Entrepreneur spends millions to reverse his aging, gets swollen face after fat injection goes wrong

A software entrepreneur, who has spent millions to try to reverse his aging, ended up with swollen face after a treatment-gone-wrong that included injecting fat from a donor into his face.

In an Instagram post on Nov. 14, Bryan Johnson, 47, shared selfies showing parts of his face swelling so bad that he almost couldn't see.

"Have any of your therapies gone wrong?” Johnson said in the caption. "In starting Project Blueprint, I had one question: Are we the first generation who won’t die?"

Johnson was talking about a medical program involving over 30 doctors aiming to reverse the aging process in his every organ. He talked about this in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek in January 2023.

The program, which he spent $2 million (P117 million) on, includes strict guidelines for diet, exercise, and sleep every day. It also includes taking several supplements and medicines.

"The body delivers a certain configuration at age 18," Johnson told Bloomberg Businessweek. "This really is an impassioned approach to achieve age 18 everywhere."

But in his Nov. 14 post, he noted that he "got really lean" and lost a lot of fat, especially in the face due to the program's caloric restrictions.

While his biomarkers were improving, he said he looked gaunt. "People thought I was on the brink of death," he said.

As his team evaluated "all the scientific literature on longevity and aging, stack ranking the best-performing health therapies with the most compelling evidence," Johnson said they discovered that facial fat is "pretty important for how people perceive youth."

"It didn’t matter how good my biomarkers were if I didn’t have face fat," he said.

That's why they started "Project Baby Face," in an effort "to explore whether we can restore lost volume."

The first therapy included injecting a fat-derived extracellular matrix "to restore volume by stimulating my body’s natural fat growth."

While it’s possible to use his body fat, Johnson said he didn’t have enough, so he resorted to a donor.

"Immediately following the injections, my face began to blow up," he said. "And then it got worse, and worse, and worse until I couldn’t even see. It was a severe allergic reaction."

He was scheduled to meet with a Bloomberg reporter 30 minutes after the treatment to talk about Project Blueprint.

"I called [the reporter] and said, 'Hey, so that you’re not alarmed, you may not recognize me today. I think I’m ok. I hope I’m ok. If I’m not ok, are you by chance trained to perform any life-saving actions?'" he said.

Johnson said his face "was back to normal" after seven days, and they're "back in the trenches reformulating plans for our next attempt."

"Building a product is one thing; being the product is a whole different thing," he added.