When the results of the trial were published in November 2021, BioViva bragged that it had done just that. “Despite decades of effort and billions of dollars devoted to dementia research, we’ve seen very little progress… thus far,” founding CEO Liz Parrish stated in a press release. Working on the fringes of medicine, she claims her company has succeeded where countless others have failed – by reversing the effects of aging.
Gene therapies that Modifying a patient’s cells, is at the forefront of medical research. The test is highly structured. In the United States, only a few dozen are authorized, to treat serious conditions such as cancer, vision loss, or muscular dystrophy. But in 2015, the same year it was founded, BioViva became the first company in the world to try using gene therapy to reverse aging, by injecting the treatment it developed into a single person. the patient? Liz Parrish, founder and CEO of the company. This was not part of a clinical trial, and it did not happen in the United States; This wild one-person experiment was conducted at a clinic in Bogota, Colombia, far from oversight by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Shortly thereafter, on a Futurology forum on Reddit, Parrish announced that she had received this treatment in South America. It also announced that BioViva would work to bring such life-extending therapies to the general public. Parrish seems to have revealed the Fountain of Youth – or at least convinced her followers to do so.
Following her self-experiment, Parrish has built a successful career promoting the life-extending potential of gene therapies, speaking at events around the world (including at the WIRED Health Summit). I saw her in person for the first time at one of these events: the Longevity World Forum in Valencia in 2019. I would have guessed she was in her late 30s, although at the time she was almost 50. And when we talked afterward, she insisted on squeezing her arm to feel the toned muscles underneath — the product, she said, of the experimental, not-yet-approved, gene therapy for follistatin, a protein involved in muscle development, which she had received along with the treatment for telomerase, one of the enzymes. Given to MJ. A 2016 press release said her experiment had turned back the clock by 20 years, while a paper published last year claims that thanks to subsequent gene therapy treatments, Parrish now appears to have a biological lifespan of 25. 52.
Parrish bemoans the lethargy with which these longevity remedies make their way to the public. It claims that regulatory authorities are the enemy of progress. They need to step aside and allow those who wish to try anti-aging treatments. This isn’t just practical, according to Parrish, it’s ethical. Millions of people die every year from something treatable: aging.
Parrish has codified her philosophy into something she calls “Best Choice Medicine.” In the United States, federal and state “right to try” laws allow doctors to offer unproven, experimental treatments to terminally ill patients. Parrish wants to see the same provisions extended to unapproved anti-aging gene therapies. When we met at her home on Bainbridge Island, Washington, last summer, she told me that seniors should be allowed to put their lives on the line to improve their children’s chances of a healthy old age. It’s the Silicon Valley motto of “move fast and smash things” that medicine brought about.