To startup founder and Stanford Medical School graduate Jesse Karmazin, blood is the next big government-approved drug.
Roughly three years ago, Karmazin launched Ambrosia Medical — a startup that fills the veins of older people with fresh blood from young donors — in the hopes that the procedure will help conquer aging by rejuvenating the body's organs. As Business Insider has reported previously, there's little to no evidence to suggest this would work.
The company is now up and running, Karmazin told Business Insider on January 16. Ambrosia recently revamped its website with a list of clinic locations, and is now accepting payments for the procedure online via PayPal. Two options are listed: one liter of young blood for $8,000 or two liters for $12,000.
In the fall, Karmazin — who is not a licensed medical practitioner — told Business Insider he planned to open the first Ambrosia clinic in New York City by the end of the year. That didn't happen. Instead, the sites where customers can now get the procedure include Los Angeles; San Francisco; Tampa, Florida; Omaha, Nebraska; and Houston, Texas, Karmazin said.
In 2017, Ambrosia enrolled people in a clinical trial designed to find out what happens when the veins of adults are filled with blood from the young. While the results of that study have not yet been made public, Karmazin told Business Insider in September that the results had been "really positive." Still, there's no scientific evidence to suggest that the treatments could help anyone, and several experts previously raised red flags to Business Insider about the treatment.
Yet because blood transfusions are already approved by the Food and Drug Administration, Ambrosia's approach has been able to continue as an off-label treatment.
There appears to be significant interest: a week after putting up its first website in September, the company received roughly 100 inquiries about how to get the treatment, David Cavalier, who previously served as Ambrosia's chief operating officer, told Business Insider in the fall. That led to the creation of the company's first waiting list, Cavalier said.
In January, Cavalier told Business Insider he'd left the company, leaving Karmazin as the company's only public employee.
Before departing from Ambrosia, Cavalier worked with Karmazin to scout a number of potential clinic locations in New York City and organize talks with potential investors, he said.
Because blood transfusions are already approved by federal regulators, Ambrosia does not need to demonstrate that its treatment carries significant benefits before offering it to customers.
As of September 2018, the company had already infused close to 150 patients ranging in age from 35 to 92 with the blood of young donors, Cavalier said. Of those, 81 were participants in its clinical trial.
The trial, which involved giving patients 1.5 liters of plasma from a donor between the ages of 16 and 25 over two days, was conducted with physician David Wright, who owns a private intravenous-therapy center in Monterey, California. Before and after the infusions, participants' blood was tested for a handful of biomarkers, or measurable biological substances and processes that are thought to provide a snapshot of health and disease.
People in the trial paid $8,000 to participate — the same price that one of the procedures is now listed at on Ambrosia's website.
"The trial was an investigational study. We saw some interesting things and we do plan to publish that data. And we want to begin to open clinics where the treatment will be made available," Cavalier said in September.
Karmazin added in September that he believed the trial showed the treatment to be safe.
Karmazin is right about the safety of blood transfusions and their capacity to save lives.
A simple blood transfusion, which involves hooking up an IV and pumping the plasma of a healthy person into the veins of someone who's undergone surgery or been in a car crash, for example, is one of the safest life-saving procedures available. Every year in the US, clinicians perform about 14.6 million of them, which means about 40,000 blood transfusions happen on any given day.
But as far as infusions of young blood is concerned — and their alleged potential to fight aging — the science remains unclear.
In early experiments in mice, Tony Wyss-Coray, the codirector of the Alzheimer's research center at Stanford University Medical School and the co-founder of another longevity startup focused on blood plasma called Alkahest, used a technique called parabiosis to learn that swapping old blood plasma for young blood plasma appeared to provide some limited cognitive benefits to the older organism. The 150-year-old surgical technique involves exchanging the blood of two living organisms; its name comes from the Greek words para, or "beside," and bio, or "life."
After Wyss-Coray's mouse experiments, he and a team of Alkahest researchers took a big leap and in 2017 completed a month-long study in which they transfused a standard unit of blood plasma from young and healthy human volunteers into nine older adults with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease.
Their results were published this month in the journal JAMA Neurology. Because the study was small and short, the authors were fairly limited in drawing conclusions about what kind of benefits the plasma offered. They wrote that the "treatment was safe, well tolerated, and feasible," and that the findings should be explored further in larger trials.
In a January interview with Business Insider, Alkahest CEO Karoly Nikolich described some observed cognitive boons in the older study participants, as tested by a standard screening tool called the Mini-Mental State Examination. Those benefits included an improved sense of self and recognition of one's environment and location, he said.
But Alkahest's work is very different from Ambrosia's.
As Business Insider reported previously, Alkahest researchers aim to develop drugs for age-related diseases which are inspired by their work with plasma. They are not looking to open a clinic.
Nevertheless, Karmazin is optimistic that blood has a range of benefits. He got the idea for his company as a medical student at Stanford and an intern at the National Institute on Aging, where he watched dozens of traditional blood transfusions performed safely.
"Some patients got young blood and others got older blood, and I was able to do some statistics on it, and the results looked really awesome," Karmazin told Business Insider in 2017. "And I thought, this is the kind of therapy that I'd want to be available to me."
So far, no one knows if young blood transfusions can be reliably linked to lasting benefits.
Karmazin said "many" of the roughly 150 people who've received the treatment have noted benefits that include renewed focus, better memory and sleep, and improved appearance and muscle tone.
But it's tough to quantify these benefits before the study findings are made public. There's also the possibility that simply traveling to a lab in Monterey and paying to enroll in the study could have made patients feel better.
Nevertheless, Karmazin remains hopeful that the benefits he said he's witnessing are the result of young blood transfusions.
"I'm really happy with the results we're seeing," he said in September.
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