This might be the silver bullet we're looking for... or not.
We have an initial 30 pills ordered for about $190 from India, if it shows up and everything seems right ( I ordered the brand name Wyeth drug as opposed to an Indian generic) I'll post the pharmacy information.
Rapamune is not your garden variety immune suppressor, it started life as an anti-fungal, became an anti rejection drug and is now being investigated for it's anti cancer properties. Immune suppressors are not known to be big anti anythings much less fungus or cancers. Several studies also indicate that Rapamune may inhibit viral infection.
So far the side effect studies that I've seen are all on patients who had received a transplant and who were also being treated with corticosteroids and/or other immune suppressant drugs, I'm not sure this represents our situation. The biggest problems I found reported by actual patients were swelling of the hands and feet, mouth sores, slow wound healing and elevated lipids and all were reported by people who'd had a transplant. I have not been able to find any studies of side effects from it's anti fungal days.
In our case we have a proven Coxsackie B4 infection in the wall of the small intestine which matches the absorption route of Rapamune so I'm more optimistic about it's potential effectiveness. It is involved in the CYP3A4 pathway so no grapefruit juice but otherwise it does not seem to interact poorly with other drugs.
We will start with a dose of 1mg daily but we'll try to reduce that if it is effective, I haven't seen any prohibitions on splitting pills or we can dissolve it in ethanol, dilute with water and take smaller doses of the liquid. Most reports of the side effects indicate that they are dose sensitive so less is better, for anti rejection a loading dose of up to 15 g. was used and daily doses of 2 to 5 g. were used. I'm guessing that the level of immune suppression required to prevent rejection of a transplant has got to be greater than suppressing reaction to infection. The variability of absorption is a problem but since we don't know what plasma levels we want it does no good to check blood samples, this is an N=1 test so we will adjust until we get results.
Our plan is to use the Rapamune in conjunction with the anti-viral Arbidol, I'm hoping that the suppression of the immune symptoms by the Rapamune will allow us to use a full dose of the Arbidol against the Coxsackie B4.
I'll post updates as we go along.