Newsweek: Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging?

[Refractive Reflections]

Well...I guess there's some truth now to all the tales of vampires becoming young through the blood of the youth.

Can Blood from Young People Slow Aging? Silicon Valley Has Bet Billions It Will
By Adam Piore, 04/07/21 AT 10:55 AM EDT, Newsweek.

https://www.newsweek.com/2021/04/16/...l-1581447.html

The Spanish firm Grifols helped set off a kerfuffle last year when it, along with other firms, offered nearly double the going price for blood donations for a COVID-19 treatment trial. Brigham Young University in Idaho had to threaten some enterprising students with suspension to keep them from intentionally trying to contract COVID-19. The trial failed, however, and now the Barcelona-based firm is hoping to extract something far more valuable from the plasma of young volunteers: a set of microscopic molecules that could reverse the process of aging itself.

Earlier this year, Grifols closed on a $146 million-deal to buy Alkahest, a company founded by Stanford University neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray, who, along with Saul Villeda, revealed in scientific papers published in 2011 and 2014 that the blood from young mice had seemingly miraculous restorative effects on the brains of elderly mice. The discovery adds to a hot area of inquiry called geroscience that "seeks to understand molecular and cellular mechanisms that make aging a major risk factor and driver of common chronic conditions and diseases of older adulthood," according to the National Institutes of Health. In the last six years, Alkahest has identified more than 8,000 proteins in the blood that show potential promise as therapies. Its efforts and those of Grifols have resulted in at least six phase 2 trials completed or underway to treat a wide range of age-related diseases, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Alkahest and a growing number of other geroscience health startups signal a change in thinking about some of the most intractable diseases facing humankind. Rather than focusing solely on the etiology of individual diseases like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's and arthritis—or, for that matter, COVID-19—geroscientists are trying to understand how these diseases relate to the single largest risk factor of all: human aging. Their goal is to hack the process of aging itself and, in the process, delay or stave off the onset of many of the diseases most associated with growing old.
....
"You have no idea how many people are interested to investing money in longevity," said Nir Barzilai, the founding director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University, and the founder of a company aimed at mitochondrial health. "There are billions of dollars."

Although the vast majority of these efforts remain in preclinical development, several have recently entered FDA trials and could potentially hit the market in a few years. Some are already appearing on the gray market, raising concerns that hucksters are peddling anti-aging snake oil. Others, meanwhile, worry what might happen if these drugs actually do deliver on their promise: Will poor young people be coerced into selling their blood to elderly billionaires? Will magical anti-aging pills become the province of the Park Avenue and Hollywood rich, like facelifts, hair plugs and botox injections? Will the rest of us senile peasants be forced to watch them age backwards as we are left to wither and die?
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Well that quote from Nir Barzilai is correct, there are massive amounts of funding by the elites to research immortality. Don't believe me? Type in the words "immortality" and "billionaire", and just see what the search engine gives out. Here are some links already:

https://abcfinance.co.uk/blog/how-bi...-live-forever/
https://www.livemint.com/Leisure/miP...mortality.html
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-im...o-live-forever
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/5-cre...100429618.html
https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...n-gene-therapy
https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...ity-healthcare
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-f...g-immortality/
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/progr...uy-immortality
https://www.dw.com/en/what-if-billio...ver/a-42840013
https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/961393...45-initiative/
https://richtopia.com/emerging-techn...n-immortality/
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/31/goog...e-forever.html

...And you thought the search for immortality was some outlandish supervillain trope found in comic books and cartoons , no, the search for it is actually real.