Rapamycin

technology

A macrolide isolated from a Streptomyces species found in soil on Rapa Nui, used clinically as an immunosuppressant in transplantation, and the most robust pharmacological lifespan extender known in mammals. It inhibits mTOR, the nutrient-sensing kinase complex whose deregulation is one of the hallmarks of ageing, which places it mechanistically adjacent to caloric restriction. The National Institute on Aging's Interventions Testing Program reported in 2009 that rapamycin extended median lifespan in genetically heterogeneous mice even when started at twenty months of age — the equivalent of a human in their sixties — with the effect somewhat larger in females than males. The result has been replicated across doses and strains. Its human position is unresolved: the immunosuppressive dose used in transplantation is not obviously the dose that would be relevant, no adequately powered human trial of ageing endpoints has been run, and off-label use has run well ahead of the evidence.

A technology is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.