A Startup Claims It Has an Anti-Aging Drug Combo, but It Won’t Share the Recipe

Generation Lab’s CEO Alina Su reached out to a reporter with an offer to join a “private cohort” receiving access to the treatment, saying there is a long wait list including celebrities and well-known people. A company fact sheet says the treatment, called 1-Generation, “blocks the systemic spread of aging in the bloodstream, reawakens the body’s own repair mechanism and restores health and youth to multiple tissues.”

The reporter, who has followed founder Irina Conboy’s research on parabiosis, said the pitch was clearly a marketing campaign and probably too good to be true. The company refused to say what the two drugs are, making the proposition hard to take seriously. Conboy, a University of California, Berkeley researcher who previously made her name by joining the circulatory systems of old and young lab animals, said she has been taking the drug combination for two months and feels more energetic. A handful of insiders, including Su and Conboy’s husband Michael Conboy, also took it. The company’s public relations staff sent a spreadsheet of supposed benefits, including improved vision in a 64-year-old woman, longer badminton games, better hand grip, and improved erections.

Generation Lab’s approach to evidence raises several red flags. The company plans to launch a larger study involving a hundred or more people, but those subjects will be asked to pay for enrollment, which is often seen as a sales channel rather than a scientific pursuit. The trial will be led by longevity doctors who practice alternative medicine, including Matt Cook, founder of BioReset Medical, who previously recommended COVID-19 treatments designated as fraudulent by the FDA.

Cook initially agreed to prescribe the combination to Conboy and other insiders as a favor, saying his confidence that it would work was zero. But after taking the weekly injections, he experienced mental clarity and old aches vanished. “I have many more questions than I have answers,” he said, adding that he still does not understand the mechanism. The article notes that no age-reversal drug has ever been shown to work, and Generation Lab’s claims are unverified.