Young Blood and the Pursuit of Eternal Youth

In one episode, a Teak executive was followed around by a so called blood boy to siphon his youth whenever he needed to pick me up, especially assistant, of course, not, it's my transfusion associate. Now, Peter Teel says he never tried it and didn't invest, though his interest was made public in several news reports at the time. Now it turns out there is actually a real, untold story about this startup that he helped make famous and the more than one people who actually signed up to be a

part of Ambrosia's experiment. I talked to one of them. I asked, what is it really like to feel a young person's blood pumping through your veins. There's a kind of an intensity that comes along with it. You feel kind of a little more alert, a little stronger, a little more in the present. Uh. And there's also a little bit of a buzz that can be too much. Kind of sounds like you're explaining in adrenaline rational most it's very much like that. This week the extraordinary rise

and fall of Ambrosia Health. This futuristic company pushed the boundaries of science and federal regulations by infusing older people with young blood plasma in a quest to slow aging. Ambrosia and its founder, Jesse Karmazin infuriated scientists who said the treatment was unproven in danger us, but that didn't start it from experimenting on humans, that is, until the federal government got involved. I'm Brad Stone and I'm Olivia

Carvill and you're listening to Decrypted. In two thousand and fourteen, Jesse Carmazon was a medical student at a hospital in Boston in the emergency room watching a blood transfusion. That's when he had what he described as a Eureka moment. Jesse had studied biology at Princeton and was obsessed with the field of anti aging. He had read about how scientists had been able to reverse aging and mice by infusing them with the blood of younger mice, and he

wondered to himself, could this also work for humans? GESC decided to drop out of his residency program rather than become a doctor. He set out to reverse aging. Hello, my name is Jessie Carmesan and as you heard, I'm the founder of Ambrosia and were a company interested in making you young again, so we all know that we're aging. That's GC introducing his company on stage at a conference

called the Superhuman Summit. His pitch was simple. GC believed he could slow aging by infusing older patients with blood from teenages and people under the age of twenty five. Ambrosia, as you might recall, is the mythological food that ancient Greeks believed the gods aid to make them live forever, and the treatment on offer was based on those mice

studies that Jesse had been so fascinated with. Since the nineteen fifties, scientists have been actually stitching together mice to form an organic circulatory system to investigate what happens when younger fluids flow through an older body. Stitching together mice, it does sound vague and horrifying, all at once. Yes, but they literally shaved the sides of the mice them open and then sow them to one another. It's like

reverse engineering Siamese mice twins. This historic and totally grewesome procedure is called parabiosis, and it's still used in studies today. Multiple scientists have found it The older mice became smarter, healthier, and stronger with the young blood. In some cases, the affir even became shinier. Jessie thought he could achieve the same effect in humans with transfusions of blood plasma, even though trials and mice often don't translate to human results.

His very first patients were as parents. These are my parents, and they liked the treatment. My dad said he felt very energetic putting up storm shoulders for the recent hurricane, and my mother thought her skin improved. It just thirty one years old, Jessie was ready to take it a step further. In the summer of two thousand and sixteen, he launched a clinical trial in the U S. Patients paid eight thousand dollars for a leader of young blood plasma.

To be clear, ambrosia was thankfully not stitching young people to old people like the scientists had done with mice. It was offering basic blood transfusions, a life saving treatment that's used every day in hospitals all over the world. Jesse bought the plasma from blood banks, and because the treatment is already available, he didn't need a sign off from the Food and Drug Administration. All he had to do was say it was an off label application for

an existing treatment, which the FDA allows. But he did seek approval for the clinical trial from the Institute of Regenerative and Cellular Medicine's Review Board. This is an independent group which determines whether a study on human subjects is ethical or not. The board gave g C the green light, and it was listed on the federal government's official database of clinical trials. Dr Barbara Krutchkoff, who signed off on it, said she didn't feel like she had the right to

reject this study. Well, we approve the application basically because blood transfusions are considered safe. They're done in millions of times around the world every year, and any physician can order a blood transfusion. It's the practice of medicine. It's not experimental in and of itself. Barbara said the board wanted to be sure that patients understood how experimental the procedure was, especially given the allure of an unproven treatment

that was claiming it could potentially extend youth. I mean a taxi the the idea. I mean, people people want to live forever, they want, they're looking for immortality. I mean, you're how popular the vampire movies were. I mean it kind of just picked up on that sensationalism. Here's how the trial worked. GC tested as patient's blood before the infusion and then a month after. He was looking for the presence of biomarkers in our blood commonly associated with

a related diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's. Ambrosia's trial was unorthodox because Jesse was essentially experimenting on humans who are paying for the privilege. Plus, Jesse was making some pretty outlandish claims about what his treatments could do. You know, when people think about aging, they think about their appearance. And I'm pretty happy to report here that we are seeing improvements in appearance. I've seen it myself. It's kind

of dramatic. And furthermore, on the medical front, we're seeing improvements in patients with symptoms of Alzheimer's disease Parkinson's diabetes. And so that's an interesting idea and you can get past the gruesomeness of using blood um feel free to find us. Thank you. About one and fifty patients did find ambrosia. We know that one person was as old

as nyby two. Until now, only one participant has ever spoken publicly about receiving transfusions from Ambrosia, and according to other media, he died of a heart attack last year. But the company put me in touch with a different patient who had been undergoing the treatments, and for this podcast, he agreed to talk about his experience on the condition of anonymity. We're going to call this patient Bruce. We

heard from him at the start of the episode. He's a businessman in his early sixties and eight years ago he was left paralyzed from a motorcycle accident. The bike went off the road, took me with it and into a canyon. Um and very rocky career, and I was up there basically playing pinball with the rocks for a while. So it was. It was a pretty violent accident. His doctors told him he would never walk again, but Bruce

refused to believe it. You know, in my case. Uh, it came down to a matter of what I was willing to accept and um, you know, was this going to be the way I wanted to live my life? Uh? And the answer was no. He took his medical care into his own hands and started experimenting with alternative treatments. You know, a lot of it is unconventional. I mean there's goofy little electrical things that come from Russia. Uh, you know where you you have a Russian space program

product that you know, supposedly develops muscles in space. You have you know, electrical stimulation with acupuncture needles that are placed pretty deep in the body. Uh. You have fairly painful, very deep tissue massage the and then of course you get into the really a satiric stuff like the blood transfusions. In two thousand and sixteen, he came across Ambrosia Health and decided to call g C himself. UM. I asked him if I could participate in his trials? And what

was his response? Of course I could. Bruce traveled to San Francisco for his first treatment, which was conducted at a regular doctor's office. Jesse had partnered with four physicians in California, Nebraska and Florida, who administered the treatment. Bruce said he had a few minor tests beforehand. The doctor checked his heart rate and blood pressure, and then Bruce sat back and received the transfusion. Well, you notice a change immediately, um, But you know, based on my experience

with other transfusions, you always noticed a change immediately. I will say, though, that with this young blood um, at least in my experience, the effect is a little stronger. Over eighteen months, Bruce had three transfusions through Ambrosia and paid close to twenty thousand dollars. He said he kept going back because it made him feel good and it helped him sleep through the night. I asked Bruce whether this might all just be a placebo effect? Now? Was

I psychologically affecting myself? Possibly? Did I have benefits? I did? Uh? Does it matter whether they were self induced or you know, a direct result of the transfusion? Probably not, as long as I had the results that I had a Bruce's clinical trial wrapped up in April two and eighteen, and by then some problems were starting to surface. Jessie had been seeking venture capital funding to grow the business and open up new locations in New York, Texas, and Ohio,

but no one wanted to back him. I talked to Gesc in early January, and he brushed this off, saying that investors are usually looking for companies that have their own proprietary technology right, whereas a common blood transfusion can't be patented. When we spoke, ges C was flying high. He said he was gearing up to publish the results from his clinical trial and that they would be impossible

for the scientific community to ignore. He claimed patients with Alzheimer's were able to do their finances again and that others with severe heart disease were out running again, and he was excited because he had just signed up his

first cancer pation. Gesc said that his trial results showed that the presence of precancerous blood cells had been reduced by twenty He claimed that the treatment quote almost certainly extends people's lives, and this was when the alarm bells really started ringing for me, right, I think it started ringing for a lot of people. They are federal laws that restrict making those kinds of statements without evidence, and more people were starting to hear about these supposed benefits.

The reaction in the scientific community was almost universally outreach, especially from the scientists who did the kind of research in mice that Ambrochia was built on. Professor Arena convoy Off UC Berkeley is one of those scientists. When you published our work on blood exchange in mice, Jessic Arnzan called me and left message and my voice mail at work saying how he enjoyed reading the paper and that

he wants to collaborate or do something together. And I never even replied to this message because it was completely out of the norm, and because it seems that he either did not understand our findings or he decided actively misinterpret our findings. Arena and other scientists started calling on Jesse to publish the data from his clinical trial, but he deflected the requests, saying the results will still be in peer reviewed. Meanwhile, he pushed on with his aggressive marketing.

Jesse was saying he could improve people's vision, their skin, their looks. He even told one journalist that the treatment quote comes pretty close to immortality. But behind the scenes, not all of the results were terrific. Jesse first told me that there had been no serious incidents, but Barbara Krutchkoff, the doctor who greenlit the trial said at least one patient had an adverse reaction, and this lines up with

what other media had reported as well. Turns out there's a reason why blood transfusions are only used in life or death situations. Here's Arena convoy again that are expected side of it that some of these people who undergo blood translusion might experience enough lactic short or be infected by protogen's in blood, or have delayed in appropriate activation of their immune system. And then just this past February,

the federal government got involved. But today the FDA said it had significant public health concerns about the use of plasma from young daughters as a means to hault normal aging or medical conditions. The idea of infusing plasma into the agency issued a statement that seemed to be targeted specifically at JESSE. It said that plasma transfusions could cause shock, infection, hives, heart disease, and lung injury, and should not be used

for treating the natural process of aging. The statement said there were concerns that some patients were being quote preyed upon by unscrupulous actors pouting plasma treatments as cures and remedies within hours, Ambrosia Health announced it would cease patient treatments immediately. When I first connected with GC before all this, he'd reply to my emails within a few hours. But he hasn't answered any of my phone calls over to earned any of my emails since the FDA warning. In fact,

he hasn't actually made any public statements at all. And as for the results from that clinical trial, well, everyone's still waiting. It's been a few weeks since the FDA warning came down. The controversy caused a commotion in the world of regenerative medicine, but researchers see it's just one small, misguided company that doesn't represent the field at all. In fact, they say that, if anything, it's been a distraction. I spoke to one entrepreneur. His name was Tristan Edwards, and

he runs a company called Life Biosciences. He was afraid that the media scrum that's erupted around Ambrosia could potentially cast a shadow over other research ch in this field. I would hate for people who think, Okay, they have been sold. I'm going to start buying blood from around humans that haven't had naturally tested. But also would also hate for the area itself to be kind of dismissed because the promising data in the animal studies within mine

sort of cloned to be the same as each other. Um. You know, that could lead to some very interesting medicines one day, but we're still in might there yet. I've talked to a lot of academics while reporting the story, and many of them believe we're on the cusp of major developments and anti aging. Some of them are even working with young blood plasma transfusions right now. Barbara, the doctor who backed the Ambrosia trial, said that the field

is moving forward rapidly despite Jessy's mistakes. There are many other experiments that are being done now with the young plasma that have built on the amblosure trail, the mistakes and the benefits. For example, we have some double blind placebo studies that are being done looking at looking at these more specific elements of what's actually happening. And this was all this was because of the Ambrosia trial. What we should learn from Ambrosia Health is that evidence based

medicine is the best way to advance the field. Not testimonials, not promises of benefit, but evidence based medicine real data, and there is real data out there. Last November, the Neurology Center in Houston started a young pleasma and fusion study with forty patients with Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis. One of the researchers told me that after one month the results look promising, and this isn't the only study of

the sort out there now. This is different than the young blood trial Ambrosia was running because for starters, half of the subjects in this study were given a placebo so they could compare results. None of the patients pay to participate, and the doctors there have been careful not to overstate the potential benefits to the patients. Increasingly, what I've heard is that researches are seeing age is basically

accumulated damage to ourselves. So if you can find ways to slow down their damage or develop ways to repair the damage by extension, you could slow down the effects of aging, so that in turn could potentially mean that people end up living for longer. There's billions of dollars being spent on this already. Alphabet's Calico inhibition has raised two billion dollars to disrupt to death, and people like Jeff Bezos and Larry Ellison have also spent money on

startups that are trying to hold aging. A lot of these investors are basically looking at death as a problem to be solved. But for the scientists on the ground, or at least the ones I spoke to, most of these studies aren't tailored toward making the richest people in the world of forever or even live until there are hundred and fifty Olivia. I'm sure that will be disappointing for for some very wealthy investors who do want to live longer. But so if it's not about life extension,

what is this about. This is really about trying to keep people active and healthier for longer. So we know that we've got our elderly population is dwarfing our young population at the moment, We've got underfunded health systems, and this rising problem where we're going to have a lot of elderly people who are suffering from diseases and it's going to be a burden on our health system. So what these companies are actually trying to achieve is to

keep elderly people active, able and working for longer. And so when you're talking to these researchers. They don't talk about the lifespan of people. They actually refer to it as their health span. I do feel like when attention was paid to the claims of ambrosure health and a lot of cases it was ridicule that was kind of seen as a sort of classic moment of excess for Silicon Valley. Yeah, exactly did people take it seriously? Do

you think? Well, I think that's a really interesting question. Um. I feel like when you talk to people, there's lots of different people on the on the spectrum of regenerative medicine, and I kind of first approached the story and didn't really know a lot about it. So speaking to these researchers was surprising for me in terms of what I could find. But then there are other people you talk to who were like, oh, no, what ambrosia was doing wasn't even all that bad. It's a basic blood transfusion

and they're trying to help people. It was just the way it was marketed that ran them into problems. Yeah. I don't think before you started doing this digging that I that I really understood that it was it was an actual field of science, and I think that if anything, what we should learn from this company is how important it is for us to distinguish between what is science and what is science fiction in this space. So Olivia tell us more about Bruce and what happened to him

after he received these transfusions. The thing with Bruce is that he's tried all these different alternative treatments and it's really hard to pinpoint what's what's actually helped him. Here. He's defied his doctor's predictions and he has been able to walk without the aid of crutches, he told me, which is pretty incredible given that he was told he'd never walk again. Um, but I need to emphasize that, and he agreed. Here there is no evidence that that

stemmed from ambrosia or blood plasma transfusions. For Bruce, it's all a bit of a shame, really. He feels like GC overmarketed the treatment, overmarketed the company, and had it not been for all the hype around this and all the media reports and all the vampire blood transfusion claims, then the company might still be around and he may still be able to benefit from it. You must have been all together on three transfusions. Thousands of dollars do

you feel that it was worth it. I don't regret having done it, and I would probably do it again. So that left me with just one last question, and just to set the record straight here, you've had three transfusions with Ambrosia health and do you feel at all immortal? Ahead, and that's it for this week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. If you have ever tried out an anti

aging treatment, I'd love to hear your story. You can write to us at Decrypted at Bloomberg dot net or I'm on Twitter at liv Carvil and I'm at brad Stone and please help us spread the word about our new season by leaving us a rating or a review wherever you like to listen. This episode was produced by Peter get Kari and Lindsay Crutterwell. Our story editor was Anne vander May. Thank you also to Emily Busso, aki Ito, as well as Liz Smith, Magnus Henriksson, and Tofa for

his Franchie Scallevi is head of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next week.