The University of Texas Health Science Center and the Southwest Research Institute have licensed new uses for a drug that has shown it can slow the aging process to a San Antonio startup biotechnology company.

The company, Rapamycin Holdings Inc., takes its name from the drug rapamycin, which has long been federally approved to suppress organ rejection in transplant recipients.

Rapamycin Holdings hopes to one day commercialize the drug for anti-aging purposes.

Instead of accepting physical and cognitive decline, we're looking for answers and solutions, said Rapamycin Holdings CEO George Fillis. Hopefully, the answer will be to extend healthy human life.

Terms of the licensing agreement were not disclosed.

So far, Rapamycin Holdings has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding to conduct a series of analytical tests to determine how the drug performs on a therapeutic level in the bloodstream, Fillis said.

The Texas Technology Development Center, or T3DC, and the Texas Research & Technology Foundation, are among the organizations that provided investment capital to the company.

Rapamycin Holdings plans to raise an additional $6 million once it nears Phase 1 clinical trials for its first drug product.

Z. Dave Sharp, a professor of molecular medicine at the health science center, in 2004 conceived the project to slow the aging process.

The federal government later awarded about $5 million in stimulus money to the health science center to study rapamycin and its anti-aging effects in mice.

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UTHSC strikes licensing deal