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Anti-Aging Start-Up Is Charging Thousands of Dollars for Teen Blood (vanityfair.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A startup called Ambrosia is charging about $8,000 a pop for blood transfusions from people under 25, Jesse Karmazin said at Code Conference. Ambrosia, which buys its blood from blood banks, now has about 100 paying customers. Some are Silicon Valley technologists, like Thiel, though Karmazin stressed that tech types aren't Ambrosia's only clients, and that anyone over 35 is eligible for its transfusions. Karmazin was inspired to found Ambrosia after seeing studies researchers had done involving sewing mice together with their veins conjoined. Some aspects of aging, one 2013 study found, could be reversed when older mice get blood from younger ones, but other researchers haven't been able to replicate these results, and the benefits of parabiosis in humans remains unclear. "I think the animal and retrospective data is compelling, and I want this treatment to be available to people," Karmazin told the MIT Technology Review.
It's Bram Stoker spining is his grave.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
You plebs better hope your not in an accident and need a blood transfusion cause the rich will be cutting into the already short supply!
Are they going to start bathing in milk again too?
... Peter Thiel would be a real-life vampire would actually explain a lot.
We gotta go to a crappy town where I'm a hero.
Why isn't the FDA shutting this down.
Note that donated Blood has an expiration date. Living cells die. Red blood cells last for 42 days, platelets last only for 7 days.
That means in order to have enough blood for medical emergencies, we need t constantly have EXTRA blood available that will be wasted. Which means that every day we throw out a ton of 'expired' blood.
This new business can help manage this problem. Bigger market, means less gets wasted. Worst case scenario, we can say "sorry, you need to return that blood, that was a 12 car pile up on I95." Build it into their contracts.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
"All I needed was the blood of a young boy" - https://youtu.be/VRNwqVU70Q8
He's stayed alive this long, he must be onto something
Twinstiq, game news
If they did it here (Canada), I'd love it because the money would go back into Canadian Blood Services, and help fund blood drives, collection, and storage.
Hell, if they gave a percentage back to young donors to encourage regular donation, and another percentage to artificial blood research, that'd be awesome too.
Lining a for-profit blood business owner's pockets though? Not so nice.
If you ever need an organ transplant, all those transfusions will lower your ability to find a good match. When my wife was on the list for a kidney transplant, she needed transfusions due to anemia, and MAN did they hold back as much as possible so as not to screw her out of a new kidney.
Once again, the Simpsons were ahead of their time:
“I tried every tincture and poultice and tonic and patent medicine there is, and all I really needed was the blood of a young boy.”
--Montgomery Burns
I like how the left out the follow-up study in mice where they only gave transfusions to the older mice and it had no effect.
It turns out the effect was from the young kidneys, liver, etc. that the older mice could use when their circulatory systems were joined.