“There are nine established hallmarks of aging,” says Dr Mohammed Enayat, founder of Hum2n, a walk-in longevity clinic in London’s Chelsea. He runs through some of them: cells grown senescent; the body’s production of stem cells; something called mitochondrial dysfunction. “By addressing some of these processes, you can see objective markers improving, and your biological age drops.” Dr Enayat talks of his Hum2n clinic as “the GP practice of the future”, where issues are discovered and dealt with before they arrive.
These can all be tested for—as I discover on a startling first day at Sha Mexico when a nurse ushers me into a dazzling laboratory containing randomly spaced machines. My results appear on an app, leading to prescriptions for procedures, supplements and exercise.
Dr Andrea Marquez is in charge of Sha Mexico’s most cutting-edge offers. With a calm, otherworldly manner, she’s more starship physician than harassed GP. She talks to me about stem cells and exosomes harvested from the umbilical cords of firstborn children. “A young boy produces approximately two billion stem cells per kilogram,” she says. “By the time he’s in his 80s, that drops to maybe 2,000.” She calls stem cells the body’s managers, moving to areas where damage has occurred, where they “signal for regeneration.” Harvesting stem cells from umbilical cords, she says, “is only allowed in Mexico, South Korea, Japan and India.” That means you cannot receive them in famed European medi spas such as Clinique La Prairie, Lanserhof, Mount Med or Sha’s mothership in Alicante, although some of them culture cells from the patient’s own body.
At Sha Mexico, they are taken from women without tattoos or a history of illness. They can also be harvested from the dental pulp of baby teeth. Wow, I say, the tooth fairy must be driving a Mercedes. “No,” Dr Marquez replies. “They are all donated.” Clearly, this freaks some clients out. A guest tells me she chose exosomes because no DNA is involved. Dr Marquez explains the difference: they both instruct cells to begin repairs, but “the stem cells are managers, the exosomes the messengers.” I ask how much a course would be. “For a man of your weight, $8,000.” Of course, stem cells and exosomes, available now for 10 years, are old cheese compared to the smorgasbord of medicines in development.