I’m surprised that they are publishing a protocol this far into the game, but I expect there are interesting tidbits:
Test of Rapamycin in Aging Dogs (TRIAD): study design and rationale for a prospective, parallel-group, double-masked, randomized, placebo-controlled, multicenter trial of rapamycin in healthy middle-aged dogs from the Dog Aging Project.
Coleman AE, Creevy KE, Anderson R, Reed MJ, Fajt VR, Aicher KM, Atiee G, Barnett BG, Baumwart RD, Boudreau B, Cunningham SM, Dunbar MD, Ditzler B, Ferguson AM, Forsyth KK, Gambino AN, Gordon SG, Hammond HK, Holland SN, Iannaccone MK, Illing K, Kadotani S, Knowles SA, MacLean EL, Maran BA, Markovic LE, McGrath S, Melvin RL, Mueller MS, Nelson OL, Olby NJ, Pancotto TE, Parsley E, Potter BM, Prescott JO, Saunders AB, Sawyer HM, Scansen BA, Schmid SM, Smith CC, Tjostheim SS, Tolbert MK, Tropf MA, Visser LC, Ward JL, Wesselowski SR, Windsor RC, Yang VK, Ruple A, Promislow DEL, Kaeberlein M; Dog Aging Project Consortium.
Geroscience. 2025 Feb 14. doi: 10.1007/s11357-024-01484-7. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 39951177.
… The Test of Rapamycin In Aging Dogs (TRIAD) randomized clinical trial is a parallel-group, double-masked, randomized, placebo-controlled, multicenter trial that will test the ability of rapamycin to prolong lifespan and improve several healthspan metrics in healthy, middle-aged dogs recruited from Dog Aging Project participants. Here, we describe the rationale, design, and goals of the TRIAD randomized clinical trial, the first rigorous test of a pharmacologic intervention against biological aging with lifespan and healthspan metrics as endpoints to be performed outside of the laboratory in any species.
This sounds brilliant. Finally a properly designed study which will use a good dose, with a proper formulation. Stratifying by body weight is a great move, but using whole coated tablets is going to be important. So the way they’ve approached this is very smart IMO. No stupid compound pharmacy formulations.
They also seem to be collecting a ton of parameters, and not just biomarkers but actual cognitive and physical functional tests.
I just hope that if there is an effect, it’s large enough to be measured with this relatively small-ish sample size, since I imagine there’s a lot of variability within each group. Of course, that’s also a strength of the trial because it reflects the lifestyle and environment of the owners. However, it’s inherently noisier than a cage of identical mice!
Do you have any information about the current status, and when it might publish results?
Good news, perhaps, for extrapolation potential for TRIAD and the DAP broadly:
Dogs and humans share biomarkers of mortality
Benjamin R Harrison, Joshua Michael Akey, Noah Snyder-Mackler, Daniel Raftery, DAP Consortium, Kate E Creevy and Daniel Promislow
There is growing interest in the use of molecular features as predictors of age, age-related disease risk and age-related mortality. A major shortcoming of this field, however, is the lack of suitable translational research models to identify and understand the underlying mechanisms of these predictive biomarkers in human populations. In particular, we lack a system which, like humans, is genetically variable, lives in diverse environments, and experiences aging-related chronic conditions treated in the context of a sophisticated health care system. Here, we present results from our analysis of data from the Dog Aging Project, a long-term longitudinal study of aging in more than 50,000 companion dogs. In particular, using longitudinal survival models, we present the striking finding of a strong, highly significant positive correlation between the effect of individual metabolites on all-cause mortality in humans, and the association of those same metabolites on all-cause mortality in dogs. We also find that across these independent human studies, the biomarkers identified are also highly correlated, strongly suggesting a general signature of mortality within the plasma metabolome across humans, and now in dogs as well. Given the many similarities between dogs and humans with respect to genetics, environment, disease, and disease treatment, and the fact that dogs are so much shorter lived than humans, we argue that dogs represent an extremely valuable translational model in our ongoing effort to understand the underlying molecular causes and consequences of age-related morbidity and mortality in humans.
bioRxiv. posted 25 August 2025, 10.1101/2025.08.20.671317
