YOUNG BLOOD
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 late March. But the Barcelona-based firm has higher ambitions. With its 289 plasma collection centers in the United States 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, revealed in scientific papers published in 2011 and 2014 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. 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, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
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 like heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and arthritis—or, for that matter, COVID-19—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 most associated with growing old.
The idea that aging and illness go hand and hand is, of course, nothing new. What’s new is the newfound confidence of scientists that “aging” can be measured, reverse-engineered and controlled.
Until recently, “people working on diseases did not think that aging was modifiable,” says Felipe Sierra, who recently retired as director of the Division of Aging Biology, part of the National Institutes of Health. “That is actually what many medical books say: The main risk factor for cardiovascular disease is aging, but we cannot change aging so let’s talk about cholesterol and obesity. For Alzheimer’s, aging is
