I see people on here discussing the idea of importing rapamycin powder from China from some unknown middleman, so as to save a little money over buying tablets from India.  The China powder seems extremely risky because the manufacturer is unknown (typically you can only do small quantities orders via middlemen) so you have no guarantee on quality or purity or know anything about potential contaminants. Taking this much risk to your health, when your objective is life extension, seems counter productive to me.

So -  I wanted to post this to help those people considering the China Powder option - a way to save money, but get a higher quality product from genuine pharmaceutical companies (not some random product from shady middlemen). If you're going to try rapamycin, by all means do it with a real product - not some powder that could have been made by some guy in his garage in china.

Typically a years supply of brand name rapamycin / sirolimus would cost about $500 from India.  For people who find that too expensive, another option is to take their sirolimus / rapamycin with grapefruit juice (which increases bioavailability by about 3X, so the actual cost per year would be under $200.  The problem with this tactic is that the efficiency / predictability of the grapefruit juice bioavailability boost is unpredictable and variable depending on the grapefruit juice.

Another, perhaps better and much more predictable option is taking the rapamycin / sirolimus with another drug called ketoconazole that has the same effect as grapefruit juice, without the variability.

For the sirolimus plus ketoconazole study, sirolimus was administered in week 1 and ketoconazole was added to all subsequent doses at a fixed dose of 200 mg bid from week 2 on day 1, followed by 200 mg daily on the next three subsequent days.

The ketoconazole consistently increases the bioavailability of rapamycin/sirolimus by  500%.  So - the typical years supply of sirolimus now would last you 5 years (so, only $100 per year).  

The downside of this approach is that ketoconazole may impact other drugs you might be taking - so you have to do your research, discuss with your doctor, and it might not work for some people.

The benefit is that ketoconazole is a very inexpensive medication, easily available from India at low cost.  And Janssen Pharma is one of the producers, so you have a reasonably trustworthy source:

Here are all the links that might be of help if you want to investigate this option:

Information about this approach:

https://www.healio.com/news/hematology-oncology/20120817/grapefruit-juice-ketoconazole-increased-sirolimus-levels-in-patients-with-advanced-cancer

The research study:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4410974/

Janssen Pharmaceuticals Nizral Tablet Ketoconazole 200 MG

Example:

https://www.indiamart.com/proddetail/ketoconazole-200-mg-11013501273.html

Here is A posting about how people are importing inexpensive medications from India, and the associated costs:

https://www.rapamycin.news/t/importing-rapamycin-to-save-money-pt-2/82

https://www.rapamycin.news/t/how-to-buy-rapamycin-what-is-the-cost-pt2/68

See the bottom of the following page for some examples of lab test results for rapamycin from Indian pharma companies:

https://www.rapamycin.news/t/why-and-how-to-test-your-rapamycin-pt2/66