Change Your Brain Every Day - How do Stem Cells Repair the Body? With Dr. Todd Ovokaitys

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

Many of us have heard of stem cell therapy and are aware of its implications for human potential, but do you know how stem cell therapy actually works? In the second episode of a series with stem cell researcher Dr. Todd Ovokaitys, he and the Amens discuss the role stem cells play in human body function and repair, and why they’re so important to the future of healing processes.  For more on Dr. Todd Ovokaitys, visit his page at: http://drtoddo.com/

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are having such a good time with Dr. Todd Obokitis, but for short, we're calling him Dr. Todd O, right? Or Dr. Todd, just to make it easy. But this is a really smart guy. I went to Johns Hopkins and was thinking about DNA in the eighth

grade when I know most eighth graders are thinking about boys or girls. I went to Johns Hopkins and was thinking about DNA in the eighth grade when I know most eighth graders are thinking about boys or girls. I have girls, so I'm thinking about boys. And you were thinking about DNA, and I just find that fascinating. So we're having such a good time. Please post your questions, what you've learned. We'd love to answer your questions. So go to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. You can leave that there. You can also leave us a review. We would be grateful. And we would enter you into a drawing for one of our books, either my book, The Brain Warrior's Way Cookbook, or Daniel's book, The End of Mental Illness. And welcome back, Dr. Todd. We're just having such a good time. And we're going to talk about,

basically in this episode, we're going to continue with stem cells, the laser guided stem cells and what you were talking about earlier, the how they differentiate why you're using the process that you use. And I'm, I'm really interested in this sound, what you were talking about with the sound and making them please repeat that. I don't want to mess it up. What you were repeating about stem to make the stem cells go

where you want them to go specifically. Right. In essence, to be poetic, we are singing the song of stem cells in light. We convert the light wave patterns from the laser into a sound wave-like waveform. So it starts with light, but it has sound-like characteristics, so it's called photoacoustic. So we start with light, we sing the song of the stem cells in light, and they're literally hearing the vibrational pattern that resonates with their surface molecular structure. So fascinating. Let's back up and just really help people understand the basics of stem cells and what they need to know. I often say the hippocampus is a very special structure in the brain because it produces about, at least this is what I've been told, 700 new baby stem cells every day. The hippocampus is

Greek for seahorse because it looks like a seahorse. And so I think of them as 700 new babies, seahorses every day. And the environment you put them in can either grow them or can murder them. And this is how I got Miley Cyrus to stop smoking pot because I'm like, you're just hurting. And she's an animal rights activist. She's an animal rights activist. And she's like, that's so unfair. That's so funny.

But let's just talk about the basics to get people to understand this area of medicine and how exciting it can be. Absolutely. My pleasure. And to do a full discussion of all the types of stem cells in the body, that could be a whole weekend seminar unto itself, even to describe what they are and how they work. I'll give the basic architecture of it because it's really interesting and also helps to understand what type of stem cells to use

for a given indication or purpose. The biggest buzz, I'd say, the biggest mystique and challenge and concerns in the media have been raised about so-called embryonic stem cells. And that's where we begin. So in essence, we start with a single cell, and that cell multiplies a number of times at a very early stage, just called the blastocyst. And at that level, if you take any one of those cells that are true embryonic stem cells, it can make a whole new person. So a true embryonic stem cell is given the name totipotent, which means it can make an entire new organism. Now, these are the most powerful, but they're also the only type of stem

cell that has no potential medical complications. And the complication that can occur, and it's often seen in animal models, is a benign tumor called a teratoma. A teratoma is a mass that has all different types of tissues of the body. So imagine someone getting a cantaloupe-sized giant hairball with teeth and skin and nails and muscles and liver and all that weird stuff in it. It's just not very attractive. So for that reason, and I think appropriately so, there's been a restriction on the use of embryonic stem cells therapeutically until that medical hazard can be overcome. And that it's appropriate to go to the next step. So right past totipotent, it's called pluripotent. That's a name that Dr.

Eamon used a little bit earlier. So a pluripotential stem cell has the attribute that it can become any of the cells of the three primary germ layers. So as you recall, after the blastocyst stage, you get the separation of the three germ layers, the ectoderm, which becomes the nervous system and skin, the mesoderm, which is muscles and bones and tendons and cartilage and such. And then the endoderm, which is largely the digestive tract, liver and intestines and pancreas and such. So a pluripotential stem cell can move into any of the three germ layers and then become any of the types of cells of the body. So the advantage of a true pluripotential stem cell is that it literally can replace any of the 200 plus types of cells in the body. And then past pluripotential, you get into more dedicated cell lines that tend to differentiate along that pathway.

So there's a lot of work now with mesenchymal stem cells, and those are often derived from fat. Those are the types of cells usually used with umbilical cord blood. Those are also the main type of cell used when bone marrow is used as a source of cells. Now mesenchymal stem cells, they're from the mesoderm so they tend to want to become tissue of that type. So they want to become bone and cartilage and tendon and muscle. So if someone has a bad joint, that is a reasonably good choice to say, remove from fat, separate the stem cells, inject them into the joint. And then you have the right type of germline cell in the right type of tissue to get a desired repair. And so you mentioned before that you have the potential of rejecting it if it's obviously, if it's not a perfect tissue match. If it's from someone else.

If it's from someone else. So is it more common these days? I mean, you mentioned the complications with embryonic stem cells. So is it more common these days? I believe you called it allergenic. That's where you take it from. Autogen. Where you take it from the person.

Are you taking their own stem cells or you're taking their own tissue and doing what to treat? Right. So autologous is the phrase if it's that person's cells. Allergenic is if it comes from somebody else. Okay.

And the current regulations in the U.S. really support autologous stem cells. And there is a whole series of definitions around what's considered to be the safe use of them, particularly that they are processed and delivered back within four hours and that the cells aren't significantly expanded or otherwise manipulated and you said if you want so for example when i got my shoulder done um he got stem cells out of my fat um hopefully there wasn't that much and um and then spun them down, waited for a little bit, and then injected them into me. And then we stored them. And so they've been growing for four or five years.

So now we have a gazillion of them. But is that more likely to then help support joint health and not so much as far as skin and brain health. Correct. Can they grow them or are they just freezing them and preserving them? No, they can grow them, is my understanding. They can grow them, and that would just be a question for the technicians at the lab in other words once they harvest it and purify them did they subject them to some cycles

of expansion where they tend to be growing to confluence in the discs in the flasks and then when they go to confluence then they will say take that and put that in 10-morph glass and grow them out. So there can be a so-called number of passages of the cells to get a bigger number of them because sometimes part of the therapeutic aspect is what is the actual number of therapeutic cells that are delivered.

And that gets into another set of technical issues because in my own experience, I found that low passage cells when they are expanded tend to be effective and anti-inflammatory. But if they're passage too many times, this is with cordless stem cells, I've seen them shift from being anti-inflammatory to pro-inflammatory. So there is some art and science around how the cells are expanded, how many times they're passage, how much the expansion factor is, and so forth. And then ultimately, what type of tissue that they will be used for. In your experience, and when we do the next podcast, we can talk about it more. We only have another couple of minutes.

Is when should people think about using stem cell therapies? And there are people selling them for all sorts of things. Autism, Alzheimer's disease. I actually did a really interesting project where I worked with a group that did a mental transposition. the fatty apron that overlays the abdomen and your liver and pancreas and intestines is loaded, from what I understand, with stem cells. And so our researchers actually took the omentum, kept it attached to its blood supply, and transposed it onto the brain, hoping that the brain would get more, I suppose, it's not mesenchymal stem cells, but a different kind of stem cell that comes from the intestine. And I did the before and after imaging with that. And we saw significant increased blood flow

with that procedure. It's a wild procedure and it's never going to become standard because it's way too hard to do but it was the first attempt to get stem cells directly into the brain i then worked with the neurosurgeon at hogue hospital here in newport beach where he put a port into ventricles in the brain, and they gave them in the brain stem cells and showed some significant improvement. Chris Duma was doing that. But I would just, we have to do it when we come back is where do you think the state of the art for the practical application of stem cells where do you think it is and how has your innovation of using um photoacoustic i just love that you know just, just imagining the light and sound.

That's fascinating that you can convert that and sort of sing the right tune. For a stem cell. And roll it to the right place. So stay with us. We're with Dr. O. Rukaits, and you can find out more about his work at drtoddoddo.com. Just passing already. He and I are working on a very special patient together and I sent him someone very important to us personally.

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