Queen famously asked ‘who wants to live forever?’, and one of the answers is Bryan Johnson, a millionaire who has gone to extreme lengths to live as long as possible.
But his efforts to stay alive indefinitely seem to have been scuppered by an anti-aging drug which could in fact have the opposite effect.
Bryan, the subject of Netflix documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, has made several attempts to reverse aging and extend his lifespan – including injecting himself with plasma donated by his teenage son.
Called Project Blueprint, he sells his own supplements and individualised health plans to customers while taking 54 supplements every day.
But he has now found out that one of those supplements may in fact have been making him older, not younger.
Rapamycin is a drug originally used as an immunosuppressant to prevent organ transplant rejection and as a treatment for some cancers and rare diseases.
It inhibits the mTOR pathway, related to aging and age-related disease, meaning there’s been plenty of research into its potential anti-aging benefits.
Unfortunately, it turns out that not only is rapamycin actually aging Bryan, it was also causing a series of side effects.
He’s stopped taking the drug after five years of use, having experimented with the dosage, to try and mitigate those side effects, but to no avail.
Bryan said on X: ‘Despite the immense potential from pre-clinical trials, my team and I came to the conclusion that the benefits of lifelong dosing of rapamycin do not justify the hefty side-effects (intermittent skin/soft tissue infections, lipid abnormalities, glucose elevations, and increased resting heart rate).
‘With no other underlying causes identified, we suspected rapamycin, and since dosage adjustments had no effect, we decided to discontinue it entirely.
‘Additionally, a new pre-print indicated that rapamycin was one of a handful of supposed longevity interventions to cause an increase/acceleration of aging in humans across 16 epigenetic aging clocks.’
Despite giving up on this particular drug, Bryan doesn’t seem too disheartened by the decision.
‘Longevity research around these experimental compounds is constantly evolving, necessitating ongoing, close observation of the research and my biomarkers which my team and I do constantly,’ he added.
In the Netflix documentary, which became available to watch this month, Bryan called his daily routine ‘the most aggressive rapamycin protocol of anyone in the industry’.
Some experts appearing in the programme shared concerns about people taking the drug for longevity process.
But it was just one of dozens of elements in his personal health regimen aimed at turning back the clock and keeping himself alive.
He eats a vegan diet, avoids the sun, and exercises daily alongside his supplement regimen.
Bryan aims to sleep for eight to nine hours every night, takes part in red light therapy, and stretches every 30 minutes – and in total he spends about $2million (£1.6million) every year on his anti-aging and health efforts.
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