Bryan Johnson, ‘The Man Who Wants To Live Forever’, has discovered a flaw in his meticulous approach to cheating death. The 47-year-old tech millionaire, who is on a relentless mission to defy ageing, has stopped taking a longevity drug, which may have done more harm than good.
Johnson recently revealed that he had stopped taking rapamycin and that it may have done more harm than good.
The tech millionaire used to take 13 milligrams of the immunosuppressant rapamycin every two weeks, a drug 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 the end of September. In November, she admitted she dropped the cancer drug from her rigid regimen.
“Despite the immense potential of preclinical trials, my team and I concluded that the benefits of lifelong dosing of rapamycin do not justify the significant side effects,” he added.
Johnson said she experienced occasional skin and soft tissue infections, abnormal blood fat levels, high blood sugar and a higher resting heart rate.
“With no other underlying cause identified, we suspected rapamycin, and since dosage adjustments had no effect, we decided to discontinue it completely,” Johnson explained.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved rapamycin for antiaging therapy, but doctors have prescribed it off-label because it has been shown to extend the lifespan of mice.
The former Silicon Valley executive said preclinical and clinical research indicated that long-term use of rapamycin can alter lipid metabolism and induce insulin and glucose intolerance.
“Longevity research around these experimental compounds is constantly evolving, which requires continued and careful observation of the research and my biomarkers that my team and I constantly do,” he added.
Johnson spends $2 million a year on medical diagnoses and treatments combined with a meticulously crafted regimen of eating, sleeping and exercising to see if he can slow, and perhaps even reverse, the aging process.
A few months ago, the tech millionaire revealed that he had undergone a total plasma exchange in which the fluid in his body had been replaced with pure albumin, a protein found in a person’s blood plasma. He emphasized that the process was different from when he exchanged blood with his teenage son.