At 87, Helga Sands could be forgiven for spending her twilight years embracing the quiet life and making peace with what is to come. Instead she’s on a quest to live forever.
Next month she will board a plane and fly to Panama where she will receive a £300,000 “rejuvenation” cocktail that is forbidden in the UK. If effective, it will revitalise her mind and body — and very possibly extend her lifespan, she claims.
When she’s not travelling the globe she takes an estimated 70 supplements a day, washes her hair with sheep shampoo, sleeps on a silver-threaded bed sheet to reduce inflammation and injects herself with microscopic molecules sourced from amniotic fluid. In total, she’s spent half a million pounds on anti-ageing therapies over the last five years.
“You might like the idea of dying and going to heaven but I have no interest,” said Sands, a grandmother-of-three who lives on the 24th floor of the Barbican’s Shakespeare Tower, in London. “I want to keep living because I still have so much to live for. I’m not slowing down but speeding up. This is a new life.
She added: “I was recently asked if I made it to 120 or 130, would I be satisfied? Hell no. I have absolutely no limit.”
The pursuit of immortality is typically a younger man’s game, championed by American entrepreneurs with deep pockets. Bryan Johnson, 48, infamously infused his blood with his son’s and every year subjects his body to hundreds of tests and scans. Mark Zuckerberg, 41, has spent millions funding innovative anti-ageing treatments, along with several other billionaires.
Then there’s Sands — who may be the oldest biohacker in the business. She has survived a world war, watched mankind reach the moon, lived through several cultural revolutions and welcomed the dawn of the internet.
Sands says her muscle mass has increased
VICKI COUCHMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Born in 1938, she left Nazi Germany as a young child during the Second World War and later evaded gunfire from the Soviets as she and her family returned home, walking for eight months from Czechoslovakia to Düsseldorf. “Bullets were going right and left because we were crossing borders we were not supposed to,” she said.
In the 1960s, she moved to the US, with her then husband, and later Paris before buying her London flat in the mid-1980s, where she has lived ever since. She worked in the City for some of America’s biggest banks and eventually became one of the first female directors in fixed income at the Japanese firm Nomura.
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It was only after she retired in 1997, having made her wealth, that Sands turned her hand to the longevity industry. For the past 25 years she has been attending conferences across the globe and making connections with leading researchers to learn about emerging therapies and sample off-record treatments — many of which can only be accessed in countries with lax health laws.
The therapies, she claims, are working. In recent years, as the technology has improved, her muscle mass has increased, her balance has improved and several lingering health ailments have vanished. The only disadvantage is that her friends can no longer keep up with her.
“I go to Kew Gardens or the wetlands for the day but I can never get anyone to go with me. ‘That’s a long walk. No I can’t do that’. I always go on my own,” she said, adding that she aims to get 10,000 steps in a day.
Her friends may be impressed by her vitality but her daughter does not approve, she admitted. “She doesn’t support this,” Sands said. “But if I asked her: ‘Would you like to have this therapy?’ ‘Oh yes mum.’ She wants it.”
Her everyday life is nothing extraordinary, she continues. She goes for regular walks with her partner — her first marriage ended in divorce while her second husband died several years ago — and avoids “crap” food from the supermarket. She occasionally eats meat but avoids gluten due to an intolerance, and treats herself to dark chocolate every now and again. Sands does still enjoy a glass of white wine “in moderation and organic only”.
“I don’t have a regime that I would say, ‘Oh, I have to do this and that’. No, I live a normal, happy life,” she said.
Sands takes between 50 and 70 supplements a day
VICKI COUCHMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Yet the treatments and supplements Sands is experimenting with are anything but normal.
She takes dasatinib and quercetin — anticancer and antioxidant compounds, respectively — to eliminate her body’s “zombie” cells. This combination, a powder that she adds to her shampoo and in smoothies, costs “just a few hundred dollars”.
Every few months her blood is filtered, infused with ozone and then added back into her body in a treatment that costs £400 a session and which purportedly maximises oxygen metabolism. She also pays £2,000 every three months to inject herself with two trillion exosomes, which derive from stem cells harvested from the amniotic fluid of pregnant women and aid skin restoration.
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In March, after first flying to Bogota for a health conference, Sands will travel to Panama to receive a “rejuvenation cocktail” that she designed in collaboration with an American lab in Houston. The cocktail is made of three key components: klotho, a protein for enhancing brain function; follistatin, for building muscle mass; and SIRT1, an enzyme that helps boost energy levels.
Along with her partner, Ken, she has invested about £300,000 in the therapy, which the couple hope they will be able to eventually produce at scale and sell to other elderly people via a rejuvenation start-up they have founded.
“This is cutting-edge gene therapy,” said Sands. “I think that will really rejuvenate our body, our brain.”
Sands hopes to produce the cocktail with her rejuvenation start-up
VICKI COUCHMAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
Many of the treatments are not permitted by the British medicines regulator, forcing Sands to buy her products online, from countries like India and the US, and self-administer from her kitchen, where she concocts her various lotions and potions. Experts warn that this type of experimentation carries notable risks.
Ilaria Bellantuono, a professor of musculoskeletal ageing at the University of Sheffield, said the safety and effectiveness of Sands’ therapies had not been tested yet in humans and should be avoided. “My view is that therapies of this kind should not be used until they have been robustly tested in well-designed clinical trials.”
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Sands is not fazed. She is “absolutely” prepared to take the risk, she said, such is her commitment to living longer and also blazing a trail that will hopefully, one day, benefit others in the years to come.
“There are therapies out there that work but people don’t have a clue about,” she said. “And then there are the regulations that get in the way. So we say: the hell with it. We’re going to do it.”