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This was literally the subplot of an episode from HBO’s Silicon Valley. Multi-billionaire and Hooli founder Gavin Belson was paying a ‘Blood Boy’ in the San Francisco area to give him liters of blood. Gavin would then inject this 20-something blood into his own bloodstream in an effort to replace his 40-year-old blood, and the idea was this would make him live longer.
Seeing this on the show, it seemed so fucking outrageous at the time that you just knew it had to be based on a true story. Shortly after that episode aired on HBO, news broke that this was actually a real trend in Silicon Valley and CEOs like Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal and Palantir) were participating.
This week, the world’s learning more about this new health craze. Florida-based Ambrosia was founded by Jesse Karmazin, a Stanford Medical School graduate who never got licensed as an MD to practice medicine. Ambrosia is up and running in five cities across America: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tampa, Omaha, and Houston.
According to the report, Ambrosia claims they combat aging through injections of blood plasma from young donors. These injections cost $8,000-per-liter of young blood. Not cheap, Bob, not cheap at all.
Business Insider reports there’s ‘little to no evidence’ that this works but that hasn’t stopped people from paying $8,000 for one liter or $12,000 for two liters.
Ambrosia began running clinical trials in 2017 and Karmazin told BI the results were ‘really positive’ despite the findings of those results not being made public. When Ambrosia put up listings for the treatments last September, they immediately received around 100 inquiries from parties interested in getting juiced up with the blood of the youth.
Mercury News reports that 81 people have participated in the clinical trial (and still paid $8K) and a total of around 151 participants have received the blood treatment thus far. 151 participants at $8K a pop comes out to $1,208,000 which I’m sure doesn’t even make a dent in how much the company’s spent so far.
The company calls its intravenous interventions “young plasma treatments.” Ambrosia says it sucks the blood (so to speak) of donors aged 16 to 25. For the older patients undergoing what the startup acknowledges is a “medical treatment,” there’s a pretty juicy volume discount: $12,000 for two liters. Patients are 30 or older, according to the company.
Karmazin, who worked for about two years as a medical resident but moved into entrepreneurship without becoming a licensed physician, said last year that an Ambrosia study found the treatments led to a 20 percent reduction in levels of two proteins, one linked to cancer and one to Alzheimer’s, The Guardian reported last year. At the time of that report, the median age of participants in the study — which cost participants $8,000 each — was 60, according to The Guardian. (via)
I really hope the aliens would hurry up and invade planet earth so they’d show up just in time to see us sucking the blood of the youth and giving it to the old. Aliens would surely then realize we’re batshit crazy and leave earth forever and we’d never have to worry about an alien invasion again.
You can and should read the full article on Mercury News where they go into detail about the potential benefits and harms of this treatment.