
Blood transfusion startup Ambrosia is now up and running - bryanrasmussen
https://www.businessinsider.com/young-blood-transfusions-open-accepting-paypal-payments-cities-ambrosia-2019-1
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shanehoban
"A startup company, Ambrosia, has been selling "young blood transfusions" for
$8,000 since 2017 under the guise of running a clinical trial ... The clinical
trial has no control arm and so is neither randomized nor blind. The company
was started by Jesse Karmazin, a medical school graduate without a license to
practice medicine. David Wright is the licensed doctor overseeing the clinical
trial; in his practice he administers intravenous treatments of vitamins and
antibiotics for nontraditional purposes and was disciplined by the California
Medical Board for the latter in 2015. Jonathan Kimmelman, a bioethicist from
McGill University, suggests that Ambrosia is running this trial as they would
be unable to get FDA approval to sell this treatment otherwise." [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_blood_transfusion#Ambros...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_blood_transfusion#Ambrosia)

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Traster
I don't know if Parabiosis will eventually prove to have any use in fighting
any sort of disease ever, but what I can tell from this article is that I
wouldn't trust that company as far as I can throw it.

Just the thought that someone running a medical company thinks he can gather
evidence worth talking about by just observing old people who got blood
transfusions tells you all you need to know. He's willing to completely
fabricate claims about the benefits of this treatment.

We now how much of a nightmare Theranos was -and that was a relatively passive
procedure they were selling. What happens when this scrappy start up skimps on
the screening tests for their donors and end up with venereal diseases in
their blood supply? The old 'fake it till you make it' doesn't fly here.

~~~
SiempreViernes
You think that was an impressive red flag? Then check this out: dismissing
objections about effectiveness and safety from the researcher whose experiment
is held up on their landing page as a proof of the treatment benefits!

[https://nordic.businessinsider.com/researchers-say-
ambrosia-...](https://nordic.businessinsider.com/researchers-say-ambrosia-
young-blood-transfusion-startup-putting-lives-at-risk-2018-9?r=US&IR=T)

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Odenwaelder
Enjoy your to-be-discovered deadly viruses you got from such a transfusion.
(I'm not joking, there might be undetected viruses that promote development of
cancer and other diseases.)

~~~
barry-cotter
The history of blood transfusion is very much this story. I sincerely doubt
there are any deadly viruses likely to be spread by transfusion that we don’t
know about already, for large values of deadly.

~~~
abcc8
The hemophilia community was devastated by HIV and hepatitis C. Anyone
considering transfusion therapy should be very cautious.

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bayesian_horse
The medical part of my brain cringed on the idea to transfuse blood to healthy
recipients.

Blood is a tremendously tricky substance. I guess they have the necessary
precautions in place. But still...

~~~
CaptainZapp
_I guess they have the necessary precautions in place_

Given the history of some SV startups and their move-fast-break-things and
fake-it-'til-you-make-it philosophy and looking back at some of the more
unsavoury examples I believe you're highly optimistic here.

~~~
bayesian_horse
There is a difference between faking some standard lab tests and infecting
people with deadly viruses or giving them fatal immune reactions.

~~~
darkpuma
Do you think that difference represents a line a highly motivated sociopath
would be unwilling to cross?

~~~
bayesian_horse
Even the highly motivated sociopath will probably understand that dead
customers are really bad for business.

~~~
CaptainZapp
Theranos management didn't much give a shit about potentially dead customers
based on test results, which they knew were fraudulent.

So I still think this is a bit optimistic.

~~~
bayesian_horse
Still, I don't think that this compares. Bad test results rarely ever cause
death, especially when the really time critical tests are done in clinics. And
it's really hard to prove a test is wrong, or even maliciously wrong.

So I do believe that someone with questionable ethics is much more likely to
assume he can get away with mostly-fake lab tests than with killing patients
outright with something obvious like a bad reaction to a blood transfusion.
Even infections with a blood-borne Virus would probably be discovered within a
year or two, because blood transfusions are sort of the first culprits you
have in mind.

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alexbilbie
To any British person they will assume Ambrosia are doing blood transfusions
with custard

~~~
Sahhaese
Given what happened in the 70s and 80s when the blood products were imported
from the US to the UK [1] and this recently being in the news again because
inquiries into it are again underway, I think many Brits may also shudder at
the thought of blood transfusions being handled in such a blase way.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_blood_scandal_in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_blood_scandal_in_the_United_Kingdom)

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yakshaving_jgt
This is of course ridiculous, stupid, and immoral, but I don’t think it’s
unprecedented.

I know that the _Vampire Facial_ [0] has been a popular supposed beauty
treatment for at least a couple of years.

When I become king, all of this would be outlawed along with homeopathy.

[0]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platelet-
rich_fibrin_matrix](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platelet-
rich_fibrin_matrix)

~~~
matte_black
If you remove the ability for people to spend money on worthless things, they
will only have money to spend on useful things, and thus drive up inflation.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Wait, what? So waste is good for economy now?

~~~
meiraleal
Not good, but better for society than rich people siting in a pile of cash
forever? It is like vegetables. They are not good, but they are better than
eating more carbs.

~~~
barry-cotter
Cash is paper. No one cares about paper. Numbers in a bank account are numbers
in a database somewhere. No one particularly cares about numbers in databases.
What we care about is either investment or consumption, the use of resources.
If rich people are _not_ consuming their wealth then they are not using their
resources. That means they’re available for everyone else to use because
there’s only so much productive capacity in the economy and most of the time
it’s almost all being used.

Investment is good for creating future wealth. Not using money rounds to
investment, not at a personal level, but at a macroeconomic one.

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Udik
Next SV startup: all the benefits of young blood transfusion, but requiring
only a single drop of blood.

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patrickg_zill
Where are they getting the plasma from? Doesn't it basically cost about $75
for the donor plus the cost of collecting the plasma? Based on the ads that I
have seen.

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ArrayList
Can you say the next Theranos?

~~~
taoistextremist
No, they have an actual product. It's just pseudo-science. It's a different
sort of fraud that would attract a different type of buy-in

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SiempreViernes
So, what exactly is the theory here? They are transfusing plasma, which, as
far as I understand, is blood without all the various cells in it. So
basically water with some elements and whatever proteins are too small to
separate in the centrifuge.

So either the specific mixture of stuff in "young blood" is better, or they
mean the specific molecules are healthier because of their origin. The latter
is homeopathy style chemistry, and the former seems mostly like a contrived
way of taking hormonal supplements.

~~~
mikkom
I think the premise is the mouse studies made on the subject, for example:

"Young Blood Rejuvenates the Aging Brain"

> Previous studies have demonstrated that instilling young blood into an old
> rodent can rejuvenate peripheral tissues, such as liver and muscle, and can
> stimulate the birth of new nerve cells in the brain. The authors show that
> this method can also counteract age-related declines in learning and memory
> by activating specific signaling pathways in the hippocampus, a region of
> the brain involved in learning

[..]

> These experiments raise the fascinating possibility that transfusion of
> blood or specific bloodborne factors from young humans might rejuvenate the
> aged human brain.

[http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/6/238/238ec95](http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/6/238/238ec95)

~~~
russdill
In these studies they connected the circulatory systems of the two mice
together for prolonged periods of time.

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mto
From Gavin Belson we know that you can never ever trust your blood boy.

~~~
aedron
Seriously, it's not the first time that the real Silicon Valley turns out to
be even stranger than the show. I guess the writers have it easy.

~~~
mto
Right ;)

