A startup claims it’s found a drug to make your blood young

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Narrated by NOAH. Listen to more of the best articles from the world's biggest publishers on the NOAH app. Or at newsoveraudio.com. Antonio Regalado writes, a startup claims it's found a drug to make your blood young. I knew I'd officially become a longevity influencer in August 2026 when a company called Generation Lab reached out to offer me the chance to write about and even receive their new rejuvenation treatment, An injectable combination of 2 existing drugs which they call One Generation. This wasn't just any anti-aging treatment either. A company fact sheet says that it blocks the systemic spread of aging in the bloodstream, reawakens the body's own repair mechanism, and restores health and youth to multiple tissues. The exclusive offer to join a private cohort receiving access to the treatment was being extended to a limited number of people whose judgment on the science we trust, under close physician supervision. There's a long waitlist including a lot of celebrities, well-known people, people who you have heard of, Generation Labs CEO Alina Su told me in a conference call. So we're 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's actually working. 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's more, Generation Lab wouldn't tell me what the 2 drugs are, making the proposition hard to take seriously. Yet this pitch got my interest. The reason? I am a longtime follower of Generation Lab's 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. The procedure, called parabiosis, or heterochronic blood exchange, is one of the few things actually proven to make an old animal act younger. But you can't go through life attached by the veins to a younger person. So, the quest has been to find practical ways to mimic those benefits. And that is something Convoy says she's now achieved by hitting on a combination of 2 existing drugs that produce youthful effects, but without the need for any bodily fluid exchange. Over the last 2 months, Convoy 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 Sue. the company's 26-year-old CEO, as well as Conboy's husband and scientific collaborator Michael Conboy. The company's 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 increased bowel movements. 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's approach to evidence raises several red flags. For instance, Sue says the company now plans to launch a larger study involving 100 or more people. However, others are being offered the drug before firm evidence of a benefit is in. In addition, the trial will be led by longevity doctors who practice alternative medicine. These include Matt Cook, founder of a network of clinics called BioReset Medical. Cook's clinics offer what I would characterize as unproven treatments, such as stem cell injections. A 2021 article reported he'd recommended COVID-19 treatments designated as fraudulent by the FDA. Those included inhaling amniotic fluid from a nebulizer. In a phone call, Cook says he initially agreed to prescribe the combination to Convoy and a few other insiders. Everyone involved, he says, is a member of the same happening Silicon Valley scene around life extension. My confidence this was going to work was zero. Like, I did not believe it was actually going to work, says Cook. That is because it's 2 safe generic drugs that are not even longevity drugs. But Cook, who also took the combination, says there was an effect. And I have to tell you, it was the most surprising thing that ever happened to me, 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. There was a fairly significant broad set of symptoms that doesn't really match what either of the drugs do, he says. So it's interesting, but I have many more questions than I have answers. I still feel like I don't understand exactly what the mechanism is. 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 2-month-old mice to very aged ones, finding that the old animals' ability to heal from injury dramatically improved. 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 Allevion, A Harvard spinout, and Alkahest, tied to Stanford University scientists, were able to raise millions to pursue treatments for stroke or Alzheimer's. However, those efforts still have not hit commercial pay dirt. Although it's 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, old blood dominates. 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 saltwater. This was like pressing the delete key on a swarm of hormones, antibodies, and other molecules released by the aged body. The reset had even stronger rejuvenating effects than sharing a young animal's blood, and within 2 years, Conboy had tried it on human volunteers who agreed to have almost half their blood volume removed and thrown away. Longevity clinics have been quick to follow Conboy's research. Some began offering therapeutic plasma exchange as a wellness intervention for prices of up to $10,000 a session. One doctor that offers it, Jeffrey Gladden, says that after seeing Conboy's publications, he raced to California to meet her and to get the procedure himself. 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'd co-developed. which allows researchers to bathe human cells kept in a microfluidic device with blood serum from old people. The new device, described in a paper in 2026, allowed her to quickly test her intuitions about what drugs might work. This 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. She says One Generation works by stimulating cells to regenerate and simultaneously neutralizing the old age factors in a person's bloodstream. It allows human cells to remain young even when they are in the presence of old people's blood serum, says Conboy. Without knowing what the drugs are, I can't give my own opinion about their promise, But some doctors working with GenerationLab expressed surprise that the combination would work. I will say right now, candidly, it's an unknown how it will play out, but there's certainly a lot of enthusiasm based on the quality of her work in the past, says Gladden, the longevity doctor who says his Texas clinic will also be involved in the study. I am skeptical and optimistic at the same time. Pressed on why the names of the drugs remain confidential, Su said it's to avoid imitators. That's important because Generation doesn't own the molecules. Instead, it will seek to quickly run a clinical trial, taking advantage of an FDA process that gives companies a short period of exclusivity— perhaps 3 years— if they can show that a combination of existing drugs has a new use. In the meantime, the company's effort to generate buzz is having some success. Generation is hosting an August 28th, 2026 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. People are clamoring for it, Cook from BioReset Medical told me. He says his office has started getting calls from high-end doctors, venture capitalists, and people in this community who are kind of biohackers. It's high-level influencer-type people, he adds. As for me, no, I won't be taking the drugs anytime soon. Not until I know what they are. You were listening to MIT Technology Review, where Antonio Regalado writes, A startup claims it's found a drug to make your blood young. This article was published on August 27th, 2026, and was read by Sam Scholl for NOAH.