The deregulation of the immune system with age eventually leads to chronic inflammation, or inflammaging, but blood sharing between young and old mice has shown rapid and robust pro-geronic and rejuvenative influences:
Interestingly, the procedure of small animal plasma exchange to dilute the circulating factors in plasma effectively reset the age-elevated systemic proteome and restored youthful healthy maintenance and repair of muscle, liver, and brain, without any added young blood, young plasma, or young factors.
For people, plasma dilution is known as plasmapheresis or therapeutic plasma exchange (TPE); it replaces a patient’s plasma with saline and purified albumin. The blood cells are returned to the patient so that while the cell profile does not change, the circulating blood proteins are diluted, including cytokines, autoreactive antibodies or toxins, and such pathogenic determinants of specific disorders.
Although its full therapeutic benefits are still being discovered, TPE is one of the treatments for autoimmune and neurological diseases such as myasthenia gravis, Alzheimer’s disease, and Guillain–Barre syndrome.
Moreover, TPE has the capacity to relieve the symptoms of long-haul COVID-19, including prevention of pneumonia, reduction of “brain fog,” and attenuation of the cytokine storm and hyper-inflammation.
This came up when eccentric life-extension fanatic Bryan Johnson (“Don’t die!”) shared the news — accompanied by a delightful photo — that he;s no longer injecting his son’s blood:
I am no longer injecting my son’s blood.
I’ve upgraded to something else: total plasma exchange.
Steps:
1. Take out all blood from body
2. Separate plasma from blood
3. Replace plasma with 5% albumin & IVIGHere’s my bag of plasma. Who wants it?
???? pic.twitter.com/rUScTIDea6— Bryan Johnson /dd (@bryan_johnson) January 28, 2025
Pilot studies of TPE involving mice and three human patients look promising:
The results demonstrate significant and lasting rejuvenation of both humoral and cellular blood compartments in people who underwent repeated plasmapheresis. The rejuvenative changes are not limited to a reduction of inflammaging but encompass diminished circulatory protein markers of neurodegeneration and cancer, as well as reduced senescence, lower DNA damage, and improved myeloid/lymphoid homeostasis. Mechanistically, these and previously reported positive effects of TPE become better understood through longitudinal comparative proteomics of the blood plasma, demonstrating a youthful recalibration of the canonical signaling pathways, broadly regulating tissue health, and interacting through the node of TPR-4. Lastly, a novel application of Levene’s test to profile the noise of the systemic proteome uncovered several proteins: new biomarkers that collectively quantify a person’s biological age, removing a need for predictions.
Even just cleaning up glycolipids may partially “reboot” immune system.
First of all, they are part of immune response regulation.
Second of all, they are the reason #1 why cancer often leads to immune problems.
Many forms of tumors make the rapidly growing cells shed membrane glycolipids, and since NKT already monitor very similar compounds, the adaptation is that they actively track down and destroy the sources of shedding. This allows rapid response, there’s not even a significant tumor as such yet. The flip side is that when this process lags too much (the obvious possibilities are T-killers being already exhausted by something else, or there are simply too few due to recent blood loss or poisoning), the growth sheds more and more glycolipids, and then immune system gets continuously jammed by the “smell” too widespread to track the gradients properly.
So, remove glycolipids from bloodstream, but keep cells, add some ready wake-up signal (like ?-GalCer https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-21480-1), and it will be “Round 2″. May need several iterations, of course.