Topical Rapamycin: How It Works

Foreign. Talk to you about topical rapamycin. Topical meaning on the skin. So rapamycin we've talked about before, it's a drug that is FDA approved to treat a certain, basically an immunosuppressant for people that have organ transplant, lower rejection. It's being studied as an anti aging drug, drug that potentially can make animals. Certainly animals have been studied, makes them live longer in the studies that have been performed. And now it's being studied in humans to see if rapamycin can extend lifespan and health sp man. It's commonly being used in probably the most cited potential longevity drug, first one that we've had. There's been some other drugs that have potentials as longevity drugs and it's not really clear how they're panning out. They haven't shortened life, but they haven't meaningfully extended life. But rapamycin is being studied now. Rapamycin is typically a pill form. It's FDA approved and is used for certain conditions. And there's also a topical forming, a cream form that's used in a fairly high concentration for children that have something called neurofiber, neurofibromas or tubers, tuberous sclerosis. These are like elephant man disease where they get these tumors on their skin and it suppresses the growth of tumors and is a higher strength than we're using for anti aging purposes. So a study at Drexel University Philadelphia did a study on a split body study. One hand was treated, one hand wasn't treated. Where they used a very thin, very, very weak strength of rapamycin cream put on the hands every one to two days for several weeks. And they looked at signs of aging on the skin on the treated hand versus the untreated hand. So this is a perfect study where they get, they get split. And that wasn't placebo control. So we can argue that, but this is a pilot study. What they found was that the skin looked younger in the treated side. It looked younger, had less wrinkles, looked to have less pore size and less damage to the, to the elastin. And when they did biopsies would actually take biopsy, biopsy the skin. They found more collagen, a more organized basement membrane. That's a portion of your, your skin that is full of stem cells that grow, constantly grows new cells. Your skin from the stem cell to falling off is about a 30 day cycle for us and area called the basement membrane that's right above the, the dermis at the base of the epidermis that gives off Continuously grows new cells and our, our skin sheds over time and that's about a 30 day cycle. On the treated side, they saw a more organized basement membrane. That sounds good. They saw better elastosis or better retractability. They saw thicker dermis, which is good. And they saw less senescent cells. This is interesting, or at least evidence of less senescent cells. So let's talk briefly about that. Our body ages and we go through something called senescence in our cells. Now this is a subject that's very hot right now for our understanding of slowing down aging. How can we slow down cellular senescence? So your cells always replace themselves over and over again. Some very fast, like in your skin, your gastrointestinal tract, your blood cells, some much slower like your fat cells, your muscle cells, your organs, and some very slow like your neurons and some cel, like in your lens of your eye. So as these cells turn over, errors are made in the genetic copying. And when that happens, the cell becomes senescent and it stops growing. And that's, and there's probably many reasons why this occurs, but it stops growing, it stops dividing and it stops replicating. It also signals cells in an immediate area to stop replicating and stop, stop dividing. And this leads to organ dysfunction and then eventually organ failure. A classic example would be arthritis. You know, when you're 30 years old, you have some injuries and your cartilage just keeps care of itself. And as we get older, we get these accumulated injuries and we start getting arthritis. These, if you look at those cells, these chondrocytes, the cartilage cells, they're, they're senescent, they're just not really doing anything. There's some people call them zombie cells. We treat them by injecting stem cells or platelet rich plasma to try and do something to wake, wake these up. So that's senescence. Well, in the skin of this treated hand with sirolamus cream, which is rapamycin cream, we call it sirolimus. They're the same drug. They had evidence that there's less cellular senescence. So that's very positive. So we're seeing clinically, we' since 2021 in the practice, four years or three years, and we're seeing pore size shrink, we're seeing fine lines improve, we're seeing color and texture improve and we're seeing more trend towards youthful age. The satisfaction we have is met with safety. So the safety data, this drug is used in children at a much higher, about 20 times higher dose for these tumor conditions. So the same drug, rapamycin or sirolimus, is used as a cream form. 20 times stronger than we're using for cosmetic every in children. We know it's safe in them. And this is a, you know, weaker strength because you don't need that much when you're not treating a tumor. It's very safe on the skin. It's not absorbed systemically. So clinically, again, we've been using this for a few years and we're seeing skin look better, looks younger. And clinical evidence shows that there's less old cells in your skin. It gets the skin younger, more organized. Basement membrane, decreased pore size, which is. We don't see many drugs work great for that. Decreased skin aging, better color, better texture, a little thicker skin, which is beneficial. We want thicker skin. And it's what's nice about too, is fairly inexpensive. So logically, this drug is used every other day. It's got a very long, what's called a half life. So we, we have a. Have it shipped to your house. It's a little clicker. You take two pumps every other day. One bottle lasts about 90 days. And actually you can probably stop it after 90 days and resume it a couple months later. You don't seem to need to use this forever because once it gets your skin going backward in age, it seems that you seem to kind of stay there. So I usually tell people, you know, do cycles a year and this will maintain more skin youth. Now, it doesn't do things like deep wrinkles and do things like Botox does or do things that filler does. You still have to use vitamin C and your skin and sunblock. This is all beneficial for skin aging. It's one of the additional things we can do. So it's Rapamycin is the drug. It's called sirolimus in this setting, even though it's the same drugs, we use it in a cream form. It's a prescription. You have to get it ordered. We use a pharmacy that gets it to you, usually within a week or so, relatively inexpensive. Get it shipped to your house. It's two clicks every other day. And we see this as part of a good skincare regimen. That this takes it one step further than anything else you can get. This is again, a prescription strength medication that appears to reduce aging in the skin, making the skin healthier and more youthful. So thank you very much.