Centro Estudios Ingleses C-65

WHAT IS NEW IN GERONTOSICIENCE ?

WHAT IS THE LATEST ON NEWSWEEK ?

PERHAPS WE WON T GET OLD AFTER ALL

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The Spanish firm Grifols is perhaps best known in the U.S. for its efforts to fight COVID-19 by harvesting antibodies from the blood of recovered patients. To acquire the blood plasma it needed for a clinical trial in the fall, Grifols offered $100 per infusion in the U.S., almost double the going rate—and apparently incentive enough for some entrepreneurial college students to deliberately expose themselves to the coronavirus.

Brigham Young University in Idaho responded by threatening students with suspension if they were caught intentionally trying to contract COVID-19. The treatment failed clinical trials, Grifols announced in March. But the firm has higher ambitions. With its 289 plasma collection centers in the U.S. alone, it 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, it closed on a $146 million deal to buy Alkahest, a company founded by Stanford University neurologist Tony Wyss-Coray, who, along with Saul Villeda, has revealed in scientific papers 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 focuses on identifying beneficial elements of blood that dissipate as we age and others that accumulate and cause damage.


	"The idea that only old, rich people can afford young blood is just UNCOMFORTABLE."

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.

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, 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 associated with growing old.

The result is a flood of investment money, an explosion of research into what precisely goes wrong in our bodies as we get old and the promise of clinical results down the road. 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 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? Will the rest of us senile peasants be forced to watch them age backwards as we are left to wither and die?