Browse existing research summaries on rapamycin and longevity science.
Reports that rapamycin-induced autophagy and lifespan extension depend on a rise in endogenous spermidine, shown across yeast, worms, flies and mice — a mechanism-level result, not a human outcome.
A narrative review of how mTOR overactivation is proposed to link diet, salt intake and the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system to insulin resistance and hypertension, and which drugs block that pathway.
Reviews how autophagy behaves in the failing heart across ischaemic, pressure-overload, diabetic and drug-induced models, and whether pharmacologic modulators of autophagy such as rapamycin and metformin protect or harm it.
Reviews how the two mTOR complexes, mTORC1 and mTORC2, are activated and how they control glucose, amino acid, lipid and mitochondrial metabolism in health, disease and ageing.
Argues that rapamycin, like fasting and very low-calorie diets, can raise blood glucose in a reversible form that is not the same as type 2 diabetes, and that the drug mostly prevents diabetic complications in animal studies.
A review of mTOR pathway structure and regulation and of how its dysregulation contributes to cancer, neurological, metabolic and cardiovascular disease, with the mTOR inhibitors approved or in trials for each.
A rat and cell study reports that three weeks of chronic sirolimus treatment lowered body weight and fat mass while causing hyperglycaemia, glucose intolerance and skeletal-muscle insulin resistance.
In 3xTg-AD mice, lifelong rapamycin started at two months of age reduced plaques, tangles and memory deficits, while the same drug started at 15 months changed neither the pathology nor the behaviour.
A mouse study showing that removing the mTOR gene from adult heart muscle causes fatal heart failure, largely through build-up of the protein 4E-BP1.
Cell and mouse-cell experiments report that the longevity-linked deacetylase SIRT1 restrains mTOR signalling, apparently by acting through the TSC1/TSC2 brake on mTORC1.
Cell experiments show that rapamycin pushes human vascular smooth muscle cells toward a mature, contractile state by relieving S6K1-dependent inhibition of IRS-1, an effect that depends on IGF-I and on selective activation of the Akt2 isoform.
A Spanish Society of Nephrology consensus review of how the mTOR inhibitor sirolimus is managed in transplant practice, covering its effects on lipids, blood counts, kidney function, lungs and wound healing, with recommendations for each.
Analyses sirolimus blood levels in kidney transplant recipients and shows how other immunosuppressive drugs taken alongside it change the level reached for a given dose.
