said, Stanfield and colleagues deserve real credit for running a properly designed, double-blind, placebo-controlled RCT on a drug that has too often been discussed on the basis of animal data and n-of-1 enthusiasm. It’s also worth noting how this trial was funded: entirely through public donations, with the sample size explicitly capped by what a single site could run on that budget. If anything, this reinforces the case for the larger, longer, better-resourced trials the field actually needs.