J. Karmazin - Young Blood to Reverse Aging

His startup, a company called Ambrosia based in Monterey, California, 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, for example, is one of the safest life-saving procedures we have. Every year in the US, nurses perform about 14.6 million of them, which means about 40,000 blood transfusions happen on any given day.

But Karmazin, who has a medical degree but is not licensed to practice medicine, wants to take the idea of blood as a drug to a 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 watched dozens of the procedures performed safely, he said on a recent phone call.

\"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.\"

So far, though, no one knows if blood transfusions can be reliably linked to a single health benefit in people. And researchers doubt Karmazin\'s trial will come away with sufficient evidence to point us in that direction.

\"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 led a 2014 study of young plasma in mice, recently told Science magazine.

For starters, to participate in the trial, you have to pay. And it isn\'t cheap. The procedure, which involves getting 1.5 liters of plasma from a donor between the ages of 16 and 25 over the course of two days, costs $8,000.

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