Friday, June 2, 2017

Anti-Aging Start-Up Is Charging Thousands of Dollars for Teen Blood

File under: Free markets at the edge of the human frontier

Jesse Karmazin's start-up, Ambrosia, is charging about $8,000 a pop for blood transfusions from people under 25, Karmazin said at Code Conference on Wednesday.

Ambrosia, which buys its blood from blood banks, now has about 100 paying customers. Anyone over 35 is eligible for its transfusions.

According to Vanity Fair, Karmazin was inspired to found Ambrosia after seeing studies researchers had done involving sewing mice together with their veins conjoined. Some aspects of aging, one 2013 study found, could be reversed when older mice get blood from younger ones, but other researchers haven’t been able to replicate these results, and the benefits of parabiosis in humans remains unclear. “I think the animal and retrospective data is compelling, and I want this treatment to be available to people,” Karmazin told the MIT Technology Review.

Though Karmazin emphasized at Code Conference that Ambrosia’s goal isn’t explicitly to cure or reverse aging in humans, he reports his customers see positive improvements related to heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease, science outlet New Scientist reported Wednesday. “I don’t want to say the word panacea, but here’s something about teenagers,” Karmazin told New Scientist.

“Whatever is in young blood is causing changes that appear to make the aging process reverse.” Still, scientists haven’t identified a reliable link between blood transfusions from young people and tangible health benefits. “There‘s just no clinical evidence [that the treatment will be beneficial], and you‘re basically abusing people‘s trust and the public excitement around this,” Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who conducted a 2014 study of young blood plasma in mice, told Science magazine last summer.

-RW 

4 comments:

  1. This is great! It's a combination of the latest craze and the latest moral panic (see http://reason.com/blog/2017/06/01/is-it-wrong-for-old-people-to-receive-bl ). Six months from now, will anybody remember? By then several new crazes/panics will have come and gone.

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  2. Government Version:

    Youth are forced to give blood on an ongoing basis and "people with elevated age" to receive the blood. Those who refuse are jailed, resistors are shot for "safety". People with elevated age tell the youth, "It's ok! I had to give my blood when I was young. And when you are older, you will get it all back..."

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  3. This is not for me. I heed what rules God gave us concerning someone else's blood.

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  4. This was featured in a season 4 episode of Silicon Valley when Hooli founder Gavin Belson had a fit young man transfuse blood into him during meetings.

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