Can Exercise Be Transfused?
Exercise-Conditioned Plasma and the Future of Exercise in Medicine
A paper published this year by longevity and exercise physiology researchers in Singapore shines a light on a fascinating and emerging area of exercise science: exercise-conditioned plasma.
The paper, published in April 2025, summarizes some of the research and mechanisms behind plasma exerkines and their positive impacts on organs across the body, including the liver, pancreas, brain, heart, and more.
What Are Exerkines?
Plasma exerkines are signalling molecules that travel through the blood. Essentially, they are messengers, released from our muscles when we engage in exercise. They communicate to the rest of the body that we're moving.
To do this, exerkines travel through the bloodstream, allowing them to communicate with organs and tissues throughout the body. By using this mode of transportation, they can help mediate many of the positive effects of exercise across multiple organ systems.
But if you don't exercise, you produce fewer exerkines, meaning you miss out on some of those exercise-induced signals and their downstream effects.
Exerkines include a whole bunch of different molecules, things like proteins, peptides, metabolites, and extracellular vesicles. So, this area of research is not only new, but expansive. This also makes it really hard to study each exerkine individually.
Figure 1. Graphical illustration showing a summary of the mechanisms of exercise-conditioned plasma on selected biological functions in health and disease. Reproduced from Sitjar and Goh (2025) under CC BY 4.0.
Can the Benefits of Exercise Be Transferred?
This recently published paper begins to ask a big question: can exerkines from a regularly active individual be transferred to someone who is inactive? and in doing so, could it carry some of the benefits of exercise from one person to another.
The research conducted in animal models, along with mechanistic speculation, is quite promising.
Researchers have observed and speculated possible changes like:
Slower tumour growth
Slower Alzheimer's disease progression
Improved blood glucose regulation
Improved immune system function
These all sound great. But until there are human trials, it's unclear whether these findings will translate meaningfully to people.
Exciting, Sci-Fi, and Maybe a Little Dystopian?
My first reaction, as a person, was: wow, this seems incredibly sci-fi and somewhat dystopian.
We've already seen how breakthroughs in longevity science have been commercialized in recent years, or co-opted to monetize peoples' fear of aging, and I wouldn't expect this area of research to be any different.
As a science fiction fan, I like to imagine this being used during interstellar travel to help keep people healthy while they rest over decades of drifting through the cosmos 🌑⭐🚀.
But as an exercise physiologist, I can also see realistic clinical applications.
For example, in oncology settings, exercise is beneficial during chemotherapy treatment. However, engaging in meaningful amounts of exercise can be incredibly difficult for many patients. If therapies like this prove effective, they could potentially help bridge that gap.
Of course, that's still speculative. The science is young, and many questions remain unanswered.
Where Does This Go Next?
It's fascinating to think about where this research could go in the coming years.
Will exercise-conditioned plasma become a legitimate therapeutic tool? Will it only benefit specific clinical populations? Or will it ultimately prove far less effective than the excitement behind this paper currently suggests?
For now, and likely down the road, the most reliable way to benefit from exerkines remains the same as it's always been:
Move your body.
Source:
Sitjar, P. H. S., & Goh, J. (2025). Is it time for exercise-conditioned plasma to enter human trials?. International journal of biological sciences, 21(7), 2954–2956. https://doi.org/10.7150/ijbs.110586
