The 53-year-old entrepreneur claims that her biological age, which dropped rapidly after the second treatment, is now under 25. However, the scientific world has always viewed these explanations with suspicion.
In fact, Parrish is trying to carry out her company's activities there by visiting countries one by one whose rules in the field of health are not very strict.
Liz Parrish, founder of BioViva, which works in the field of gene therapy, was worried as she headed to Bogota, Colombia, in 2015. She was going to a clinic for an untested gene therapy. She had been developing and preparing for this therapy for two years, but she did not know how it would turn out. She was in this country because she could not obtain the necessary permits in the USA.
The treatment consisted of two injections and went smoothly. The first was a myostatin inhibitor being tested as a treatment for muscle wasting. The other was telomerase gene therapy. She had the results a few weeks later. The report was surprising. Before the treatment, Parrish's health indicators showed her biological age to be 66, a full 22 years more than her actual age. After the treatment, her biological age and real age were 44, the same. Parrish repeated the treatment in 2020 and observed that her biological age had decreased by an average of five years each year since 2015. The 53-year-old entrepreneur claims that her biological age, which dropped rapidly after the second treatment, is now under 25.
BioViva was founded in 2015. CEO Elizabeth Parrish appeared at WIRED Health 2017 in London to discuss BioViva's testing of gene therapies targeting hallmarks of the ageing process. She stated, "The company was built essentially to prove these therapies work or not. Remember, BioViva is not a research organisation. We are taking things like gene therapies and using them like technology."
As you can see, Liz Parrish, the head of BioViva, founded in the USA, is a name that believes in the first gene therapy developed to reverse aging, enough to try this treatment on herself. That's why she defines herself as 'Patient Zero'. According to Parrish, aging is a disease, and millions of people die needlessly every year because studies that could potentially treat this disease do not receive enough support.
A country that will embrace you?
Studies by Maria Blasco, director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center in Madrid, showed that mice that received injections of viruses loaded with reparative genes not only aged healthier and experienced fewer diseases but also lived a staggering 25 percent longer. Findings like these support the potential of gene therapies to live longer, healthier lives. According to Parrish, science is progressing very slowly on this issue.
BioViva claimed that six months after treatment, telomeres in Parrish's white blood cells, which normally shorten after each cell division, lengthened by 9%. Parrish announced that when she had a test accepted in the scientific world, her telomeres lengthened by the equivalent of 20 years. However, the scientific world has always viewed these explanations with suspicion. In fact, Parrish is trying to carry out her company's activities there by visiting countries one by one whose rules in the field of health are not very strict.
75 thousand dollars
George Church, Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and one of BioViva's advisors, thinks that gene therapy is promising, but criticizes Parrish's hasty attitude, saying, "If you release human trials without any restrictions, you may face frightening consequences." As a matter of fact, Jesse Gelsinger, who died in 1999 during a gene therapy trial in France, reveals the dangers of such attempts. According to experts who oppose Parrish, interventions that reduce aging to just telomeres could be dangerous. Shortening telomeres aims to limit the number of cell proliferations and potentially limit the risk of cancer. Tampering with a basic evolved tumor suppression mechanism therefore doesn't seem like such a good idea.
In 2019, just three years after being injected with telomerase gene therapy in Bogota, Colombia, the female entrepreneur announced that BioViva was ready for human testing of anti-aging drugs. Prices started from 75 thousand dollars. “We're trying to get to the heart of the pain caused by the so-called diseases of aging in the industrialized world,” says Parrish.
What is telomere?
Every time our cells divide, our telomeres, the protective covers of our cells, shorten. This ensures that our cells have a limited lifespan. When telomeres are too short, the cell can no longer survive. The accumulation of these dead cells causes aging and a range of diseases, from dementia to atherosclerosis. However, some of our cells, such as stem cells, do not have this limiting factor, thanks to a gene (telomerase) that repairs telomeres and extends the life of the cells. If a cat has nine lives, then a human cell division process has approximately 50 to 70 lives. According to Parrish's claim, if we artificially introduce this gene into other cells, we can not only slow down their aging but also 'resurrect' even cells that are close to death and reset their chromosome clocks.