Then how would you recommend one gives a smaller dose of rapamycin to their cats? I have two cats and only 1mg tablets, so what would be a good way to give them both 0.5mg without breaking the pill?
I thought about crushing the pills down and mixing it in with some of their wet food, but now after what you said it seems that it wouldn’t really do anything for them since they will have low bioavailability.
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What you may want to do is what people are doing… dose higher than the standard dosing at one time, but then increase the time between doses.
Many people are taking higher levels of rapamycin (for example Bryan Johnson is taking 13mg of rapamycin every two weeks). Bryan Johnson's Longevity Protocol - Your Thoughts?
This is compared to the normal longevity dosing for males of around 6mg , once per week.
There is no reason why the same approach could not be used in pets: What is the Rapamycin Dose / Dosage for Anti-Aging or Longevity?
Because my dog is relatively small (24 lbs) and the tablets are all in 1mg portions, I give my dog 3mg every two weeks or so now.
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I ask because the 1mg tablets would be hard to get the cat to swallow, instead of mixing it in food crushed up/powdered. Its easy for a dog to just swallow it with a treat, but cats are different.
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Ah, I thought cats would eat pretty much the same way dogs do. My dog, and I think perhaps most dogs, really don’t chew things much. I put the rapamycin tablets inside a small cube of cheese (using a knife to cut a small incision in the side of the cheese, then tucking the tablet inside that incision). My dog basically just swallows it whole.
I have no experience with cats. Perhaps someone can test this approach out, or try other similar approaches, and see what works best, and report back on what doesn’t work and what does work.
Given the well-documented bioavailability issues with powdered/unencapsulated rapamycin, I’m pretty sure you don’t just want to crush the tablets and mix with the food.
Perhaps covering the tablet with a delectable cat-treat (peanut butter?) might work? Does anyone else have any ideas? The smaller the animal gets, the more this becomes a problem.
The original NIA ITP studies on rapamycin were delayed for many months when they first discovered this bioavailability problem (the rapamycin is destroyed in the stomach) when they were starting the mouse trials. They ended up developing a custom/expensive method of encapsulating the rapamycin powder (now named E-rapa) in tiny . The rapamycin researchers out of Texas (Rodney Strong and David Sharp) ended up forming a small company just to produce this eRapa that was used in all the rapamycin mouse trials.
Since then the company seems to have gotten additional funding and are trying to expand their market - but I spoke with Matt Kaeberlein at the Longevity Summit in December, 2022 about this company as I saw that they are now doing human clinical trials with their eRapa product (see here ) but that seemed a little odd to me, as functionally it seems that this version of eRapa is basically the same as the Rapamune and generic rapamycin tablets that all had slightly different methods of getting around the bioavailability problem. Matt agreed, there didn’t seem to be any functional difference between eRapa and the regular human-use rapamycin tablets. Historically the key benefit of eRapa was that there were very small granules that were encapsulated and that could be mixed in with mouse chow. But - the company charges a lot of this product, (very small volume I’m sure) - so its only used in mouse and other small animal research studies.
More information on the company behind eRapa: https://emtorabio.com/
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I am not a cat fan.
But we had cats on meds as a kid and we would open their mouths and shove the pill down with the end of an eraser on a pencil. Worked!
Maybe dose the pill with a bit of wet cat food to make it more palatable.
Yes? Too mean?
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Happy to say the clinical study with rapa on cats with hcm is now finalised and report should be available soon. On TriviumVet website they published today a video with Joshua Stern from UC Davis taking about it.
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My cat is taking 1 mg pill without any issues at all. He swallows is whole with a snack, no chewing. Easy. 
if normal snacks do not work, try easy pills. 90 percent of cats will swallow absolutely everything coated by this malarkey.
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How do you give it to him? Any hiding it in food? Or covering it in something that tastes good?
I hide it in a snack. A piece of cats’ “sausage” stick rubbish from supermarket by webbox. Not great ingredients but soft enough to hide the pill. And easy pill works wonders, too.
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Is this what you’re talking about regarding “easy pill”? I’m not familiar with it:
Use the tiny amount. No need to give a lot.
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Who cares if you are not a cat fan?
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I have one cat who will swallow it whole no problem, and my other one refuses to eat it regardless of method I try. He just wont eat it
You probably have a solution by now. But, here is what I use:Amazon.com : FELINE GREENIES PILL POCKETS for Cats Natural Soft Cat Treats
Just pick the flavor your cats like.
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I will check it out, thanks! I am working on getting one of my cats to eat it, as he refuses regardless of what I try.
You can lead a cat to rapamycin but you can’t make him eat
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Guess we’ll have to wait for the published study to confirm what dose they actually used (I watched and didn’t see any specifics besides “low dose” and “high dose,” and it was stated even the high dose was lower than what is used for other conditions).
I did find a patent for Trivium that shows several doses mentioned - .15 mg/kg, .45 mg/kg, .75 mg/kg, and three specific tablet sizes, .4mg, 1.2mg and 2.4mg.
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I wonder if there is a veterinary equivalent of the clinicaltrials.gov website where they list all the animal clinical trials? In the human clinical trials they usually include dosing information I think.
For example a site like this?
https://studypages.com/ucdavisvet/studies/
Ah, no such luck, no dosing data:
Yes, i have already bombarded everyone with questions. We will se if they answer or if we have to wait for the publucation. But yay to the results !
I expect they’ll be tight-lipped about the dose until the trial is published, hopefully ASAP.
I’m glad you found that video, because ever since I heard about the RAPACAT study last year I’ve been frequently checking every place I can think of (Trivium’s site, Dr. Stern’s twitter, etc.) to see if there was an update, and I was getting slightly annoyed to find that while they’ve been presenting data at vet conferences (there was another in Germany late last year where they revealed some info), it appears to be embargoed for vets only. That seems to be standard for pre-publication data, especially when someone is seeking FDA approval for a drug, but I know all of us with cats who could benefit are very eager to have some answers.
It’s interesting that the trial apparently showed a greater benefit from the “low dose” regimen of Rapamycin, though the higher dose also did better than placebo.
I’ll note that Trivium is also running a trial for CKD, but that’s at a much earlier stage than the HCM trials.
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