An anti-ageing startup is offering transfusions of blood from young people

They buy the blood from blood banks, so people donating blood don&#x27;t know it&#x27;s going to paranoid rich people instead of sick people, and they don&#x27;t get any of the money!<p>Edit: I thought it was illegal in the USA to pay for body parts, but there is an exception for plasma (and maybe the rest of the blood?). But it&#x27;s already predatory <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;12&#x2F;06&#x2F;business&#x2F;06plasma.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;12&#x2F;06&#x2F;business&#x2F;06plasma.html</a> and this new business only makes it look worse.

I love that, true to form for the U.S.&#x27;s peculiar flavor of capitalism, the producers can&#x27;t legally sell their product, but those who receive the donations can, leading to a company whose value-add is apparently advertising and customer service creating yet another creepy service for rich paranoids.<p>Think I&#x27;ll be checking with the place I occasionally donate to and see where theirs ends up. If they need money, they can ask for that; reselling what I thought was going to hospitals, etc. to these literal vampires is not, ah, kosher with me.

Putting aside the ookiness factor, the science here seems pretty tenuous. &quot;Self-reported improvements that scientists have been unable to replicate in clinical trials&quot; are what&#x27;s behind every questionable medical practice from homepathy to crystal healing.<p>Especially given the time and money involved in having to get regular transfusions, I&#x27;d think the practitioners would be better off using the time to spend an extra hour in the gym.

Without knowing how reputable any of this is, I&#x27;m somehow not shocked to hear Peter Thiel is interested in medically unnecessary blood transfusions. This could be totally fake, but just based on what I know about him from news, this seems like a perfectly plausible and normal for Peter Thiel interest.

There is already a shortage of plasma and blood for people with real medical conditions that need treatment.<p>Consider in IVIG treatments that thousands of plasma donations are needed to make a SINGLE treatment dose and most people receiving these treatments have chronic diseases requiring ongoing treatment, so for just a single patient for one year you are talking about in excess of 10,000 donations needed.<p>But hey; lets just sell it all to the Peter Thiels of the world so we can keep them alive forever...

“I don’t want to say the word panacea, but here’s something about teenagers, whatever is in young blood is causing changes that appear to make the aging process reverse.”<p>Sounds like the most stereotypical trope of snake oil.

The title should be &quot;a scam startup is stealing money from fool people&quot;.

This remembers the death of Gianbattista Cibo in 1492, or Pope Inmocent VIII, and an attempt from a foreign doctor to revive him on his deathbed by blood transfusions from three young male children (who died as well in the process).

From what I understand, Ambrosia is transfusing plasma, not whole blood.<p>There are a number of studies, going back many years, suggesting that young blood has a rejuvenating effect in older animals.<p>I have been using bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells to develop therapies for stroke and other forms of neural injury for more than a decade. What is particularly striking, is the effect of age upon these cells is quite obvious, both in vitro and therapeutically. In our own work, we found that when we treated stroked older animals with syngeneic MSCs from younger mice, they recovered much better than if they were treated with aged-matched MSCs.<p>What is even more interesting IMO, is that a couple of groups have reported that transplantation of young-to-old bone marrow, or just young-to-old MSCs significantly extends lifespan in mice. <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;23967009" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;23967009</a> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;22355586" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;22355586</a><p>Based on the value of preserving your own autologous bone marrow stem cells, and their potential to be used in self young-to-old rejuvenating transplantation, I co-founded <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foreverlabs.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;foreverlabs.com</a>. In short, we cryopreserve your own bone marrow stem cells, to be used later in life. It&#x27;s much like cord blood stem cell storage, but for adults.<p>The blood is born out of the bone marrow. Furthermore, the bone marrow cells (including MSCs) produce many soluble factors (proteins, cytokins, microvesicles, non-coding RNAs, etc.) that can significantly alter the blood profile. Thus, there is reason to believe that the parabiosis or the &#x27;young blood effect&#x27; could be conferred by rejuvenating the bone marrow niche. Indeed, we this might be happening in the studies cited above.<p>We just launched our own version of a young-to-old bone marrow stem cell transplantation study in mice. It is our goal to better understand and optimize the young-to-old bone marrow transplantation effect, and to eventually offer the ability for our clients to donate their own younger bone marrow to their older selves (in addition to providing a store of young cells for other potential therapies).<p>There is much work to be done, but IMO there is real opportunity for a health-maintenance approach to medicine, and this is one of them. Disease treatment will not long remain as the most rational or economical approach to healthcare.

In the meantime people who need transfusions because they have kidney failure they might have a hard time getting them.

More traditional clinical trial is being run by Stanford. Estimated completion was January 2017, but data is not posted yet.<p>The official title is &quot;The PLasma for Alzheimer SymptoM Amelioration (PLASMA) Study: Intravenously-Administered Plasma From Young Donors for Treatment of Mild-To-Moderate Alzheimer&#x27;s Disease&quot;. More on <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clinicaltrials.gov&#x2F;ct2&#x2F;show&#x2F;NCT02256306" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clinicaltrials.gov&#x2F;ct2&#x2F;show&#x2F;NCT02256306</a>

Who knew that Countess Bathory was a visionary entrepreneur?

Their website looks like it was designed in FrontPage 2002: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ambrosiaplasma.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ambrosiaplasma.com</a> - The whole thing is super weird. As someone who has an interest in transfusion medicine, I would absolutely not do this.

I was concerned about this because I&#x27;m scheduled to donate blood later today so I contacted the American Red Cross on Facebook and asked if they had ever sold blood to Ambrosia.<p>&quot;The Red Cross has no record of providing blood to this organization.&quot;<p>So Ambrosia must be getting their blood from another supplier.

there is a bad 80s made for tv movie (or maybe a twilight zone ep) where a convenience store worker finds out the store is a front for stealing young&#x27;s people blood so old rich people can live forever. in the end he run away and one of the old rich customer hold the pursuit saying &quot;don&#x27;t worry, he will be back eventually&quot;<p>...and now it&#x27;s lucrative pseudo science. sigh. maybe if they find the director he can be their very own hon Hubbard!

Now you too can have your own blood boy. Careful that your donor has good habits, or your cholesterol might go through the roof. At that rate, you might die by 120!<p>For those of you confused, it&#x27;s a reference to a recent episode of Silicon Valley, which actually covered this.

Anyone watch the Strain? <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-strain.wikia.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eldritch_Palmer" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;the-strain.wikia.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Eldritch_Palmer</a>

The old taking the vigor of the youth; what an apt metaphor.

If we are on the verge of cultured meats of various types, is blood that far behind?

Every millionaire wants their personal blood boy :)

I always suspected Peter Thiel was a vampire.

Thought Silicon Valley TV show was a comedy.

Start-ups in the health care field have difficulty managing their HIPAA &#x2F; HITECH compliance. You would have to be a special kind of idiot to allow them anywhere near your blood.

vampires

just make it a market, regulate it to ensure there&#x27;s no abuse and let people sell their blood if they want to. this could lead to improvements in people&#x27;s health - to donate your blood it gets tested for diseases.<p>edit: grammar