PLASMA, EXTRACTED FROM THE BODIES OF THE YOUNG, IS BEING INJECTED INTO THE VEINS OF THOSE WHO LONG TO LIVE FOREVER: THE BOLD, DISTURBING SCIENCE BEHIND SILICON VALLEY’S QUEST FOR ETERNAL YOUTH.
This Silicon Valley startup says US$8,000 worth of rich, yellow blood plasma can help you live longer
IDEA IS TO RECALIBRATE BLOOD ‘SO THAT YOU WILL FEEL YOU ARE 35 WHEN YOU ARE 65.’
Clients sit in recliners watching videos or working on their laptops as rich, yellow plasma extracted from the bodies of the young drips into their veins.
The treatment doesn’t require any special preparation. It only takes about two hours to infuse two litres of plasma, the liquid element in the blood that normally holds red and white blood cells and platelets in the blood in suspension. It’s mostly painless, except maybe the bill. The cost to take part in treatments like this, part of a clinical trial run by a company called Ambrosia, is US$8,000 a pop.
But then, amortized over time even that’s a small price to pay for the hoped for results — the reversal of aging. The plasma flowing from IVs is from donors aged 16 to 25, the dream that it might rejuvenate the sluggish, shrinking cells of older clients.
According to company founder, Jesse Karmazin, transfusions are already bestowing Methuselah-like effects: One sixtysomething’s greying hair turned noticeably darker; a 55-year-old with early-onset Alzheimer’s showed improvements after just one treatment.
If that sounds implausible, in the San Francisco Bay Area where Karmazin is based, tech billionaires like PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who has said he “stands against the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,” are investing millions of dollars into anti-aging startups experimenting with everything from gene editing to replacement organs made with 3D printers. Google’s secretive US$1.5 billion life sciences spinoff Calico (“Can Google Solve Death?” Time magazine’s cover asked after the company’s 2013 launch) is working on drugs to increase maximal lifespan.
Nor is Ambrosia the only company exploring the possible benefits of young plasma. Alkahest, a biotech with US$37.5 million in backing from the world’s largest plasma-based manufacturer, has been infusing a small number of Alzheimer’s patients with pints of young plasma. There are also plans to test the rejuvenating effects of a plasmaderived product, eliminating the need for bags of yellow liquid altogether.
Stanford neuroscientist Tony WyssCoray, who most recently showed that repeatedly injecting old mice with human plasma from the umbilical cords of newborns improved rodents’ performance on memory tests, heads the company’s scientific advisory board.
In mice at least, the old brain is malleable. “It can be rejuvenated,” he said in a TED Talk in 2015. The proverbial fountain of youth may actually be within us, “it has just dried out.”
Unlike Alkahest and other startups, Karmazin is still looking for financial backing. But the 33-year-old, who interned at the U.S. National Institute on Aging following his sophomore year at Princeton and has a medical degree from Stanford University, stands by his ambition — to delay aging not only in the brain but the entire body.
The idea that we can stave off old age, if not necessarily Karmazin’s method, is supported by scientists. Earlier this year, McGill University biologists argued that it’s not outside the realm of possibility humans could live to 150, or beyond. In a commentary in Nature, they and other longevity experts dismissed a high-profile paper published in the same journal last year that said the maximum human lifespan, save for a few outliers, maxes out at around 115. Humans aren’t immortal, the critics said, but there’s no evidence we’ve reached a plateau.
Although none of Ambrosia’s findings have appeared in a peerreviewed journal, in interviews with New Scientist magazine,
Karmazin said that since his team started testing plasma infusions last September, they have found a 10 per cent drop in blood cholesterol levels, a 20 per cent fall-off in a protein found in the blood of some people with cancer, a 20 per cent drop in amyloids, a protein known for causing the gummy plaques linked to Alzheimer’s, as well as changes in other biomarkers he says are related to aging.
“We test blood before and one month after treatment,” Karmazin told the Post. Just one infusion “dramatically improves people’s appearance, their memory and their strength. It’s sort of surprisingly effective.”
So far, Karmazin’s trial — which he says the Food and Drug Administration has allowed to proceed — has attracted 100 subjects. But there is no control group, or placebo arm, which critics say prevents him from making any scientifically valid conclusions.
Karmazin argues that since people are paying to take part in his experiment, it would be “ludicrous” for them to take a 50-50 chance of being transfused with lemon-coloured saline instead of plasma. Instead, he plans to treat 100 more people before submitting his data for publication. “It’s too early right now, but I don’t want to wait forever,” he says.
Renowned New York bioethicist Arthur Caplan says that even at this stage of Karmazin’s research — which he calls “science by go-fund-me” — he has a number of concerns.
One is the source of the plasma: “I think there’s a betrayal in trust here. ‘You may think we’re using your blood to save somebody but we’re actually using it in a kooky experiment to try and prolong the life of people who would never hire you.’ ”
What’s more, Irina Conboy, an associate professor at University of California, Berkeley, whose work inspired the “young blood” movement, says Karmazin and others have misunderstood her research. Young blood doesn’t reverse aging, even in mice, she says.
As reported in Nature in 2005, Conboy and her colleagues used a variation of the age-old procedure of parabiosis — where an old mouse and a young mouse are surgically stitched together so that blood is swapped between the two — to see if they could rejuvenate older tissue. Within five weeks older mice showed restored muscle and liver cells.
The problem, Conboy explains, is that when two mice are sutured together blood isn’t the only thing they share — the old rodents also got access to younger lungs, hearts, livers and kidneys.
In a newer experiment reported last year, Conboy and her co-authors developed a more direct blood exchange system. Instead of suturing a young and old mouse together, they used a special device to move blood between the two until each mouse had half of the other one’s blood.
From this exchange, the older mouse showed some improvement in muscle and liver function, but “zero benefit” with respect to brain, cognition or the formation of new neurons. Instead it was the young mouse that experienced big changes — huge declines in most tissues and organs tested. It immediately became older. The old blood dominated.
For Conboy, this means “we need to find something that is in the old blood and we need to neutralize it. Someone’s young blood can’t be added in enough volume, or often enough to offset aging.”
She’s now collaborating on a device like the ones used for kidney-dialysis to cleanse old blood of harmful inhibitory molecules. The idea is to recalibrate blood to a younger state and buy a few more decades of healthy, productive life, “so that you will feel you are 35 years old when you are 65.”
It’s not clear how often, or for how long, we’d have to sit connected to a blood-cleaning machine. And asked about Conboy’s new research, Karmazin replies in an email that it still “proves that young blood rejuvenates mice.” Her reversal, he adds “is seen in the community as a selfish move to patent inhibitors of old blood and stifle competition.”
As for his own approach, Karmazin says he did get “a pretty much blank reaction” when he approached blood banks about his trial. He contacted about a dozen before he found one willing to sell him plasma from young donors. But if his use of blood isn’t “traditional,” he says consent forms do acknowledge that donations may be used for research purposes.
Karmazin has no trouble attracting people to pay for that plasma — in particular men, who account for two-thirds of his subjects. Despite earlier reports, Thiel is not among them. But Karmazin says his company has transfused a number of Silicon Valley executives, who are “used to solving really difficult problems in out-of-the-box ways.”
“Aging isn’t treatable with conventional approaches. It’s pretty clear we need a paradigm shift. And there are a lot of people in the Bay area who think like that.”
“There’s just a lot of money to be invested,” he adds, “in anything.”