edit: grammar
Edit: I thought it was illegal in the USA to pay for body parts, but there is an exception for plasma (and maybe the rest of the blood?). But it's already predatory http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/business/06plasma.html and this new business only makes it look worse.
And a quick google search says that people donating to a blood bank get $20 to $60 a pint, and the blood banks sell for $200-$600 a pint.
I wonder if blood banks will figure out the model here and sell direct.
Plasma donations are often paid though.
The reasoning is that if a blood bank is trying to grab a bigger slice of the pie than just its operating costs, a second blood bank can open and compete with the first one on price, and the only equilibrium is to have blood banks charging exactly at cost and no more.
Since you say that the business is predatory on the blood donors, do you think it's just that the market hasn't had time to settle, or that there's some funny business in this market maybe?
The problem is abetting those desperate to sell their blood and body parts are going to be abetting the downward spiral such people tend to be on. The most blood donors are homeless and drug addicts. Donating blood doesn't make someone more able to find a job, housing etc because it's a literal drain on their vitality.
I've long that people should be allowed to profit from selling their bodies /organs to medicine (especially after they die -- ie selling options), but it seems that only others can profit from your donation for the most part.
Is there any way to find out what blood-banks, and if it's disclosed to the donors that this is where the blood is going? I'd donate to a donor awareness campaign for these blood banks.. If they are not disclosing, I suspect their donations would take a hit if people found out their donation might not go to burn victims or cancer patients, and instead go to modern day Ian McCandless's.
Think I'll be checking with the place I occasionally donate to and see where theirs ends up. If they need money, they can ask for that; reselling what I thought was going to hospitals, etc. to these literal vampires is not, ah, kosher with me.
Ok so... blood does have an expiration date, at which point the blood banks must throw it out. If the supply of donated blood is less than the demand of patients for the blood, then what's wrong with a company recouping their costs by selling almost expired blood to millionaires who don't need it? It didn't say anything in the article about how fresh the blood is, but if what I describe is what is going on, then I don't see the moral issue.
And if there are more rich paranoids than I think and there is real demand for this, what do you want to bet on the expiry date creeping back or similar shenanigans?
Especially given the time and money involved in having to get regular transfusions, I'd think the practitioners would be better off using the time to spend an extra hour in the gym.
I'm not sure where this quote comes from or even if it's a quote, but over the last couple of years I often read about studies proving just what this controversial startup claims. Reversing aging in mice and better healing through younger blood. The ability to use pre existing stem cells through transfusions of "younger blood" and such. I'm not sure what to think of it especially since it was only tested on mice and I didn't check the credentials of the researchers, but a quick search turned up multiple hits:
https//arstechnica.com/science/2017/04/component-of-human-umbilical-cord-blood-perks-up-the-minds-of-old-mice/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/03/130325093659.h...
I remember another article that I couldn't find right now, but claiming a non reproducibility seems wrong.
Again wouldn't go to this startup and think that many things are wrong here, but plausible at least.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to-...
Consider in IVIG treatments that thousands of plasma donations are needed to make a SINGLE treatment dose and most people receiving these treatments have chronic diseases requiring ongoing treatment, so for just a single patient for one year you are talking about in excess of 10,000 donations needed.
But hey; lets just sell it all to the Peter Thiels of the world so we can keep them alive forever...
Sounds like the most stereotypical trope of snake oil.
There are a number of studies, going back many years, suggesting that young blood has a rejuvenating effect in older animals.
I have been using bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells to develop therapies for stroke and other forms of neural injury for more than a decade. What is particularly striking, is the effect of age upon these cells is quite obvious, both in vitro and therapeutically. In our own work, we found that when we treated stroked older animals with syngeneic MSCs from younger mice, they recovered much better than if they were treated with aged-matched MSCs.
What is even more interesting IMO, is that a couple of groups have reported that transplantation of young-to-old bone marrow, or just young-to-old MSCs significantly extends lifespan in mice. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23967009 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22355586
Based on the value of preserving your own autologous bone marrow stem cells, and their potential to be used in self young-to-old rejuvenating transplantation, I co-founded https://foreverlabs.com. In short, we cryopreserve your own bone marrow stem cells, to be used later in life. It's much like cord blood stem cell storage, but for adults.
The blood is born out of the bone marrow. Furthermore, the bone marrow cells (including MSCs) produce many soluble factors (proteins, cytokins, microvesicles, non-coding RNAs, etc.) that can significantly alter the blood profile. Thus, there is reason to believe that the parabiosis or the 'young blood effect' could be conferred by rejuvenating the bone marrow niche. Indeed, we this might be happening in the studies cited above.
We just launched our own version of a young-to-old bone marrow stem cell transplantation study in mice. It is our goal to better understand and optimize the young-to-old bone marrow transplantation effect, and to eventually offer the ability for our clients to donate their own younger bone marrow to their older selves (in addition to providing a store of young cells for other potential therapies).
There is much work to be done, but IMO there is real opportunity for a health-maintenance approach to medicine, and this is one of them. Disease treatment will not long remain as the most rational or economical approach to healthcare.
...now grab the popcorn and see how the people against free healthcare is going to rationalize a defense for this.
The official title is "The PLasma for Alzheimer SymptoM Amelioration (PLASMA) Study: Intravenously-Administered Plasma From Young Donors for Treatment of Mild-To-Moderate Alzheimer's Disease". More on https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02256306
This is another one of those things that makes me fear that open class warfare is imminent, with torches, pitchforks, guillotines, and all the accessories.
"The Red Cross has no record of providing blood to this organization."
So Ambrosia must be getting their blood from another supplier.
...and now it's lucrative pseudo science. sigh. maybe if they find the director he can be their very own hon Hubbard!
For those of you confused, it's a reference to a recent episode of Silicon Valley, which actually covered this.
If I donate to earthquake victims, I expect at least a portion of my donation to end up in the hands of earthquake victims.
If I donate whole blood to help those with medical needs, then I expect at least a portion of my donation to end up in the bloodsteam of someone with a genuine medical need.
The US has outlawed paid whole blood donations, so EVERY whole blood donation in the US is an act of charity.
It'd be interesting to see what Ambrosia told the blood banks though.
As mentioned, though, this creates an odd situation. The donor is sort of misled that they are doing something charitable, which is clearly not the case here.
It looks like I donate to a for profit organization, but for instance, the Red Cross isn't paying shareholders profits from the blood they sell.
That's an interesting spin, which may be true of other types of injection. However for flu shots, it can save lives (the poor are particularly susceptible and potentially focal for infection clusters). In that way the financial incentive is progressive.
[0] http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/16/health/flu-shot-effective-cdc-...