A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young

I knew I’d officially become a ‘longevity influencer’ this month when a company called Generation Lab reached out to offer me the chance to write about—and even receive—their new rejuvenation treatment, an injectable combination of two existing drugs which they call 1-Generation. This wasn’t just any antiaging treatment, either. A company fact sheet says that it “blocks the systemic spread of aging in the bloodstream, reawakens the body’s own repair mechanism and restores health and youth to multiple tissues.” The exclusive offer to join a “private cohort” receiving access to the treatment was being “extended to a limited number of people whose judgment on the science we trust, under close physician supervision.” “There’s a long wait list including a lot of celebrities, well-known people, people who you have heard of,” Generation Lab’s CEO Alina Su told me in a conference call.

What’s more, Generation Lab wouldn’t tell me what the two drugs are, making the proposition hard to take seriously. Yet this pitch got my interest. I am a longtime follower of Generation Lab’s irascible scientific founder, Irina Conboy, a take-no-guff specialist in the bizarre, but scientifically fruitful, practice of joining together the circulatory systems of old and young lab animals.

The procedure, called parabiosis, or heterochronic blood exchange, is one of the few things actually proven to make an old animal act younger. But you can’t go through life attached by the veins to a younger person. So the quest has been to find practical ways to mimic those benefits.

And that is something Conboy says she’s now achieved by hitting on a combination of two existing drugs that produce youthful effects—but without the need for any bodily fluid exchange. Over the last two months, Conboy has been taking the drug combination and feeling quite a bit better and more energetic, she says. So have a handful of other insiders, including Su, the company’s 26-year-old CEO, as well as Conboy’s husband and scientific collaborator Michael Conboy.

The company’s public relations staffer sent me a spreadsheet of the supposed benefits experienced by the participants, including improved vision in a 64-year-old female, longer landscaping sessions for a 59-year-old man, longer badminton games, improved hand grip, better erections than with Viagra, as well as “increased bowel movements.” Obviously, any age-reversal drug that works would be the best-selling product of all time. The problem is that none have ever been shown to do that. And Generation’s approach to evidence raises several red flags.

For instance, Su says the company now plans to launch a larger study, involving a hundred or more people. However, these subjects will be asked to pay for their enrollment. Such “pay-to-play” clinical trials are often seen as a sales channel, rather than a scientific pursuit.