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Dec. 28, 2023 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:35:05
You Don’t Have To Live With Chronic Pain | Dr. Adeel Khan | EP 409
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Hello, everyone.
I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024.
Beginning in early February and running through June, Tammy and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the U.S. You can find out more information about this on my website, jordanbpeterson.com, as well as accessing all relevant ticketing information.
I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, Out November 2024.
We who wrestle with God.
I'm looking forward to this.
I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon.
Bye-bye.
You could take any somatic cell in your body, like a muscle, a skin cell, and you can reprogram it using genetic reprogramming and turn it back into an embryonic stem cell state.
So to revert to an earlier form, essentially?
But we have to figure out and give it the right signals so that you can heal disease.
And that's what regenerative medicine, the promise of it, is really about.
Hello, everyone.
So today I have the opportunity to speak with Dr.
Adil Khan.
Adil is a physician that I've worked with.
He offered Tammy and I a treatment, a couple of different treatments.
The treatment for her was particularly successful.
It helped her deal with chronic osteoarthritic condition in her forearms and And was quite remarkably successful.
And so that's very interesting.
And it deals a young Canadian physician, very, very sharp character.
Seems to be on the cutting edge of the expanding field of regenerative medicine, which is, what would you say?
It's developing not precisely in opposition to, but in parallel to...
Standard allopathic medicine that's more symptom-based in its approach.
So the regenerative medical types are attempting to get to the root cause of chronic health problems and to address them.
And so there's much advance being made on that front.
And so we're going to talk through the potential of these new treatment treatments.
protocols for depression, chronic pain, degenerative diseases like osteoarthritis, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, and a variety of chronic pain conditions.
We talk about gene therapy, stem cell usage, and tissue engineering.
So, stay tuned if you're concerned about your health and about, you know, living happily and healthily, and even just living.
Well, thank you for coming in, Dr.
Kahn.
You treated Tammy and I a while back, and so maybe you could start by telling everybody who's watching and listening what you did.
And why?
And then we'll talk a little bit about what you do more generally and about who you are and the way we'll go.
Yeah, so in your wife's case, she had a very common issue, which is chronic pain.
Chronic pain is something that the medical industry has grappled with for years.
And traditionally, they've used cortisone, which is an anti-inflammatory drug.
They've used narcotics, opioids, and then if that doesn't work, surgery.
So what we do is we identify that there's a gap where people don't get better necessarily with just cortisone and therapy, and they don't always want surgery.
And so this is kind of that gap of patients who are just suffering or living with chronic pain.
and taking pain meds, as we know, OxyContin, and so many other pain meds, what they can lead to with addiction and all these risks.
And so what we do is what's called regenerative medicine.
So we use different types of regenerative molecules, whether that's stem cells, PRP, exosomes, which we'll talk about, to repair the tissue back to a previous state.
So in your wife's case, she had what's called osteoarthritis, which is degradation of the joint, cartilage loss, and you get inflammation, And then she also had some small tears in the tendons around the joints.
And it bothered her for 10 years, as you know.
And she couldn't garden, and she loves to garden.
So what we did is we used an ultrasound, as you saw, and we go directly into the tears and into the joint where the inflammation is to repair the tissue back to your previous state.
And so that's how we got rid of her chronic pain.
When was the ultrasound for diagnosis?
Diagnostic and intervention.
And intervention.
Yeah.
So how does the ultrasound intervene?
Because it allows us to guide the needle directly into the area of damage.
Right.
And how can you see what's damaged?
Because the ultrasound...
And that's the skill.
So it's telling gray from gray.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's the steepest skill set.
To give you an example...
I treated Mohammed Oliver.
He's the guy who owns the Burj Khalifa and the six tallest buildings in Dubai.
So he had a shoulder issue for 15, 20 years.
And he did an MRI. MRI was normal.
So they just did cortisone, they did physio.
He was living with chronic pain for 15 years.
And he's arguably the most, he's the wealthiest man in the Middle East, and he's a very well-renowned businessman.
So he has access to any doctor in the world.
Right, right.
He found me, and when I flew down, I did an ultrasound, and we found some small tears that were missed on MRI, and then we injected them, similar to what we did with Tammy, and we fixed it.
But the principle is the same, which is that sometimes you need to do diagnostic, dynamic ultrasound to find the issue.
How did you learn to distinguish, as you said, gray from gray, and are the AI image systems getting good at that?
We're developing a machine learning neural net to do that, but that hasn't been developed yet.
That's actually something we're doing because we're kind of set the standard for it.
Because my mentor, Dr.
Anthony Gallia, he was the first one in the world to do this stuff.
He did it for Tiger Woods, Alex Rodriguez, a lot of A-list athletes.
So he was the one who taught me all this, and he was the one who pioneered this field.
So I learned from him, and I was fortunate because I got to learn from the best.
And because of that, I was able to kind of take it and translate it into my own patients.
How much exposure to image data did you have to undertake in order to start to be able to distinguish?
Thousands of hours?
The learning curve is so steep, and we have ultrasonographers, if you remember, I brought her with me at the time, who are specially trained by us, and they're the ones who actually guide us.
Because there's so much nuance between telling what's a tear and what's not a tear, that you really need a specialist.
Yeah, and a really trained specialist who actually knows what they're doing.
I know there's huge difference in radiologists, for example, in their diagnostic accuracy.
I know on the AI front that they have trained AI systems now, from what I understand, to be able to be pretty good at distinguishing lung cancer lesions, for example.
Yeah, they're pretty good at x-ray and cancer, but musculoskeletal is still a big gap.
And so that's what we're developing because that's our specialty is we're going to develop a machine learning neural net using what's called supervised and reinforcement learning to teach the machine learning algorithm to detect what's a tear and what's not a tear and then guide the physician on how to do it.
So that's kind of how we're going to scale what we're doing.
And how do you get the data set set up properly?
Because you need a training.
If you're going to reinforce the proper response, you have to be sure that the material that you're training the machine on is actually accurate.
Exactly.
So how do you solve that problem?
Because we have a brilliant radiologist on our team who's going to be training the AI on what's not a tear and what's a tear.
And then you have normal...
You have to first get the...
Use more than one radiologist?
No, we're just going to use the one who's specially trained by us, who does our MSK interventions and diagnostics.
And she's obviously exceptional at what she does.
And she can train the AI to say, but the AI needs thousands of normal before it can recognize abnormal.
And that's the data sets that you have to build into at first.
And then she has to train it over time to say, hey, this is a tear and this is not a tear.
And then eventually it learns.
Right, right, right.
And what did you inject Tammy with?
So we used something called exosomes.
So...
The way I explain exosomes, let's talk about stem cells first to explain exosomes.
Most people have an intuitive concept of stem cells.
They understand that they rebuild tissue or they repair tissue.
They can come from Umbilical cord, they can come from fat, they can come from the bone marrow, they can come from amniotic fluid.
There's so many different sources where we can get them.
We use something specifically called mesenchymal stem cells, which is just an embryological term to explain their origin of where they're being derived from.
And the reason we use mesenchymal is because they're easy to access.
So, for example, the most easiest place to access is after birth.
Right?
You take the umbilical cord tissue, or you take the amniotic fluid, and you can isolate the mesenchymal stem cells, or stromal cells is technically the right word, but anyway, most people call it stem cells, but MSCs for short.
And so what you do is you isolate those, and then you can grow them in a lab for three to four months.
Why are they in umbilical cord tissue?
Why?
Because they're just a rich source of repair and regeneration of the mesenchymal stem cells from that.
So meaning the umbilical cord tissue is just rich in MSCs.
So why are they rich in MSCs?
Well, I read that babies actually send stem cells into their mother's body to help the mother repair her own tissue.
Right.
Yeah, there is that mechanism built in.
So, I think a lot of it is probably that crosstalk between the placenta and the mother, right?
So, I believe...
And the cool thing is your body has stem cells too, right?
And you have stem cells in your bone marrow and in your fat.
And they're basically cells that are undifferentiated that can turn into any tissue.
So...
There's different types of stem cells.
If you have embryonic stem cells, which is from the fetus, then they can turn to any type of tissue.
But as you know, embryonic stem cells during the Bush era and everything, it was controversial, right?
And the reason for that was because they were saying, are we going to be harming fetuses?
Obviously that becomes ethical issues.
And so that never really took off.
But luckily we figured out, hey, wait a minute, we have something that's almost as good as embryonic stem cells.
Not as good, but it's called pluripotent, meaning it has the ability to turn into many different types of tissue, but not every type of tissue.
I see.
So they're slightly farther down the developmental chain?
It's not totipotent, it's pluripotent.
And so those pluripotent stem cells, mesenchymal stem cells, are pretty ubiquitous.
You can get them from dental pulp, you can get them from fat.
Umbilical cord, as you talked about, bone marrow, there's a lot of different sources.
And so they're easier to harvest and easier to source.
And because of that accessibility, that's where the research really took off in the last 10 to 15 years is with the MSCs.
So are there variants of cells, like is it a continual variant from the cells that are omnipotent?
Totipotent, yeah.
Totipotent, that can turn into anything.
And then there's the ones that are, what was the next level?
Pluripotent, yeah.
Pluripotent, yeah.
Do the totipotent cells turn into the pluripotent cells?
Is that the developmental sequence and then into specific tissue?
Exactly, yeah.
And that's kind of how it can differentiate down the line.
What's the difference between a stem cell and a cancer cell?
So...
A cancer cell has some similar properties because it can essentially, it loses a signal, or in a sense it gets kind of hijacked, and it loses the ability to stop killing itself.
So meaning it stops apoptosis, so it keeps replicating.
Right, right.
And it has an infinite amount.
It can keep going.
Right, and it's undifferentiated to some degree too.
Right, and so that's why there's actually something called cancer stem cells.
And so if we can target cancer stem cells and stop that process, that's an active area of research.
So not all stem cells are good, right?
And that's the problem with stem cells.
Well, undifferentiated tissue in the wrong place could be a real fault.
Exactly, and lead to tumor.
And that's actually the problem with embryonic stem cells too.
They have too much stemness, meaning they can keep replicating and grow into tumors.
Right, right.
Whereas mesenchymal stem cells, they have a finite ability to grow, so they don't keep growing, which is why they're safe.
Oh, okay.
So when we grow the mesenchymal stem cells, the soup that they grow in, so imagine...
How do you say that?
Mesenchymal.
How do you spell it?
M-E-S-E-N-C-H-Y-M-A-L. Yeah, wow.
And it's going to take me a while to get that one right.
Yeah, I know.
It's an embryological term, so just call them MSCs.
MSCs.
Yeah.
Okay, I'll do that.
So MSCs, When they're grown, imagine the MSCs are the chicken meat and the soup, the broth, is the exosomes.
So the broth has all these nutrients and cytokines in there, but there's no actual stem cells.
And why is that important?
important because those exosomes can send all the signals, which are the proteins, the cytokines and growth factors to reduce inflammation and repair tissue without the risk of having cells, which sometimes can not survive or can cause reactions in certain people.
So that's what you used on Tammy with exosomes.
And that encourages the cells that are already there to what?
To repair themselves?
Exactly.
It's a signal.
It's a signal that says to your body, okay, start repairing this tissue.
So it sends signals to your endogenous cells.
So does it essentially signal to the body that something's wrong?
It sends to the bodies to start healing and regenerative pathways.
Well, I know that, for example, and correct me if I'm wrong, but part of the reason that your face skin doesn't repair itself when it wrinkles is because your body doesn't actually note that the damage has occurred.
And I know that some of the therapies that regenerate skin, like intense pulsed light, produce enough damage so that...
Damage is now signaled, right?
Your body has to figure out.
So the cross-linking that occurs as a consequence of sun damage is so subtle that it can accumulate across time with no indication of damage.
And so the exosomes signal to the body that something needs to be fixed.
Exactly.
And that's what this really is all about.
And especially the first generation of stem cells.
We'll talk about second generation.
But first generation of stem cells is really about paracrine signaling.
Which is basically signaling to the local tissue, hey, there's something wrong here, start fixing it.
And that's really what it is.
And so exosomes, in the case of Tammy's case, they send a signal to reduce inflammation and then they send growth factors to help repair and regenerate the tear.
And then you can actually see, if you do a follow-up ultrasound, which we do all the time, that the tissue is actually repaired and regenerated.
Can you do that systemically?
Yeah, exactly.
So intravenous stem cells or intravenous exosomes are being used a lot for a variety of neurodegenerative conditions, autoimmune conditions, chronic pain, chronic inflammation.
There's so many different things that are being done for it.
There was a recent trial done for inflammatory bowel disease, which is a really terrible condition.
And right now, the only really medications are like methotrexate or immunosuppressants.
Carnivore diet.
Yeah, carnivore diet.
It does work, actually.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But not everyone's going to stick to it.
Yeah, right.
It's a hard diet.
And a lot of doctors don't really know about it, so they're not going to recommend it to their patients.
So patients have to self-educate, right?
And so instead of just suppressing your immune system, what the intravenous stem cells do is they do what's called immunomodulation.
So they actually reset or repair your immune system from a pro-inflammatory state to an anti-inflammatory state.
And is that the exosomes or the stem cells per se?
It's not.
It's more the stem cells.
The stem cells have a strong immunomodulatory effect.
The exosomes don't have a strong immunomodulation.
That's why you have to do intravenous stem cells if you want to treat something systemic autoimmune conditions.
And there's trials where patients have actually gone into remission.
And that's incredible to see.
Yeah, you've treated MS? We have.
But MS is much more tricky because there is an autoimmune component to it.
But then there's also...
There's a lot of other components to it.
And that's where it becomes, you have to take a holistic approach.
So the way we're going to treat MS, which we're working on, is we're going to have the second generation of stem cells.
So what that means is, instead of just using umbilical core stem cells, we create what are called gene-edited stem cells.
So we can actually take...
So this is what Professor Yamanaka in Japan, he won a Nobel Prize in 2014 for what's called Discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells, IPSCs.
So what he discovered was that you could take any somatic cell in your body, like a muscle, a skin cell, and you can reprogram it using genetic reprogramming and turn it back into an embryonic stem cell state.
So to revert to an earlier form, essentially?
I like to call it the Yamanaka stem cell.
And basically...
It's a pretty crazy discovery if you think about it.
The fact that your body has this almost innate ability to go back to like an infant state.
But you just have to overexpress certain transcription factors to do that.
And so that discovery was pretty incredible.
You know, the immune system does that too.
When it's mutating, when it's adapting to the presence of a new virus or a bacteria, it'll produce more and more accurate gripping mechanisms.
At the cellular level, but it stores representations of the ones that were part of the developmental sequence.
So, you can imagine that an immune cell is trying to get purchase on a bacteria.
It'll sort of go like this first, right?
It's not doing it very well, but it'll stick a bit.
And then what sticks a bit varies, and then it'll stick a bit better.
And then that'll vary, and then it'll stick a bit better like that.
Well, then if the thing mutates, this grip might not work, but this one might.
And so that information is still stored.
And if this one doesn't work, well, this one might.
So it stores that developmental...
So there's more early variability and less...
Fine accuracy.
There's a trade-off, right?
And it sounds like the same thing is happening with the stem cells, is that they'll differentiate into their final form, which is specialized, but that the possibility for earlier forms with more potential is reserved.
Exactly.
The same thing seems to happen with regards to junk DNA. So I had a friend tell me, for example, if you breed fruit flies and you breed them so that they don't have eyes, you can do that.
You can alter them genetically so they don't have eyes.
And then you take the blind fruit flies and you let them breed amongst themselves for seven or eight generations, the eyes will come back because the genome takes...
Information out of the junk DNA and rebuilds the eyes.
And so, even in the DNA itself, there seems to be additional information stored so that the system can revert to an earlier stage of development and then progress forward again.
And that's really what I believe is you have 3.2 trillion cells or so in your body, and I believe they're working for you, but we have to figure out and give it the right signals so that you can heal disease.
And that's what...
Regenerative medicine, the promise of it is really about, which is that we can use customized cell and gene therapy to restore your body back to a previous state.
And that's the era we're finally in.
It took a while to get here, but you see how there's all these interesting almost clues from fruit flies, from the immune system, that tell us that maybe this is possible.
And now we're just trying to piece that together using next-generation cell therapeutics.
So...
Can you distinguish, let's speak more generally for a moment, if you can distinguish between regenerative medicine per se and medicine as it's commonly practiced.
And it sounds like the regenerative field is much newer, and you're obviously at the forefront of that.
But how do you distinguish what you do from what physicians typically do?
Well, I think the big narrative shift that's hopefully going to happen is instead of giving pills for chronic disease, we want to be giving cells.
And what that means is we can make customized cells now to treat chronic disease.
Traditional medicine is amazing when it comes to acute care, right?
If you get a fracture, you go to the hospital, phenomenal.
Our surgeons are amazing.
They're so good at that.
But when it comes to chronic disease, unfortunately, we've been told by regulatory bodies and by guidelines that giving prescription drugs is the best way to manage them.
And the reality is those drugs don't really treat the root cause.
They're just kind of symptom.
Symptom maskers.
Exactly.
And so, but now, and it was fair, it was not an unreasonable solution.
But now we're kind of at this place where we actually have real solutions to get people better using these specific cell therapies and put them into remission.
Or actually, I don't like to say cure, but at least remission, right?
Where there's diseases controlled.
And so they don't, and they don't necessarily have to be on pain meds.
And so I think people need to, and this is, I'll give an example, like, Lupus is a terrible condition.
And again, the only way they can traditionally manage it, it's an autoimmune condition, it's usually some sort of immunosuppressant.
Right, which brings with it all sorts of other risks, like chronic infection of other sorts.
Exactly.
And so many other risks with it.
And so there was a trial done in Germany where they used something called gene-edited CAR T-cells.
So what they do is they take your T-cells out of your body, they add a chimeric antigen receptor, which basically allows these T-cells to hone in and kill B-cells, which become hyperproliferative in lupus.
And so it's called CD-CAR19.
It's a specific type of antigen that they add on to the T receptor.
The gist of it is that what it does is just makes it hone in on the problem.
So it's really fascinating because you're gene editing these, you're making these bespoke cells almost that are specifically designed to do a task.
And these cells, they actually put everyone in the trial into remission.
And even a year follow-up, even though their B lymphocytes went back up, patients were still doing well.
Their symptoms didn't come back.
So that just shows you the power of these next generation therapeutics.
So is that a widely used treatment now?
So CAR-T is approved by FDA. However, it's $500,000.
And why is it so expensive?
Because the pharmaceutical companies, a lot of them just...
Unfortunately, because it's patented and all this stuff, they just charge a lot of money.
And so what we're doing is we're using our technology, which we can talk about, to create our own CAR-T and hopefully offer it at one-tenth the price.
And that's kind of the goal that we want to take.
Very few people can afford that, obviously.
But the point is, you can make these customized cell therapies for different chronic diseases.
And there's so many.
It's going to be autoimmune conditions, cancer, and Everything in the next few years is going to shift towards gene and cell therapy to actually cure people or put them in remission as opposed to just giving them pills for everything.
How far along is regenerative medicine in relation to the treatment of cancer?
So a variant of CAR-T is used for different types of leukemia and lymphomas, and it's successfully been used for several years.
So that's one type of gene-edited cell therapy that's being used.
And then there's also something called natural killer cells, which are part of your innate immune system, as the name suggests.
Natural killers.
They go there, they kill things that don't belong.
So what you can do now is you can actually gene edit those natural killer cells with that CAR antigen I was talking about, so you can create something called CAR NK. And that CAR NK, with that antigen onto it, can hone in and kill the cancer.
There's trials being done now where they're using CAR-NK for different types of solid tumors as well.
And the results are very promising.
It's still early stages, but again, this is where the cross-cultural medicine becomes really important.
So when I worked in Japan earlier this year, I learned that they've been using these types of cell therapies to treat cancer for over 10 years.
But in the U.S., it's completely new.
So it just shows you that there's this disconnect.
Why is there a 10-year lag?
Exactly.
So it's a loaded question because the problem is, the biggest problem by far is regulatory bodies.
And unfortunately, the regulatory bodies in North America are making it very difficult for cell and gene therapies to be approved.
Whereas in Japan, they set a framework, it's called PWDA, which is just a framework for regenerative medicine regulation, which started in 2014.
So it's almost nine years.
So they actually approved different type of cell therapies nine years ago.
Whereas in the US, it's technically still illegal to do certain types of stem cells.
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So why do you think that is?
Is it merely a matter of...
I mean, nine years is long in terms of...
Nine years is a long time if you happen to be suffering from cancer, but on a historical time frame, it's a blink in time.
Obviously, there's going to be some resistance and lag in every system to the introduction of new innovations, and perhaps some of that's useful because some innovations cause a lot more trouble than they solve.
But why do you think it is that there is a lag in the United States, which is generally a very dynamic place with regard to innovation, on the regenerative medicine side compared to Japan?
I think it has to do, unfortunately, with the pharmaceutical companies, because a lot of them have lobbyists that influence...
Yeah, seven for every member of Congress and senator in the US. Seven lobbyists.
Right, so plenty.
And I think they control 75% of mainstream television advertising.
I think it's something like that, and I think it's actually higher for news broadcasts, per se.
And they actually spend more money advertising to doctors than they do to even consumers.
So then doctors are inundated with these pharmaceutical reps and with this information.
And if you're busy, doctors have really challenging lives, as I'm sure you know.
And so they're busy working, they're in clinic, they're trying to just help their patients.
They don't really have time to check everything that's going on outside of...
They don't have time to travel, they don't have time to look at what's going on in the whole world of medicine.
Or read the journals.
And they're not trained very well to do that to begin with.
No, they're not.
What they're trained well to do is follow guidelines.
And those guidelines, where do they come from?
From specialists who have industry sponsors or ties to pharmaceutical companies.
Well, it's a tricky business, right?
Because the pharmaceutical companies are within their proper purview to attempt to educate physicians about their new products.
But drawing the line between that and marketing per se and unethical marketing is very, very tricky.
I mean, it's the same with regards to High prices for novel medical interventions.
I mean, it can take a lot of time and money to develop a new drug or a treatment.
And it's not surprising at all that to begin with it's expensive because everything that's introduced into the market to begin with that's novel is expensive.
Exactly.
Hopefully then it gets widespread enough so the price starts to come down.
I mean, it's easy to damn the pharmaceutical companies and I'm highly inclined to do that under certain circumstances.
You know, because I think...
I don't know.
It seems to me that maybe a line was crossed when the pharmaceutical companies got the okay to advertise directly to consumers.
That seemed to have warped the system pretty badly.
And that was about 20 years ago, if I remember correctly.
I think they moved from, what would you call it, scientific research enterprises to marketing machines at that point.
And it doesn't look to me like the consequences of that were particularly good.
So...
No, and the reality is that if you're a physician, most of your continuing education comes from once-a-year conferences that are given by specialists who are considered the top in their field from institutions who usually have some sort of ties with pharmaceutical companies.
So where are you getting your continuing education from?
And it's really difficult for them to get out of that system.
And so the only reason I think I was able to get out of that system was because I always looked at prevention and I always looked at Finding cures.
That's just the way I was taught.
Because of functional medicine.
And functional medicine is this whole concept of trying to repair your body and trying to heal it.
Before cell and gene therapy, a lot of it was just focused on supplements, lifestyle.
Like carnivore, those type of interventions can be very powerful.
But there's no education on the physician side of that stuff.
Well, it's also hard to transform them into something that generates profit.
And this is, you know, it's easy to be cynical about that, but that's actually a big problem.
I mean, I know there are a lot of off-the-shelf pharmaceuticals that are essentially free that can be used effectively for treating various conditions.
So there's a lithium, I'm not, this is not medical advice, by the way, for everyone watching, listening, but there's a lithium variant called lithium orotate, which is dirt cheap and has virtually no side effects that appears to be reasonably effective in the treatment of manic depressive disorder.
And you can buy it across the shelf for virtually nothing.
And everyone asks, well, why isn't this more widely known?
And the answer is, well, if the chemical is widely available and essentially free and no one can generate a profit from it, no one has the incentive to market it or educate people about it, right?
You see the same thing for treatments like...
What's the precursor to serotonin?
5-hydroxytryptamine, which is a good precursor for serotonin.
It's also extremely inexpensive and, by all appearances, relatively harmless.
And you might say, well, why isn't it more widely known?
And again, it's the same problem.
If there's no market, there's no impetus for the distribution of the product or for education about it.
So they just fall by the wayside.
And so it isn't merely a matter of the profit-hungry, you know, vampires of the pharmaceutical industry.
It's actually a very troublesome technical problem.
When you're making dietary recommendations too, it's like, well, you know, how do you do that?
And at the same time, or any form of prevention for that matter, it's hard to even get credit for prevention, right?
Yeah.
Now, if you're very good at prevention...
Then the thing that you could be rewarded for just never happens.
And so that's great, but it's very difficult to reward and to note.
So, how did you get interested in regenerative medicine and why did your educational pathway diverge from the typical physician?
Before I went into med school, I was a personal trainer.
So as a personal trainer, my job was to get people moving, exercising, and a lot of times you actually see them come off their medications, diabetes, high blood pressure, just by exercising.
So then intuitively I knew, I was like, wait a minute, exercise can solve so many chronic disease problems.
And it turns out in the literature, 80% of chronic disease is preventable.
Right, right.
With lifestyle.
Right.
So it's very hard to get people to make lifestyle changes.
Exactly, and it is.
So I was always fascinated by that.
And so even in medical school, I was kind of like, why aren't we learning more about nutrition?
We had one lecture on nutrition in all of medical school.
One.
One.
And it was probably wrong.
It was wrong.
Yeah, no doubt.
It was the can of food guide.
Oh, great!
Which is what?
Sponsored by dairy?
It's like you have to have grains.
It's just ridiculous.
But then what happened was I got exposed to this whole alternative medicine world.
Because even though I was studying allopathic medicine, I was simultaneously studying functional and integrative medicine.
Distinguish those for the people who are watching.
Allopathic medicine is traditional medical doctorate.
You get a doctorate of medicine, and that's the traditional drug-based, surgical-based interventions that we learn in medical school, which is great.
Disease treatment.
But then functional medicine and integrative medicine is taking naturopathic stuff that's evidence-based, that has actual science behind it, and Lifestyle measurements to intervene and treat chronic disease.
You know, I went to the Temple of Asclepius in Greece recently.
Yeah, it was extremely interesting, a very large compound.
And at the Temple of Asclepius, there were rooms where you could...
They actually had people sit and dream in rooms full of snakes.
Right, and God only knows what the reason for that was.
My daughter used to have snakes as pets, and she said that she would often have nightmares as a consequence of having the snakes in her room, and I suspect it had something to do with their order.
So God only knows what dreaming with snakes would produce in terms of visions.
But anyways, there was a place set up where you could have a healing vision.
But there were also theaters and stadia there and places for massage and for saunas, essentially.
Like, it was a compound that was devoted to health that was multidimensional, right?
And there were theaters there because part of the healing process was drama and part of it was exercise and part of it was vision.
And when I went to that temple, I thought, these people were more sophisticated than we are in their approach to disease, right?
Because they were...
It wasn't merely a matter of, I know there are modern medical miracles and certainly surgical bone setting and that kind of thing, hip replacements and so forth.
Some of the things that can be done are absolutely miraculous, but our notion of what constitutes health and how to progress towards it, I don't think is, it's certainly not as sophisticated as what the ancient Greeks managed at their heights.
No, and I believe in 30 years we're going to look back on this era and be like, wow, we did a lot wrong.
And the reason is because, just as I was saying, we realize now that the system is broken.
the US spends more money per GDP on capita than many developed countries, but they don't have better health outcomes.
And they're just drowning in debt because of how much their health expenditure is going up.
And the reality is, like you were saying, people aren't going to...
Yes, I think the concept of people promoting exercise, health, and healthy living is great, but the reality is it's really hard to get people to change.
And the environment is obesogenic, meaning it's set up Let's be honest, it's set up for failure because of just the accessibility of processed foods and the way the environment— Massive calorie foods, you know, and the advertising— Mussins with 1,500 calories.
You know, in, I think, Netherlands, they ban direct-to-consumer advertising of sugar to children.
Uh-huh.
Which is great.
That's a great start.
And Japan, I think, did that as well.
So there's starting to be finally this notion that, hey, processed refined foods like sugar is really, really bad for you, and it can lead to food addiction.
And what are the obesity rates in the U.S.? It's 40%, I believe.
I mean, I think overall, some states are higher than others.
Yeah, it's stunning.
It's absolutely stunning and catastrophic.
Yeah, so I think the reality is it's going to be really, really hard to get people to change unless there's huge policy changes, which probably won't happen anytime soon.
So what we're doing is we're trying to build resiliency in people's body so that they can get the benefits of healthy living without necessarily doing healthy living.
So it sounds kind of crazy, but that's what gene therapy is all about.
Well, it's kind of crazy, except, you know, I mean, people also...
Hand wave about the pathology of pill taking, but one of the things you learn as a behavioral psychologist, perhaps above all else, is that behavioral changes are very, very difficult for people to make, even what you would think of as small changes.
And everybody kind of knows this because they have their New Year's resolutions and they decide they're going to go to the gym.
And they go for like a week and then they quit.
And people revert back to their old habits.
And you might say, well, people should behave better.
It would be better for them.
But then you think, well, how often do you take that advice for yourself?
And so one of the things you learn as a behavior therapist is to help people make behavioral changes Very gradually and incrementally, but that's very labor-intensive, right?
And it's also difficult for the people themselves to do, especially if you're dealing with someone who imagine that they're quite ill and they're in crisis, maybe economically, not least as a consequence of the illness, then to ask them to make a Maybe it's even necessary, but the probability that they're going to do that on top of everything else they're struggling with is very, very low.
So it's a tricky, very tricky thing to get right.
It's called social determinants of health.
Basically, if you're low socioeconomic status, that's the best predictor of health, long term.
So, unfortunately, if you're poor and you don't have access to...
Much capital, then you're more likely to have obesity, more likely to have chronic disease, and then helping those vulnerable populations...
You're going to get cheap, fast sources of calories.
So, how can you tell people, yeah, you just need to exercise more and eat less.
It doesn't make any sense.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, and people also won't do that.
The literature on diet is pretty damn clear, is that if you put someone on a diet that actually requires food restriction, so they're chronically hungry, they may diet successfully for a while, lose some weight, but as soon as they stop dieting, They're going to revert not only back to their original weight, but generally gain weight on top of that.
And so any diet, it seems to me that any diet that involves protracted periods of hunger is actually doomed to failure.
And that's what the fitness industry promotes to people.
So they set them up for failure because they see all these people online who are doing these extreme diets, but they're doing it, A, as a profession, and B, a lot of times they're enhanced using other things.
Yeah, right.
So the regular person sees those people and then they wonder why it's so hard for them.
Right.
Well, and those people are actually specializing in doing that, right?
Because maybe they make a living doing it so they can put the time of effort into it.
One of the advantages of a ketogenic diet or a carnivore diet is that you don't have to be hungry.
Exactly.
That's a big deal.
Because protein is very satiating.
And you can eat as much as you want.
So that's a massive improvement over diets that involve chronic calorie restriction.
The other thing, too, you see people develop eating disorders this way, too.
If you get in a fight with the systems that mediate hunger, you're going to lose.
Because those systems are very, very powerful when they're over-activated.
And you see this with people with eating disorders.
They get into a war with their hypothalamus.
No one wins that war.
No, you're going to be set up for failure or you develop a very unhealthy relationship with food.
So it's developing a healthy relationship with food, which means you're eating it for nourishment and not for coping with emotions or stress or so many other reasons why people use food for.
And developing that healthy relationship is really what...
It takes a lot of therapy, actually, and it takes a lot of work, which is cognitive behavioral therapy, right?
CBT. And CBT is one of the few evidence-based therapies out there to help people treat obesity.
Yeah.
And so, but it's a lot of work.
It is a lot of work and a lot of attention, a lot of strategic planning, and it's expensive for that reason, too.
Exactly.
And time-consuming on the part of the people who are being treated.
So, alright, so how did you...
You said that you worked as a personal trainer, and so you were already interested in lifestyle modification.
And then you...
And how long did you do that, and why did you decide to go to medical school?
So I was basically doing that from undergrad for three, four years, and then I got into medical school.
But the reason I decided to go to medical school was mainly because of intellectual stimulation.
Because obviously being a personal trainer, there's only so much you can do.
And it kind of becomes repetitive very quickly.
And so I wanted to learn more about how I can help and heal people.
And being a doctor naturally seemed the best way to do that.
But what I didn't realize was when I got into medical school, I was a little bit disillusioned because I realized that a lot of these things just don't resonate with my belief system, which is that I don't believe just giving pills to people.
It just never resonated with me.
And so I was always kind of trying to learn more about how can I actually get to the root of this.
And that was just a question I always wanted to ask myself.
I did like surgery because surgery is very gratifying because If you have a trauma, if you have someone, you can fix them, you get them on their way and they're done.
But then you realize, even in surgery, most of what you're treating is the end stage of chronic disease.
Like hip replacements is osteoarthritis.
Like ophthalmology, a lot of it is cataracts and that's related to diabetes.
And so many other Surgical specialties are actually vascular.
It's just chronic vascular disease, heart disease.
These are just end stage of lifestyle stuff.
And so the reality is, if you look at even most surgical specialties, a lot of them are just doing what could have been prevented.
And so That's why I ended up not going into surgery.
And then I kind of got into this whole world of...
Naturally, because of personal training, I like sports medicine.
So then that's why I went to sports medicine with Dr.
Anthony Gallia.
And was that a post-medical school?
Yes, after residency training.
After residency training.
Then you do sports medicine with Dr.
Gallia, who's kind of the pioneer of the platelet-rich plasma injections.
Yeah, sports medicine is the medical domain that probably overlaps most with cognitive behavioral therapy, as it turns out.
Interesting.
Yeah, right.
Well, that could make sense.
Yeah.
And so...
Interestingly, I've had professional golfers that we do something called a vagus nerve injection, which helps with their nervous system to help performance-based anxiety.
But anyway, when I went to sports medicine, I got exposed to Dr.
Gallia and the pioneer of platelet-rich plasma, which is where you take your blood, you centrifuge it, you concentrate the platelets in the plasma, and those platelets release growth factors that stimulate healing.
This is kind of like a lower version of the exosomes we were talking before.
If you were to compare...
profile is about 10 times weaker.
PRP is the platelet-rich plasma.
Yes, so PRP is still good for muscle tendon tears, like acute injuries.
It's not great for chronic wear and tear.
So that's where exosomes and stem cells are more superior.
But when I worked with Dr. Gallio, obviously I got exposed to all this alternative stuff.
But then I realized he's treating some of the most high-profile people in the world.
I'm like, there must be a reason they're coming to him.
So why would these people who can go to any doctor...
Right, so is it alternative or is it cutting edge?
Exactly, exactly.
And the media used to print it as though he's, you know, there's a lot of negative stuff out there about him.
So it's hard to discern, right?
It's like, what's really the truth?
And then you realize quickly, once you're in there...
Some of the most important people in the world come see him.
And so I realized he's obviously doing something right.
And then that's when I got into regenerative medicine.
In regenerative medicine, PRP was a great starting point, but now it's evolved into cell and gene therapy and tissue engineering.
How did you learn to read the relevant scientific literature?
I had to just make Google Scholar alerts and just for everything regenerative medicine-based and just reading primary literature sources.
And was that something you did fundamentally on your own?
Correct me if you think I'm wrong, but one of the things, I did a fair bit of research with psychiatrists, especially back at McGill when I was doing my PhD, And one of the things I learned very rapidly was that there was a big difference between physicians and scientists.
So, if you're trained as a Boulder model clinical psychologist, you're basically a research scientist who does clinical work.
So, you're trained to evaluate the scientific research.
You're trained to learn how to do statistics and to understand them.
And to write scientific papers and to evaluate them.
And I thought the same was true of physicians, but I soon discovered it wasn't true at all.
And even the psychiatrists that I did work with, they often had statisticians do their stats, and I thought that was so unbelievably interesting.
Well, you know, even the peer-reviewed process, do you know how that works?
The doctors don't actually review the data.
They just get the primary paper, and no one vets it to them.
They just go through it, and they're just like, yeah, it looks good.
Yeah, well, it takes a long time to learn to evaluate scientific research.
This is why I was wondering how you managed to do it, because it's a very intense training process.
Even to understand the jargon that surrounds the statistical analysis, that's years of work.
And now the medical literature is doubling so fast.
From 1900 to 1950, it took 50 years for the medical knowledge domain to double.
Now it takes 73 days.
It's 73 days.
For the medical knowledge literature.
Yeah, I can believe that.
You know, I've been reviewing some of the psychological literature pertaining just recently to disgust sensitivity, which is a neurologically based, partly gastrointestinal, partly emotional response.
But it has implications for all sorts of things you wouldn't expect.
So, for example, societies that are...
What would you say?
Characterized by higher levels of infectious illness are much more likely to have authoritarian forms of local and national government.
Like, way more likely, not a little bit.
There's a massive connection between disgust and authoritarianism, as it turns out.
Anyways, I was reviewing that literature and I haven't looked at it for, you know, five years.
And I was just absolutely stunned at...
It is essentially impossible to keep up.
But it's also extremely exciting because there is so much knowledge being generated constantly.
And so I think the key takeaway is you have to be able to look at it from a bird's eye view because there's too much.
So you have to look at trends and you have to look at where is the science headed.
And that's the tricky part.
That's for sure.
And that's the problem with the current medical system is that everyone's in silos.
And then you have scientists and you have doctors who are in their little silos, but they're not stepping back and looking at, hey, where is medicine headed?
And how can we take the best of what the science is presenting to us and bring it into patients?
Or into public policy.
Exactly.
And so a lot of that, and there's a huge, what's called a clinical translation gap of 15 to 20 years.
So meaning that there's data out there to support the use of certain treatments, but a lot of regular doctors don't put it into their treatments for 15 to 20 years, which is crazy, right?
And so patients aren't getting access to the best treatments available.
And it's very unjust because a lot of people are living with chronic disease and suffering when there are options for them.
And that's really what got me super motivated to get into this field because I saw people suffering with chronic pain.
People don't realize how hard it is to live with chronic pain.
It is one of the most challenging things.
It leads to mental health issues, it leads to disability.
And in fact, chronic musculoskeletal conditions have a greater cost to society than any other disease.
Meaning the total cost, there's billions and billions of dollars because of missed work days and because of the disability burden.
Yes, heart disease kills more people, but Quality of life and economic burden of musculoskeletal is the highest.
So it's a very important problem, and that's why I was so motivated to get into this field, because I saw these people not getting better.
And I've been able to help a lot of people that no one was able to help.
Well, let's talk about that a little bit.
So when you first see someone...
Now, the regenerative medicine practices that you engage in, that's an element and aspect of lifestyle medicine.
So you're looking at sleep and exercise and stress, a broad sort of, I would say, a behavioral analysis.
So how do you move from the general behavioral analysis through the diagnosis to the recommendation of the therapies that you can provide?
And how do you step along that?
How do you decide who's Well, that's what I mean.
How do you lay out the diagnostic process and determine what treatments are appropriate?
If someone came to see you, what could they expect?
Yeah, no, I have a team who are kind of health coaches and biochemists who can work with the nutrition and lifestyle stuff.
So they try to optimize that as much as possible, but sometimes that's not enough, right?
And that's why they're coming to me, because they've already tried the traditional things.
A lot of them have already seen multiple specialists.
And so the most common thing I see by far is osteoarthritis.
Osteoarthritis is just like we're talking about.
It's cartilage wear and tear.
It's chronic inflammation.
But now we realize that osteoarthritis isn't just chronic inflammation.
There's all these hallmarks of aging.
There's 10 hallmarks of aging.
And as you probably know, aging and longevity is a huge hot topic.
Because if we can cure aging, we can pretty much treat almost all chronic disease.
Because they all have the same 10 hallmarks.
So I'll list a few of them.
There's genomic instability, mitoclonal dysfunction, loss of proteostasis, stem cells.
Loss of?
Proteostasis, which is protein regulation, like homeostasis of protein regulation.
And you get malfunction of proteins and they build up and that can lead to cell dysfunction.
And then there's also stem cell exhaustion, chronic inflammation, and senescence.
There's all these different hallmarks.
So there's about 10 of them.
And now we realize those 10 hallmarks of aging actually govern most chronic diseases.
So even osteoarthritis, what happens is those chondrocytes, which are the cells that line the joints, they have all these different hallmarks of aging.
So they get...
They get those epigenetic alterations, the mitochondria start becoming dysfunctional, all those things start happening at a cellular level, which can happen years before the doctor picks it up.
Right, sure.
And so, that's part of the problem.
Well, I know with neurological conditions, often you don't see any overt symptoms until 95% of the underlying tissue is being destroyed.
And so that's why diagnostics is becoming advanced too.
In fact, they're using exosomes, which can be a biomarker for a lot of these diseases, because these cells start releasing these different biomarkers, and you can detect them using exosome technology.
So it's becoming, and even the diagnostics is really far behind now in traditional medicine because they're not doing any of this stuff.
But anyway, so to the point, so if you have someone, let's say a knee, that's really bad osteoarthritis, like stage four.
They've been told by their regular doctor they want to get a knee replacement, and they want a second opinion.
So that's usually why they come to me.
And they want to look at the alternatives, and they've tried the lifestyle stuff.
And so what we do is we assess their x-ray MRI, we do an ultrasound examination, and then we see if they're an appropriate candidate for our procedure.
And the way we do that is based off MRIs.
So you have to have...
For example, bone edema, which is inflammation in the bone, that's something we can target and treat with stem cells because they're very anti-inflammatory.
We also have to make sure their bone isn't too deformed.
This is a problem with my field.
If you Google regenerative medicine doctor, there's a thousand of them in the U.S. There's so many of them not doing things properly.
There is almost a black market where there's a lot of people doing it illegally in the U.S. Because the FDA can't keep up with shutting down all these clinics, there are so many stem cell clinics, even though stem cells are technically illegal in the U.S. So it's become a weird place because it's hard for...
Patients to kind of figure out who's actually telling the truth and who's just selling them a lie.
And that's the biggest problem with the whole stem cell field.
You see the same thing with plastic surgery?
Exactly, exactly.
It's the exact same thing.
Yeah, well, it's a Pareto distribution problem, which is that in every field, only a tiny minority of people actually know what they're doing.
Right.
So you always have a signal-to-noise detection problem.
It's like, who are the people who actually...
And then, of course, often the people who don't know what they're doing genuinely think they know what they're doing.
The Dunning-Kruger effect.
It's really problematic.
And that's exactly what happens.
So why should people trust you?
Because I'm a Canadian physician.
And in Canada, we were never taught about money.
We were never taught about...
The business side, we're always taught about patients first and making them better.
Being on the global stage, as I am now, we're in traveling and treating people around the world.
My focus is never on the monetary stuff.
I always focus on treating the patients first.
Yes, some of the treatments are expensive, and that's just because the market price is expensive.
But as we talked about earlier, anytime there's a new technology, over time the price is going to come down.
And there's always going to be early adopters.
And over time, we want this to be accessible to the average person.
In fact, we want it to be covered by insurance, which in Japan it is.
So if Japan's doing that already, I think eventually there's going to be an impetus for this stuff to move over here.
It's just going to take time.
I think that's because I went into medicine generally to make a difference and help people.
That's always been my motivation.
It has never been anything more.
And the big thing, too, is honestly, a lot of patients who see me, they can tell I'm honest and I'm transparent.
And I don't promise the moon.
There's certain things that we can fix, certain things that we can't fix.
Stem cells aren't a magical cure for everything.
But the next generation of cell therapy, like we were talking about, like the genetic cell therapy, that really will be allowing us for custom cell lines for almost every medical condition.
Like diabetes, cancer, dementia, there's Parkinson's disease, there's a clinical trial done this year.
Those iPSCs I was talking about earlier.
And they are, iPSCs are?
The induced pluripotent stem cells, the Yamanaka stem cells.
So they created what are called iPSC dopamine-producing neurons.
And then they transplant them surgically into the areas where they lose those dopamine neurons.
And then they did a one-year follow-up, and so many of the patients basically go into remission.
Their symptoms get so much better.
And they actually regrow new neurons that produce dopamine.
This was a Blue Rock therapeutic clinical trial.
So this shows the power of iPSCs.
And this is what I'm going to call the iPSC revolution.
There's going to be so many different iPSC cell lines that are going to allow us to treat specific medical conditions.
So in the future, people will think about cells to treat their conditions as opposed to pills.
Let's go back to osteoarthritis, because that's a very interesting place to dive into, because generally, when people have rheumatoid arthritis and use anti-inflammatories, you can slow down the degenerative process, but often when you see people in late stages of osteoarthritis, they've already suffered a tremendous amount of loss of cartilage, for example.
You evaluate people using MRI and you said there are times when their joint damage is too far gone for you to be able to intervene.
So at what level of severity can you intervene and what sort of responses have you seen and how widely generalizable is that?
Yeah, so there's four kind of stages of osteoarthritis.
So we can even treat stage 3, stage 4, which is the more advanced one.
As long as their bone, like I was saying earlier, if their bone is actually deformed, where they need some sort of alignment or corrective, where the problem is mechanical.
If it's mechanical, then stem cells aren't going to fix that.
They need some sort of surgical correction.
So But if it's more inflammatory-based, or if it's more based off the cellular dysfunction we were talking about, then that's something stem cells work really well for.
So for example, people who have chronic daily pain, night pain, it's affecting them all the time, that's very inflammatory-based.
And that's where stem cells work really well for.
And even MRI, we can correlate, if they have inflammation in the bone, then we have a specific target.
So it is generalizable, because if we have patients like that, we know it's going to work.
So it brings down the inflammation...
And it can help to regrow a little bit of cartilage.
This is the first generation of stem cells, which are the umbilical core stem cells.
Now we're transitioning.
Over the next six months, actually, we just licensed it.
We just have this technology now.
It's the second generation of stem cells.
So they're the Yamanaka stem cells, but specifically for osteoarthritis.
So they're the IPSC-derived MSCs.
So they're mesenchymal stem cells, but they're iPSC-derived, and they're gene-edited to overexpress certain transcription factors to target osteoarthritis.
So see how specific the cells are getting?
It's becoming a really cool technology because it's not just like, okay, stem cells.
It's like, no, this is a very specific iPSC-derived MSC product for osteoarthritis.
So that's the era we're in now.
So you can treat muscle tears and damage and tendon tears and damage?
Yes, yeah.
And you can treat osteoarthritis.
What other conditions do people suffer and come to you for that you have had success in treating?
I've had...
I get a lot of...
So because of...
The online world, I get patients from all over the world, and most of them are chronic complex conditions.
So a lot of them are like fibromyalgia, which is just like chronic pain everywhere.
There's chronic fatigue syndrome.
There's people with toxic mold who don't get better.
There's people with rheumatoid arthritis who just have chronic inflammation and joint pain everywhere, and they've tried all the meds.
Inflammatory bowel disease.
So we're getting a lot of chronic complex conditions, and now we're building out a team of specialists.
So these are long-term systemic dysfunctions.
Exactly.
And so it's about restoring your immune system and getting it to be functional again.
And that's kind of what we can do with the combination of the systemic intravenous stem cells and with the different peptide protocols we have.
And even now we're manufacturing and we have our own what are called fecal microbial transplant pills, FMT pills.
But basically FMT, as you know, is to repopulate the gut bacteria.
And the gut is where most of your immune system is stored.
So if we can restore the immune system, we can treat a lot of chronic diseases.
So tell me what you're doing with those?
So we have our own process to manufacture FMT. I have a human microbiome.
Is this in Canada?
No, Mexico.
In Mexico.
So we have a manufacturing plant there.
That's where we do stem cell manufacturing.
Is that product available already?
It'll be available in the next few months.
And so our scientist, her name is Dr.
Caroline Gannabis, great PhD, human microbiome specialist.
And this is her specialty, and she has her own proprietary process on how to manufacture these pills, select for the donors, and give them to patients.
And the beautiful part about these treatments are only one week long, and they can have a huge impact on your body.
And who do the fecal transplant pills work best for?
So, you can use them for even anti-aging and longevity because in mice, FMT has been shown to extend lifespan by 30%.
So, I think there's going to be a lot of people who are just going to use it for longevity.
And that's a consequence of gut proliferation.
Because the gut microbes produce so many different metabolites and help with so many different cellular processes.
They're not just...
And that can be used post-antibiotic treatment as well, right?
Yes.
And so we're going to make one for children as well, because a lot of toddlers and a lot of young kids, unfortunately, get antibiotics like crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
And there's actually...
Well, and cesarean birth actually is a problem, right?
Do you want to explain that?
Yeah, because you don't get exposed to the vaginal flora, which is the bacteria.
So I recommend anyone who gets a C-section, just take the stuff down there after your baby's born and rub it on their face.
Right.
And just get them that exposure to the good bacteria.
So the reason is because...
That's a good example of just how bloody complex things are.
Exactly.
Because who the hell would have ever guessed that a cesarean birth would cause post-birth trouble years later because there wasn't the proper trip through the vaginal canal?
Exactly.
Man, that's unbelievably complicated.
It is.
And that's why...
But what we've got to learn are principles.
What's the principle of the human body?
Immune dysfunction is one of the most important principles that govern so many different chronic diseases.
So if we can train your immune system properly at a young age...
I always say your immune system is like a teenager.
If you don't train it properly, it's going to misbehave when you're older.
So now we're learning how to train it properly, which means you have to get exposure to certain...
Bacteria, you have to play with pets, you have to play with soil.
You can't be afraid of germs when you're young because that actually leads to more issues older.
Too much cleanliness.
Too much cleanliness.
And we know that antibiotics, for every antibiotic course that children take, it increases the risk of autoimmune disease by 1%.
Is that right?
That's interesting because I was chronically treated with antibiotics for recurrent tonsillitis probably 20 times.
So, and I think a problem, and we talked about the beginning of an interview, what we did for you, I think you have a component of immune dysfunction, which is why we're going to be doing these different cell therapies to get your immune system functioning again, and get you out of this chronic pro-inflammatory state.
Now, you've also treated depression.
Yeah, so let's talk about that a little bit, because the first thing people who are watching and listening should understand is that there isn't any such thing as depression.
There are multiple medical and physical conditions that produce decrement in mood, and some of those are lifestyle-associated, and some of them are a consequence of Not having a functional life.
And some of them are pure consequences of physiological malfunction.
So there's a lot of evidence, for example, that chronic depression is an inflammatory condition.
And there is evidence as well that part of the reason that SSRIs work is not directly because of their neurochemical consequences, so on serotonin function, but because they're actually anti-inflammatory.
And there's a big overlap between...
That's like statins too, by the way.
Oh, yeah.
No, I don't know that.
So statins, for people who don't know, are cholesterol-lowering drugs.
But the reason they actually have an effect on mortality, we believe, is because they reduce inflammation.
Aha.
So, what's the underlying cause?
Right.
Chronic inflammation.
Where does that come from?
Chronic immune dysfunction.
Right, right.
And where does that come from?
Your gut.
Right.
Well, there's a huge overlap, too, between depression and immunological problems.
Exactly.
And so, okay, so what have you done with regard specifically to the treatment of so-called depression?
So, let's come back to the fundamental principles of what causes depression from a cellular level.
It's neuroinflammation, there are some chemical imbalances, and then there's the gut-brain access.
You have more serotonin receptors in your gut than you do in your brain.
And so it's looking at this from a holistic approach.
And so for me as an interventional physician, what we can do is we can reduce neuroinflammation by using intravenous exosomes.
They cross the blood-brain barrier.
They reduce inflammation in the brain.
And then we can also help with the nervous system.
What are symptoms of brain inflammation?
If you look at this data out there, if you go to the literature, almost every neuropsychiatric disorder is linked to neuroinflammation.
It's hand-in-hand.
It's almost kind of like autoimmune conditions and intestinal permeability or leaky gut.
You've heard of leaky gut?
I know there's, Michaela interviewed a psychiatrist at, what's the big hospital?
McLean's.
McLean's in Boston who's been using dietary manipulations to treat like schizoaffective disorder.
Right.
And I think it's very probable that the really catastrophic neuropsychiatric diseases like schizoaffective disorder or schizophrenia, we're going to find out they have a physiological basis.
Exactly.
And so we're starting to learn.
Depression too, manic depression.
Exactly.
Exactly.
And so we're starting to learn about those physiological bases, and that's what we intervene on.
So the way we do that is reducing neuroinflammation.
And that's with exosome treatment primarily?
Yes, intravenous exosomes.
And then what we do, because we know so many mental health disorders are rooted in unresolved emotional trauma.
And a lot of that comes from, do you know Paul Conti?
No.
He's a psychiatrist.
He wrote a book about this.
But he talks about how many depressive and anxiety disorders are rooted in this unresolved emotional trauma from childhood.
And sometimes it's in the unconscious mind and they don't even know it.
And so what we do, interventionally based, is we actually do something called the stellate ganglion block and inject into the vagus nerve.
Because the stellate ganglion integrates into your sympathetic nervous system.
And a lot of times your sympathetic nervous system is over-activated.
Exactly.
It's over-drugged.
That's chronic chronic.
Exactly.
And that's also because of that unresolved emotional trauma.
And then the vagus nerve is kind of this master nerve regulator of your parasympathetic nervous system.
And that's the one that helps you to relax and calm down.
But a lot of people, what happens in neuropsychiatric disorders is they can't relax.
They're just jittery.
They're just irritable.
It's like telling an obese person to eat less.
Or someone on cocaine.
Exactly.
It's not helpful.
Just telling people who are anxious and depressed to relax is not helpful.
And so what we do is we're trying to intervene.
And so what we actually inject directly into the stellate ganglion, we inject something called peptides and anesthetic, which calms it down.
And then into the vagus nerve, we inject peptides and actually some exosomes, which help to remodulate the signaling of the vagus nerve.
So this can have a dramatic effect on their nervous system, make them more calm, make them more resilient, and deal with stress better, and just make their bodies...
Until you help with parasympathetic activation.
Exactly.
So I have a diagnostic question for you.
Yeah.
One of the things I noticed when I was practicing as a clinician in concert with physicians who were prescribing SSRIs, I mean I had clients who showed like miraculous response to SSRIs upon occasion where they would be chronically depressed for months or even for years and they'd start a course of antidepressants and if they were fortunate their symptoms would remit in like well between three days and a month.
And it's not supposed to remit that quickly.
Yeah, it's been six weeks.
But there's a neurochemical effect as well as the neurophysiological effect.
But here's one of the things I noticed.
I want you to tell me what you think about this.
So, as we already discussed, there's a lot of different disorders in the depression bin.
And one of the things I would do with my clients is do an evaluation of the dimensions of their life.
So imagine this.
Do you have a long-term partner?
Do you have friends?
Do you have a job that you enjoy or that at least is functional and providing for you economically?
Do you have plans for your education?
Do you take care of yourself physically?
Do you have an alcohol or drug or other abuse problem?
So multidimensional analysis of functionality along all these different dimensions of life.
Now, now and then I'd have a client who had no problem with any of those, but was depressed.
Right?
And those were often people who showed a stellar response to an antidepressant.
As opposed to the people who, well, they didn't have a partner, they didn't have any friends, they didn't have, like, their life was just an absolute bloody catastrophe.
Then you could imagine two different forms of depression.
There's many different forms, but two classic forms.
One would be, you're not depressed.
Your life is in absolute shambles.
And you're miserable because nothing you're doing is working.
And then there's another person that's like, oh no, you work hard, you're well-educated, you have goals, you have a partner you love, you have friends, but your mood is just absolutely dysregulated.
You're worse in the morning.
Something's wrong with those people physiologically.
So I'm wondering if when you do your diagnostic process, if you look at...
Because I can imagine that there's a subset of people whose lives are in functional order but are suffering dreadfully for whom a physiological intervention like exosomes would work particularly well.
And those are the ones we're primarily treating.
Yeah, okay.
And so why are those the ones that you're primarily treating?
Is that just the people who end up coming to you?
I was going to say, I think it's just selection bias.
Yeah, probably.
I think the people who seek me out are generally those type of people.
Right, they have the wherewithal to do it.
Exactly.
Unfortunately, the people in the other category probably don't even know I exist.
Right, of course.
Because they're just going to their family doctor and that's all they have.
Yeah, well, and this is of course the case if you have a chronic illness long enough, it's going to start to affect Your function and all these other dimensions of life, too.
So it's not a clean cut.
But I often think, too, that the research literature pertaining to the effectiveness of antidepressants would be a lot cleaner if the diagnostic categories were set up properly.
It's like, well, are you depressed?
Which means that your life is functional, but your mood is dysregulated.
Or are you just merely suffering the consequences of having an absolutely dysregulated life?
There's no way that a pharmaceutical intervention is going to Fix that.
I mean, I didn't see some of my more seriously affected clients on the behavioral side.
Now and then they'd take an antidepressant and it would decrease the probability they would commit suicide, which isn't nothing.
And maybe it would help them a little bit garner enough energy to start to improve some of the things they could improve, but it couldn't be a magic bullet because an antidepressant isn't going to give you a life partner, for example.
No, and for us it's about...
Restoring the cellular processes as much as possible so they have resiliency to deal with the life stressors.
And that's why we take this approach.
And so, we were talking earlier, and because the intervention that we're doing is so powerful, we actually have the Canadian military wanting to cover this for their veterans.
And that was for specifically which treatment?
For the vagus nerve and the stellate ganglion block.
It's a combination of that.
Any downside to it?
For me, it's a five-minute procedure.
I've done hundreds of them, and it can have such a big impact.
I'll give you an example.
I had a special forces operative.
He has a world record for the longest sniper in the world.
He's 3.2 kilometers, which is crazy.
He's this high-level special forces operative in Canada.
He's mid-40s.
Really, really bad PTSD. To the point that he tried every medication, tried every psychiatrist, psychologist, and he was basically told that you can do MAID, which is medically assisted suicide, essentially.
In Canada, that's now allowed.
Oh, even recommended.
Honestly, it was heartbreaking because he has four children and the fact that this was the only option that our government is giving to him, it just made me devastated.
I actually wasn't even into mental health.
I mean, I'm a sportsman.
This was actually one of my friends.
So, So he asked me, is there anything I can do?
And so that's how I started getting into this whole interventional mental health stuff.
And so that's how I came across these procedures, and I talked to some of my friends in the States.
And so he came down, we did the procedure for him, the stellate ganglion, and then the vagus.
And what do you do to do that, exactly?
So in the stellate ganglion, we're injecting something called bupivacaine, which is an anesthetic, and we mix it with certain peptides.
And what the combination of peptides and stellate ganglion do is they suppress that sympathetic overdrive.
Hmm.
And then the vagus nerve, we inject some exosomes and peptides, and what that does is it modulates the vagus nerve.
And so you do both of those?
At the same time.
At the same time.
Oh, yeah.
And then we do it, usually we try to do dual.
We do both sides.
Oh, yeah.
And so afterwards, he literally said, a weight had been lifted off his shoulders, and he started crying.
Wow.
Oh yeah.
It was the most dramatic thing I've ever seen.
I don't say this happens to every...
How long did he cry?
How long?
Yeah.
10-15 minutes.
His wife was there too, and he just said he was...
And he gave me a coin, which they usually don't give to anyone who's not in the military.
So that was a huge honor for me.
And I just felt very privileged to help someone like this.
So it was that fast?
It was that fast.
And now he's doing pretty good.
He's back to playing hockey.
He's feeling better.
It's hard to explain because there's so much...
Emotional baggage and unconscious reservoir of these different traumas are built inside of your body.
I think they lock themselves into something like a positive feedback loop.
Once you get anxious to a certain point, every little thing makes you more anxious.
And then you can start to become anxious about the anxiety itself.
I actually think that most of the things that we regard as psychiatric disorders are positive feedback loops that have gone out of control.
So, for example, let's say your mood starts to fall, and then you isolate, right?
And then you start performing worse at work.
Well, obviously...
you isolate and you're performing worse at work, your mood is going to get lower and then you're gonna isolate more.
So it loops. - Yeah. - With panic disorder, what happens is people get anxious, right?
But then they start to avoid and that makes their anxiety worse.
And so then they're in a loop.
And with alcoholism, what happens to people is they start to see that if they drink, it cures their hangover.
Well, obviously, that's going to generate a positive feedback loop.
And so, many of the things that we see as conditions, I think, are positive feedback loops that are self-sustaining and inspiring.
Exactly.
And so, for us, it's creating an intervention that breaks that spiral positive feedback loop.
Yeah, yeah.
So, how many people have been treated with this particular treatment?
At this point, I've done hundreds, including panic attacks for young girls.
It's been incredible to see the changes that one intervention can have on people.
Is it for everyone?
No, but there are a lot of people it can help.
How do you decide who can be helped?
What are your inclusion and exclusion criteria for the treatment?
I mean, the biggest thing is a lot of them, if they say yes to, have you heard of Gabber Mate?
Yeah.
So his ACEs, Adverse Childhood Events, he has his questionnaire.
So a lot of them, if they're positive to that, that's giving me an indication that they have some sort of unresolved childhood trauma.
And almost, I would say it's crazy, almost 90% of them say yes.
So many of them have these issues that they've just kind of buried in the past.
Yeah.
And they're dealing with depression or anxiety, but they actually have something that triggered that maybe when they were younger.
So that's a good indication.
Classic Freudian analysis.
Yes, so that to me is a big indication that these treatments will work.
And for a lot of people who just have anxiety, it can be very helpful too.
So like panic attacks or low stress resilience and day-to-day irritability, then that's an indication where they just need some...
Do you ever do personality assessment on your clients?
Well, here's something.
This would be a very good thing to do on the research end of things, is that before you do your intervention, have them do a big five personality inventory.
And then have them do it six months later.
And see if you get decreases in trait neuroticism.
Right, because if you did, that would be absolutely fascinating.
We are going to start a trial, so I will include that.
Use the big five aspect scale, because it gives you more differentiated analysis.
But if you could show that you could decrease trait neuroticism with a physiological treatment like that, that would be a major discovery.
Yeah, no, I think that's great.
Because that's a resilience measure, essentially, right?
An emotional resilience measure.
And I get that feedback all the time.
My patients say that I have more resiliency.
Yeah, yeah.
What used to stress them out doesn't stress them out anymore.
Right, right, right.
And so I see that anecdotally, so it'd be great to quantify that.
Absolutely.
Well, and it would be quite the miracle if you could produce a transformation in a personality trait, because neuroticism is actually very stable.
Right.
Right, and so, and very difficult, well...
Difficult to ameliorate.
It goes along with stable.
But, you know, there are other indications that such things are possible.
So, for example, a single dose of psilocybin that produces a mystical experience produces, I believe it's a half standard, no, it's a one standard deviation increase in trait openness a year later that's permanent.
Right, one standard deviation.
Well, you just took the words out of my mouth, because I was going to say, we call this procedure the V-shot, the vagus nerve shot, and basically we combine it with psilocybin-assisted therapy, a macrodose.
And so that combination is so powerful to kind of reset their...
Which do you do first?
We usually do this first, and then send them off to therapy afterwards.
The psilocybin therapy.
No, we do our injection first, calm down the nervous system, and then afterwards they go off to therapy and do psilocybin.
Yeah, so they do the physiological intervention that decreases stress reactivity first.
So that would also increase the probability that the experience they have with a hallucinogenic would be positive because their nervous systems are calmed down.
Because that matters, right?
So if you're in an anxious state...
And you take a hallucinogenic, the probability that that state will be magnified into something approximating a bad drip is very high.
Yeah.
And so we're going to start, hopefully, a phase one trial sometime next year for this intervention, so we can actually get some real data behind it.
Yeah.
Use the big five.
Use the big five.
That's great.
That's really powerful.
Big five aspect scale.
Right.
No, that makes perfect sense.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, that would be really remarkable if you could manage that.
All right, so you...
And what sort of effects have you seen with the people that you've treated for depression?
We've talked about anxiety more specifically, so...
Yeah, no.
Depression, I think the big thing with that is combining it with some sort of psilocybin or some sort of psychedelic-assisted therapy, and the combination of that with...
Everything else that we do has been great.
And so it can help people who are even, like that better now saying, who was PTSD, who was suicidal, and it shifted him from not being suicidal anymore to basically not being suicidal.
It actually changed his life.
And so...
It's been super impactful on people like that, but he's also the right candidate because he has severe PTSD. And because of that PTSD... And he has a life.
And he has a life.
He has a wife, he has kids, he has all that other stuff.
So it may not be for everyone, but I think there are a lot of people who fall into that category where they have this trauma and they have these issues that they haven't dealt with and this intervention can actually make a big difference on their life.
And how do you protect yourself against over...
Like, you know, people say anecdotes are not data, and that always bothers me, because anecdotes might not be data, but they are definitely hypotheses.
Yes.
Right?
But how do you protect yourself against over-interpreting the positive consequences of your interventions as a consequence of this plethora of anecdotal information that you are receiving?
For me, it's all about clinical outcomes.
As a doctor, my job is to improve my patient's health or quality of life.
At the end of the day, if they're feeling better and they tell me that, that to me is what matters the most.
That often is multimodal, meaning that you have to use multiple interventions.
And the problem with traditional randomized control trials is they only want to look at really one intervention for one specific problem.
But that's not how the body always works.
Well, it's also a conflict with the immediate necessity of medical treatment, right?
Because it's lovely if you can just change one thing.
But if you're dealing with people who are absolutely bloody desperate, you're going to be tempted to throw everything and the kitchen sink at them.
And that's the reality of the patients I see.
They're refractory to the traditional medical system, so they're looking for alternatives.
So it's not often just one intervention.
I often have to do multiple things to get them better.
And that's why the trials we're going to be doing are going to be multimodal.
We're going to have multiple things that we're using to intervene.
And when you say trials, are these actual research trials?
Yeah, clinical trials.
So, for example, we already...
We're starting a clinical trial, a phase 2 trial for our gene therapy, which we haven't talked about yet, but basically we're going to be looking at It's called phallostatin gene therapy.
So it's basically the world's first reversible plasmid gene therapy.
So traditionally viral vectors were used for introducing a foreign gene into your body.
But what we've developed is a plasmid, which is just a circular strand of DNA. It comes from E. coli, but there's no actual live bacteria in there.
And the plasmid, the beautiful part about the plasmid is it can target any protein or peptide up to 10,000 base pairs with 100% accuracy.
And it What do you mean by target?
What does it do exactly?
So meaning it can tell your body to whatever gene of interest to produce more of that.
So for example...
Whatever gene of interest?
Yes.
Oh yeah, that's promising.
Yes, it's very promising and it's what's called an epizomal vector.
So it's non-integrating.
So it's not going to go into your genome and make you translocate or have those risks that viruses may have.
And it's also because it's not a virus, you don't have to take immunosuppressants, it's not immunogenic.
So there's all these cool benefits to it.
So is it temporary?
And that's the beautiful part.
It's reversible because it's E. coli origin.
So you can take a tetracycline if you want it out of your body.
So it has that safety mechanism.
And it lasts for about one and a half to two years.
So you can repeat it as needed.
Whereas viral vectors, you cannot repeat them.
Once you do them, you do them.
And you can't really get them out of your body.
Right, right, right.
So this technology is really beautiful.
And we did our phase one already.
So we're doing our phase two.
Targeting what conditions?
So sarcopenia.
And what is that?
That's the loss of muscle as you get older.
Oh, really?
Which is probably the biggest driver of aging.
Because as you lose muscle, your body, to protect itself...
And regulate your immune system and vitality goes down.
You become frail.
And that frailty, we know, is such a big predictor of mortality.
Like falls.
Falls.
And even in COVID studies, they found that people who had more muscle mass had better outcomes.
Well, you know, one of the best predictors of lifespan is grip strength.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
Which is quite remarkable.
Which is just a proxy, right?
Yeah, it's a proxy for muscular integrity, essentially.
Yeah, and so if you look at it, if we can preserve muscle, that can be one of the best ways to have...
Right, oh yeah, that's a huge deal.
Exactly.
So, folistatin is a peptide that's naturally made in your body, and as you get older, your folistatin levels decrease.
And so what we're doing is we're just delivering this through a gene therapy form, the plasmid vector, and it increases your folistatin levels for one and a half to two years.
And it's completely reversible if you want to have your body for whatever reason, and it wears off on its own.
Well, what happens if you increase folistatin levels?
Exactly.
So it inhibits myostatin, which is kind of the enzyme that sets a limit on how much muscle you can put on.
So it makes it easier for your body to put on muscle.
It also increases...
So why does it decrease with age?
Because the aging process is cruel.
And so so many different peptides...
So you think it's just a consequent, another element of degeneration?
Exactly, degeneration.
Entropy.
Yeah.
And so if we can restore it back to your youthful levels, not only will you inhibit myostatin, which makes it easier for your body to put on muscle...
It'll also activate what's called FOXO3 pathway, which reduces systemic inflammation.
And so we showed in our phase one trial that patients over the age of 60, on average, reduce their intrinsic biological age by 12 years, which is actually incredible.
Wow, at 60?
Yeah, and there was actually some hyper-responders who had biological age reduction of access of...
60 years, which is crazy to believe.
So does that mean they're going to leave 60 years longer?
We don't know that yet.
Well, probably not.
There's probably multiple dimensions.
Exactly.
But still.
But their telomere length, which is a proxy, we also set a world record for that as well.
You showed telomere length?
Length increase as well in that patient who was a hyper-responder.
And so...
We're actually applying...
Wow.
Yeah, so it's pretty powerful.
And are there animal studies that have been done with this already?
Yes, fall statin gene therapy has been around for a while in animal studies.
And what has it shown with animals?
Similar, 32% life extension in mice.
But actual life extension, not just the markers?
No, exactly, life extension.
Wow.
And so...
When people fast, I mean, I know animals that are starved to like 75% of their body weight, they'll live 40% longer, something like that.
Does that have anything to do with...
Yeah, because it activates similar pathways, which are anti-inflammatory pathways, regenerative pathways, pathways that help with cellular senescence, like all the hallmarks of aging that we talked about.
So whenever you think about any intervention, think about how is it affecting the hallmarks of aging.
So now we have an understanding of biology, because in physics, we always had first principles, right?
Like Newton's laws.
We understand first principles, right?
In biology, we never had first principles until recently.
Now we understand there are what are called fundamental principles which govern chronic disease and cellular dysfunction.
And are those associated with those 10 markers for aging?
Exactly.
Those 10 hallmarks govern...
So that gets you to...
It gives you a foundation on how to interpret data and how to figure out if an intervention is actually going to do something for you.
And where are you with this trial?
So the phase 2 trial is going to start in spring 2024 in Canada.
We have tentative approval.
We're just getting the funding together to start it.
And so the phase 2 trial is to look at false statin gene therapy.
It's going to be a randomized controlled trial with a placebo group.
And basically to look at sarcopenia, osteopenia, and then different inflammatory markers.
How old are your clients?
We'll have anyone from age...
It's going to be open to age from 30 to 80.
It'll be really interesting to see what it does with people who are particularly old.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's where it's the most powerful.
But even in, I mean, younger people don't need it as much, but a lot of them just do it for the gym.
Like I've done it on myself, just for the benefits of more energy, more strength in the gym.
Because obviously by inhibiting myostatin, it gives you more...
Downside?
To date, there hasn't been any adverse effects.
Wow.
That's amazing.
Hard to believe.
I know.
It's been studied for over six years and we haven't seen any adverse effects.
To add some credibility to it, we are backed by Peter Thiel and Sam Altman.
Those are our two seed investors and they're both Well-known names in the world.
And I think the reason they backed us is because they understand that this has a potential to revolutionize a lot of gene therapies.
Because if you think about it, the only other real big gene therapy competitor is CRISPR. But the problem with CRISPR, yes, it's more powerful than MiniCircle, our technology, but it also has off-site targets.
Meaning it may do something that's unintended.
And that's the risk with CRISPR. Whereas with the mini-circle vector, it's not as powerful, but whatever vector that we want to do, it's going to do that with accuracy.
And that's the beauty of this plasmid vector technology.
Well, that's ridiculously exciting.
It is.
So I wanted to also ask you about...
Let me see, I just checked my notes here too.
Yeah, tissue engineering.
So we were talking about earlier...
Can we regrow cartilage, for example, in osteoarthritis?
So with the first generation, no.
The second generation, what we can do now is we can combine those IPSC MSCs that we're talking about.
They're engineered specifically for osteoarthritis, and then we can use a 3D bioprinter, and we can embed them into a scaffolding, basically a scaffold.
And then you can implant those arthroscopically, and then that can regrow new cartilage.
The scaffold?
The scaffold with the embedded stem cells.
So that's called...
That's the intersection of gene therapy, cell therapy, and tissue engineering.
And is that specifically for cartilage, or can you do that with other organs?
No, that's the promise of it, right?
This is just the beginning of tissue engineering.
And how far is that advanced, and what are you doing specifically?
So for cartilage, there's already trials being done.
It's Dr.
Farshad Galiak in the University of Washington.
He's already been doing trials in humans with the similar technology.
And so we're just starting to do our own trials with that this year.
And who's we?
The regenerative medicine community.
Okay, I see, I see.
But you also have people that you're working with who are involved in these specific trials.
Yes, I have my own group, and we have our own company, and we have our own researchers and scientists we're working with.
And where's that company located?
So, we have our mini-circle technology company that's in Austin, Texas.
That's in Austin.
And then we also do research in Mexico.
Why in Mexico?
Because...
So you can do phase one trials a lot quicker offshore, and then you can get the approvals and move things along quickly, and then we can move onshore for the phase two.
So that's kind of our strategy.
Because if you just go through traditional health can and FDA, it's going to take 10 to 15 years to get anything done.
Yeah, that'll just kill you.
Exactly.
So we figured out kind of a disruptive model where we can do phase ones quickly, get our trials done, collect our patients, collect our data, show our safety.
Risks in that?
Yeah.
Are there risks in doing it that quickly, do you think?
I mean, the technology we're using already has really good basic science behind it and has lots of animal data.
So there's already safety data there, and we're not doing it without unreasonable justification.
So there is mechanistic basis for what we're doing, as well as good safety data on animals.
So the next logical step is put it in humans.
Someone has to do it.
And that was the same thing with the plasmid technology.
It was just, we were the first ones to do it in humans.
It was done in animals for a long time, but then we were the first ones to take it into humans.
When did that start to happen?
About six years ago.
Wow, that's ridiculously exciting.
Yeah, it took six years of R&D to get it into commercial product.
But now we have our first commercial product, and we're doing phase two, but we're also offering the folistatin gene therapy in approved regions, like Mexico, Prospera, Dubai.
We have approvals in certain areas where we can do it.
Do you enjoy the business side?
Because it sounds like you do.
I enjoy helping people and creating scalable technologies allows me to help more people.
And that's really...
Yeah, well, fair enough.
But that's the intelligent integration of the business vision into the medical practices, right?
If you set up an organization properly, then you can move faster, you can do more things, and you can scale.
Exactly.
I can only help so many people one-on-one as a musician.
But if I create technologies and do trials that are large-scale...
Eventually we can help millions of people.
Imagine you go to your family doctor, let's say 20 years from now, and you get these gene therapies, you get these cell therapies, and you keep every two years, and it keeps you healthy, and you never get sick.
That's the world I want to see.
Where we just eradicate chronic disease.
Now you're going to treat me for something tomorrow, as I understand.
So exactly what are you planning to do to me?
Well, as you have talked about publicly, you have toxic mold.
You've been exposed to it, right?
And I think in Florida.
That's the theory.
Yeah, that's the theory.
And so what happens with toxic mold is it kind of hijacks your immune system and makes it difficult for your immune system to function properly.
And so what we did for you the first time was we did intravenous stem cells, which is to help your body to build some resiliency and to strengthen.
And that was different than the exosome.
Tammy did that as well, but she also did the exosome treatment, which I didn't do.
Yes, yeah.
Because your problem's more systemic.
And so what we're going to do now is we're going to do work called intravenous natural killer cells.
And natural killer cells, as we talked about earlier, are the cells in your innate immune system that can kill chronic diseases.
It can kill cancer, it can kill chronic fungal infections, which is kind of what happens with mold.
So it's basically giving your body the...
I think it's very underappreciated because a lot of physicians don't test for mold and they have a lot of patients with chronic illnesses that...
Well, the literature is horrifying, you know?
I mean, I was reading about the state of military accommodations across the United States and the unbelievably high levels of mold toxicity that military personnel are exposed to.
It's absolutely horrifying.
In fact, you can't read it.
I guess it's about as bad as the discovery that asbestos was causing cancer.
I mean, asbestos was...
It was used everywhere, and all of a sudden it was like, uh-oh, we're killing people like lead in gas.
Exactly.
I mean, these things have happened before.
No, and there's a new theory on cancer.
It's called cell suppression theory, which now is getting a lot of traction.
It's basically the idea that fungal spores are hijacking the cell and preventing cell opoptosis.
So they're preventing the cell from functioning properly.
So then they're saying that the root cause of cancer is actually potentially fungal infections, in addition to everything else that happens with genomic instability.
Right, right, right.
But this is one of the potential risk factors.
Because we all get exposed to funguses all the time.
It's part of living in a modern environment.
Most people's immune system can deal with it, but some people's immune system can't.
Well, especially if they're in a place where they're being chronically exposed to levels that they can't actually tolerate.
Exactly.
So how do we build a resiliency in your body so you can deal with those fungal infections?
We give you the cells to do that.
And that's what the natural killer cells are going to do.
And eventually, we probably give you the FMT as well.
So we can give you your And FMT is?
The fecal microbial transplant.
Oh, yes.
Because then your body, again, we're strengthening your immune system and we're building resiliency for you to deal with these chronic infections in your body.
So it all comes back to first principles.
And that's the biggest, I think, takeaway for people to understand is biology is moving at this point, at this alarming pace almost, where we're understanding down to a single-cell How cells can operate and target those, make very specific targeted interventions, as opposed to just being like, take this pill and hopefully your disease doesn't progress.
Right, right.
Okay, so if people are interested in, the listeners are interested in following up with such things, learning more about it, what should they do?
I think scientists are the best people to learn from.
Unfortunately online, a lot of the people who are the loudest aren't usually academic scientists because they just don't get a lot of attention.
So my favorite podcasts on these topics, if you're interested, they're very dense, but there's one called the Stem Cell Podcast and there's one called the Immunology Podcast.
And there are academic scientists who are top tier who go bring on different scientists on their show and they talk about these different topics.
And I think that's where you have to go to.
You have to go to scientists who are doing the hard work to make this a possibility for patients to get access to one day.
And I talk about it a lot online.
I try to take that information and disseminate it in a way where people can understand it.
Because it is complicated and there is a lot moving at a fast pace.
And so my job as a clinician scientist is to take that information and simplify it and make it digestible so people can access it and hopefully give them hope that there is a brighter future of medicine ahead of them.
Right.
All right.
Well, that's...
Unless you have something else you'd like to tell people who are watching and listening, that's probably not a bad place to close off.
Is there something that you wanted to cover that we didn't discuss yet?
I like to tell the world that we're in the world of Medicine 4.0.
Yeah.
And so medicine 4.0 is essentially using cell and gene therapy that's targeted to allow for more longevity, which means a broader lifespan and healthspan where you can do what you want and live a high quality life.
So instead of just saying exercise, eat well, we can use these gene therapies like folistatin to allow your body to get all these benefits, even if you're not exercising of longevity.
And that's where the era of medicine we're headed towards.
And that's what we want to really share with the world.
Okay, well...
Thank you very much for all the information that we walked through today.
That was much appreciated and very enjoyable.
And to everybody watching and listening, thank you very much for your time and attention.
I'm going to talk to Dr.
Khan for another half an hour on the Daily Wire Plus platform.
I think we'll go over, well, some of the topics that we've gone over already, but I want to also, as I usually do on that platform, delve into the development of his interests.
And so we'll go a little further down that road.
And if you want to join us there, Please feel welcome to do so.
Otherwise, hopefully you'll tune in again in the relatively near future.
And thank you to the Daily Wire Plus folks for making these conversations possible.
Thanks again, sir.
All right.
Thank you.
You bet.
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