Anti-aging enthusiasts are getting stem cell injections in their knees – at more than $16,000 a year

It is a joint venture.

Longevity enthusiasts are flying around the world and spending thousands of dollars to inject stem cells into their ailing knees.

Bryan Johnson, the businessman famous for spending $2 million a year to try to reverse the aging process. recently revealed that he flew to Physical Longevity in the Bahamas to undergo treatments on his knees, hips and shoulders using mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs).

Stem cell therapy has been used to treat a variety of health conditions, including leukemia and diabetes, but using another person’s cells to keep knees healthy is a relatively new development and not FDA-approved.

The FDA only allows procedures in which a person’s own cells are used.

That’s why anti-aging enthusiasts – and athletes including Peyton Manning – are flying to places like the Bahamas and Panama to undergo the knee procedure.

When healthy cells are injected into a person, they can regenerate and repair tissue that has been damaged.

Medical experts hope the therapy can be used to treat a long list of medical issues.

“What I’m really hoping for is that in the future, when we go to the office for our annual checkup and get our flu shot, maybe we’ll also get a stem cell boost either to treat our current conditions or to we delay their onset, to treat our bodies in the best way possible, regardless of whatever the genetic lottery has given us,” Matthias Bernow, CEO of the biotech company Cellcolabs that provided the stem cells for Johnson’s procedure, told Business Insider.

However, stem cell therapy is currently very expensive and requires much more research, especially when used for newer treatments such as joint regeneration.

Johnson, for example, spent $16,500 per injection.

The tech mogul said he hired a team of medical experts who evaluated and reviewed studies on potential longevity treatments, which led him to undergo the procedure at Physical Longevity.

Johnson was injected with cells from young, healthy Swedish volunteers.

Because his health is already at peak health, he said he hasn’t noticed a big difference yet, but is awaiting objective data from his personalized longevity tests.

“That’s probably because my health biomarkers are already in the top 1% in terms of muscle, fat, metabolic health, cardiovascular health, etc,” Johnson told Business Insider. “So it’s very difficult for my subjective sense of well-being to improve.”

Doctors are optimistic about this type of stem cell therapy, but they want eager patients to understand that it is still being studied.

“I have to temper expectations and let patients know that this is not magic pixie dust. We’re studying this in a clinical trial, and the results take time,” Johnson’s doctor, Steven Sampson, told Business Insider.