Sajad Zalzala
Family physician who co-founded AgelessRx and, as senior author, co-led PEARL, a year-long randomised trial of low-dose intermittent rapamycin in healthy older adults
Founder and Medical Director, Root Causes Medical · Co-Founder and Chief Medical Officer, AgelessRx · Family physician, Dearborn, Michigan · Residency in Family Medicine, Wayne State University (2009–2012) · MD, Wayne State University School of Medicine (2009) · Board certified in Family Medicine, American Board of Family Medicine
AgelessRx (Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA) ↗
Zalzala is the senior author of MOE2025 and one of the four people the paper credits with designing and implementing the study. PEARL (NCT04488601) was a 48-week, decentralized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial sponsored by AgelessRx with the University of California, Los Angeles as collaborator, comparing 5 mg or 10 mg of compounded rapamycin per week against placebo in healthy adults aged 50 to 85. Its authors describe it as the first completed long-term randomized trial of rapamycin taken for ageing itself rather than for a disease.
The pre-registered primary endpoint - visceral fat measured by DXA - did not move at all (p = 0.942). Because the endpoint had been fixed in advance, the trial has to report a null result, and the more interesting secondary findings, such as better lean tissue mass and less self-reported pain in women on the 10 mg dose, stay where they belong: as hypotheses for the next trial rather than as conclusions. Adverse events were comparable across all three arms, which is the safety answer the study was mainly built to give.
He is a board-certified family physician who trained at Wayne State University in Detroit and practised in Dearborn, Michigan, before co-founding AgelessRx, a telemedicine company that prescribes off-label longevity drugs, and serving as its chief medical officer; he also founded the clinic Root Causes Medical. The paper states the obvious conflict openly: all seven authors are employees and shareholders of AgelessRx, which is why the pre-registered, placebo-controlled design and the honest reporting of the null primary endpoint matter so much here.
Milestones in the Atlas
| Year | Evidence | Study |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 | H | Influence of rapamycin on safety and healthspan metrics after one year: PEARL trial results MOE2025 Senior author; the paper's author contributions list him among the four people who designed and implemented the PEARL trial. |
Co-authors in the Atlas
People with a profile here who share at least one study with Sajad Zalzala.
- Girish Harinath Designs, analyses and writes up human studies of repurposed drugs such as rapamycin at a longevity telehealth company, turning trial and real-world prescription data into peer-reviewed evidence
- Mauricio Moel Analyses trial and real-world data on repurposed longevity drugs at AgelessRx and led the reporting of the PEARL rapamycin trial