Scientists Dodge FDA to Offer a $1 Million Anti-Aging Treatment in Colombia
By Emily Mullin,
Medium One Zero
| 12. 05. 2019
Would you pay $1 million and fly to South America for a chance to live longer?
Libella Gene Therapeutics, a Kansas-based company that says it is developing a gene therapy that can reverse aging by up to 20 years, is hoping your answer is yes. In an interview with OneZero, the company says it is ready to give an experimental anti-aging therapy to older people at a clinic north of Bogota, Colombia. But that’s not all — it’s also charging people $1 million to participate. Scientists and ethicists say the company’s experiment is not only dubious but it also raises concerns about how anti-aging treatments should be tested in people.
The aim of Libella’s therapy is to lengthen a person’s telomeres, which sit at the tips of chromosomes like caps on the end of shoelaces. First discovered in the 1970s, telomeres have been linked to aging because they seem to shorten as a person gets older. By delivering a gene called TERT to cells, which in turn makes a telomere-rebuilding enzyme called telomerase, Libella thinks it can prevent, delay, or...
Related Articles
By Emily Mullin, Wired | 11.14.2023
In a small initial test in people, researchers have shown that a single infusion of a novel gene-editing treatment can reduce cholesterol, the fatty substance that clogs and hardens arteries over time.
The gene-editing treatment aims to permanently lower cholesterol...
By Carissa Wong, Nature | 11.16.2023
In a world first, the UK medicines regulator has approved a therapy that uses the CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing tool as a treatment. The decision marks another high point for a biotechnology that has been lauded as revolutionary in the decade since...
By Emily Mullin, Wired | 11.16.2023
The first medical treatment that uses Crispr gene editing was authorized Thursday by the United Kingdom.
The one-time therapy, which will be sold under the brand name Casgevy, is for patients with sickle cell disease and a related blood disorder...
By Alexis Heng, UCA News | 11.13.2023
In recent years, Singapore has increasingly leveraged new reproductive technologies to overcome the country's rapidly aging demographics and dismal fertility rate, which hit a new low in 2022.
Hence, it would be timely for Singapore’s Bioethics Advisory Committee (BAC) to...