He's been researching the subject for years and is measured and balanced about the value of using it (he is a proponent).
I'm planning on starting soon because the clock is ticking and I can't wait a couple more decades for more research to come out.
as described in the conclusion: "This may be explained by the inability of rapamycin to completely block mTORC1-mediated signaling events, the presence of several feedback loops, and the upregulation of compensatory pathways that promote cell survival and growth."
targeting mTOR is like saying "let's write a bug that takes down Linux"... the community isn't going to let that happen
It seems to be not fruitless in all the organisms that it has worked on so far.
https://radiolab.org/podcast/dirty-drug-and-ice-cream-tub
I have no other words.
It's immunosuppressant. Suppressing immune system for completely health person decreases inflammation that comes with aging. Suppressing immune system makes person more vulnerable for infections (flu, sepsis, herpes, ...), and wounds heal slower. Also cancers.
Trying to push further out seems to run into a lot of trade-offs. It seems from what I've read that there are mechanisms that cause aging but also are defenses against cancer, like telomere shortening which imposes a cellular division limit. The immune system causes inflammation which causes aging but turn that off and stuff eats you. And so on...
Not saying it's not possible, just that it's going to require more than tweaking a few knobs. I highly doubt there will ever be a "longevity pill" that radically extends life span, though obviously there are medications that can have some positive effect especially on health span. Anything radical like taking the average well past 100-120 years is probably going to require genetic engineering or radical (and invasive) regenerative medicine.
1. Immune system kills cancers. T cells attack and try to destroy the cancerous cells and Rapamycin weakens T cell reactions.
2. Rapamycin inhibits the growth of several cancer cell lines.
But it is an interesting drug:
>> The protein, now called mTOR, was originally named FRAP by Stuart L. Schreiber and RAFT1 by David M. Sabatini;[6][7] FRAP1 was used as its official gene symbol in humans. Because of these different names, mTOR, which had been first used by Robert T. Abraham,[6] was increasingly adopted by the community of scientists working on the mTOR pathway to refer to the protein and in homage to the original discovery of the TOR protein in yeast that was named TOR, the Target of Rapamycin, by Joe Heitman, Rao Movva, and Mike Hall
He's had biologists, virologists, bio-hackers, engineers, doctors, regenerative farmers, psychologists, wild life experts, physicists, etc.
He also blocked Brad Stanfield (who, I kind of look up to for a lot of health research)
Hard to take him seriously after all this.