For the past decade, researchers have been actively investigating the effects of rapamycin on laboratory animals.
Studies have shown that treatment with rapamycin increases the lifespan of yeast, nematodes, fruit flies and mice.
And in addition to increasing lifespan, rapamycin therapy has also been shown to improve a variety of age-associated conditions in mice, such as reducing cancer incidence, improving brain function, reversing heart and immune system declines, restoring stem cell function and improving muscle function in older animals.
Interestingly, the benefits of rapamycin are similar whether treatment is instituted in early or mid-life, with life expectancy increases between 20 and 60% in mice models.
With these exciting results in lab animals, more recent research has focused on effects of rapamycin treatment in dog and cat populations. A comprehensive long-term study, the Test of Rapamycin In Aging Dogs (TRIAD), is tracking a large number of dogs over their lifetime to determine the effects of long-term rapamycin administration on longevity as well as health outcomes.
An initial safety study published in 2017, from which Petspan derived our current dosing and administration protocol, demonstrated no significant side effects of treated animals relative to those in the placebo group.
In addition to confirming the medication is well tolerated, these researchers found that treated dogs showed improvement in their heart function within the 10 week trial. Owners whose dogs received the medication also showed increased activity and energy.
A later study in 2023 found the same effect - rapamycin-treated dogs were significantly more likely to show positive changes in behavior or indicators of good health. In other words, they just seemed to feel better!
Cat studies have focused to this point on primarily condition-related responses to rapamycin rather than longevity in particular.
In 2023, a study published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (JAVMA) found that rapamycin treatment significantly slowed the progression of a heart condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, an inherited and sometimes fatal heart disease with few effective treatments.
Cats in these studies had a low incidence of side effects, mirroring the outcomes of the safety studies in dogs.
Studies of rapamycin are ongoing for pets. In addition to the long-term TRIAD study, researchers are studying the effects of rapamycin in dogs on certain types of cancer, a heart condition called dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), and dementia (also called canine cognitive dysfunction).
For cats, researchers are investigating how rapamycin might improve painful stomatitis (gum inflammation) conditions and if it can slow progression of chronic kidney disease - a degenerative disease affecting 30-40% of cats over 10 years and 81% of cats over 15 years for which there is currently no treatment.
It is an exciting time for longevity science in veterinary medicine, and we will continue to update our protocols and share with you the most recent research results as they become available.
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