In this week’s newsletter

✅ Introducing LEVITY Knowledge - our new deep-dive, educational section.
✅ The quest for something better than rapamycin.
✅ Inside Rapamycin Longevity Lab’s next move after securing crucial funding.
✅ “Bryan has interpreted the study wrong” - Krister Kauppi responds to the rapamycin controversy.

🤙🏼 Want to connect? Add me on LinkedIn. 🙏🏼 Not subscribed to the LEVITY podcast on Youtube yet? Do it here. 🎧 More of a listener? The LEVITY podcast is also available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other places.

Some housekeeping before we begin:

🦉 LEVITY now has a new section called Knowledge - a place for timeless, educational deep dives into the biology of aging and longevity. These pieces don’t go out via email but live on the web, and you can explore them anytime. They’re designed to explain the ideas, people, and mechanisms that shape this field - the kind of stuff that’s worth coming back to. The first post is up now: it’s about antagonistic pleiotropy.

🤫 Next week you can look forward to a new edition of Longevity Builders. I’m very excited about this one - it’s about a company that’s quietly building a new kind of drug platform, one that could open up targets the rest of the world has written off. You want a hint? Think closeness. But on a molecular level.

Longevity Builders is a LEVITY Premium feature, but this upcoming piece will be unlocked and free to read for a limited time. Premium members will be able to read it before anyone else though.

And while you’re waiting - remember Fauna Bio? If you missed the profile I did on them recently, it’s worth checking out.

🐣 No regular sections in the newsletter this week - it's been a busy time wrapping things up before the Easter break, and I’ve been swamped with other work.

But that just means more room to focus on a concise update on mTOR inhibitors - always a hot topic in the longevity community. You'll find it below.

Wishing you a Happy Easter, and see you next week!

Bryan Johnson gave up on rapamycin. Krister Kauppi’s just getting started

In the world of longevity science, the mTOR inhibitor rapamycin has become something of a gold standard - one of the few compounds consistently shown to extend lifespan in multiple species. Originally discovered in the soil of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) and first developed as an immunosuppressant, rapamycin works by inhibiting a protein complex called mTOR (mechanistic Target of Rapamycin), which plays a central role in regulating cell growth and metabolism. By dialing down mTOR activity, researchers believe we can slow down many of the processes associated with aging.

Yet even among its advocates, there’s a growing consensus that rapamycin alone won’t be enough.

To address this gap, Krister Kauppi*, founder of the Rapamycin Longevity Lab, has partnered with Ora Biomedical (co-founded by Matt Kaeberlein) to launch a large-scale screening project that might reshape our understanding of mTOR inhibition.

* Longtime subscribers of LEVITY might remember Krister from earlier features - like this one.

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