Mainstream publications are starting to cover rapamycin…
Tough testing
About a dozen already approved drugs ‒ including rapamycin, used to prevent organ rejection in transplantation, and the diabetes drug metformin ‒ might be repurposed to help expand healthy lifespan, said Dr. Nir Barzilai, the founding director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
But funding clinical trials and proving to the Food and Drug Administration they are safe and effective will be difficult, said Barzilai, who has been trying to finance a metformin trial for years.
Testing drugs for their longevity benefits in humans is challenging if not impossible. A definitive study would require thousands of people to take either the drug or a placebo for decades. No one is willing to wait that long for an answer.
Many people aren’t waiting at all. The transplant drug rapamycin already is a favorite of the biohacker community – people trying drugs (often more than one) on themselves, hoping to extend their lives.
Although biohackers do this against the advice of their doctors, these self-experimenters may provide useful data for science, if they allow their doctors to track their blood, urine and experiences closely enough, said Dr. James Kirkland, a geriatrician and former director of the Robert and Arlene Kogod Center on Aging at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.