Young blood for a billionaire

Why is Peter Thiel so interested in young blood

Jeff Bercovici, Inc.: Peter Thiel Is Very, Very Interested in Young People's Blood Translated by Vyacheslav Golovanov, Geektimes

For links, see the original translation.

Most of all, Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and founder of PayPal, is interested in finding a way to avoid death. He invests millions in startups working on drugs that prevent aging, spends serious money and time on experimental therapy for personal use, and believes that the community should be sympathetic even to such methods of prolonging life that look strange or disgusting.

By the way, about this – most of all, Thiel is pleased with the possibility of pumping the blood of young people into his veins.

This practice is known as parabiosis, and, according to Thiel, can potentially become a biological "source of youth" – the best that science has been able to do so far on the way to an anti-aging panacea. Research on parabiosis began in the 1950s with crude experiments with rats, when they were opened and the circulatory systems of different organisms were stitched together. After decades of working in the shadows, these studies suddenly began to attract the attention of more serious researchers, human clinical trials began in the United States, and even more advanced research in China and Korea.

Given the fantastic promises of the benefits of parabiosis, these studies are very little covered. But Thiel was watching them closely.

Till and Ambrosia

In Monterey, California, 180 km from San Francisco, Ambrosia recently conducted one of the tests. The title "Plasma transfusion of young donors and biomarkers of aging" concealed a simple experiment: healthy participants over the age of 35 were transfused with donor blood up to 25 years old, and researchers tracked their blood in the next two years, looking for molecular indicators indicating health and age. Patients paid for the study. The subjects, whose ages ranged from 35 to 80 years old, had to pay $8000 for participation, and live near Monterey or travel there for examinations.

The founder of Ambrosia, Jesse Karmazin, a doctor who studied at Stanford, has been studying aging for more than a decade. He became interested in launching a company dealing with parabiosis after studying the impressive data obtained in experiments with animals, as well as in foreign experiments with humans. Time after time, the subjects felt that the symptoms of aging in all major organs were reversed. And although the mechanisms of these processes are not fully understood, according to him, the blood of young organisms is not only full of different proteins that improve cell function; somehow it forces the patient's body to produce more of these proteins on its own.

"The effect looks almost permanent," he says. "It's as if there is a reset of gene expression."

And although Ambrosia advertised the study to attract attention to it, she did not seek wide publicity. Therefore, Karmazin was surprised to receive a message from Jason Camm, the chief physician of Thiel Capital, who expressed his interest in the company's work.

Although Camm's LinkedIn profile states that he is a "business angel", this is not his main job. Camm was an osteopath, treated the best athletes, and now he is "the personal health director for Peter Thiel and many other prominent businessmen and investors of Silicon Valley," according to his profile. "He helps his clients achieve radical breakthroughs in health, cognitive functions and physical capabilities – and all this increases their health and life expectancy."

Among his classes at Thiel Capital is "communication with the best doctors in the world, health professionals and researchers from the USA, Europe and the Middle East on life extension, optimization of blood markers and new technologies for improving health."

We are too biased

When I interviewed Thiel a year ago about his investments in biotechnology and life-prolonging drugs, I asked him what methods of maintaining health he could use in his life.

"There's something I'm going to do. But I haven't started yet," he told me, adding, "I usually feel awkward trying to make recommendations on this issue." "I suspect that I have always been too biased about the use of these things in society," he told me.

After a brief discussion of the pros and cons of calorie restriction, growth hormone, and the diabetic drug metformin, Thiel said the following:

I am not yet convinced that we have found a working panacea. It is possible that there are some things that could work. I am studying parabiosis, and it seems quite interesting to me. This is where they transfused the young blood of an old mouse and found a powerful rejuvenating effect. It's one of those weird things that people explored in the 1950s and then stopped completely. I think that there are many such topics that, by a strange coincidence, have remained unexplored.

I asked if he found parabiosis "very interesting" from the point of view of business or maintaining his own health.

He made it clear that he was talking about the second option. "This is the case when it is unclear whether the method works from a scientific point of view. In such cases, it is unclear whether a company built on the basis of such a method will work well. Perhaps it cannot be patented. Also, for parabiosis, you do not need to obtain a license from the FDA (FDA), since this is just a blood transfusion."

In Silicon Valley, where scientific research on life extension is a passion of many, myths are very popular that various rich people from the technological field already practice parabiosis, and spend tens of thousands of dollars on the procedure and the blood of young people, and repeat these procedures several times a year. In an interview from April 2015, Thiel seemed to make it clear that he had not yet started using parabiosis. A representative of Thiel Capital said that nothing has changed since that time.

Untagged blood and the FDA

Anyone who wants to privately organize parabiosis will quickly face the question of getting enough blood from young people. But not everyone can buy human blood.

The FDA representative said that the department "regulates the collection and manufacture of blood and its components in order to preserve the health of donors and ensure the safety, purity and efficacy of the collected blood." And although blood is not officially used to prevent aging, it can be prescribed for so-called "off–label" [off-label] use that is not provided for by the FDA drug lists - unless no advertising is given and no statements are made about the effectiveness of the drugs.

For clinical trials, such as those conducted by Ambrosia, it is quite easy to get blood from blood banks, but Ambrosia is a commercial organization. In order for her to start selling blood transfusions as a service to clients like Thiel, she needs to somehow organize a blood source other than non-profit blood banks.

Karmazin acknowledges the possibility of problems with supplies, but notes that there is a lot of plasma in general, and it can be stored for up to two years. He estimates that a surge in attention to parabiosis may affect an increase in the number of young donors, whose blood use in therapeutic transfusions usually has more advantages.

And Thiel can't wait for the day when parabiosis will not only be clinically proven, but also accepted by society. After all, he's not getting any younger.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  17.07.2017