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BioViva is a Bainbridge Island, Washington-based biotechnology company developing treatments to slow the ageing process in humans.
Contents
History
BioViva was founded in 2015. In early 2016, Sierra Sciences announced that they were working with BioViva to start a new medical tourism-based venture, BioViva FIJI, on Fiji and that they will be the first company to use gene therapy to treat biological aging in humans. CEO Liz Parrish explained the reason for setting up in Fiji: "The current regulatory authorities have an outdated model that does not accommodate these new technologies." In June 2016, government sources in Fiji denied knowledge of the venture.
Response
Parrish's treatment, often labelled as self-experimentation, is highly controversial. As the requirements to progress to human trials had not started, the US Food and Drug Administration did not authorize Parrish's experiments. Parrish travelled to Colombia for the treatments.
Altering the genetic makeup of humans, or gene therapy, by lengthening telomeres has been described as dangerous, as the ageing process is poorly understood. The telomeres' function is to restrict the number of times a cell can divide (thereby multiplying) to suppress cancer. Duncan Baird, a professor of Cancer and Genetics at Cardiff University’s School of Medicine states, “Meddling with a fundamentally important tumor-suppressive mechanism that has evolved in long-lived species like ours doesn’t strike me as a particularly good idea.”
Timothy Caulfield, professor in the Faculty of Law and the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta, characterized BioViva's work as 'pseudoscience' and lacking scientific rigor. George M Martin, professor of pathology at the University of Washington had agreed to be an adviser to the company but resigned upon hearing about Parrish's self-experiments.
Antonio Regalado, reporter for the MIT Technology Review states, "The experiment seems likely to be remembered as either a new low in medical quackery or, perhaps, the unlikely start of an era in which people receive genetic modifications not just to treat disease, but to reverse aging."