This MTOR Study REVEALS How Rapamycin Affects Chronic Illnesses

When you do a study, there's a lot of— once you get done and you write it up and you turn it in, there's a lot of peer review that goes on and your data has to be verified and all of that. So that's going on with some other studies that are happening right now. But for this particular discussion, I wanted to bring up that there is a study going on right now, and that's— Hey, I'm Dr. A. Welcome to the YouTube channel. I have been researching and teaching in the integrative and naturopathic community for 30-plus years now, and I've been seeing patients for a very long time, and I use a YouTube channel to answer questions. Today, what I want to talk about is a particular study that is being done currently that may help us to answer some of the lingering questions we have about the use of mTOR inhibitors like rapamycin in people who don't need them for the usual on-brand indicated purpose, which is normally organ rejection treatment. So you get a new organ, we give you something like rapamycin to help calm your immune system down so you don't reject the So I want to talk specifically about this trial and what kind of implications the trial may have. Now, this trial's name is Low-Dose Rapamycin in ME/CFS, Long COVID, and Other Infection-Associated Chronic Conditions. So ME/CFS is commonly known as chronic fatigue syndrome. There's some other designations, but that's what you're looking at there. And if you go to clinicaltrials.gov, the ID number for this is NCT-06257. That's the trial identifier where they tell you what they're doing. It doesn't have like the data because they're still doing the trial right now. But the reason I want to bring this up is number one, it's happening right now. Number two, it sort of illustrates something we talk a lot about on this channel, which is chronic illness and infection-associated chronic illness. So you notice there you have chronic fatigue, you have long COVID, and then other infection-associated chronic illnesses. And what we generally talk about here is While most of the chronic illnesses that you see are not 100% caused by infections, they can be associated in a number of ways. And a lot of times in something like chronic fatigue or long COVID, you might see where it starts with an infection and then you never really felt right after that. And there's lots of other things. So we're not blaming the infections for everything, but we want to be clear that the immune system getting thrown off by something like, you know, inciting a chronic fatiguing Long COVID, et cetera, that can be something that sets the immune system up to not function correctly afterwards. But the reason I want to bring this up here in our, you know, trail of different videos on mTOR and rapamycin and stuff is in the other videos I've mentioned how we have some limitations with our knowledge around the drugs that inhibit or slow down mTOR, like rapamycin known as sirolimus or its cousin everolimus, for example. And one of the things that we don't know about Because our research that we have, a lot of the research on is on organ rejection, and that's one dosing strategy. And then for non-organ rejection, like chronic fatiguing illnesses, infection-related illness, longevity, potentially maybe cancer, maybe other stuff, we're not using those anti-rejection doses. We're using lower doses spread out over time. And so what we don't know so much, there's some research, but we don't know so much is can these punctuated doses of a lower dose of rapamycin or something similar given, say, once a week as opposed to daily, can that affect the cell mechanics that would make the person maybe recover from one of these chronic fatiguing illnesses and help them along the way? Could we use this approach of mTOR manipulation but in a more modulated way? So this is actually looking— it's a prospective study looking at humans, human patient study, and they're going to look at The clinical response, meaning how do your signs and symptoms, how do you feel as you go through here? But they're also going to look biochemically or mechanistically at the function and manipulation of autophagy in these patients. So if we recall, and we did this on a couple of the other rapamycin videos, that when we have mTOR being active, it's pro-cell growth. Autophagy essentially is about the cleanup of cells that don't need to be around anymore. It's about Taking the trash out, removing cells, et cetera. So growth phase and autophagy sometimes have to balance each other out, meaning if I have a lot of mTOR activity, I'm going to inhibit autophagy. And then when autophagy is really going, mTOR is going to slow down. So if I then take and use one of these atypical low-dose strategies with rapamycin, sirolimus, et cetera, and then I give it in this study once a week, will that alter the growth autophagy balance. So that's what they're going to look at from a biochemical or a pathway point of view. Quick interruption from the regular video. If you are a healthcare practitioner and you have an interest in this topic, we're going to put a link in the description below to my CE website and specifically the webinar that is about this topic. We'll see you over there. Thanks. So when you're doing research, usually you, you have set up, when you set up your trial, you set up questions that you want to try and answer with the data that you're collecting. So again, remember the data's coming from patients who have already been diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, long COVID, infection-related illnesses. And so the first question is, does rapamycin at this lower punctuated dose reduce the symptom burden over time? Does it improve quality of life? So if you're sick, lowering your symptom burden usually improves your quality of life, but symptom burden and quality of life are very important factors to think of if you're doing an intervention with people, which this is. This is. This is a medical intervention. Then the other question is, does rapamycin change the mTOR-driven autophagy deficits observed in some of these patients that we're looking at? So what is an mTOR-derived autophagy deficit? Basically what that means is that, as I said, when mTOR is more active, autophagy cell cleanup and maintenance is less active. So if I give you once a week an mTOR inhibiting drug like sirolimus or rapamycin, does that slow the mTOR down and raise up the autophagy? So it's not a deficit. We want a balance. You don't want all one and not the other or vice versa. Now we've been asked if things like in chronic illness care, potentially cancer care, longevity medicine, all this stuff, if those doses are different from what's normally studied as an immune inhibitor, like organ rejection medicine, what is the difference between the dosing strategy? So in the organ rejection medicine rubric of dosing something like sirolimus or rapamycin, usually you have a loading dose. And the purpose of a loading dose is to get enough in you so that the mechanics, the kinetics of the drug going through your system load up on the front end. And as you might know, you have peaks and troughs when you take medicine. We want to get up to something that where the peaks and troughs are in the range that we want them quickly. So the loading dose can be 6 to 15 milligrams. And sometimes higher, sometimes lower, but that's kind of typical for somebody who just got a new organ, you know, new set of lungs, new kidney, something like that. And then long-term after your loading dose, you go to, based on body size and response, between 2 and 5 milligrams every day. So you're getting a bigger dose on day 1, and then you're going every day with 2 to 5 milligrams. And that's what you're taking along with other medications so you don't reject your new organ that you just got. So what's the point of that? It's frequent, it's fairly high dose, And it's there to suppress part of your immune system. Now again, we don't want to suppress your whole immune system because that would not be good for many, many other reasons. But if you have a new set of lungs or new kidney, new liver or something, and we don't suppress your immune system a little bit, your body's going to reject those new organs. So that's for organ rejection, high dose loading dose, and then 2 to 5 milligrams every day of the week. In the world of non-organ rejection, it is usually dosed, and this is not always true, but right now it is usually dosed every 7 days, so once a week. And the dose is in the similar range to the daily dose, but it's not analogous because we're not taking it every day. So what you're trying to do is get a punctuated amount of mTOR inhibition and then kind of recovery phase on the days following. And so the doses are very wide, but they go between 3 and 10 milligrams one day a week. So as opposed to 2 to 5 milligrams 7 days a week, in others it's 3 to 10 milligrams, and that is kind of what people doing out there. There's some studies that have been done. There's some that are not fully published yet, and they're all in those ranges. Now, what is this particular study doing? So the one on chronic fatigue syndrome and long COVID, it's 6 milligrams once a week. And the reason that they chose that, if you think of 3 to 10 milligrams, it's kind of in the middle. We believe at somewhere around 5 or 6 milligrams for the average-sized adult, we're going to have some amount of modulation of mTOR over time. So this study, and this study will probably— I'm recording this right now in January 2025— this study will probably not report results out for a couple of years, I'm going to think. Might be a little bit sooner, but it's probably going to be a couple years before we know how this turns out. In the meantime, there's other studies being done. As I said, there's some larger trials that are looking at, you know, dosing and other parameters that are in process. When you do a study, there's a lot of— once you get done and you write it up and you turn it in, there's a lot of peer review that goes on, and your data to be verified and all of that. So, that's going on with some other studies that are happening right now. But, for this particular discussion, I wanted to bring up that there is a study going on right now, and that's the clinicaltrial.gov identifier NCT06257420. And, that is on low-dose rapamycin in chronic fatigue, long COVID, and other infection-related illnesses. They're giving 6 milligrams of rapamycin, sirolimus, Yes. One day a week. So every 7 days. And then they're going to measure quality of life, symptom burden, and then also some biochemical markers that look at the balance between the pro effects of mTOR complex and the anti-growth effects and cleanup effects of autophagy and see if they can't get them back in balance. Now, I do want to say, as other content we've done, there is this drug approach using the mTOR inhibiting drugs. And then there's also a lot of things from the plant world that modulate mTOR, et cetera. Those are going to be on other videos. That we do. All right, well, I hope this answers the question about that particular study with the rapamycin intermittent dosing, the dose ranges, and how that dose range differs from your organ rejection dosing, what we're looking for in the study. And we'll see what we see when the data comes out. Thanks again for listening. Please do like, share, subscribe, do notifications so you know when we're doing stuff. I'm Dr. A. I love to answer your questions, and that's what I use this channel for. I want to thank everybody who's been with us since the beginning and all the people that have helped us grow the channel. We really are very very happy and we're grateful for all of you. I'll see you all on the next video. 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