The company’s public relations staffer sent me a spreadsheet of the supposed benefits experienced by the participants, including improved vision in a 64-year-old female, longer landscaping sessions for a 59-year-old man, longer badminton games, improved hand grip, better erections than with Viagra, as well as “increased bowel movements.”
Obviously, any age-reversal drug that works would be the best-selling product of all time. The problem is that none have ever been shown to do that. And Generation’s approach to evidence raises several red flags. For instance, Su says the company now plans to launch a larger study, involving a hundred or more people. However, these subjects will be asked to pay for their enrollment. Such “pay-to-play” clinical trials are often seen as a sales channel, rather than a scientific pursuit.
In addition, the trial will be led by longevity doctors who practice alternative medicine. These include Matt Cook, founder of a network of clinics called BioReset Medical. Cook’s clinics offer what I would characterize as unproven treatments, such as stem-cell injections. A 2021 article reported he’d recommended covid-19 treatments designated as “fraudulent” by the FDA. Those included inhaling amniotic fluid from a nebulizer.
In a phone call, Cook says he initially agreed to prescribe the combination to Conboy and a few other insiders as a favor. (Everyone involved, he says, is a member of the same “happening” Silicon Valley scene around life extension.) “My confidence this was going to work was a zero. Like, I did not believe it was actually going to work,” says Cook. That is because “it’s two safe, generic drugs that are not even longevity drugs.”
But Cook, who also took the combination, says there was an effect. “And I have to tell you, it was the most surprising thing that ever happened to me,” he says. After taking the weekly injections, he experienced a sense of mental clarity that lasted for a day, and then several days. The other subjects, he says, reported a sense of well-being, as well as old aches and pains that evaporated.
“There was a fairly significant broad set of symptoms that doesn’t really match what either of the drugs do,” he says. “So it’s interesting. [But] I have many more questions than I have answers … I still feel like I don’t understand exactly what the mechanism is.”
Prior to joining Generation Lab full time in 2025, Irina Conboy had a long career at the University of California, Berkeley, where she made her name via a widely cited series of experiments aimed at learning whether the characteristics of age, or youth, could be transferred between animals via the bloodstream. In 2005, for instance, she surgically connected two-month-old mice to very aged ones, finding that the old animals’ ability to heal from injury dramatically improved.
This suggested that young blood must contain specific, powerful molecular signals capable of restoring the regenerative capacity of an old animal. As researchers zeroed in on candidate signals, several startups, including Elevian, a Harvard spinout, and Alkahest, tied to Stanford University scientists, were able to raise millions to pursue treatments for stroke or Alzheimer’s. However, those efforts still have not hit commercial paydirt.
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