For US$8,000 this start-up will fill your veins with the blood of young people
But they have no idea if it’ll have any benefits
To Jesse Karmazin, blood is a drug.
His start-up, a Monterey, California-based company called Ambrosia, is currently enrolling people in the first US clinical trial designed to find out what happens when the veins of adults are filled with the blood of young people.
In many ways, he’s right about blood’s life-saving qualities. 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, is one of the safest life-saving procedures we have. Every year in the United States, nurses perform about 14.6 million of them, which means about 40,000 blood transfusions happen on any given day.
But Karmazin, who has an MD but is not licensed to practice medicine, wants to take the idea of blood as a drug to a very different level. He wants to use transfusions to fight aging.
As a medical student at Stanford and an intern at the National Institute on Aging, Karmazin explained over a recent phone call, he watched dozens of the procedures be 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. “And I thought, this is the kind of therapy that I’d want to be available to me.”