{"id":8184,"date":"2026-08-27T20:00:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T20:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/2026\/08\/27\/a-startup-claims-its-found-a-drug-to-make-your-blood-young\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T20:00:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T20:00:15","slug":"a-startup-claims-its-found-a-drug-to-make-your-blood-young","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/2026\/08\/27\/a-startup-claims-its-found-a-drug-to-make-your-blood-young\/","title":{"rendered":"A startup claims it\u2019s found a drug to make your blood young"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I knew I\u2019d officially become a \u2018longevity influencer\u2019 this month when a company called Generation Lab reached out to offer me the chance to write about\u2014and even receive\u2014their new rejuvenation treatment, an injectable combination of two existing drugs which they call 1-Generation.<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t just any antiaging treatment, either. A company fact sheet says that it \u201cblocks the systemic spread of aging in the bloodstream, reawakens the body\u2019s own repair mechanism and restores health and youth to multiple tissues.\u201d<\/p>\n

The exclusive offer to join a \u201cprivate cohort\u201d receiving access to the treatment was being \u201cextended to a limited number of people whose judgment on the science we trust, under close physician supervision.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a long wait list including a lot of celebrities, well-known people, people who you have heard of,\u201d Generation Lab\u2019s CEO Alina Su told me in a conference call. \u201cSo we\u2019re super excited to, like, create this drug and [are] letting you know that this first longevity therapeutic in [the] human body is here and it\u2019s actually working.\u201d<\/p>\n

This was all clearly a marketing campaign and, like most other claims in the world of longevity medicine, probably too good to be true. What\u2019s more, Generation Lab wouldn\u2019t tell me what the two drugs are, making the proposition hard to take seriously.<\/p>\n

Yet this pitch got my interest. The reason? I am a longtime follower of Generation Lab\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

The procedure, called parabiosis, or heterochronic blood exchange, is one of the few things actually proven to make an old animal act younger. <\/strong><\/p>\n

But you can\u2019t go through life attached by the veins to a younger person. So the quest has been to find practical ways to mimic those benefits. <\/p>\n

And that is something Conboy says she\u2019s now achieved by hitting on a combination of two existing drugs that produce youthful effects\u2014but without the need for any bodily fluid exchange. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s 26-year-old CEO, as well as Conboy\u2019s husband and scientific collaborator Michael Conboy.<\/p>\n

The company\u2019s 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 \u201cincreased bowel movements.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201cpay-to-play\u201d clinical trials are often seen as a sales channel, rather than a scientific pursuit.<\/p>\n

In addition, the trial will be led by longevity doctors who practice alternative medicine. These include <\/strong>Matt Cook, founder of a network of clinics called BioReset Medical. Cook\u2019s clinics offer what I would characterize as unproven treatments, such as stem-cell injections. A 2021 article<\/a> reported he\u2019d recommended covid-19 treatments designated as \u201cfraudulent\u201d by the FDA. Those included inhaling amniotic fluid from a nebulizer.<\/p>\n

In a phone call, Cook says he initially agreed to prescribe the combination to Conboy and a few other insiders as a favor. (Everyone involved, he says, is a member of the same \u201chappening\u201d Silicon Valley scene around life extension.) \u201cMy confidence this was going to work was a zero. Like, I did not believe it was actually going to work,\u201d says Cook. That is because \u201cit\u2019s two safe, generic drugs that are not even longevity drugs.\u201d <\/strong> <\/p>\n

But Cook, who also took the combination, says there was an effect. \u201cAnd I have to tell you, it was the most surprising thing that ever happened to me,\u201d he says. After taking the weekly injections, he experienced a sense of mental clarity that lasted for a day, and then several days. The other subjects, he says, reported a sense of well-being, as well as old aches and pains that evaporated. <\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a fairly significant broad set of symptoms that doesn\u2019t really match what either of the drugs do,\u201d he says. \u201cSo it\u2019s interesting. [But] I have many more questions than I have answers \u2026 I still feel like I don\u2019t understand exactly what the mechanism is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prior to joining Generation Lab full time in 2025, Irina Conboy had a long career at the University of California, Berkeley, where she made her name via a widely cited series of experiments aimed at learning   whether the characteristics of age, or youth, could be transferred between animals via the bloodstream. In 2005, for instance, she surgically connected<\/a> two-month-old mice to very aged ones, finding that the old animals\u2019 ability to heal from injury dramatically improved.<\/p>\n

This suggested that young blood must contain specific, powerful molecular signals capable of restoring the regenerative capacity of an old animal. As researchers zeroed in on candidate signals, several startups, including Elevian<\/a>, a Harvard spinout, and Alkahest<\/a>, tied to Stanford University scientists, were able to raise millions to pursue treatments for stroke or Alzheimer\u2019s. However, those efforts still have not hit commercial paydirt.<\/p>\n

Although it\u2019s clear that young blood is good for old mice, scientists also know the reverse is true: Even a single exchange of plasma from an aged mouse has powerful, negative effects on a younger animal. That means that in the battle of age versus youth, says Conboy, \u201cold blood dominates.\u201d  <\/p>\n

Conboy next tried a new approach. Instead of giving old animals young blood, in 2020 she removed the plasma (the part of the blood without cells) of old animals and replaced it with a neutral mixture of albumin and salt water. This was like pressing the Delete key on the swarm of hormones, antibodies, and other molecules released by the aged body.<\/p>\n

The reset had even stronger rejuvenating effects than sharing a young animal\u2019s blood, and within two years, Conboy had tried it on human volunteers who agreed to have almost half their blood volume removed and thrown away.<\/p>\n

Longevity clinics have been quick to follow Conboy\u2019s research. Some began offering \u201ctherapeutic plasma exchange\u201d as a wellness intervention, for prices of up to $10,000 a session. One doctor that offers it, Jeffrey Gladden<\/a>, says that after seeing Conboy\u2019s publications, he raced to California to meet her and to get the procedure himself.<\/p>\n

By the end of 2025, Conboy had retired from Berkeley and joined her startup full time. Generation Lab has been selling an aging diagnostic test, but Conboy still wanted to find a drug that could mimic the benefits of plasma exchange. To do that, she started using a testing system she\u2019d codeveloped, which allows researchers to bathe human cells kept in a microfluidic device with blood serum from old people.<\/p>\n

The new device, described in a paper this year, allowed her to quickly test her intuitions about what drugs might work. \u201cThis is an awesome screen or experimental system which allows us then to ask a question: If tissue becomes old in the presence of old blood, which molecule or combination of molecules will prevent that and allow tissue to remain young, even when the circulatory milieu is old?\u201d<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s how 1-Generation was discovered, she says. \u201cIt allows human cells to remain young even when they are in the presence of old people\u2019s blood serum,\u201d says Conboy. She claims it does that by stimulating cells to regenerate and, simultaneously, neutralizing the old-age factors in a person\u2019s bloodstream.<\/p>\n

Without knowing what the drugs are, I can\u2019t give my own opinion about their promise. But some doctors working with Generation Lab expressed surprise that the combination would work. \u201cI will say right now, candidly, it\u2019s an unknown how it will play out. But there\u2019s certainly a lot of enthusiasm based on the quality of her work in the past,\u201d says Gladden, the longevity doctor, who says his Texas clinic will also be involved in the study. \u201cI am skeptical and optimistic at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pressed on why the names of the drugs remain confidential, Su said it\u2019s to avoid imitators. That\u2019s important because Generation doesn\u2019t own the molecules. Instead, it will seek to quickly run a clinical trial, <\/strong>taking advantage of an FDA process that gives companies a short period of exclusivity, perhaps three years, if they can show that a combination of existing drugs has a new use.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, the company\u2019s effort to generate buzz is having some success. Generation is hosting an August 28 invite-only event that will feature talks by George Church, the noted Harvard University synthetic biologist, as well as researchers from Anthropic, whose CEO, Dario Amodei, has been saying AI will cure all disease within a few years. In an email, Church says he was also offered a chance to take the drug combination.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are clamoring for it,\u201d Cook, from BioReset Medical, told me. He says his office has started getting calls \u201cfrom high-end doctors, venture capitalists, and people in this community who are kind of biohackers.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s high-level influencer-type people,\u201d he adds. And no, I won\u2019t be taking the drugs any time soon. Not until I know what they are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I knew I\u2019d officially become a \u2018longevity influencer\u2019 this month when a company called Generation Lab reached out to offer me the chance to write about\u2014and even receive\u2014their new rejuvenation treatment, an injectable combination of two existing drugs which they call 1-Generation. This wasn\u2019t just any antiaging treatment, either. A company […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[67],"class_list":["post-8184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mit-feed","tag-mit-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoo.central12.com\/portal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}