Anti-aging guru Bryan Johnson breaks down the controversial anti-infection remedy

Anti-aging advocate Bryan Johnson, who takes 54 pills a morning, recently discovered a wrinkle in his meticulous approach to avoiding death.

Every two weeks, the 47-year-old tech millionaire consumes 13 milligrams of the immunosuppressant rapamycin, which transplant patients take to help prevent organ rejection.

The US Food and Drug Administration has not approved rapamycin for antiaging therapy, but doctors have prescribed it off-label because it has been shown to extend the healthy lifespan of mice.

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

But not long after filming the doctor, he confessed that he had stopped taking rapamycin – and that it may have done more harm than good.

“I accept this because there are potentially some longevity benefits,” Johnson says in the film.

“It’s the kind of thing in the longevity community that people are excited about,” he continued. “Outside the longevity community, it’s still kind of crazy, like [if you say]’Yes, I take an immune suppressant.’ [People react]’Exactly, that’s weird and why would you ever do that?'”

Johnson said he experimented with rapamycin for nearly five years, until the end of September. He admitted in November that he dropped the cancer drug from his rigorous regimen.

“I tested various rapamycin protocols including weekly (5, 6, and 10 mg), biweekly (13 mg), and alternate weekly (6/13 mg) dosing schedules to optimize renewal and limit side effects ,” Johnson said at X.

“Despite the tremendous potential from preclinical trials, my team and I concluded that the benefits of lifelong dosing of rapamycin do not justify the major side effects,” he added.

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

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

Medical experts featured in the Netflix doc shared concerns about people taking the molecule — originally isolated in soil collected from Easter Island in the 1960s — for longevity.

Because rapamycin suppresses the immune system, “side effects can include very dangerous bacterial infections, things like pneumonia, cellulitis or pharyngitis,” said Dr. Oliver Zolman, a longevity doctor who works with Johnson.

Dr. Vadim Gladyshev, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said there must be “properly designed experiments” to test rapamycin’s effectiveness in slowing human aging.

“Then we can make scientific conclusions,” Gladyshev says in the documentary. “What Bryan is doing is not a scientific approach.”

In explaining why he gave up rapamycin, Johnson pointed to a recent study that “showed that rapamycin increases biological aging according to two [measures]while ineffective according to others.”

There are other rapamycin studies in the pipeline. One from the University of Washington is evaluating whether the drug can restore oral health in older adults.

And doctors at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia are investigating whether low-dose rapamycin can delay ovarian aging in women. The study is scheduled to be completed at the end of October. Results are expected shortly thereafter, a NY-P representative told The Post.

Rapamycin aside, Johnson has raised eyebrows for a regimen that includes eating dinner at 11 a.m., exposing himself to penile shock wave therapy and undergoing a multigenerational plasma exchange with his teenage son and elderly father.

When he replaced his plasma with the albumin protein in the fall, Johnson boasted that the medical specialist operating the plasma exchange machine marveled that his plasma was “the cleanest he’d ever seen. Until now.”

“He can’t get over it,” Johnson said of the operator. “When we finished, he couldn’t put it down. He was imagining all the good he could do in the world.”