Time’s arrow: Brief exposure to rapamycin has the same anti-ageing effects as lifelong treatment
Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing
I searched to see if anyone had previously posted this and didn’t find it.
The institute’s team conjectures that a short course of Rapamycin can give optimal life long benefits.
Works in animals, but they still need to determine dose and timing for humans.
Yes - Matt Kaeberlein and Allesandro Bitto did something similar about 7 years ago in mice and had positive results. The issue that “brief” or “transient” in mice or drosophila still could translate to a number of years in human terms. And the dose used (at least by Bitto/Kaeberlein) was extremely high (as high as 8mg/kg) - so risk of side effects is also extremely high. And remember - in these lab environments the mice and flies are in pathogen free environments, so risk of immune supression is much less of an issue than for humans who are not in that type of environment:
The problem with these types of studies is that they usually give Rapamycin from birth and try to convert this to old people
Here in NIA ITP, they gave Rapamycin for 3 months to old mice:
https://phenome.jax.org/itp/surv/Rapa/C2015
In male mice, it still extended lifespan almost as good as continuous Rapamycin - but in female mice, it didn’t extend lifespan - there was a trend for 4% lifespan extension - but it wasn’t statistically significant