Blood. Eternal Youth. Immortality. Despite these evocative words being central to the topic of today’s discussion, this is not a story about vampires. Instead, we are taking a dive into yet another biohacking realm that may just be the key to unlocking the bloody fountain of youth.

Since the early 2000s, the transfusion of young blood into the ailing bodies of the elderly has become an exciting new and potentially transformative scientific field of study.

Dr Aubrey de Grey, the chief science officer and co-founder of Sens Research Foundation, a biomedical research charity based in Silicon Valley that focuses on the development of new medicines that repair the damage of ageing, classifies blood transfusion technology and research under the term “rejuvenation biotechnology.”

This fairly mouthy term refers to “simply any therapy that repairs some aspect of the damage of ageing — the molecular and cellular changes that the body accumulates in its composition and structure throughout life as consequences of its normal operation, and that eventually contribute to the health problems of late-life once they exceed what the body is set up to tolerate.”

The leading research on young blood transfusions is attempting to do just that: rejuvenate and repair the damages of ageing through replacing old blood in an old body with new blood from a young donor. Or as de Grey puts it, “rejuvenating the body by rejuvenating the blood.”

But how does this work, and how did this research come about?

The beginning…

Youngblood transfusion practices are actually a revival of parabiosis, a pretty gruesome realm of research that was practised in the mid 20th century.

Inspired by the phenomenon of naturally occurring conjoined twins (Siamese twins), parabiosis involves the pairing of mice (one young and one old), peeling back their skin, and stitching them together so that the two share the same circulatory system. In other words, so that the blood of the young mouse flowed into the body of the old mouse and vice-versa.

This practice was revisited in the early 2000s by a group of scientists from Stanford University, California, with the idea that “old tissues might be made to regenerate as well as young tissues if, by means of systemic influences, the molecular pathways could be ‘rejuvenated’ from an old state to young”. They saw the potential that new blood could lead to regeneration in old tissues.

The results, published in 2005, were extremely promising, with clear signs of rejuvenation in both the muscles and the livers of the older mice pairings.

Already teetering on the edge of sadism, it’s important to reiterate that these experiments were done on mice alone (imagine the Frankensteinesque implications of experimenting like this on humans). However, it did open up many new frontiers of experimental ground for the potential of this kind of science working to heal ageing damage in humans.

A couple of key players and their research

Perhaps you got wind of the semi-scandalous blood transfusion company Ambrosia? Based in Monterey, California, the company was selling the plasma of young donors to older customers for around $8,000 (R11,0594.56) with very little research backing their claims of the supposed anti-ageing benefits of the practice. 

After the FDA issued a public warning that Ambrosia’s practices were neither safe, nor extensively researched, the company shut down for a brief period (opening up again later that same year.) The “unwise risks” (says de Grey) that Ambrosia have taken in their practice has given blood transfusion research a somewhat nefarious reputation. However, there are a variety of companies that are engaging in research with a much more reasonable and responsible outlook. Two examples of this is the work being done by Alkahest and Elevian.

Alkahest

Alkahest was co-founded in 2014 by Tony Wyss-Coray, a professor of neurology and neurological sciences at Stanford University, California, whose research found that the practice of parabiosis and young blood in old mice had an effect on brain function (as well as the tissue and liver) of the mice.

Based near Silicon Valley, the company primarily does research on plasma and the specific proteins in it that may cause the ageing processes. They have coined these proteins ‘chronokines’, and carefully study which of them cause positive processes (homeostasis/tissue repair/neural functioning/stem cell regeneration) and which cause detrimental processes (tissue damage/inflammation/neurodegeneration).

According to their website, through understanding which chronokines have the most impact, Alkahest attempts to “create transformative therapies that halt or reverse the harmful effect of ageing.” Focusing on Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and age-related muscular degeneration, the company is still in the throes of its investigations.

Elevian

“Elevian are focused on introducing elevated quantities of certain factors that are present at progressively lower levels with age, of which their main candidate is a protein called GDF-11” explains de Grey.

GDF11, which stands for “growth differentiation factor 11”, is a naturally occurring molecule in the plasma. Allegedly, when injected into ageing mice, the molecule reproduces many of the regenerative effects of young blood.

Elevian’s website claims that GDF11 supplementation “reduces age-related cardiac hypertrophy, accelerates skeletal muscle repair, improves exercise capacity, improves brain function and cerebral blood flow, and improves metabolism.”

According to de Grey, “there is quite a lot of controversy about whether GDF11 really is a good example, but the company is well funded, so we’ll know more soon.”

Which begs the big question: does this young blood transfusion work?

The research says maybe…

Alkahest published this study in 2016 in which they first injected a mutant gene of Alzheimer’s disease into older mice, and then used parabiosis to prove that the blood of a young mouse could indeed, cure a lot of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s.

According to the study, the results were incredible, and the old mice almost completely rejuvenated: they “showed a near-complete restoration in levels of synaptic and neuronal proteins after exposure to young blood in parabiosis.”

Great. But we’re still dealing with mice here. In this 2016 study, however, scientists injected young, fresh frozen plasma donated from healthy men aged 18-30 into older Alzheimer’s patients so as to determine whether or not the processes were harmful. It turns out that, overall, none of the older patients suffered from any severe side effects, but there was also no evidence that it did anything at all.

Elevian conducted this study in 2020, which showed that GDF11 decreased the body mass and increased the glucose homeostasis of the mice that it was injected into. This could be a monumental find for diabetes sufferers.

Also in 2020, they conducted this experiment, that proved that GDF11 had significant results in brain reparations of mice that had suffered from strokes.

And this study, actually done on humans, concludes that GDF11 has amazing short term effects on skin health, like an increased production of procollagen I and hyaluronic acid, as well as a decrease in melanin production (dark spots), and an increase in skin thickness. The study was funded by cosmetics and skincare company, Avon Products; according to the funding disclosure that accompanies the paper, “the funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

The research is certainly showing encouraging results. As de Grey explains, “I think at this point we can say with some confidence that there are ways to do it that work, yes. However, improvements are absolutely still being made at a rapid rate, and clinical trials are only at an early stage, so it won’t be routine for a few years yet.”

He also mentioned, however, that in the realm of rejuvenation technology, young blood transfusion research is somewhat of a “stopgap, because the contents of the blood is determined by what cells put into it and take out of it, hence the best solution is to fix the cells.”

Basically, unless you want to be permanently stitched onto the body of a younger person so as to share their circulatory system, the young blood transfusion methods may only be a short-term fix.

Why are people doing this, and what does it mean?

The struggles of ageing are difficult, for those who suffer from them and for their loved ones too.

Perhaps you have seen The Father (featuring a riveting performance by Anthony Hopkins, for which he won Best Actor at the Academy Awards and many others), a delicate yet powerful story that depicts just what it feels like to be slowly losing your mind to neurodegenerative disease. A moving rumination on ageing and memory, the movie pinpoints the exact nodes of discomfort and pain that Alzheimer’s can bring to a sufferer and their family.

This just about sums up why anybody might be interested in the awesome potential of avoiding (or curing!) those kinds of late-life issues completely.

Hold on, you might think… ageing is a totally natural part of living and dying. It’s part of what makes our experience on this earth very human. What are the ethical implications of bypassing ageing… of living young and strong for much longer?

De Grey says “I don’t regard them as ethical issues at all — they are psychological ones, in the minds of those who feel the need to view ageing as a blessing in disguise in order to put it out of their minds. That attitude slows down progress and costs vast numbers of lives in the future.”

And perhaps he is right. Let’s just hope that if this kind of technology does become available, that access won’t be severely divided over lines of wealth, class and geopolitics. A discouraging idea in light of vaccine-imperialism and general Covid-19 medical inequalities in the world today. DM/ML