I participated in the TRIIM-X trial, a phase 2 test by Intervene Immune, intended to regrow the thymus. Regrowing the thymus likely delays age-related declines in health.
I’m also an investor in Intervene Immune.
Here’s a video presentation of some results of the trial. It confirms the moderately impressive evidence from the original TRIIM trial.
The main ingredients of the treatment are human growth hormone, metformin, and DHEA.
The use of growth hormone is controversial, due to concerns about cancer.
There’s a consensus that high life-long levels of growth hormone increase cancer risk. A company called Loyal is working on a treatment for dogs that’s intended to reduce cancer by reducing growth hormone levels.
On the other hand, there’s evidence that growth hormone increases thymus size and immune function (see Growth hormone enhances thymic function in HIV-1–infected adults). Immunosenescence is thought to be one of the causes of the increase in cancer incidence with age. That leads me to think there will be some ages at which growth hormone provides benefits. I wrote more on this topic in my review of True Age.
My Experience
My treatment lasted from Feb 7, 2021 to Aug 8, 2022.
The most unpleasant part of the treatment was that I needed to inject myself with the growth hormone 4 times per week. I found that fairly stressful the first few times, then learned to tolerate it once it became a familiar ritual.
I felt almost no effects from the first few doses. My body felt a bit warmer at night. Maybe a bit more tinnitus.
My muscles started feeling stronger within a few weeks. I got the subjective impression that I was doing more intense hikes, and hiking at a faster pace.
But now that I’ve done a careful analysis of my hike intensity records (I estimate the number of calories burned based on mileage and elevation gain), I don’t see any pattern. Most likely I was mildly limited by stamina before the trial started, and now I’m mostly limited by the available time. I’m pretty sure I feel less tired after long hikes than I did before the trial.
My weight increased from 152 to 157 pounds, then quickly dropped back to 152 after stopping the treatment. According to my body fat scale (likely not too accurate), about 2 pounds of that was due to increased muscle mass. Some of the weight increase was likely due to their requirement that I reduce my calorie restriction days from two per week to one.
A couple of months into the treatment, they discovered that my glucose levels had risen too much, indicating that they had guessed wrong about the optimal dose, and that I was creeping toward diabetes. They made a large change in my metformin dose, and my glucose returned to good levels without me noticing any related symptoms.
My testosterone declined a good deal, with one reading down to 288 eight months after the end of the trial. I’m unsure whether that means much. My testosterone levels have fluctuated a good deal since I started measuring them, and I don’t measure them very often. I haven’t detected any symptoms that look connected to the testosterone changes.
My blood pressure rose during the treatment, and remained higher than I wanted until I started treating it with Rauwolfia in April 2023. It had been on an upward trend before the trial, so it’s hard to say how much the trial changed it.
Benefits and Measurements
I’ve been testing my cognitive abilities regularly via BrainHQ since 2017. My scores had dropped to slightly below 700 just before I started the trial. They declined to 618 7.5 weeks into the trial, then increased to 800 after 9 months, and have been fluctuating around 800 since then.
According to (defunct site) Aging.ai, my biological age on 2022-09-14 was 33.0 years, compared to a calendar age of 66. I think I had calculated my Aging.ai age a few years earlier, getting a result in the low 50s, but I can’t find a record of that result or a way to recalculate it. At any rate, 33 seems implausible enough that I’ve mostly decided not to trust the Aging.ai algorithm for this purpose.
According to the Thrivous Biological Age Calculator, my blood test on 2020-02-12 indicated an age of 57, and on 2022-09-14 it showed an age of 52.54. That likely overstates the trial’s benefits, but could well be somewhat close to an accurate indicator.
My c-reactive protein (crp) results were complicated, fluctuating dramatically. (Crp measures inflammation). I eventually decided that a lot of the fluctuation was due to how much exercise I’d gotten recently. The blood tests that the trial used were scheduled to always be on Mondays, and I usually hike on Saturdays. Spikes in the crp, sometimes above 3, were a bit worrying until I saw that they mostly correlated with me having done a more strenuous than average hike. I also decided that modestly elevated crp in early May of both years was likely due to grass pollen, even though I didn’t notice hay fever symptoms at the time. But the best crp readings got better over the course of the trial, going from 0.44 in 2020, to 0.33 after the trial, and 0.26 in 2024.
I didn’t have any direct measure of changes in the thymus size, because pandemic-related difficulties made that test too hard to arrange at the start of the treatment.
Intervene Immune collected more test information than what I’ve seen in their casual presentations. I’m getting impatient for a full, formal report. Alas, they’re still a pretty small company (about 2 full-time people at the start of my trial, growing since then), trying to do work that would normally require dozens of people.
Concluding Thoughts
The trial felt like a fair amount of work. My guess is that it was worth the effort, in that it likely delayed important aspects of my aging for months, maybe even years. It will take a much bigger trial to get more than an educated guess as to what the treatment does. But it’s unsafe to do nothing about age-related health decline, so I’m tentatively glad that I took this gamble.
They’re still looking for people to participate in their clinical trials. I recommend them to people over about age 50.