Ambrosia's first clinical trial

Young blood and anti-aging: Are there any benefits?

'The results looked really awesome'

To Jesse Karmazin, a startup founder and Stanford Medical School graduate, blood is the next big government-approved drug.Roughly three years ago, Karmazin launched Ambrosia, a startup that fills the veins of older people with blood from younger donors, hoping the procedure would help conquer aging by rejuvenating the body's organs. As Business Insider previously reported, there's little to no evidence to suggest this would work.The company is now up and running, Karmazin told Business Insider on Wednesday. Ambrosia recently revamped its website with a list of clinic locations and is now accepting payments for the procedure via PayPal. Two options are listed: 1 liter of young blood for $8,000, or 2 liters for $12,000.In the fall, Karmazin -- told Business Insider he planned to open the first Ambrosia clinic in New York City by the end of the year. That didn't happen. Instead, he said, the sites where customers can get the procedure include Los Angeles; San Francisco; Tampa, Florida; Omaha, Nebraska; and Houston, Texas.In 2017, Ambrosia enrolled people in a clinical trial designed to find out what happens when the veins of adults are filled with blood from younger people. While the results of that study have not been made public, Karmazin told Business Insider in September that they were "really positive."In January, Cavalier told Business Insider he'd left Ambrosia, leaving Karmazin as the company's only public employee.Before departing from Ambrosia, Cavalier worked with Karmazin to scout several potential clinic locations in New York and organize talks with potential investors, he said.Because blood transfusions are already approved by federal regulators, Ambrosia does not need to demonstrate that its treatment carries significant benefits before offering it to customers.The trial, which involved giving patients 1.5 liters of plasma from a donor between the ages of 16 and 25 over two days, was conducted with David Wright, a physician who owns a private intravenous-therapy center in Monterey, California . Before and after the infusions, participants' blood was tested for a handful of biomarkers, or measurable biological substances and processes thought to provide a snapshot of health and disease.Trial participants paid $8,000, the same price as one of the procedures now listed on Ambrosia's website."The trial was an investigational study," Cavalier said in September. "We saw some interesting things, and we do plan to publish that data. And we want to begin to open clinics where the treatment will be made available."Karmazin added in September that he believed the trial showed the treatment to be safe.Karmazin is right about the safety of blood transfusions and their capacity to save lives.A simple blood transfusion, which involves hooking up an IV and pumping the plasma of a healthy person into the veins of someone who's undergone surgery or been in a car crash, for example, is one of the safest life-saving procedures available. Every year in the US, clinicians perform about 14.6 million of them , meaning about 40,000 blood transfusions happen on any given day.But the science remains unclear about whether infusions of young blood can help fight aging.After Wyss-Coray's mouse experiments, he and a team of Alkahest researchers took a big leap and in 2017 completed a monthlong study in which they transfused a standard unit of blood plasma from younger, healthy human volunteers into nine older adults with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease.But Alkahest's work is very different from Ambrosia's.As Business Insider previously reported, Alkahest researchers want to develop drugs for age-related diseases that are inspired by their work with plasma; they are not looking to open a clinic.Nevertheless, Karmazin is optimistic that blood has a range of benefits. He got the idea for his company as a medical student at Stanford and an intern at the National Institute on Aging, where he watched dozens of traditional blood transfusions performed safely."Some patients got young blood, and others got older blood, and I was able to do some statistics on it, and the results looked really awesome," Karmazin told Business Insider in 2017. "And I thought this is the kind of therapy that I'd want to be available to me."But Karmazin remains hopeful that the benefits he said he's seeing are the result of young-blood transfusions."I'm really happy with the results we're seeing," he said in September.