Andrew Huberman· PhD
if you take rapamycin as a human at least every day it seems to suppress your immune system but if you just pulse it once a week as they did in that study it seems to improve immune function
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
if you take rapamycin as a human at least every day it seems to suppress your immune system but if you just pulse it once a week as they did in that study it seems to improve immune function
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The "high risk" framing here is the right call. I've had three patients ask about rapa this month and none of them grasped the immunosuppression tradeoff until I walked them through it.
The PEARL trial framing in the dossier is the clearest writeup I've seen for a non-specialist. Worth linking from the AMA pages too.
I'm on 6mg/week, year two. Tracking IL-6, fasting glucose, lipids. Happy to share the spreadsheet if Whalespan wants longitudinal user data.
The dosing variance across the advocate camp is staggering. 3mg, 5mg, 8mg, biweekly, weekly… brief is right that "monitor or specialist only" is the responsible read.
Rapamycin was developed as an immunosuppressant at higher doses, but at low doses, it has shown beneficial effects on inflammation and other aging biomarkers
so we've already talked about immune function you can take an old immune system and make it work more like a young immune system
the real innovation was being able to recognize that i'm doing air quotes for the listeners age of the immune system is something that's measurable and potentially modifiable in a reasonable time frame and we had that paper from chen in science cell signaling that showed a short course of arapalog could alter the biology of lymphocytes and you're saying that in a favorable way not a disfavorable yes
I do i think we certainly know that high doses of arapalog are immunosuppressive the dose of 20 milligrams once a week is sufficiently high to fully suppress torque 1. i expect that we probably interfered with lymphocyte proliferation
so there's there's you know there's multiple things going on here in that study they used lower doses they tested once weekly dosing and these are old people who show a functional decline you're not going to see a functional improvement in vaccine response if you did this experiment in young people right you're only going to see it in the context of of older people where they already have a functional deficit
i mean we we know every drug has a dose response right and that you can get different effects different outcomes different side effects depending on the dose and so you know when you back off on the dose of rapamycin or everolimus um in the context of an aged physiology
we shouldn't think of this as an immune supressant we should think of it as an immune modulator and that was a clear example of how you take at at least an aged immune system and make it more robust
May and this I think is getting with what you were talking about Peter maybe it is possible that lower doses of AR rapalog in relatively healthy older adults could be well tolerated and maybe this idea that as a ger therpeutic we might be able to give Ramy to older people maybe it's not so crazy
I think those vaccine studies were uh a a great start and if they would because they were uh those were healthy people right they just were older people they were people I think 65 and older um I would like to see the those things um continued
But I think the main thing for aging is that it's not immunosuppressant. I think at the levels that people are taking it for longevity, which is once a week, let the trough levels come down. Um, and I don't think we're seeing immune suppression in that context, at least not above background.
what was remarkable about that data was the fact that um this is from a drug that is supposed to be an immune suppressant immunosuppressant and you know it's been a long road for the longevity field to try to get our colleagues who are actually using uh rapamy as an imunosuppressant to have to to have them believe that um this actually has an effect on
Rapamycin extends median and maximum lifespan in mice across multiple lab strains and dosing protocols.
Rapamycin will extend human lifespan by 5+ years at standard weekly dosing.
Weekly rapamycin dosing in healthy adults shows favorable safety and immune markers in early observational data.
Chronic low-dose rapamycin imposes an immune trade-off that outweighs the longevity hypothesis for most healthy adults.
mTORC1 inhibition is the mechanistic backbone for rapamycin's healthspan effects in mammals.
The PEARL trial showed an acceptable 48-week safety profile in healthy adults on weekly rapamycin.