Anti-aging advocate Bryan Johnson, who gulps down 54 pills for breakfast, recently discovered a wrinkle in his meticulous approach to dodging death.
Every two weeks, the 47-year-old tech millionaire consumes 13 milligrams of the immunosuppressant rapamycin, which transplant patients take to help prevent organ rejection.
The US Food and Drug Administration 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.
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.”
But not long after filming the doc, he confessed that he had stopped taking rapamycin — and that it may have done more harm than good.
“I take this because there’s potentially some longevity benefits,” Johnson says in the flick.
“It’s the kind of thing in the longevity community that people are excited about,” he continued. “Outside the longevity community, it’s still kind of crazy, like [if you say], ‘Yeah, I take an immune-suppressing drug.’ [People react], ‘Like, that’s wacky and why would you ever do that?’”
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.
“I have tested various rapamycin protocols including weekly (5, 6, and 10 mg dose schedules), biweekly (13 mg) and alternating weekly (6/13mg) to optimize rejuvenation and limit side effects,” Johnson shared 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,” 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.
Medical experts featured in the Netflix doc shared concerns about humans taking the molecule — first isolated in soil collected from Easter Island in the 1960s — for longevity.
Because rapamycin suppresses the immune system, “side effects can include very dangerous bacterial infections, things like pneumonia or cellulitis or pharyngitis,” said Dr. Oliver Zolman, a longevity doctor who works with Johnson.
Dr. Vadim Gladyshev, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said there needs to be “properly designed experiments” to test rapamycin’s effectiveness in slowing human aging.
“Then we could make scientific conclusions,” Gladyshev says in the documentary. “What Bryan’s doing, it’s not a scientific approach.”
In explaining why he ditched rapamycin, Johnson pointed to a recent study that “showed rapamycin increased biological aging according to two [measures], while ineffective according to the others.”
There are other rapamycin studies in the pipeline. One from the University of Washington is assessing if the drug can rejuvenate oral health in older adults.
And physicians at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia are investigating if low-dose rapamycin can delay ovarian aging in women. The study is scheduled to conclude by the end of October. Results are expected shortly thereafter, an NY-P rep told The Post.
Rapamycin aside, Johnson has raised eyebrows for a regimen that includes eating dinner at 11 a.m., exposing himself to penis shockwave therapy and undergoing a multigenerational plasma exchange with his teenage son and elderly father.
When he replaced his plasma with albumin protein in the fall, Johnson bragged that the medical specialist who operated the plasma exchange machine marveled that his plasma was “the cleanest he’s ever seen. By far.”
“He couldn’t get over it,” Johnson said of the operator. “When we finished, he couldn’t bring himself to throw it away. He was imagining all the good that it could do in the world.”
