Buck Institute for Research on Aging / Circulate Health
research_org · Novato, California, USA
FINANCIAL CONFLICTS
The Buck Institute for Research on Aging is a nonprofit aging-research organization founded in 1999 in Novato, California, with Eric Verdin as President/CEO since 2016. Circulate Health is a private for-profit company co-founded by Verdin, by Dobri Kiprov (Chief Scientific Officer; senior apheresis clinician with more than four decades of practice; founding member of the American Society for Apheresis), and by Brad Younggren (CEO). The *Aging Cell* trial published 28 May 2025 states the authors received no specific funding for the work; the disclosed conflict of interest is that three of the listed authors (David Furman, Eric Verdin, Dobri Kiprov) are members of Circulate; Verdin and Kiprov are co-founders, and the paper acknowledges technology support from Edifice Health. Circulate is commercializing the protocol as a private clinical service at the time of writing; the 2.61-year biological-age-reduction finding from the trial is deployed directly in Circulate's marketing materials. The conflict structure (a surrogate-endpoint trial with PIs as company members and a commercial product launched on the strength of the trial finding) is acknowledged in the paper's disclosures but is structurally identical to the developer-vendor-credentialing identity pattern that recurs across the historical cases in this archive. Specific equity stakes and commercial terms are not specified in the public record.
INTERVENTIONS PROMOTED
NOTES
The Buck Institute for Research on Aging is one of the leading nonprofit aging-research organizations in the United States. Its scientific portfolio is broader than the TPE-IVIG protocol, and the institutional credential it provides to Circulate Health rests on decades of basic aging research independent of the plasma-exchange work. Circulate Health is the clinical-commercial vehicle through which the TPE-IVIG protocol reaches paying clients; it is the contemporary counterpart of Clinique La Prairie in the Niehans case (Niehans’s developer-and-vendor identity in a single physician, now distributed across an institute and an affiliated company). The structural conflict between research institution, company, and clinical-service marketing is the central feature of the case and the primary subject of critical commentary in the apheresis and aging-medicine literature.