Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains that rapamycin works as a calorie-restriction mimetic, not a direct repair therapy, and has limited effects on longer-lived species. Combining multiple modest lifespan-extending interventions produced greater longevity benefits than any single treatment alone.
So rapamycin is not a damage repair approach. It's a calorie restriction mimetic, basically. It tricks the body into thinking it's not getting enough food when it is. And we know the thing is, the thing about calorie restriction, and therefore by extension also mimetics of calorie restriction, is that they're really effective in short-lived animals, but they really don't work worth a damn in longer-lived species. And this has been known for a very long time. So it's definitely not the way to go if we really want, not on its own anyway, if we want to make progress. But it's a useful, as I say, positive control for laboratory work. So all of these things had been shown to extend lifespan individually a little bit. And we thought, well, okay, what we want is to see whether we can get an additive effect, whether if we put them all together, we can get more benefit. And the great news is that that is what happened.
