Vampires need to drink blood to have eternal youth and life. It turns out vampiric eternal youth has a ring of truth to it.
A California-based biopharmaceutical company called Alkahest is doing tests into blood plasma for rejuvenating the elderly. The elderly mice at first, and soon hoping to try it out on elderly humans. The team at Alkahest, includes Sakura Minami, who recently presented her finding at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting, on November 14th.
Miniami has concluded there is something in young people's blood that is important to keeping them young. MInami and Alkahest are not talking too much, as they hope to turn this knowledge into an product for anti-aging or to treat people with aging brain issues.
The study took the blood plasma of 18-year old volunteers, and injected this liquid plasma into 3 month old and 12 month old mice. The 12 month old mice are equivalent to 50 year old humans, which is when mice and people start to degrade in bodily and memory performance. These older mice received an injection each week, for 3 weeks.
What were the results? Impressive. The older mice not only moved quicker and had more energy, like their younger mice cohorts, but they also performed a Barnes maze test as well as the young mice.
Karoly Nikolich, the founder of Alkahest, says there are hundreds of proteins that change with age, and that aging plasma is no different with an increase of proteins that are inflammatory and case cell death. If young plasma can stop cell-death, then this automatically prolongs life by holding off the cell death cycle from an aging body.
Comparing the treated old mice to untreated, there was also a marked increase in new neurons, which happens through process called neurogenesis. Young plasma appears to increase neurogenesis.
Alkahest isn't the first to look into this. In 2014, Stanford University neuroscientist and PhD Tony Wyss-Coray was able to show the blood plasma from young mice improves the brains of older animals. There was also a team in 2013 led by Amy Wagers, a stem-cell researcher at Harvard University in Cambridge, who did research on sharing a blood circulatory system and how the young blood affected the old in positive ways.
Despite the promising data so far in human plasma to mice treatment, these are still untested procedures for humans. Earlier research showed how young mice plasma can affect old mice plasma, intra-species. Now it has been demonstrated that the blood plasma can treat intra-species. Next is to find out of human plasma can affect elderly humans int he same way. Clinical trials are underway for 18 people with mild or moderate Alzheimer's disease.
Another US company, Ambrosia, also had trials where people aged 35 or older can receive a one-off injection of young plasma for a cost US$8,000. Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel is also interested in blood treatments, and is heavily invested in medical and health research.
The blood treatments are even hyping up for the Hollywood demented "souls", like Kim Kardashian who undertook a "vampire facial". She had blood from her own body injected into her face with needles.
What some people will do to avoid reality, fear death, and do so much to themselves just because they can't let go of their attachments to be a static, pristine, porcelain doll that doesn't age.
[References: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]
