Can a Drug Extend Your Fertility by Five Years?

Infertility due to aging is a tough problem to solve. Ovaries start with a specific reserve of eggs. As you get older, this reserve diminishes until, eventually, it is completely gone. What treatments exist can be expensive and difficult and, in the case of egg freezing, require years of planning.

Does this really have to be the case? Rapamycin, a bacterial compound prescribed to organ-transplant patients, is being tested in various contexts as an antiaging treatment. It may be able to extend fertility—and stave off menopause to boot. Numerous outlets are reporting that a weekly dose of the drug could specifically provide a whopping five extra years of fertility, a very promising development if true.

Unfortunately, the evidence we have right now simply isn’t convincing. It’s possible that taking rapamycin could help with fertility, but we have no real idea if it does.

Rapamycin has been a mainstay of the antiaging crowd for over a decade. Early studies in the late 2000s showed that it could potentially keep lab mice alive for quite a bit longer with few noticeable downsides, a discovery that has led to an expanded range of research on rodents. In mice, rapamycin has proved to reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease, enhance memory, and even improve the immune system. There’s some evidence that, when combined with exercise therapy, rapamycin can mitigate age-related loss of muscle in mice. That’s quite alluring—muscle loss causes so many of the issues we see in older humans.

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