I’m pretty much in the same position as you. Lets hope someone with more knowledge than us can help and contribute in this effort to develop a low scalp irritation formulation of this hair tonic…
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I was about to order the pills for this and took a look at the paper. It looks like the quantities in the paper were:
*1.2 mg/ml cyclosporin
*5 mg/ml minoxidil
*120 ng/ml RT175
The unit for RT175 is in nanograms rather than milligrams, so this would correspond to 0.00012 mg/ml, or a total of 0.012 mg in your 100 gram or 3.5 oz mix.
This seems like a tiny amount and I wonder how it could make a big difference. Is it possible that the RT175 is more effective/potent than standard tacrolimus? I’m not sure how we could find this out since RT175 was formulated for the study. They seem to attribute the color regeneration to the RT175 in the paper.
Did you arrive at the 100 mg of tacrolimus in your mix using a different method? Am I reading the quantities in the paper correctly?
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Sorry - I may have made a mistake in my calculations - go with the paper data, but I also believe that there is a pretty wide range of dosing cited in the patent application made by RiverTown (see patent above). I’m just embarking on my effort to create this formulation and have yet to order the ingredients. Hope to move on this over the next week or two and will update the info when I have time. Nobody has done any work at figuring out the optimal doses of these different factors used in the formula - so at this early stage its still a lot of trial and error, and hopefully people will report their results and dosing protocols, concentrations used, etc.
RT175 is a derivative of Tacrolimus - when I spoke with David from Rivertown he didn’t say anything about RT175 being more effective/potent than tacrolimus, his pitch was more on the safety side (tacrolimus has slightly increased risk of cancer when used in young people, not a concern in this type of application though - so I suspect David is hyping the risk factor to make the RiverTown formulation have more perceived value).
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Maybe Melissa L. Harris can help you out?
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Since the quantity is so small, it would probably make sense to order the 0.25 mg tacrolimus capsules, which are the smallest I see for sale on Indiamart. In a 100 ml solution, this would still be about 20x the amount used in the paper. A single strip of 10 tacrolimus tablets would be a ~10+ month supply and cost less than a few dollars.
Has anyone talked about a minimum dollar amount when ordering from Indiamart? Perhaps you’d have to by something like $20 or $50 of tacrolimus to make it worth their time, even though it’s orders of magnitude more than you’d need based on the paper quantities.
Just order all the medications you need at once and the online pharmacies always ignore any “minimum order quantities” that they claim to have when you first start discussions. They always start discussions saying “minimum order quantity” of some number , eg. 20 packets, but then they don’t push back when you say you want to order fewer, as part of an overall order.
This is true at all the online pharmacies we have listed here: Anti-aging Benefits of Rapamycin, Personal Experiences (part 2)
Just contact them with a request for a price quote, eg. something like this:
Cyclosporine (Panimun Bioral 50mg Capsules, 1 pack of 30 tablets): USD 45x1 = USD 45
Minoxidil (Lonitab 5mg Tablets, 10 strips of 10 tablets): USD 12x10 = USD 120
Tacrolimus (.5 mg Capsules or .25mg Capsules, 2 packs of 10 tablets): USD ? x 2 = USD ?
Shipping charges : USD 30
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This post is a work in progress - I’m too busy to day to complete the calculations I’m now realizing, but will finish it later and update the post with a spreadsheet of the calculations that everyone can check and verify. Right now the numbers below are not entirely accurate.
So - a .5 milligram tablet of Tacrolimus has 500 micrograms in it.
So to recalculate the formulation per the new data from the corrected paper, looks like this:
For a 100 gram (3.5 oz) batch of the formulation I think I’ll use something like the following:
The unit for RT175 (Tacrolimus for us) is in micrograms (mcg) rather than milligrams (mg), so this would correspond to 0.000024 g mg/ml, or a total of 0.024 mg in a 100 gram or 3.5 oz mix.
Note, just for reference purposes, there seems to be a wide range of percent tacrolimus used in topical formulations, and we don’t yet know what dose is best in terms of stimulating hair growth and repigmentation, so it would seem reasonable to try a range of dosings and test to find out what is optimal (perhaps on an individual level?): Regular Tacrolimus cream (that is commercially available) is typically in two dose levels: tacrolimus 0.03 % and tacrolimus 0.1 % ointment
Also, for reference purposes, in the Patent, it notes (where the first compound is the tacrolimus derivative:
A composition for use in a method of treating alopecia comprising from 0.000001% to 0.0001% w / v of a compound of formula (II) ** (See formula) ** or a pharmaceutically acceptable salt or ester thereof, from 1% to 10% w / v of minoxidil and from 0.01% to 1% w / v of cyclosporin A, where w / v denotes weight by volume.
- 500 mg of minoxidil (approx. 50 of the 10mg tablets, powdered)
- 120 mg cyclosporin (approx. 5 of the 25mg tablets, powdered)
- WorkInProgress… mg of tacrolimus (approx. of the 2mg tablets, powdered)
I was about to order the pills for this and took a look at the paper. It looks like the quantities in the paper were:
*5 mg/ml minoxidil
*1.2 mg/ml cyclosporin
*240 mcg/ml RT175/Tacrolimus
The unit for RT175 is in micrograms rather than milligrams, so this would correspond to 0.00024 mg/ml, or a total of 0.024 mg in your 100 gram or 3.5 oz mix.
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I’m no math genius but I think this calculation is wrong.
24 micrograms/ml = 0.024 milligrams/ml
for 100 ml solution need to multiply by 100 = 2.4 milligrams/100 ml
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I posted that as a placeholder - I’m still creating a spreadsheet with all the dose calculations and will post that when I’m finished. Yes - the math is wrong in the current iteration - I’ll delete our messages on this after I’ve completed the spreadsheet and posted it for everyone to review and comment on.
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Yes this would be the correct amount reflecting the change to the paper. I only looked at the “accepted paper” print rather than the online version. Thanks for finding the correction. The quantity of ~2.5 mg for a 100 g solution seems way more reasonable compared to the original 0.012 mg based on the 124 ng/ml number. Now it seems we should be able to order the 0.5 mg tablets and be able to accurately mix to the paper quantities.
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I second reaching out it Melissa Harris on this. I’ve corresponded with her before and while I don’t know how much she can disclose, she’s usually always happy to answer and chat
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I was only able to find a couple of places on Indiamart that had all three drugs, Kachhela (Globestar was the other). I ordered the following:
Cyclosporine 25 mg, 7 strips of 10 for $21
Tacrolimus 0.5 mg, 7 strips of 10 for $14
Minoxidil 10 mg, 300 total pills (I think it was also 30 strips of 10) for $32
Shipping was about $37,
Total of about $110 sent through Wise.com.
Overall, this seems like a good price. This should be a year’s supply of solution assuming I’ll use 100 g per month. A 2 oz bottle of 2% minoxidil solution on Amazon is around $25, so it would cost quite a bit more if using a pre-mixed solution and adding the cyclosporine and tacrolimus. The downside there is that you don’t know the ratio of ethanol, PEG, and water are in it. My plan is to make and use a 2% minoxidil solution for the first few months rather than the 5% in the paper because my hair is already very thick. If someone were to make a year’s supply of 5% solution, 60 strips of the minoxidil would be needed.
One potential issue is that the cyclosporine pills may not be crushable. Most all the cyclosporine I found were labeled as “soft gelatin capsules” including the Biocon Cyclophil ME that Kachhela sells. So, TBD on whether it will be easy to either dissolve the pills in the hair solution or if there’s some other way to get the cyclosporine out such as cutting the capsules open.
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Cyclosporine will be in liquid form inside the gelatin capsule. It will dissolve easily.
Problem is to dissolve tacrolimus as every brand uses magnesium stearate as filler. It doesn’t dissolve in any solvent.
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You can get tacrolimus ointment, though it is very greasy almost like vaselin
I have not seen this as a significant issue. In my DIY toothpaste it was not a noticeable problem. There may be some residue, but its not significant. @Agetron and others have already been using rapamycin tablets in their hair formulation without significant issues noticed or reported. See discussion here: Rapamycin for Hair Growth, Hair Pigmentation, Skin Anti-aging
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Based on this info, magnesium stearate is soluble in hot ethanol. The boiling point of ethanol is about 78 C, and the melting point of tacrolimus is 126 C. If dissolving the crushed tacrolimus pills ends up being an issue when mixing the formula, then it stands to reason that we should be able to heat the ethanol to near boiling, mix the tacrolimus (and magnesium stearate) in to dissolve, and not risk harming the tacrolimus. The tacrolimus should dissolve in the ethanol.
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Small update after 2 months of using generic tacrolimus ointment on half my face.
I’m not going to say which is which and on which half of my face I used the tacrolimus. Can anyone see a difference. I made 2 collages one unfiltered 1 with a slight enhancing filter
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The right side of the image (left side of your face) seems to have a large patch of darker hair.
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Right side on pic, lower pic is post treatment. I wasn’t very careful applying on my chin as I was more focused on the sideburn area which didn’t show any change (yet)
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