The Dr. Hyman Show - Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Episode Date: November 20, 2024What if your body could repair itself? In this episode, I sit down with regenerative medicine expert Dr. Adeel Khan to explore cutting-edge approaches in functional medicine that go beyond symptom man...agement to activate the body’s own healing systems. From the power of stem cells and exosomes to cutting-edge gene therapy, discover how these therapies work to combat chronic pain, reverse aging, and enhance longevity by tapping into your body’s own repair systems. This isn’t science fiction—it’s the future of medicine. In this episode, we discuss: The Regenerative Medicine Approach Stem Cells for Healing The Benefits of Exosomes Gene Therapy and Longevity Managing Autoimmune Conditions Whether you’re curious about the future of medicine or seeking ways to optimize health, this conversation will open your eyes to the possibilities. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal Which diet really gives you the best shot at optimal health? On Wednesday December 4th, Mark Hyman, MD will answer that question during The Diet Wars, a LIVE digital experience. Joined by Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, they’ll break down the science, debunk the myths, and share their expert perspectives to help you make the best choices for your health. Find out more and get tickets now at https://www.moment.co/markhyman This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Pendulum, BIOptimizers, and Thrive Market. Streamline your lab orders with Rupa Health. Access more than 3,500 specialty lab tests and register for a FREE live demo at RupaHealth.com. Pendulum is offering listeners 20% off their first membership order at PendulumLife.com/Farmacy. Discount applied at checkout. Today until November 28th, BIOptimizers is offering 25% off sitewide. Go to Bioptimizers.com/Hyman and use code Hyman10. Head over to ThriveMarket.com/Hyman today to receive 30% off your first order and a free gift up to $60.
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Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy.
Using what should be called committed progenitor cells,
which is a fancy word for just saying
that they can't turn into new tissue,
that they can reduce inflammation,
which can still be useful in some conditions,
but it's just misleading
because a lot of patients are like,
oh yeah, I got stem cell injections.
It's like, well, it wasn't really a stem cell per se.
It was more just something to reduce inflammation.
Hey everyone, it's Dr. Mark.
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Hi, I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, a practicing physician and proponent of systems medicine,
a framework to help you understand the why or the root cause of your symptoms.
Welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. Every week, I bring on interesting guests to discuss the latest topics in the field of functional medicine and do a deep dive on how these topics pertain to your health. In today's episode, I have some
interesting discussions with other experts in the field. So let's just trump right in.
Adil, welcome to the Dr. Sarnes podcast. It's great to have you here. Last time I saw you
was in Cabo when you were about to inject me with a bunch of interesting compounds that are biological
compounds they use in regenerative medicine for my disc issues, which helped tremendously.
And I think, you know, you've been in the leading edge of this whole field of regenerative
medicine.
And I think most people don't really understand what is regenerative medicine.
So why don't we start by talking about your own story of how you
kind of went through your medical training, you know, where your frustrations were and how you
ended up in this place where you're practicing a medicine that most people probably have never
heard of and don't know what it is. And we're going to describe today in detail, but is, I think
in many ways, the future of repair, healing, renewal, longevity, managing orthopedic issues,
which I've certainly used for my own body. So tell us about your journey, how you got here,
and then what the heck is regenerative medicine? Yeah. Yeah, no, actually it's funny because
I watched your TED Talk when I was in medical school, and I remember you talking about depression and how you have to look at
micronutrient deficiencies, the gut health, neuroinflammation, and that just the whole
concept just made so much sense to me. So you were definitely a part of the inspiration for me to
pursue this. So thank you for that. And in terms of Yeah, I read your books. I read obviously,
Jason Bland functional medicine book, like his textbook.
Jeff Bland, yeah.
Jeff Bland, yeah. And, you know, integrative medicine textbooks. Luckily, medical school was fairly easy. So I had lots of extra time and I could read, I had a I saw patients not always getting better. And even my own mom
had some medical illnesses. And it was kind of frustrating when the doctors were just like,
well, there's nothing else you can do. And, and then I started digging deeper. And obviously,
I came across functional medicine, and all this kind of root cause work. And then I'm like,
wait a minute, there is stuff you can do, we're just not learning about it. So then it was kind
of like, why aren't we learning about it? And then you realize it's just because doctors don't know
what they don't know. And that's just how medical school is. You're being taught by specialists
who might be the best cardiologists at their in-depth center, and they're amazing, they do
amazing work, but they don't know much beyond what they do. And that's just the limitations
of their knowledge and so oftentimes
we're only being given one perspective which is allopathic medicine but there it turns out there's
a lot more than just allopathic medicine out there and when you look at the totality of the research
you realize there's a lot of stuff out there that can be quite beneficial with less harm and that's
really what drew me to this field was just because hey hey, if I can do less harm for my patient and have the same benefit, why wouldn't I do that first?
And that's kind of what got me into regenerative medicine, because regenerative medicine is just a playoff of functional medicine, which is, you know, you're trying to restore tissue or restore dysfunction of the cell back to normal. And now you can do that using cell therapy, gene therapy, or tissue engineering,
or the combination of those three is kind of what we label as regenerative medicine.
Yeah, it's really interesting because, you know, as I think about functional medicine,
it's really about how do you restore optimal function using compounds that support and
enhance the body's function as opposed to interrupt, block,
or interfere somehow. And most traditional drugs are anti-drugs, right? They're antibiotics,
they're inhibitors like ACE inhibitors, they're, you know, blockers like beta blockers. So they're
anti-inhibitors or blockers, right? And that's fine for some pathways in some medical therapies, but
there's an incredible healing system built into our biology that most people are not even aware
of. And when you cut your skin, how does it know what to do to repair your skin? Or when you break
a bone, how does your body know what to do? Well, you have a built-in healing regenerative repair
renewal system. We just don't know how to activate activate it and that's a lot of what functional medicine is but regenerative
medicine you know my understanding of it is that it actually uses the body's own repair and healing
systems to actually help facilitate repair by extracting them from biological sources and then
repurposing them and putting them back into the body so they can go
and do the repair and healing work without a lot of the side effects and consequences. Is that right?
Yeah, exactly. Our slogan is empowering the body's natural healing abilities. So that's what we live
by. But to your point, it's not just limited to biological substances. You can even use something like bioelectricity or shockwave electrical signals that can manipulate
the bodies at a cellular level to help it to heal.
So essentially, it's anything really signaling-wise that can facilitate healing or regeneration
in your own body.
And that's why even peptides, in my opinion, fall into this category of regenerative medicine,
because a lot of them are just sending signals, especially, obviously, there are some peptides that are more regenerative in nature.
They're just sending signals to help your body to heal better.
And, of course, there's biological substances, which we'll go into, too.
But at a very high level, we're just giving your body the right tools and the right signals so it can heal on itself.
Yeah, that's exactly right. And it's really quite amazing. And it's unfortunately not
accessible through traditional medicine. I've had back issues for the last 30 years because
I ruptured a disc and really damaged a nerve when I was 32. And that left me with sort
of chronic limp and then chronic back pain as a result of changed biomechanics. And I
sort of managed it with yoga and stretching and massage
and sort of managed my way through.
But as I've gotten older, it's gotten more degenerative
and there's been more issues.
And I was in a place where it just was really a mess.
And I looked toward regenerative medicine as a way to solve it.
And I'd had steroid injections.
I'd had radiofrequency ablation, which I didn't know at the time
would cause secondary consequences of damage to my back through damaging the muscles in my back.
And so basically I really struggled. And the only thing that's helped me take away my back pain are
these compounds that are from this toolkit of regenerative medicine. So, so maybe we can sort
of talk about, you know, there's two parts in my mind to regenerative medicine. So maybe we can sort of talk about, you know, there's two parts in my
mind to regenerative medicine. One is orthopedics, basically healing, repairing, you know, trauma,
injury, stuff that hurts, right? And pain management. And the other is sort of renewal
rejuvenation around various chronic illnesses or longevity that's more systemic. So there's like,
you know, injecting a knee with something or they're just putting something in your veins. I'm going to talk about both those things, but before we start sort of getting into
the details of it, I would love to sort of run through at a high level, what are the sort of
tools and the toolkit of regenerative medicine? What are the kinds of things that are included
in that bucket? You mentioned peptides, which are things that all of us have tens of
thousands of these running around our biology that are the communication superhighway regulating all
of our biological processes. You might've heard of Ozempic, that's a peptide, insulin's a peptide.
You know, they're very powerful, but there are things that the body makes that we can then
synthesize or extract, and then we inject back into the body to help accelerate the healing.
But that's just one component. So maybe you can take us through, you know, what are the kinds of tools in our toolkit that are considered
regenerative medicine? Yeah. And I think that's really the key. The tools that we have now
are much better than they were even five years ago. So regenerative medicine is moving at an
accelerated rate. And that's to your point, a lot of
physicians don't understand that there's so much innovation happening in regenerative medicine.
And so they still have this concept that they were taught in medical school, or maybe they
learned, you know, or 10 years ago, when, you know, stem cells had all this hype, and they don't
actually end up doing anything. And so in their mind, that's what they still think. And of course,
stem cells is the first one I have to talk about, just because I think that's the one people always think about was regenerative medicine. And so stem cells is a
very broad term, number one. Number one, what that means is that it's, it's not specific to any type
of nomenclature. So if you go to a stem cell clinic, they're not specifying, like, what does
that mean? Right? Like, does that mean, does that mean you're getting a stem cell clinic, they're not specifying, like, what does that mean?
Right?
Like, does that mean you're getting a stem cell from, like, the fat, the bone marrow? And even if you get the stem cell, is it culture expanded?
How's it being engineered?
How's it being isolated?
Is it yours?
Is it somebody else's?
And there's so many questions that just don't go answered when you ask these clinics that,
and that's a problem uh still to this date
with a lot of the offshore clinics too is you know the there's all this excitement around stem
cells but at the end of the day stem cells have two functions one is to self-renew and the other
is to differentiate and turn into other types of tissue so the analogy i like is it's kind of think
of it like a you know like a master key And that master key can replicate itself. And then it can, you know, open up like different doors, or it can divide and clone
itself and then open up other doors that way. And so if, if that's a function of a stem cell,
in theory, then it should be able to repair tissue and fix things in your body when we put
them there. But it turns out when we take stem cells in the test tube
versus when we put them in your body, they behave differently.
So it's not as simple as we thought.
And there's a lot of different types of stem cells.
So stem cells are one of the big categories of regenerative medicine.
That's one of the –
All right.
So keep going around that.
I'm just sort of contextualizing
because there's a lot of other compounds that are used besides stem cells.
There's so many. But even in stem cells, I mean, you can just do a whole podcast just literally about that because stem cells are such a depth concept.
But at a very high level, what people need to understand is just when you take something from your own body, like, for example, if you go to the US right now, there's a lot of stem cell clinics, but they're not actually true stem cells. Because if you're
just taking your bone marrow or your fat, and then you're just isolating that injecting it,
it doesn't actually have the ability to turn into new tissue, but it does have an ability to
reduce inflammation. And so a better term for it, that Arnold Kaplan, who's the guy who coined the
term mesenchymal stem cells in 1992, he's a he's the guy who coined the term mesenchymal stem cells
in 1992, he's the guy who coined it. He wrote a paper about this, but basically he said that
these things should be called committed progenitor cells, which is a fancy word for just saying that
they can't turn into new tissue, but they can reduce inflammation, which can still be useful
in some conditions, but it's just misleading because a lot of patients are like, oh yeah, I got stem cell injections. It's like, well, it wasn't really
a stem cell per se, it was more just something to reduce inflammation, because it's not because
whenever because remember, the definition of a stem cell is something that can actually regenerate
new tissue. And if you're just taking your fat or your bone marrow, and injecting it, that's not
regenerating new tissue. Through the mechanism of that stem cell, it may
send signals to your own body stem cells to help with some regeneration, but for the most part,
it's an anti inflammatory product. And so that's, that's the number one thing to understand about
these. And this is we're talking about the broader category of mesenchymal stem cells,
which is just, you know, an embryological term. But essentially, what it means is this is from,
you know, these, the reason we use mesenchymal stem cells is because of the easiest to source,
because they're in the fat, they're in the bone marrow, they're from a myelocore tissue or dental
pulp, there's so many different sources now. But that's the reason why MSCs or mesenchymal stem
cells are so popular. And the other reason is because mesenchymal stem cells only have a finite
ability to differentiate, which means they
can they won't cause tumors or cancer. Of course, that's always been a concern with like embryonic
stem cells, which are if you're taking them from aborted fetuses, which some clinics still do. And
obviously, during the Bush era, there was a lot of controversy around that. And that's why stem
cells kind of got categorized into this unethical thing. But that's not how we're sourcing our stem
cells. We're sourcing them, you know,
obviously, we're not hurt, we're not harming any babies, and
they're being sourced from C section births after, you know,
and some instead of being thrown away, they're donated. So it's a
very simple collection process. But the problem with the
mesenchymal stem cells, as we said, is first of all, there's a
lot of clinics saying that they're taking your fat and bone
marrow and cleaning their stem cells, which are not but are not. But let's say you go offshore somewhere,
and they can isolate them, and then they can do what's called culture expansion,
which means they can grow them and they can replicate them. So then they can actually have
some sort of dose that can be a therapeutic and potentially regenerate tissue in theory.
But then what happened, it turns out when you take these
stem cells, whether from any of these sources, when you put them in the body, most of them don't
survive. And when you do them intravenously, most of them get trapped in the lungs or die.
And that's why the results have been very inconsistent. And that's why stem cells haven't
taken off in the way we thought they would, you know, 10, 15 years ago. And that's why the clinical
trials have been so mixed. And so unfortunately, there's still a lot of clinics claiming that, you know,
we can regenerate tissue, you can do it. And it's just, it's just misleading, because and even I
thought this, you know, which is that I thought IV stem cells were great, but it turns out a lot
of them just get trapped in the lungs, and most of them die. And that even with that, you still
get some people who get benefits. And that's, and that's,
and that's the old generation technology. But now, we can isolate, we can isolate the best stem cell population and use that one. So it turns out that when you take a stem cell, a mesenchymal stem cell,
there's actually 17 subtypes, which is kind of crazy to think about it. So it's like they,
there's something called single cell RNA sequencing, which is basically to look at gene expression of individual cell profiles. So that way, you can see
how different cells behave. And then you can see that, hey, there's actually these 17 different
cliques that they hang out together, and they behave differently. And some of them are more
useless, and some of them are more useful. So we don't necessarily want all 17 subtypes, which is what most stem cell clinics do. And
that's what we were doing up until a year ago. But as you know, I spent the summer in Japan,
and in Japan, they won the Nobel Prize for regenerative medicine, Professor Yamanaka,
for cellular reprogramming, in which we can talk about those stem cells. But there was another
professor, Professor Mary DeZawa, who discovered something called MUSE cells, which stands for
multi lineage, differentiating stress enduring cells. So it's a mouthful. All you need to
remember for people is that these are cells that are MUSE, exactly the MUSE, the MUSE is the cool
stuff. And they're able to, they're pluripotent, which means they can differentiate into all 220 cell types in our body or two over 200 cell types. And they are stress
enduring, which means they can survive harsh environments. So that's really the key. So they
don't die when they go in the body. So we can isolate these using cell sorting technology and
filter them out so that
we're injecting primarily new stem cells instead of just injecting all the different types of stem
cells. And so that's now what we've moved on to. And of course, you talked earlier about your back,
and that's what we use for you. And that's what we're using exclusively just because the results
are so much more consistent and the science makes a lot of sense. And, you know, I'm in the process
of doing some clinical work with Professor DeZawa as
well.
And we want to investigate these new cells for a lot of different conditions.
But in Japan, they've already published trials for ALS, for heart attacks, for stroke.
And these are not easy to treat conditions.
And with intravenous new cells, you do see benefits.
And of course, we're seeing that in the real world, treating patients with all sorts of degenerative conditions and actually seeing a real meaningful difference. And that's
just because these cells are actually surviving and doing what they are meant to do, which is
reduce inflammation, repair cellular function, reduce oxidase stress. We know one of the biggest
mechanisms by which they work is through mitochondrial DNA transfer and mitophagy,
which is preparing damaged mitochondria. And I think everyone now knows the mitochondria are so important,
not just for energy, but for regulating cellular metabolism and aging. So that's why there's so
much interest in this space for longevity and not just orthopedic conditions. And so those are
mesenchymal stem cells. And then there's also induced pluripotent stem cells, iPSCs.
And that's the Yamanaka stem cells where you can take any old cell and you can make it
young again.
So of course, when you think about that, you're like, holy, wow, that's great.
Shouldn't everyone be doing this?
But it turns out when you make that old cell young again, it makes it almost embryonic
in nature, which means it can cause cancer or tumors.
So IPSCs, as they're called, or Yamanaka stem cells to honor Professor Yamanaka,
they're great, but the problem is they have the risk of tumor genicity. And so we don't actually use them clinically yet. There's a lot of work being done on it, but it's still, I think, a few
years away from clinical translation. So that's why the new cells, because we know they don't
cause cancer, and we know they're naturally occurring on the body. So that's why the new cells, because we know they don't cause cancer
and we know they're naturally occurring on the body. So they have a lot more
clinical translation than the Yamadaka steps.
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That's thrivemarket.com forward slash hymen. So these are basically these different kinds of
stem cells and the most of the kind in the first generation seems like they were getting,
you know, an anti-inflammatory effect, but they might not be doing the full effect we had thought they might and why there was variable results. And
they get trapped in the lungs. The mu cells seem to be stress resistant. So they hang out more,
they have time to do their job more, and they have the ability to actually work in a different way
because they're not sort of chewed up so fast. And these don't get also trapped in the lungs?
They are resistant to that?
Yeah, so about 10 to 15 times more are able to go into circulation.
So there is still some that get trapped in the lungs,
but Professor Daza was showing work showing that it's, you know,
it's not like two times more.
We're talking an order of magnitude,
like 10 times more are able to go into circulation.
So it is still a big
difference compared to standard MSCs. And, you know, there's two kind of uses, as you mentioned.
One is injecting it into a joint or a back or some damaged traumatic tissue or injecting them
intravenously for systemic effects around really things like ALS or stroke.
Those are really, like you said, almost impossible to treat problems.
And what kinds of results are they seeing when they do these systemic treatments?
And what are the kinds of conditions where it might be applicable for?
Yeah.
Look, I just had an ALS patient I treated a couple weeks ago and I was blown away because
it was my first ALS patient I treated with new cells.
And she couldn't swallow because of the Bulbar symptoms, you know, and now she can swallow, she can speak clearly,
she couldn't, she was barely able to speak before. And that was just one IV. And I mean,
it was pretty incredible to see, obviously, that's anecdotal. But the clinical trial that was done
also showed, you know, some slowing of progression. And we all know how devastating ALS is.
And if you can, if there's something that
can slow it down, even, I think we just don't know the exact dosing for ALS yet. But I think
for now, I think we can certainly say it can be helpful, and it's not harmful. And then for stroke,
we can be much more, much more kind of certain that they are going to have positive results.
Because in stroke, for example, she showed that 30% of patients in the clinical trial
were able to go back to full-time work
when they were disabled.
Like we're talking patients who are disabled.
And so imagine you're-
So are you saying if someone's in a wheelchair
and can't move the side of their arm or leg-
Exactly, exactly.
And they're able to go back.
Yeah, exactly.
And they go back to full-time work.
So that was 30% of people.
And the other 70% still had significant clinical benefits and were able to get off.
They weren't necessarily able to return to work, but a lot of them were able to get back to normal functioning of ADLs and IADLs and stuff like that, which is still a big deal.
And you know what the most interesting part was?
25% of the patients in the clinical trial had reversal of gray hair.
And that was just like an accidental finding.
That's amazing. That's wild. So what other kinds of conditions might this be able for autoimmune
diseases, longevity? I mean, I know it sounds, you almost sound like a, you know, like a used
car salesman or something when you're like, this can treat everything, you know, but once you
understand the physiology of chronic disease, as you do,
you understand that there's certain hallmarks of aging, and there's hallmarks of chronic disease
that overlap. So I'm not going to list all 12 of them, because I'll bore people. But there's
basically 12 hallmarks of aging. We've listed a few of them mitochondria dysfunction, you know,
stem cell exhaustion, yeah, chronic inflammation, which is related to
amino sin essence. And, and, you know, there's lots of protein, like, there's so many protein
misfolding, there's so many other ones. And so basically, these 12, let's call them the 12
hallmarks, they actually underlie not just aging, which is, you know, arguably the most complex
chronic disease, they underlie all chronic diseases from heart disease to asthma, to dementia, to cancer even,
and just components of that that are overlying.
And a lot of them are metabolic in nature.
And so that's why these stem cells have this ability to restore metabolic health
because of that mitochondrial DNA transfer
and helping to repair the mitochondria through mitophagy. And then, of course, the mitochondria
are the ones that help to regulate metabolism, right? That's where they have, that's where your,
when you eat food and your body has to process it, it has to go through your mitochondria to
produce energy. And if your mitochondria aren't working properly, which is what happens to
everyone with aging and chronic disease, then guess your metabolism is messed up and that's why
metabolic disease is really the root cause of so many different problems and that's why they call
you know dementia type 3 diabetes and all this other stuff right because a lot of them are
metabolic in nature and if you can restore metabolic health which stem cells can do then
that's why you can treat so many chronic diseases.
And that's number one. And number two, the other beauty of these stem cells is their ability to regulate your immune system. So this is called immunomodulation. That's the medical term,
but that just basically means we're shifting your body from a pro-inflammatory state to an
anti-inflammatory state. So this is called immunomodulation, which is reprogramming your immune cells, specifically your macrophages. And if there's one cell that you need to understand,
it's your macrophages. They're probably, they're my favorite cell in the body.
You're like little Pac-Man. They like go and chew up all the stuff that shouldn't be there, right?
Exactly. So they're like your little, they're like your little Pac-Man controlling and surveilling
and making sure the bad guys don't get in and they eat the bad guys when they're around.
They take them away and they'll dispose of them.
But what happens to a lot of Pac-Men or police officers, as I like to call them, is they get fat and tired with age.
And then they start eating too many donuts and they can't do their job anymore.
And this is actually called lipid associated macrophages or
lambs. And so they accumulate fat and lipid perioxidation inside of the macrophage, and then
they can't do their job anymore. And which in the job is so important. And then they start releasing
the wrong signals, they start saying, so the macrophages start releasing pro inflammatory
signals. And then that causes the cycle of chronic inflammation. And that's really the root, as we know, of so many disease processes. And that's why if you can treat chronic
inflammation, you can treat so many different chronic diseases. And that's why these IV
new cells have so much potential. And even with IV, let's call it the first generation,
even with the IV, you know, first generation stem cells, there are clinical trials that are
published showing that inflammatory bowel disease can get into remission that rheumatoid arthritis can get into remission
it's just the dosing is quite high and people need a lot of frequency of those but with the
new cells you can get obviously you can get a lot better results but it's the same principle
which is you're just regulating the immune system that's it's incredible yeah so for autoimmune
disease and for chronic inflammatory age-related diseases, for just rejuvenation and longevity itself, these seem to be helpful.
One of the things I'd love you to explain is how do stem cells work? Because you kind of alluded to the fact that they don't actually work as we thought they did, which is you inject them and then they go.
If you have a liver problem, they become a liver cell. Or if you have a kidney problem, they become a kidney cell.
They just have certain compounds inside of them that go out and kind of yeah exactly so stem cells
things so mesenchymal stem cells primarily work through let me just before you kind of go into
that mesem for everybody listening that's a big word it means just your body's tissue what the
other kind of stem cells come from umbilical cords or from embryos we're
not doing embryos at all we're talking we're talking mostly about umbilical cord blood um
blood that actually has basically baby stem cells as opposed to mine which are like almost 65 right
so they're and they're not as antigenic. In other words, they don't tend to cause this foreign reaction.
Like if you were to take, I was taking your stem cells, I'd have a rejection of those
stem cells as part of my biology because we don't like foreign stuff.
But with these kind of umbilical cord cells, it's not like that.
So you can use these umbilical cord muse stem cells to actually kind of bypass that thing,
but actually have the benefit of these
younger stem cells, right? Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, using your own stem cells,
there's many reasons not to, but the biggest one is definitely they've gone through a lot of
replicative stress because they've gone through their own aging process. And so they can actually
have markers of senescence and other even cancer markers as you get older. So you don't want to
take your own stem cells and put them in your body, especially if you're over age 40. But,
but anyway, yeah, back to Yeah, back to the point about, you know, what these stem cells are doing
inside of your body, the mesenchymal stem cells are primarily reducing inflammation via this,
what's called the secretome. So the secretome is kind of the soup that the stem cells grow in or
release and their signals. So there's micro RNAs, there's what are called cytokines, which are
these proteins that that help to reduce inflammation, there's growth factors. So this is
all what's called the secretome. And depending on what type of secretome the stem cells are
releasing dictates their ability to change the microenvironment and
help with these different cellular processes. So for example, the secretome of a stem cell from
your own body isn't going to be as good as a secretome from umbilical cord tissue. And you
can probably understand that intuitively, because it's like, Oh, yeah, it makes sense. This my cells
are old, they've gone through x amount of cell damage versus umbilical cord tissue, which doesn't. And that's why exosomes
are such a hot topic because if the, most of the benefits of mesenchymal stem cells are due to the
signaling process, then why not just isolate those signals and inject those? And that's what the
exosomes are. Okay. So hold there, hold there for a sec and that the there's stuff that
the stem cells secrete right that's why it's called this secretome or secretome which is
right so there's stuff that it squirts out basically in its environment that goes out
and does all these good things and what you're saying is that these inside of the stem cells
there are these little vesicles these little packets of healing factors called exosomes. And they're maybe where most of the benefit comes from, from the stem cells. So
you can actually take the exosomes out of the stem cells. You grow the stem cells in a lab,
you remove the exosomes, you can concentrate them. They don't have any DNA material. They're
much safer. They're less expensive. And then you can use them also. So now explain to us what are exosomes, because that's another part of this whole field of
regenerative medicine.
We kind of sort of basically skirted the surface of stem cells, so I hope you kind of got a
good sense of that.
But I want to get into a few other things.
So exosomes are the next topic, and let's kind of explore what are exosomes, how do
we use them, and why do they work?
Yeah.
I mean, you kind of just said
the definition, which is they're a type of extracellular vesicle, which are just packages
by which your cell communicates with other cells. So they help with cell-to-cell communication.
And there's different type of extracellular vesicles. So there's something called
apoptotic bodies. There's something called MVBs, which are microvesicle bundles.
And then there's exosomes, which are the smallest type of extracellular vesicle. So extracellular vesicle
or EVs is kind of the class. And then there's different types of EVs and exosomes are the
smallest type of EVs. And they're basically to help facilitate cell to cell communication,
which interestingly changes as you age. So exosomes are also becoming
a hot topic in diagnostics because it turns out the exosome profile of your cells, as they become
cancerous or as they become chronic diseases, you can detect certain exosome products because we
didn't have this technology, right? Like five years ago. And now we do. And now we can figure
out, hey, the signals your cells are sending are changing. This means that you might be developing this problem.
So that's why exosomes are becoming a hot topic in diagnostics too.
And then, of course, in intervention or therapeutics, then it makes sense because, like you said,
it's all about the signals that are being sent by the stem cells that dictate their
ability to modulate or change the cells in a favorable way.
And now the exosomes can be
isolated in a lot of different ways. Previously, it can only be done through, you know,
ultracentrifugation of cells that are replicating. So you have to have cells that are replicating,
but now that technology is improving, so that you can actually get exosomes from
terminally differentiated cells. So meaning even if they're not replicating, you can basically, it's called homogenization,
which is basically like, you know, you're blending, you know, how you, you know, you
blend like fruit to get like the pulp out and the juice.
It's like taking the juice, basically, of tissue, and that's the exosome.
So you can do that now with any tissue.
So for example, there's people working on natural killer exosomes, dendrit's the exosome. So you can do that now with any tissue. So for example,
there's people working on natural killer exosomes, dendritic cell exosomes, exosomes from liver,
from muscle. So there's so many interesting exosome products being worked out. There's
290 or 281 patents or something like that on exosomes in the last couple of years.
So that tells you the scale. Yeah. There's different kinds of
exosomes. Oh yeah. So that tells you the scale though, two over 200 patents on just exosomes
alone in the last couple of years. So that tells you the scale and the magnitude of research that's
happening right now on this. Yeah. You know, interesting. I, I actually, um, you know,
there's, we're gonna talk about some of them in the muse exosomes, but I, I had COVID and like
many of us out there in the world and after one course of COVID I got
seriously depressed and I don't have that as a thing I deal with and I felt like it was a
physiological depression of inflammation in the brain because we know the depression is inflammation
in the brain and I felt my cognition was off I had severe brain fog I kind of couldn't understand
why people would kill
themselves it was a really strange experience and i had you know my higher self was there knowing
hey this is just your covid talking and uh i was able to get some exosomes and inject them
intravenously and almost like instantaneously it went away it was quite striking i was like wow
you know like this is quite an interesting tool and i also had back surgery four years ago that went badly and i had bleeding into my spine and had severe disc pain
afterwards for months and i saw a regenerative medicine doctor before before and i and i had
matt cook and i had exosomes injected right up into the spinal canal through the bottom of my spine. It's called a caudal epidural, essentially of exosomes.
And it just, within, you know, really almost minutes, I was feeling dramatically better.
And so I began to kind of understand by using this on my own body with my own degenerative arthritis,
with all the messed up things that are going on in my back with the discs, with the inflammation, that these
products actually really help relieve this chronic pain that I've had for so long. And it was really
striking to me because I, you know, I didn't know that this was possible just with these simple
therapies. And yes, it's anecdotal. And the problem with stem cells is that they've been
a neglected area of research in America.
There are people doing it in academic centers, but it's kind of on the margins.
Traditional medicine hasn't recognized it. You have to go to other countries like Mexico or Costa Rica or Panama or Dubai or Japan or whatever.
All the places I went.
Lithuania is the other place we work now.
Lithuania, Albania, whatever.
Yeah, seriously.
And so we're often sort of trying to find solutions for people.
And I have to send them other places if they want to try these things.
And it's still sort of, I would say, in the experimental phase.
There's concerns about certain risks of it.
There's more data needed.
But I would say, you know, when you're in pain,
you don't really care about what the randomized controlled trial says. You just want to be out of pain. And if something can help,
you're going to try it. And a lot of athletes use it. A lot of people in professional sports use it.
I know you work with a lot of professional athletes. And these regenerative compounds,
whether it's stem cells or exosomes or peptides or other even compounds like placental matrix,
which is kind of mashed up placenta, which I found
incredibly helpful for pain relief, all are available. And there's other kinds of things
that are also being used systemically that are part of regenerative medicine, including
cord blood plasma, which is the fluid the cells run in. There's gene therapies that are available
to help improve muscle, for example, like
full stat and there'll be clotho gene therapy, which is another sort of longevity gene that's
there that some people have some people don't, but you can actually provide it into people
through different vectors that actually then can activate it and turn on these longevity factors.
So it's a really extraordinary field of medicine that is, I think, going to be the future.
And I think it's not really available that widely because it's hard to get to, it's expensive.
What other tools besides sort of the exosomes, which you can use, by the way, systemically,
or you can use them directly into an injured area, what are the other kinds of things you're seeing are being effective?
And talk a little bit about the Muse exosomes, because I think these are special forces. I think of these
like these special forces and the Navy SEALs and the Army Rangers, the great braids of stem cells,
right? Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, a few things. First thing I would say, just because you touched on a
little bit, was there's a lot of politics limiting regenerative medicine's
ability to really get mainstream in U.S. And interestingly, Japan has the opposite politics,
which is that because of Professor Yamanaka, they spent $8 billion of taxpayer money on
regenerative medicine and they have lobbyists for regenerative medicine. So it's a very different environment
that's actually favorable for regenerative medicine. And unfortunately, the US has taken
a really archaic stance to the point where they regulate exosomes, which is an acellular product,
meaning it doesn't have any cells, like you said, no DNA material. And therefore,
we know it's very safe. They're just signals that stay in the body for minutes to hours
and then they're more or less, they're gone. But they help to change the microenvironment,
it helps to change the functioning of cells. And so the safety is so high of exosomes,
but FDA has decided to regulate it like a drug. And so therefore an FDA has still not approved
any drug or any exosome products. So technically, you know, I mean,
obviously, there's so many clinics offering it, which is very interesting, but technically,
none of them are FDA approved. So it's just something to understand the regulatory environment.
I don't agree with it. But that's the world we live in. And that's why people have to travel
offshore, unfortunately. And that's, I think that's gonna, that's gonna be the way it is for
the next few years, it'll take a while before, you know, even someone like us gets FDA approval for the Muse exosomes.
It takes seven years, you know, five to seven years.
You just got to, you have to go through the phase one, the phase two,
the phase three, the post-market, like you have to go through all that.
And even then you may not get FDA approval.
And so they really made it difficult for regenerative medicine,
which doesn't make sense.
But other countries are moving forward right oh yeah
exactly us is being left behind us is being left behind basically and so the data is in how strong
is the data around these things so there are trials it's always about safety safety is always
number one exosomes are so safe uh and even you know mesenchymal stem cells have so much safety
data around them too it's always about first do no harm. And this stuff does not have
harm. And so why not try it as an alternative to opioids or to surgery for chronic pain,
especially, right? Like it doesn't, to me, it baffles my mind, but it's very clear. Unfortunately,
do you know what the most profitable drug now is?
Ozempic?
No, it's actually methotrexate. It made something like $26 billion last year.
So it surpassed spattens.
Methotrexate, which is a chemo drug, but it's used for autoimmune disease.
So you're saying it's the rise of autoimmune disease?
It's an epidemic of autoimmune conditions, probably related to toxins in the environment,
probably COVID, maybe everything else that's going on in the modern world.
And so it's just an epidemic. And you and I both know you can treat many of these just through nutrition and lifestyle. But most doctors don't know anything about that. So of
course, they're just prescribing medications. And we know these things, wouldn't you rather be on
something that's going to regulate your immune system and fix it than just suppress it, which
may cause cancer, right? Like it doesn't the risk benefit. It just makes no sense, you know, and I think you always have
to look at what's called number needed to treat versus number needed to harm. And that's essentially
just a fancy, fancy way of just saying benefit versus harm. And if you look at that for a lot
of the pharmaceuticals, it's not that great. You know, it's like for statin medications,
the number needed to treat is not it's not one to
one meaning not every person who gets it their life is going to be safe from a heart attack
it's something like one in 200 yeah you have to treat for for people for preventing a heart attack
you have to treat um 89 people to just prevent one heart attack and death but you know it's it's
quite it's quite amazing it's not really good data on
how effective these are it's like so talk more about why why you brought that up yeah because
to me then you have these interventions that we're seeing that are reducing inflammation
oxidative stress that are helping with so many different chronic diseases and they don't have
harm so why not have them as a first line,
as opposed to going straight to a lot of these pharmaceuticals that have risk. And,
and, and that, that to me is kind of the logic and on your note of news exosomes, the reason they're
superior to standard exosomes is simply because they're from that new cell lineage.
So when new cells are replicating and when they're growing the soup that they're growing in,
we're that's what we're isolating, which has the signaling profile, meaning that secretome,
which we talked about earlier, is superior than just a standard mesenchymal stem cell. So it has
a better profile, number one. And number two, because it is from a stressed, enduring lineage
too, meaning the exosomes can stick around longer than standard exosomes, which it cleared up pretty
quickly. So what is the difference between stem cell use and exosome use?
Like some people say, oh, you can use, use exosomes.
You don't need the stem cells because it's actually the exosomes that are doing all the
work.
So why bother with the stem cells?
It's more of a hassle, more expensive.
Yeah, that was, that was my take until I had the mu cells.
That was my take more or less.
I would only use the stem cells in very specific situations, but now that's changed, because the new stem cells are actually pluripotent, which means they
and they new stem cells are very interesting, because they act kind of like macrophages,
they actually eat, they gobble up damaged cells, and then they turn into the new tissue. So they'll,
for example, in the heart, they'll go to the heart, they'll each they'll eat the damaged cardiomyocytes, so like damaged heart cells, and then they'll actually
regenerate new cardiomyocytes. So it's they're actually pluripotent, right. And that's the key
difference, because they're not just reducing inflammation. And that's why new stem cells are,
of course, more powerful than use exosomes, because they're actually going to regenerate new tissue
versus just reducing inflammation, which is what the old generation of stem cells
used to do.
And that's why when I was using the old generation of stem cells, I was kind of just using exosomes
for the most part, because I didn't see the point.
Cause I'm like, you're just really reducing inflammation.
But now that we have something that's pluripotent, if I'm injecting it for something degenerative
and I actually want to regenerate something new, then I'm going to use
the stem cells. So for example, with advanced osteoarthritis, if we want to actually stimulate
cartilage regeneration, using the new stem cells makes a lot more sense. But if you just want to
reduce inflammation, then you can just use the exosome. So you kind of have to use both of them
in practice and there's different uses for different people depending on what the
issues are they're struggling with yeah and there's studies out there showing that the exosomes can
create a micro mic can create a favorable micro environment for stem cell differentiation and for
stem cells to do their job basically so that's why i tend to just combine them because the exosomes are only there
for like minutes to hours, you know, like we said, like they're cleared up pretty quickly,
but then they, what they do is they go in there, they reduce inflammation,
they make it a better micro environment so that the stem cells can do their job more effectively.
And, and, and there's other kinds of tools out there with regenerative medicine
that I think are
really emerging and interesting.
And in terms of the orthopedic part, you know, you can inject peptides, you can inject stem
cells, you can inject exosomes, you can inject placental tissue, we call it placenta matrix.
You know, what are all the kind of things that you tend to use and inject to help with
these kind of orthopedic chronic injuries and what kind of things that you tend to use and inject to help with these kind of orthopedic chronic injuries?
And what kind of results are you seeing?
So the results since the new stuff has been honestly incredible.
And as a physician, you always want your patients to get better.
And now we have much more consistent results.
With the older stuff, the results were a bit more inconsistent, meaning some people would get better, you know, some people wouldn't. And whereas this stuff just tends to be reproducible. And the way
we do it is it's still very specialized, right? And this is the problem, too. There's so many
stem cell clinics, but they don't know how to inject properly. I'm, you have to, you have to
have a very high skill level. You can't just Yes, there is a certain homing mechanism. But at the
end of the day,
the treatments are going to work better if you get them to where they need to go.
So for example, if you have a rotator cuff in your shoulder and you don't get the right
spot, your results aren't going to be as good as getting it right in the right spot.
So, and that takes a skilled, that takes a very skilled, you know how it's skilled.
It'd be very skilled at ultrasound and you have to have a high level of proficiency to
be able to do that image guided injection. And so that takes years of training. And then on top
of that, you have to know which products to use. So I think people don't realize this is a very
specialized field. It's not like anyone can just do it. Despite a lot of people just offering stem
cells, you know what I mean? A lot of people are like, yeah, I do stem cells. It's like, well,
you can't, it's not, it's not just like, you can't just like do that. It's like doing, to me,
it's like almost doing surgery. It's like, I don't just do surgery just for the sake of it.
You know, intravenously, anybody can do that, but when you're trying to direct it to specific
tissues or injuries or spots to hit that spot. Yeah. And so the image guidance is very key to
it. And the results for musculoskeletal conditions, chronic pain, even neuropathic pain
has been, it's very consistent, meaning the only patients that I find that don't get better
usually just need a second treatment or sometimes a third in very rare cases. So it's just a dosing
thing. We don't know the perfect dosing for everyone, but we're starting to learn that
more and more now. The dosing of the stem cells or the exosomes? Yes, because some people respond
great to one treatment and some people need two treatments and we don't really know why.
Now, can you talk a little bit about gene therapy? Because this is an emerging area of treatment.
Most people have probably never heard of it, but I mentioned them a little bit before, like
folistatin gene therapy or clothogen therapy.
What are these therapies?
How do they work?
You know, what is the science behind them?
And, you know, what are the risks?
And what are we seeing in terms of the benefits?
Yeah, so I work with a company called Minicircle. And Minicircle has the world's first reversible plasmid gene therapy. So what that means is, it's basically
a way for us to transmit any gene of interest up to a certain size to your body. So for example,
if there's a gene like phallostatin, which is a bioidentical peptide hormone in your body,
and we want your body to produce more of that, we can put it onto
this mini circle vector, we call it mini circle, because literally, it's like a circular strand of
strand of DNA, and you insert that phallostatin gene onto there, and then you can inject it,
and then that will transmit it to your cell and tell yourself, hey, your cell will now read that
instructions. And then it'll say, hey, I need to produce more phallostatin. And then phallostatin
goes into the blood and you raise your phallostatin levels and that has all these downstream benefits which
we can talk about in a second but the vector is what people need to obviously is you know
probably being like holy what was what is he talking about right the kind of scary you're
like what are you doing like yeah exactly are you modifying are you modifying my dna
are you a gmo human yeah exactly yeah so it's Yeah, exactly. So it's not as advanced as CRISPR,
which is kind of the gene editing technology where you're actually like cutting out different
strands of DNA and kind of putting them back together. This isn't as complicated as that.
It's not as powerful as that either. But it is still a form of genetic modification because
we are inserting a foreign DNA into your body.
Where does that foreign DNA come from? It comes from E. coli. So we're not injecting bacteria
into your body, but we're injecting something called plasmid. The plasmid is kind of think of
it like exchanging cards with people. It's how bacteria exchange information. So we're isolating
that plasmid from the E. coli, and then we're using
that as a vector. So plasmids have been around in microbiology for two, three decades. They're not
new, but the new breakthrough was just getting the plasmid to not shut off. Because normally,
when you put a plasmid in the human body, it does something called transient silencing,
which just says, hey, this doesn't belong here. I'm going to shut you off, and then it just shuts it off. And then, but we figured out a way for it to keep remain on,
specifically to express whatever gene of interest we want, which obviously are longevity genes,
we're not going to put something in your body that's not useful, we're going to put something
in your body that's going to have some real longevity benefits. And polystatin has been
studied again, for two decades, polystatin is something your body makes, it's basically a way for your body to put on more
muscle, because the higher your polystatin, the lower your myostatin, which is basically imagine
the brakes on your muscle. And so if you take the brakes off a little bit, it's not like you're
going to get jacked like the anabolic steroids, but it will make it a little bit easier to put on muscle.
But much more importantly, and this is why I like polystatin, it's very anti-catabolic,
right? And because as you get older, especially after age 60, your catabolism increases like exponentially. So what is catabolism? So basically, yeah, so there's anabolism and catabolism. So
anabolism is building more tissue. And anabolism is building, building more tissue.
And catabolism is what happens with aging, which is loss of tissue, we actually lose,
I forgot the exact percentage, but we lose some, like, you know, very large percentage of our
total tissue mass as we age. And that's loss of mitochondria, that's loss of muscle,
that's loss of bone density. So we lose a lot of tissue as we age. And so if you can maintain as
much tissue as possible, that's going to be a net positive thing, and especially muscle tissue,
because muscle tissue is the most metabolically active, it has all these protectives, cytokines
that are released called myokines that, you know, turn off tumor suppressors that help prevent
cancer help with diabetes, I'm sure most people know about the benefits of muscle and anything we
can do to help preserve that I think is going to have a net positive effect on
your health. There's obviously a lot of people get concerned. They're like, how do you know this is
100% safe? Because it's new. It is new, obviously. And I'm not saying there's not enough long term
data to know, is it going to do something to you 20 years from now, we can't say that for sure.
But what I can say, and the reason I'm a believer believer in it and the reason I've done it for myself and obviously
patients and many I've injected hundreds of people with it. And the reason is because
and the reason patients like it too, it's because the net positive of having more muscle and having
reduced systemic inflammation, which is what false satin does to me is going to outweigh any
theoretical risks that maybe we don't know about. But I think I think it's unlikely anyway, because inflammation, which is what false statin does, to me is going to outweigh any theoretical risk
that maybe we don't know about. But I think it's unlikely anyway, because we understand how false
statin works. Let me just break this down, because that was a lot. So first of all,
just to make sure I understand, you can insert into your cells through something called the
plasmid, which essentially is a communication vesicle that can then take a gene that produces a certain protein and and it's
something that you normally would make but you don't make as much of as you get older and so the
you don't have the benefit of this molecule at the same level you had when you were younger to
build muscle so you can insert this gene that produces this thing called folostatin, which then inhibits the
thing called myostatin, which then, myostatin is the thing that prevents you from building
muscle.
So that's why as you see people get older, they lose muscle, they look more frail, they
don't have as much, you know, bulk, and that's because they're having lower levels of this
folostatin.
So by actually putting it in your cells and having like a little factory
to make extra folostatin,
you actually can stop this process
which prevents you from building muscle
as you get older.
Is that right?
That's exactly right.
And it's one of the drivers,
but that's a great summary, yes.
So is there a risk of inserting this gene
from who knows where into your body that,
you know, because it sounds scary, right?
If you, oh my God, I'm going to get some.
Yeah.
I mean, what if the gene, what if the part of like some of the risks, for example, in
theory could be, what if, what if the vector that we're using migrates?
What if it goes somewhere we don't want it to go?
But plasmid vectors are very well studied, and very well kind of documented how
they work. And they have a very high, you know, they have a high safety profile, because they're
very inert, meaning they don't stimulate your immune system. They don't cause they don't have
any, you know, known serious risk, but there are vectors, for example, so people can understand,
like what is with the vector, for example, when they use the COVID vaccine, they use something called a lipid nanoparticle vector
LPV. But the LPV, if you read about LPV, the vector that they use, unfortunately can migrate.
And that's why some people get myocarditis or pericarditis and, and, and the vector can
also be immunogenic. So that's why it stimulates some people's immune system. And that's why
they get autoimmune conditions. And, and it's. So that's why it stimulates some people's immune system. And that's why they get autoimmune conditions.
And that's why we know now.
Or neurological conditions.
Exactly.
We know that the vaccine actually has some harm
more than we probably thought when it first came out.
And so basically the plasmid vector, though,
as compared to like a lip and nanoparticle vector,
is a lot safer just for comparison.
It's incredible.
So there's really two that are main gene therapies that I've heard about.
One is folistatin, which is around and available now.
When you go offshore, you can get it.
Not cheap.
And then there's this new emerging technology around the clotho gene.
Now, can you tell us about the clotho gene, clotho gene therapy, where we are in the research and what it does and actually how we're maybe going to be able to use this clinically soon?
Yeah.
So clotho is a really, really interesting peptide because the word itself comes from the Greek of saying the one who controls the threads of life, which is a bit dramatic, but basically,
but basically, it's like, whoa, holy, what does this clotho do? Does it control my life? Yeah,
well, yeah, what they thought, what they realized, they found this accidentally in some animal research, and they found out that animals that had higher levels of clotho lived
30% longer. And then they've seen similar data in humans of people who have high levels of Clotho
naturally, not only live longer, but they're protected against dementia, even if they have
the ApoE4 gene, which is super interesting. And then it can actually help with chronic kidney
disease too. So the two levels where most of your Clotho is produced is your brain and your kidneys.
And so those are the two main medical indications which Clotho is being very,
very like looked at like there's a lot of research going on right now. And there's a lot of biotech
companies looking at Clotho. But our platform, I believe has the most applicability just because
of the ease of use and obviously being able to just give it same technology through a plasmid
vector, which is just an injection in your arm or in your stomach, and then optimizing your colto levels. But colto is more, definitely more high risk than
phallostatin. Because if you're you don't want your colto levels to go too high, either. If
phallostatin levels go too high, it doesn't really have any harm, it just saturates and there's not
really much that happens. But colto, if your colto levels go too high, it can cause your PTH to go
down and it can it can kind of mess up your hormonal system and it could actually be other detrimental side
effects. So culto is definitely exciting, but I think we're still, you know, at least a year,
a year and a half away before, you know, after the clinical trial that we're just starting now,
before we can start offering it to people. I'm going to be doing it on myself actually next
month. So I'll keep you posted. Okay. Well, i hope you're okay it's it caused some level
of something to go down what was that pth parathyroid hormone yeah parathyroid hormone
right so you have to monitor so you have to do blood work for that yeah so so this what does
this do because it's you know the the folostatin seems really clear it just prevents the breakdown
of muscle what does clotho do biologically? So it activates Wnt genes, which are these
regenerative pathways. The Wnt gene pathway is kind of well known for being one of the more
important ones that a lot of different regenerative molecules work on. And Clotho helps with that too.
So it can facilitate regeneration and repair as well. And it can also, in terms of helping with
neuronal death,
so there's something called the intubated stress response,
which is your neurons, when they are under stress,
they have this stress response called ISR,
and Clotho can help to mitigate that so there's less neuronal death.
And that's why it can help with various,
that's why there's so much interest for so many different neurodegenerative conditions and and so this really fascinating kind of field of different things that we're discovering that
the body has built into it innately whether it's certain proteins it produces or stem cells or
whether it's you know peptides and they're seeming to be kind of this explosion of research in this area.
I mean, Ozempic is a peptide.
It's probably one of the biggest, most profitable drug in history, I think.
But it's just something that the body naturally makes.
The GLP-1 agonist is something the body naturally uses to regulate its function.
And so a lot of these compounds we're talking about are being explored, which are actually helping activate the body's healing repair system by using these different compounds that come from different
sources and we're still sort of sorting through what works what doesn't work what the research is
you know do when do you feel like this is ready for prime time i mean this is going to be covered
by insurance that health care because right now it's not accessible to those people the price is
so high i mean i remember i bought my first computer in 1988 it was a mac se 30 and it was 3 500 for four megabytes of hard drive and one megabyte of
ram on a floppy disk you know and it was like this tiny little black and white screen and now you
know you i get my iphone which is you know you can probably have more computing power than what took
men to the moon for the first time, right?
So how are we looking at this field in terms of, you know, the research advances,
when it's going to be clinically kind of more widespread and when the costs are going to come down?
Yeah, so the costs will come down.
And then I believe in that really like not, we're not talking like 10 years.
We're talking within the next five years because we're very close to this kind of automation of manufacturing.
There's a company in Silicon Valley that actually just started, and they're doing well.
They basically figured out how to automate cell manufacturing using robotics.
And so using that plus bioreactors,
which allow you to grow a lot more cells a lot quicker, will significantly reduce the cost of
manufacturing these cells. And obviously, if the cost of manufacturing goes down, then the cost of
the consumer goes down. But then there's also... It's almost like to get rare diamonds, it's hard,
but now they make these artificial diamonds that right exactly exactly
yeah and so that's so that's that's the first thing and then the the the second thing is there's
economies of scale which just means as more people do it and there's more demand then obviously you
can lower the pricing as as there's going to be more people who are willing to do this type of
treatments at a lower price point and that's one of of the things, you know, I'm at, I'm very adamant about making this stuff accessible to the average
person. And the only way that's going to happen, as you, as you just said, there has to be early
adopters, right? You bought a Mac in 1988 and probably not many people had a Mac back then.
So it's like, but there's going to be early adopters for every technology. Just like,
you know, I was an early adopter of Tesla personally. I bought an electric vehicle before anyone else really did.
And I was, but now it's becoming much more common.
And so I think it's going to be the same thing with this, where it's like, okay, there's
going to be the early adopters.
There's going to be people who are more into this stuff.
And also, I think the way to think about it is if you have the means to do this stuff,
you're kind of, you are paving a
better way for a future of people because we're, at least our company, you know, we're investing
all of our profits back into R&D and trying to push this field forward and trying to really make
a difference in regenerative medicine, you know, as opposed to just trying, you know, as opposed
to just kind of using it for just for profit for yourself type of thing. So, and that's why I'm,
and, but the, but the only way to push this bill forward is you have to,
at the end of the day, do controlled clinical trials,
because that's the only way you're going to get insurance companies and regulators to buy into this.
And that's the long game.
But by being able to offer these offshore treatments that people are willing to pay for,
and people actually get real results for,
they're funding our ability to do the research, which ultimately will be used as justification
for regulators to approve it, which I think will take probably seven to 10 years, you know,
in terms of getting approvals for specific medical conditions. Like I think osteoarthritis,
for example, is not very far away. We're already getting incredible results with the new cells and
hydrogel scaffold, which is kind of, you kind of like a jello that protects the stem cells and allows them to stay there so
they don't migrate.
And the results are already incredible.
And just before I came on this call with you, we're working with a company that's making
custom scaffolds using 3D bioprinting, and that can actually resurface an entire joint.
And they've already done that in large animal studies.
So the human trials are next.
And that's what we're going to do.
And so this stuff is not that far away.
So this whole field of regenerative medicine, it's definitely super exciting to me.
Because it's always what I thought of in functional medicine, which is how do we use the body's own healing power to get better?
How do we just get rid of the things that are causing harm and adding in the things that are supporting the body's own repair and healing?
And so now we have all these exploration of these biological products that have been discovered
really over the last decades that now are being used clinically. And there are these sort of
longevity enthusiasts or athletes or kind of early adopters who are starting to use it, including myself, and seeing quite significant benefit.
Do you see this becoming part of mainstream health care at some point?
Yeah.
Insurance covering it?
Look, in Japan, I keep bringing up Japan because they're just so far ahead of us. But in Japan, they actually cover intra-articular stem cell injections for knee osteoarthritis
and cartilage defects.
And so, and those are culture expanded stem cells.
And so, you know, the fact that, and the reason I bring Japan up too, because it's not like
Colombia or Mexico or Panama, you know, some random country that doesn't really have any
sort of developed economy and like rigorous, like Japan, Japan has like rigorous standards, like they're very meticulous with everything.
And so, so to me, the fact that they're able to approve, not only approve it, but actually have
insurance companies reimburse people already, just shows you like, what's possible. But I think,
America, there's just so many politics, right? And the politics,
unfortunately, affect the ability for us to offer these to patients. And what I believe is a solution is personally, you know, if our company becomes big enough, I'm going to get some
regenerative medicine lobbyists. And you bet you I'm going to get them to start lobbying for us,
because I think that's the only way to really get this stuff moving in the US.
Yeah. I mean, so are there,
it seems like there are probably a lot of companies involved
in producing different products and compounds,
and there's a lot of money going into this,
but is there a lot of funding of research
on regenerative medicine?
Is this something coming from governments?
Is it coming from private individuals?
Well, no, that's the problem, right?
Like that company I was just talking about,
for example, that 3D bioprinting company,
they got a national NIH, for $18 million, they're
able to do some animal studies and some preliminary phase one stuff. But now they're hitting a
roadblock because obviously, they have to need more money to do more trials. And it's
so expensive to do clinical trials in the US that you and they can't get any more money
from NIH. So basically, they have to go to DC's venture capital or private equity and try to raise money and they're having they can't get it
it's like too hard because they're biotech and it's high risk and yada yada yada. And so it's
really hard for these regenerative medicine companies to fund and find money and to and
honestly, that's, that's actually been my strength is I'm good at finding technology and I have,
I have a good networks and I'm able to help like the MuCells, for example,
Professor Gisela, unfortunately, she had funding, but then lost her funding because, again,
politics. But I'm able to help her with that stuff. And then obviously, I have marketing and
other resources. And that's kind of my, I guess, vision with this stuff is being able to actually
drive this stuff forward by doing the controlled clinical trials of very promising technologies that I believe that, you know, based off the science, I think are going to be a huge part of the future of medicine.
Yeah, it's a pretty exciting moment.
I mean, we're seeing the advances in healthcare medicine happening so fast.
But just the sad thing is it often takes decades between the discovery of something that works
and actually having it end up
in the doctor's office or your clinic.
And you created an incredible...
I think that's going to change thanks to social media,
funny enough,
because alternative media is becoming more and more popular.
And I think people will demand that their doctors
or people know that, hey,
look, I deserve to have this as an option, you know, and I think that's what it comes down to.
Patients have the right to have all their options explored and especially options that are safe and
can be just as effective as surgery. So I think it's, you know, it's unfair to patients to not
be able to, or the doctors to not even know anything about this stuff and not be able to have a conversation with their patient about it just because they
don't know unfortunately they don't know anything about regenerative medicine and just because i
mean you and me didn't learn anything about regenerative medicine in that school right so
there was no education that was amazing so so uh you know tell us more about how people can find
you about your clinics where they are because maybe people listening want to go try it out so
how do they how do they,
how do they get to learn more about what you're doing? Yeah, well, I'm in, I'm in Dubai now, but we do have clinics in Las Cabos, Mexico, which is probably closest for most of our U.S.
patients. And then we have a clinic in Europe and then we have a partnership in Tokyo as well.
And then maybe Mark Hyman and I, maybe, maybe we'll have something in Abu Dhabi soon. But yeah, our company is called Eterna, like eternal without an L and Eterna.health.
But my Instagram, I'm very responsive on there.
And it's at dr.akon, K-A-H-A-N.
And I try to be as helpful as possible.
We've helped many patients with chronic diseases.
And sometimes we know affordability
can be an issue and we do try our best to help those patients with hardship pricing and stuff
like that and uh so it's not you know it is expensive but we are also we are trying our
best to work on that and also starting a foundation uh to help cover those costs for like you know
for veterans and for people on disability and stuff like that that's amazing so we'll put the
link in the show notes to your website which which is Aeternia.health,
and to your social media so people can find more about you.
We'll link to some of the sort of research that we've talked about.
And it's just, it's an incredible field.
I just can't wait to see where it's going.
And for me, as a guy who's coming up on 65, I'm like, thank God.
So I can keep, you know, getting all the old injuries kind of fixed
up and keep moving up so I can keep skiing and playing tennis and climbing mountains and having
fun. So I really appreciate the work you've done, your enthusiasm, your dedication to thinking about
this, to learning about what's on the leading edge, trying to sort of navigate a very difficult
and complex world. And I know we'll be hearing more about this from you in the future.
So thank you so much, Adil, for being on the Dr. Swarm's podcast.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
Thanks for listening today.
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