October 6th, 2024

The milestone we have hit this time is that all 20 groups (10 male and 10 female) have now reached their last "cull point", i.e. the point where only eight mice of the original 50 are alive and we sacrifice two of them to store various tissues, as well as doing a lot of the non-invasive measurements on the others. This also means that the survival curves as you see them here are set in stone, because the denominators of the groups are now excluding all the sacrificed animals (so they are all 38 except for a few adjustments that happened for operational reasons during the first month of the study).

As for conclusions, we can't really say anything more than we could say in August. The treatment group getting all four interventions is still doing the best in both sexes, but not by much. Females are showing fairly straightforward additivity, with rapamycin dominating the effect, while males are showing a more complex pattern in which rapa on its own does very little but potentiates the treatments, which if anything are actually harmful in the absence of rapa.

But the big consequence of reaching the final cull point on all 20 groups is that we can now launch into the rigorous analysis of the non-invasive data we have been gathering all this time, which (other than body weight) is mostly gathered at those same points. We have recently recruited two outstanding data scientists as volunteers, so I'm hoping we will have quite a bit to report soon.