Is anyone interested in organizing a group buy for this? This is such a promising protein. Being a protein, surely we can get some made up. It's $3900 for 1mg on one site, sure we can get it for a LOT less if we buy in bulk. Anyone want to take a lead on this? This could be the big one we've all been waiting for.
http://www.newscient...ue#.U_W43IHmeE0
....In 2005, Thomas Rando at Stanford University in California and his team found that young blood returned the liver and skeletal stem cells of old mice to a more youthful state during heterochronic parabiosis. The old mice were also able to repair injured muscles as well as young mice...
...Spooky things seemed to happen in the opposite direction, too: young mice that received old blood appeared to age prematurely. In some cases, injured muscles did not heal as fast as would be expected.
Several other experiments have shown similar effects. In 2012, Amy Wagers at Harvard University showed that young blood can reverse heart decline in old mice. Her team paired healthy young mice with old mice that had cardiac hypertrophy – a condition which swells the size of their heart – and connected their circulatory systems. After four weeks, the old mouse's heart had shrunk to the same size as its younger partner...
Once the researchers had ruled out the effect of reduced blood pressure on the older mice, they identified a protein in the blood plasma called growth differentiation factor 11 (GDF11) that appeared to fall with age. To see if it was linked to the rejuvenating effects, the team gave old mice with enlarged hearts daily injections of GDF11 for 30 days. Their hearts decreased in size almost as much as they had in the parabiosis experiments.
A year later, the same team showed in mice that daily injections of GDF11 also increases the number of blood vessels and the number of stem cells in the brain – both factors known to improve brain function. A separate team led by Tony Wyss-Coray at Stanford performed similar experiments. His team injected blood plasma from young mice into old mice and showed an improvement in the old mice's physical endurance and cognitive function.
In both mice and humans, GDF11 falls with age. We don't know why it declines, but we know it is involved in several mechanisms that control growth. It is also thought to mediate some age-related effects on the brain, in part by activation of another protein that is involved in neuronal growth and long-term memory.
So the billion-dollar question is: would a GDF11 boost have the same effect in humans? Wyss-Coray thinks it will, having taken the next step of injecting young human blood plasma into old mice. His preliminary results suggest that human blood has similar rejuvenating benefits for old mice as young mouse blood does.
"We saw these astounding effects," he says. "The human blood had beneficial effects on every organ we've studied so far."