‘HUGE SIDE EFFECTS’: Tech millionaire Brian Johnson drops ‘longevity drug’ from his mission to cheat death

Brian Johnson, “the man who wants to live forever,” discovered a flaw in his meticulous method of cheating death. The 47-year-old tech millionaire, who is on a relentless mission to defy aging, has stopped taking a life-extending drug that may have done more harm than good.

Johnson recently revealed that he stopped taking rapamycin, and that it may have been doing more harm than good.

The tech millionaire used to consume 13 milligrams of the immunosuppressant rapamycin every two weeks, a drug taken by organ transplant patients to help prevent organ rejection.

In a new Netflix documentary about him called Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, Johnson describes his routine as “the most aggressive rapamycin protocol of anyone in the industry.”

Johnson said he tried rapamycin for about five years, until late September. He admitted in November that he had dropped the anti-cancer drug from his strict diet.

“Despite the enormous potential of preclinical trials, my team and I have come to the conclusion that the benefits of lifelong doses of rapamycin do not justify the huge side effects,” he added.

Johnson said he experienced occasional skin and soft tissue infections, abnormal levels of fats in his blood, high blood sugar, and an elevated resting heart rate.

“With no other underlying causes identified, we suspected rapamycin, and since dose adjustments had no effect, we decided to discontinue it completely,” Johnson explained.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not approved rapamycin as an anti-aging treatment, but doctors prescribe it off-label because it has been shown to extend the healthy lifespan of mice.

The former Silicon Valley executive said preclinical and clinical research suggests that prolonged use of rapamycin can disrupt fat metabolism and induce insulin and glucose intolerance.

“Longevity research on these experimental compounds is constantly evolving, necessitating constant, close monitoring of my research and biomarkers, which my team and I are constantly doing,” he added.

Johnson spends $2 million a year on medical diagnostics and treatments combined with a carefully designed regimen of eating, sleeping and exercise to see if he can slow, and perhaps even reverse, the aging process.

A few months ago, the tech millionaire revealed that he had undergone a complete plasma exchange, where his body fluids were replaced with pure albumin, a protein found in a person’s blood plasma. He noted that the process was different from what happened when he exchanged blood with his teenage son.