Rapamycin: What You Should Know

Hi, I'm Dr. Charles Molker. I want to talk to you about rapamycin cream, or sirolimus cream, which is named for rapamycin. So, rapamycin is a drug that was discovered about four or five decades ago, and it was used to treat rejection of organ transplant and later used to treat certain conditions of the skin where people, particularly young children, grow these abnormal tumors. And what rapamycin has been shown to do is not only inhibit tumor growth or inhibit organ transplant, it also seems to make animals and animals younger, even mammals. And it's been studied in humans, being studying humans currently to see what happens when we take rapamycin, either orally or topically in terms of our actual age. Does it slow it down or reverse it? And it has reversed ages of animals and flies and different creatures. And it's being studied right now in human beings in various studies. One of the things I'm really intrigued about is rapamycin's effect in the skin, because we know the skin safety of the drug. Rapamycin, or sirolimus cream, because it's been used for certain conditions where tumors keep growing, actually suppresses the growth of tumors. And the way it works on the skin for aging is it seems to suppress conversion of young cells into old cells, and that's called senescence. So senescence is a hallmark of aging, where your cells, as they age, they become damaged and they turn into senescent cells, which are kind of like, toxic. And that is a hallmark of aging, which makes, in case your skin, your skin get wrinkly or saggy. And if we could either kill off senescent cells, which is called senolytic drugs, or you can stop conversion into senescent cells this aging. So a study was done, healthy volunteers that had they did that in their hands, so you can have a control hand when they use a fake cream and the sirolimus cream or rapamycin cream, and use a strength 100 times weaker than the strength used to treat tumors. So it's very low dose, and it's known to be safe at these higher doses. What they found was that the skin, after several months, was younger in appearance, but not only in appearance. They had more. What's called type 7 collagen, which is a collagen that bonds the epidermis, the outer layer skin, to the dermis, the inner layer skin, in a layer called a basement membrane, a layer of your skin that houses all your stem cells. And what they found was that there was less synthetic, there's less senescent cells in the treated hand versus the untreated hand, they kept getting older. The skin looked thicker because there was more collagen. The skin looked younger, it had better texture. We've seen this clinically in patients. When they put it on their face, the skin looks younger. And it actually seems to reverse the age of the skin, although we don't quite know if we can actually say that for sure yet. But that appears to be happening. It's actually reversing instead of just protecting the skin. Right now the seromis cream or rapamycin cream is compounded by a pharmacist because the stronger the prescription strength, regular prescription is really stronger than you need. This is a bottle right here that I got from a tailor made pharmacy. And you take the top off and you turn a click. You turn a, turn it and every time it clicks, it pushes out a quarter of an ML. And the dose for the face would typically be two to four clicks or a half to one ML, applied daily or every other day. Little under 100 bucks for a bottle and there's 30 ML. So if you did one click or four clicks a day would be $95. And I think that might be a good starting dose to sort of turn off what's called zero conversion or conversion to older cells and then let them do it a little less often, like maybe every other day, it might be every other month. I don't think you need to do this significant dose long term. So that's, that's something that is available. It has been studied in the skin. There's further studies looking at oral rapamycin to slow down or reverse aging. We don't really know the answers to that yet. But this is something that is available now in addition to your regular skin care. So I wouldn't say do this instead of sunblock or instead of topical vitamin C or instead topical retinol, which is a vitamin A. I'd use this as an adjuvant for somebody who's aged and they want to reverse it. Another thing that I think that's important to point out, it probably does nothing for young, healthy skin because young healthy skin does not have much senescent cells. So once we've gone past the point of resilience, and resilience is where we can spring back naturally on our own. Once we start getting wrinkles and start getting loss of elasticity or skin start to getting sun damage, then we've lost resilience. And that's when this might be more appropriate. But it is not preventative in the way that vitamin C or retinol or sunblock or glycolics are. So this is for somebody that's got skin damage, that has already has damage. You're trying to reverse things. So thank you very much.