Bryan Johnson, ‘The Man Who Wants To Live Forever’, has discovered a glitch in his meticulous approach to cheat death. The 47-year-old tech millionaire, who is on a relentless mission to defy aging, has stopped taking a longevity drug, which may have done more harm than good.
Johnson recently disclosed that he had stopped taking rapamycin — and that it may have done more harm than good.
The tech millionaire used to consume 13 milligrams of the immunosuppressant rapamycin every two weeks, a drug that transplant patients take to help prevent organ rejection.
In a new Netflix documentary about him, “Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever,” Johnson called his routine “the most aggressive rapamycin protocol of anyone in the industry.”
Johnson said he experimented with rapamycin for nearly five years, until late September. He admitted in November that he dropped the anti-cancer drug from his rigid regimen.
“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,” he added.
Johnson said he experienced occasional skin and soft tissue infections, abnormal levels of fats in his blood, elevated blood sugar and a higher 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,” Johnson explained.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved rapamycin for anti-aging therapy, but physicians have been prescribing it off-label because it has been shown to extend the healthy lifespan of mice.
The former Silicon Valley executive said preclinical and clinical research indicated that prolonged rapamycin use can disrupt lipid metabolism and induce insulin and glucose intolerance.
“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.
Johnson spends $2 million a year on medical diagnostics and treatments combined with a meticulously crafted regimen of eating, sleeping, and exercising to see if he can slow, and perhaps even reverse, the ageing process.
A few months ago, the tech millionaire revealed that he had undergone a total plasma exchange in which his body’s fluid had been replaced with pure albumin, a protein found in a person’s blood plasma. He highlighted that the process was different from when he swapped blood with his teenage son.