June 29th, 2024

This update marks a milestone, namely that one treatment group of each sex has now entirely expired. For males it's the group getting only telomerase, and for females it's the group getting everything except rapamycin. In females, moreover, the group getting only rapamycin is doing as well as the group getting everything - both of them are still above 25% survival.

I think it's now fair to conclude that the impact of rapamycin in the female groups has overshadowed everything else - which is disappointingly boring, but which we will of course be analysing in much greater depth as we collate more of the firehose of data on mouse health that we've been collecting.

In males, however, the situation is altogether more interesting, and since males of this strain are well known to live longer in the first place (and considerably more lifespan studies have been done on males than on females anyway), that's for sure the sex I would choose to give interesting results.

Here, the rapa-only group is also doing better than any of the other single-treatment groups, but it's being beaten not only by the all-four group but also by three of the three-treatment groups. Indeed, the all-but-rapa group, which was doing the worst of all a few months ago, has now overtaken all the other groups that aren't getting rapa. So at this point it can reasonably, albeit still tentatively, be said that the three bona fide damage-repair interventions are indeed conferring meaningful benefit over and above rapa in males, even if not in females.

Nonetheless, the results for both sexes strongly argue for the decision we've provisionally made regarding RMR2, which is to give everyone rapa so as to provide the best possible baseline.

We've also, finally, reached the point where all groups have passed the 50% mortality point and we can thus do final analysis on median lifespans. But honestly I'm not sure there's much point, because everyone is (rightly) much more interested in maximum lifespans, which we're getting close to being able to analyse too.

It's certainly weird that the no-telomerase group and the no rapa group fell below 50% in males at so early an age, but since they both completely caught up I have difficulty getting intrigued. And all other groups are maintaining pretty much the same rank order that they had at 50% survival (and indeed at 75% survival), so we may as well wait until the curves are complete (or almost so, anyway) before analysing them further.