Ruminations

Yearning to be Reborn

"Without any clear evidence of benefit beyond placebo, PRP is now being marketed aggressively as a cure-all for sports injuries. And at about $300 per injection (the NYT reports $2000/treatment), there’s plenty of money to be made. … a nation-wide marketing initiative has begun, using sports celebrities as guinea pigs."
ScienceBasedMedicine.org

"We test blood before and one month after treatment. [Just one infusion] dramatically improves people's appearance, their memory and their strength. It's sort of surprisingly effective."
"It's too early right now [to submit data for publication scientific journals], but I don't want to wait forever."
"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, in anything."
Jesse Karmazin, founder, Ambrosia, San Francisco

"[Karmazin's research represents] science by go-fund-me; [the source of the plasma is troubling]."
"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'."
Arthur Caplan, bioethicist, New York

"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 to in enough volume, or often enough to offset aging."
Irina Conboy, associate professor, University of California, Berkeley

A controversial pay-to-participate clinical trial will test whether plasma from young donors can counteract aging. Martin Schutt/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

Professor Conboy and her colleagues set off, in 2005, an interest in what is now called the "young blood" movement, when a research paper published in Nature alerted science to a procedure called parabiosis that appeared to give a youth advantage to old mice when paired with young mice. Her research team surgically stitched together an old mouse and a young one to enable the blood to run between both to determine whether old tissues might be rejuvenated.

They were rewarded when, within a five-week period, the older mice had muscle and liver cells restored. Dr. Conboy interpreted the result biologically, pointing out that it wasn't only blood that was shared, but with the two mice sutured together the old mouse had the advantage of access to younger lungs, heart, liver and kidneys. More latterly she and her colleagues developed another, direct blood exchange system with a special device to move blood between two mice without stitching them together.

Each mouse obtained half of the other's blood and while the older mouse demonstrated some improvement in muscle, "zero benefit" was obtained with its brain, cognition or the formation of new neurons. On the other hand, the young mouse experienced notable declines in most tissues and organs tested, becoming immediately older, to show that the old blood dominated. She is now working on a new concept to cleanse old blood of harmful molecules "so that you will feel you are 35 years old when you are 65".

These genuine, replicable results conforming to methodology in scientific investigation are held to be reliable, enabling science to go on from the point where one step invariably leads to another. However, the new sensation among those seeking the 'fountain of youth", to be restored to that time when they were younger, physically and mentally, is being marketed to people through the injection of rich, yellow blood plasma with the promise that this protocol will help people live longer.

Infusion of the plasma takes two hours for two litres of the liquid that holds red and white blood cells and platelets. It is a physically painless procedure, and costs about $8,000 for each treatment through what is being termed a 'clinical trial' by Ambrosia, among other purveyors of instant youth. The plasma is obtained from donors whose age is between 16 to 25 who have been informed that their blood is vital to restore patients' blood in emergencies through infusions.

Another biotech company, Alkahest, the world's largest plasma-based manufacturers, been infusing pints of young plasma into Alzheimer's patients. The company's scientific advisory board is headed by Stanford neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray whose own research showed repeated injections of old mice with human plasma from newborn umbilical cords improved memory tests performance on old mice. The old brain is malleable, he said "It can be rejuvenated; it has just dried out".

McGill University biologists on the other hand wrote their conclusions recently through a massive study that humans could conceivably live to 150 or beyond in their Nature commentary, dismissing a profile paper published in the same journal a year earlier claiming the maximum human lifespan would be 115. Still, the general consensus is that though humans are mortal, no evidence exists we've yet reached a plateau in span-of-life.

Karmazin claims that his team found a ten percent drop in blood cholesterol levels, 20 percent fall-off in a protein recognized as causing the plaques linked to Alzheimer's, and changes in other biomarkers related to aging, since they began testing plasma infusions last September. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has permitted Ambrosia's trial to proceed, and 100 people signed up as subjects, but the trial lacks a control group, invalidating scientific conclusions.

Ambrosia is reliant on blood banks making plasma available to him. A dozen blood banks refused to sell plasma from young donors to Karmazin, but one agreed to. Conventionally donations may be used for research purposes and donors are advised of this when they sign consent forms. Men, it appears account for two-thirds of Karamzin's trial subjects willing to pay $8,000 for each treatment, among whom have been a number of Silicon Valley executives.