[MIT] Just off a winding highway along the Pacific coast in Monterey, California, is a private clinic where people can pay $8,000 to have their veins pumped with blood plasma from teenagers and young adults.Jesse Karmazin is the entrepreneur who made the practice possible, by launching a clinical trial on the potential of "young blood" through his startup Ambrosia. He says that within a month, most participants "see improvements" from the one-time infusion of a two-liter bagful of plasma, which is blood with the blood cells removed.
Several scientists and clinicians say Karmazin’s trial is so poorly designed it cannot hope to provide evidence about the effects of the transfusions. And some say the pay-to-participate study, with the potential to collect up to $4.8 million from as many as 600 participants, amounts to a scam.