Mel Gibson and Dr. Neil Riordan reveal how umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) dramatically improved his 92-year-old father’s hip pain, kidney/heart failure, and cognition—even reversing prolapse valves—after the Mayo Clinic gave him a 48-hour death sentence. Mel’s own shoulder injuries, treated with 10 million MSCs in Panama, resolved for nearly three years, while Joe Rogan’s less potent U.S. version left lingering effects. Dr. Riordan cites studies showing 172 rheumatoid arthritis patients achieving 50% TNF-alpha reduction and heart failure patients improving ejection fractions from 11% to functional levels, proving MSCs’ regenerative potential. The conversation underscores Panama’s advanced, unregulated access to high-efficacy stem cell therapies compared to the U.S., where federal exemptions may soon vanish, leaving patients with limited options despite groundbreaking results. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I was initially, it was for my dad, who was, you know, he was 92. And he was doing all the old man stuff.
You know, his hip was killing him, and he was like...
He had multiple problems.
I mean, I won't get into the whole litany of complaints, but hey, you know, your engine starts wearing out, and you've got to replace the carburetor and a few other things.
I took him to the Mayo Clinic.
Great place.
If I ever get into serious trouble, that's where I'm going.
And they were fantastic there, but they were able to say, you've got to leave me here, he'll be dead in 48 hours.
I'm like, oh.
So they clocked every problem that he had.
Everything from, you know, the prostate to the hip, to the kidneys, to the heart, to the lung, you know, the whole deal.
And he, you know, they stabilized him.
They said, okay, we'll do this and we'll do this.
And they did some, you know.
Orthodox medical procedures all allowed in this country.
And they were great.
But, you know, I still had reservations about him getting a hip replacement because he was old.
And of course, just the recovery from a traumatic surgery at that age is like, it's a big deal.
And I thought, oh, what can I do?
And my brother says, why don't you look into these adult stem cells?
I'm like, eh, you know, I've heard things about this, you know.
You grow a spare mouth on your head.
You end up with an extra asshole or something.
But I was like, okay, we'll look into it.
So we did.
And of course, a buddy of mine who was a Mayo doc, he said, stay away from those witch doctors down in Panama.
He said, it's like leprosy and banana boats and three-legged dogs, you know.
I'm like, can we call him?
And so Brad and I got on the phone to Neil, and who else was it?
So they're talking highfalutin terms, medical, all being medicos, you know, they sort of, they know what a mesenchymal stem cell, or mesenchymal, how do you say it?
Right now, there are clinical trials going on in the U.S., but it's not broadly available.
And in Panama, they passed a law in 2004, which allowed doctors, actually, to go down there to be able to treat people using adult stem cells.
So the bill was actually designed to prohibit the use of embryonic stem cells.
And in the same law, they said it's okay to use adult stem cells, including those from umbilical cord.
Basically from ethical sources and so in Panama they gave us, we have a license from the Ministry of Health to manufacture and use those cells in addition to doing clinical trials there.
So it's one place on the planet where you can get really high quality umbilical cord, this type of cell.
There are two major kind of stem cells.
We only work with one kind, the mesenchymal or we just call it MSC. It's a lot easier.
So anyway, that's how I think we actually owned apartments in the same building in Panama and never met each other.
We met through his brother finding us on the internet.
But, you know, as I recall, when he got there, he was in a wheelchair and really wasn't talking a lot and things like that and having a pretty rough time.
And then after getting medical clearance for him to actually fly down there and mail for him down there privately, then we did some IVs on him first in the clinic.
I went into the clean rooms, and they make you put on hats and gloves, and you feel like all Frankensteined out, and you walk into these cold rooms, and you're watching cells divide under the microscope.
It's kind of miraculous, really, to look at this stuff.
Well, the good thing is that this kind of stem cell, the mesenchymal stem cell, they're found throughout your body, and normally what they do is they modulate your immune system, they decrease inflammation, and they stimulate regeneration.
And the good thing about them is they tend to home to areas where there is inflammation.
So intravenously, they do a lot of things, but they can home to areas of inflammation and They really reduce inflammation in the body because they upregulate part of your immune system that controls the inflammatory process, which I can talk more about later.
But in his case, you know, his kidneys were in trouble.
His heart was in trouble.
And the cells, they don't...
Unlike what we used to think in the early days, they don't become anything.
This kind of stem cell does not become anything in your body, but it homes to areas that need repair and it secretes things that stimulates the repair and decreases the inflammation and helps out with the immune system.
So the vast majority of what we treat are autoimmune diseases.
And in Hutt's case, we gave him IVs so that he could basically have these things on board secreting The secreting the cytokines and the growth factors that are normally secreted, and when you're 92 and you have multi-organ failure, you're basically running on fumes.
And so you put these day zero young healthy cells and they secrete these things that kind of restarts everything.
Well, the only thing that's legal in the U.S., at least for now, I don't think it's going to last much longer, is from Amnion.
Yeah, that's what I got.
And there's an exemption in the...
It's a federal exemption for the use of amnion for wound covering, and a lot of people have now translated, now they're using it in joints and things like that.
Yeah, I don't understand it myself, to be honest with you.
Amnion's been used clinically in the United States for over 100 years without serious adverse events.
But I think it's more about the claims that people are making because there haven't been studies For example, of amnion, you know, amnion tissue injected into a joint.
And I think that the biggest concern is the claims that are being made and maybe people are being vulnerably, you know, I don't know, vulnerable to the economics of it.
I'm not really sure, but I know that I just...
I have my finger on the pulse, and it seems like they've gone after fat.
We were the first in the world to use fat-derived stem cells in 2006. In 2007, we published on using those to treat rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
And then a lot of doctors in the U.S. started doing that.
Now there's a new guidance in the industry that came out a few months ago that specifically prohibits using it for, for example, taking your own fat, isolating the stem cells out of it, and then injecting them in your bloodstream or even injecting them into a joint.
So I don't...
I don't really know the motivation behind it, but I know that they very clearly stated that that's not going to fly anymore.
It could be considered a new drug product in the U.S. And we are in clinical trials in the U.S. We have two INDs for the treatment of Duchenne's muscular dystrophy.
And we're just going to start a spinal cord injury trial at the University of Miami and Thomas Jefferson University.
We got funding from the Marcus Foundation.
Bernie Marcus is one of our clients.
And he's seen all these kids with spinal cord injury getting better.
And so our product is, we were able to figure out which cells work, which umbilical cords give cells that are really useful, and which ones aren't.
So we throw away the vast majority of the umbilical cords that we get.
Well, we had the advantage of having thousands of cases.
And I'll give you an example of one case of a football coach from Dallas where I live.
And he had diagnosed with MS. He was in and out of wheelchair, was on, you know, basically out.
And he was out on disability and retired from a very successful three-time state champion in Texas.
That's really saying something.
And he came down in 2010 for the first treatment and we gave him the treatment and he got much better.
He improved for about 14 months and then he came back again in 2011 and got another treatment, improved not as much as the first time.
And he came down in 2012 and Boom!
All of his symptoms were gone.
And now he's back coaching and he is completely normal.
He's probably, you know, he's a junior, he's a bit younger than me, but he's probably healthier than me.
I mean, the guy works out all the time.
He's out there in the field.
He doesn't have any heat intolerance, doesn't have any problems.
So I wanted to know what's the difference between those cells in 2012 and the ones in 2011 and the ones in 2010. And then we took other cases similar to that where we'd had less than spectacular results.
I mean, they're still good results, but they weren't, you know, ba-boom.
And so we took cells from those different lots and we grew them up and then we had them analyzed for 1,200 different molecules that they expressed.
And we found that these cells, we call them our golden cells because they just seem to work all the time.
And we found that they underexpressed certain proteins.
And then, so early on in the culture process, we can select for those and say, hey, these are golden cells.
These aren't.
Throw them out.
So we throw a whole bunch out, and we keep the golden cells, and then we grow those up.
And those are the only cells that we use.
So that's the big difference.
And the advantage we have is that we've had all those cases.
We're able to look back retrospectively at which cells really worked and analyze them from a molecular basis.
Yeah, I was really impressed with what I was able to get done, but the stuff that, I wish I had Dr. McGee tell me exactly what it was, the stuff that they had done to me about a year and a half ago is no longer available.
They decided that it was considered a drug, and they weren't allowing that form of amniotic stem cell treatment, so now there's a less effective but still effective form.
So it seems like there's some sort of an effort afoot to diminish this in the United States.
But in the meantime, a lot of people are probably suffering from some pretty significant injuries that they could deal with that far easier if this could somehow or another be sped up.
Do you anticipate this moving back to the United States in any way, or is this something that the hurdles are so steep that it's going to take a long time?
We were the first to get an eye to treat a human being in the United States with these cells, and that was three and a half years ago with a young man with Duchenne's muscular dystrophy.
And my other book that's hopefully interesting to read, it starts and finishes with his case where we treated him in Panama for a number of years and then we just petitioned FDA and said it's kind of ridiculous for us to do this down there.
Please allow us to do it.
So we're using the cells that we isolated and expanded in Panama.
We're using it to treat him and another, now a seven-year-old, with Duchenne's muscular dystrophy.
So that was the first wedge.
And then our next wedge is going to be for spinal cord injury.
And there are a number of clinical trials that are going on not...
Not just outside the US, there are a number going on in the US. The biggest hurdle is that a new drug, if you look at the last several years, cost $2.5 billion to get to market.
And unless we do something a little bit differently on the regulatory side, it's going to be kind of hard to do this.
Japan has a law that went into effect two years ago that It basically allows you to, once you demonstrate your product is safe, then you can go ahead and start marketing it, and then you have seven years in which to demonstrate efficacy.
So safety first, then efficacy.
And that's resulted in four new drugs already in less than two years, and we have zero.
The only cell product that's approved by FDA is umbilical cord blood for the treatment of when you're doing a bone marrow transplant.
There's an argument that they want to err on the side of safety.
I mean, that's their number one priority is to create a safe environment for receiving medicines in the United States.
I think the model is a little bit antiquated for the cell products just because they are natural products.
I mean, if you think about it, every woman that's ever given birth to a baby, they have stem cells from their baby in them.
These MSCs, you can find them 50 years later, and they're not toxic, and we wouldn't exist as a species if there was an inherent toxicity to genetically distinct cells, because the cells are 50% mom, 50% dad, and you can find them in mom for her entire life.
And the Cures Act was supposed to address some of that, and we'll see that went into effect last year, and we'll see going forward if that actually does affect things.
We're working with a hospital that we're actually going to...
We're going to have a room just for doing backs, just for doing spine.
Because there are studies, a study out of Europe just came out a couple months ago, and it showed about 50% of the patients had their discs become normal on MRI after treatment.
So it's not every case, but I'd take a 50-50 shot versus having a fusion, right?
You know, we have a clinic in Dallas that the RMI clinic where we can do bone marrow, right?
And so we use autologous bone marrow and we do do the DISC in the United States.
And it does help a percentage of people.
It doesn't help everybody.
And we were talking before about...
Not just the disc, but the muscles around the disc.
If you take somebody who's had an injury, my partner, Dr. McKenna, is an orthopedic surgeon and he's been talking about this for years.
But if you take somebody with a disc injury and you look at the muscles right on the either side of the spine there, And you'll find that they're withered away or they're marbled with fat and that sort of thing.
You take an elite athlete, somebody who's super healthy, works out all the time, those muscles, they're like ropes.
It's a filet mignon of the human body, right?
And you look at that and they're just black on MRI. But you take somebody that's had a disc injury at any level and you can look and there's marbling in there and it's withered and that sort of thing.
So, one of the things we do in South Lake and Dallas is we inject the disc, but also inject those muscles along the side.
And that's using your own bone marrow, and that's still allowed in the United States.
So, the bone marrow draw, concentrate the stem cells and inject them in those areas.
Well, that's something that we were talking about earlier when I showed you the reverse hyper, when I showed you that machine and then that Dex back stretcher.
I think that's a significant part of the injuries that you see with people with discs, with back injuries.
They don't have strong backs.
The tissue, the muscle around the back that protects the spine is just very weak.
Yeah, well, the cells kind of re-educate the immune system.
A lot of what we treat are rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, autoimmune diseases, and there's a retraining that's going on in the immune system.
That involves cytokines and those molecules, those peptides are the things that make you feel sick.
I mean, when you get the flu, the flu virus doesn't make you sick.
It's your body's immune reaction to that.
That's the stuff that's being thrown off from the fight.
That's what actually makes you feel sick.
And so when you're activating certain parts of the immune system and they're throwing out things that make you a little bit tired, some people, a very small percentage have some flu-like symptoms for one day.
But that's kind of like the extent of the side effects that we typically see.
But if you look at, like, you ask why isn't it being done in the U.S., for rheumatic drugs, so you see them on TV, they're advertised, Basically, every hour of every day on almost every station, you see these antirheumatics.
And, you know, if you have rheumatoid arthritis, if you have psoriatic arthritis or this sort of thing, these are biologics and these are antibodies to a certain molecule called TNF. TNF is one of the commanders of the immune system.
It kind of says, hey, let's cause a bunch of inflammation and make you miserable.
And so these drugs basically bind up or sop up the TNF that's in your body for a period of time.
That's why you have to get retreated like every month, every six months, every two months, something like that, six weeks, two months.
And you have to get retreated and retreated.
There's a study of rheumatoid arthritis where it was 172 people that were already on medication for rheumatoid arthritis, not adequately controlled.
They gave them like the equivalent of what a typical dose we give in Panama is, like roughly 120 million cells.
And all of them got better.
All of them symptomatically improved.
And the cool thing was that TNF-alpha and another molecule similar to it Decreased by 50%, and that decrease persisted for eight and a half months.
That was the length of the study.
So rather than putting an antibody in to sop up what's being produced, apparently, by your immune system, the cells tell your immune system to stop it, right?
They upregulated a certain immune cell called a T-regulatory cell.
That says to the immune system, hey, quit making TNF-alpha.
Quit making this IL-6 stuff.
And they took 30 patients, a sub-cohort, like three months later, and gave them another shot, the same dose, and it dropped their levels another 50% from that baseline.
So from baseline to post-second treatment, two treatments, two IVs sitting in a chair, dropped their levels 75%.
I had a, you know, they looked at my neck, I had a 50% occlusion in the right carotid, you know, like buildup of stuff, like you don't feel it happening all of a sudden, you know, all of a sudden when your carotid is shut down, they think, well, you have to eat the statins, right?
Yeah, well, just in general, your body, you have a certain number of these cells when you're born, and they age just like the rest of your body.
They perform more poorly as you age, right?
So if you take one of these cells from a newborn, like when you were born, you could pluck one of these cells out, throw it in a petri dish and let it grow.
You let it grow for a month, it divides roughly every 24 hours, or that's the doubling rate.
So at the end of a month, you have a billion cells.
And then if you take from a 35-year-old and do the same thing, doubling times like two days instead of one day, and at the end of the month you have 32,000 cells.
And you take them from a 65-year-old who's relatively healthy and they divide every 60 hours, you get 200 cells at the end of the month.
So if your problem is 1,000 cells or it's 20,000 cells or if it's a million cells, You can't get it done past a certain age just because the cells don't have the regenerative capacity.
And the good thing about the umbilical cord cells is they, if you co-culture them with these older people's cells, with the young cells, they don't even have to touch each other.
Just the secretions of the young cells will make the old cells start Dividing faster and behaving younger.
And the mitochondria, you see pictures in my book, you can see a picture of cells from a 65-year-old diabetic without any juice on them.
And then you put the juice from the young cells on there, and they look like 18-year-old MSCs.
With functional mitochondria all throughout the cell body rather than all bunched up, they look healthy.
I mean, as a cell biologist, I know what looks healthy and anybody else would.
You can see just from the picture how vastly different it is just to be exposed to the juice.
You heard of this parabiosis study they did at Harvard where they took young mice and they sewed them together with old mice and then the old mice actually got younger.
So at the end of the study, they showed that the older mice, their neurologic system got better, their cardiovascular system got better, their skeletal muscle got better, everything got better.
And one of the key molecules in there is called GDF11. And GDF11, when we look at the secretome, what these cells secrete when they're growing, and we pull that out and we quantify it, in the top four every time is GDF11 from the golden cells.
So the golden cells are overproducing GDF11, which is one of the key molecules for stimulating regeneration in your body.
And one of the individuals actually clinically is perfect, and all of his lesions went away.
And we only did one treatment with these.
Typically with MS, it's more refractory than rheumatoid arthritis.
Rheumatoid arthritis, usually after one treatment, people get a ton of benefit.
With MS, Usually see after two or three treatments that they really see the most benefit.
We only did one treatment in this trial.
But one gentleman had three lesions in his brain.
All three lesions completely disappeared.
So MS is a big thing.
Rheumatoid arthritis is a big thing.
And I tell you, there's stories in the...
Not stories, but people talking about their responses.
And it's pretty incredible.
There's one lady that...
Her husband is a PhD physicist.
He carried on working just so she could have insurance to afford the medications, which were around $100,000 a year, for her to get treated for rheumatoid arthritis.
And she came down about...
It's a little over three years ago, November, and she hasn't been on any medication since.
She actually started...
Walking around the mall when she was in Panama.
And then when she got home, she's completely, you know, pain-free.
And she's been pain-free for three years.
And her husband finally retired because he didn't care about, you know, having the insurance to pay for these very expensive drugs that she was taking.
So MS, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus.
We don't have a lupus protocol.
There's a group in China that's published six really good papers on lupus.
It's very, very effective in their trials.
We haven't done it yet.
And then autism, you know, it's not considered an autoimmune disease, but we have a trial.
We just completed our autism trial with 33 enrollees with very good results.
Many of those kids became non-autistic after treatment.
Well, I wrote an article in 2007 about why these cells should be good for autism.
And basically, it's the most downloaded article this journal's ever had.
Something like 75,000 people have downloaded a scientific journal article, which really doesn't happen very often.
People with autism have inflammatory things going on in their body.
A lot of times in the gut, at the end of the small intestine, there are these inflammatory nodules that look a lot like Crohn's disease, and they secrete this inflammation that then goes to the brain, inflames the white matter of the brain, the white matter of the brain swells, decreases the blood flow to the brain.
All that's intertwined.
And then just a few years ago, there was a study that came out, and this is what This is what allowed us to go forward with our clinical trial.
They found that there are these two inflammatory molecules that are MDC and TARC, and they perfectly correlate with the severity of symptoms of autism.
And so we measured not only those two, but another 30-some biomarkers.
We did quantitative EEGs.
We did a lot of standardized scoring with a neurologist that read them, you know, Before treatment, during treatment, after treatment.
So I believe a lot of the problems with autism stem from the inflammatory status, and these cells are definitely anti-inflammatory.
Yeah, they've had some benefit with changing the diet and changing the gut biome of kids with autism, and they've made some benefits for that, which they believe is also connected to inflammation.
If your immune system is freaking out every time you eat a piece of bread and that immune system is throwing out molecules that are swelling your brain and inflaming your brain, then it makes complete sense.
I think, in general, the people with autism that do the best are the ones that get that addressed before they come down.
You know, there's some other doctors that do functional medicine.
They look at their diet.
They look at see if they have any heavy metals and that sort of thing.
And the ones that just are slam-dunk, do the best, have been cleaned up before they come down.
The interesting thing about heart failure is the cells don't need to go to the heart and to actually become new heart cells and that sort of thing.
It's actually the secretions of the cells.
Like I said before, there was a study at University of Buffalo where they injected cells IV in a hamster model of heart failure and then they looked in the heart and there were very few cells, but the heart failure got better.
And then they said, oh, let's inject those same cells, these are umbilical MSCs, inject them into the hamstring muscle.
And they demonstrated that none of the cells came out of the hamstring muscle, and yet the heart failure got better.
So then they took just the juice, the liquid that the cells secrete, and they simulated the amount of juice that the cells would have produced in the body and just injected the juice and the heart failure got better.
So it's really the secretions of the cells stimulating the natural repair, augmenting the natural repair process of the body that has been stretched to its limit.
You know, if you have a 65-year-old, those cells aren't dividing very well.
The juice can help the cells divide faster and produce more repair molecules and make it better.
And there are clinical trials using similar cell types that also have demonstrated that.
There's a molecule called BMP, which is high in heart failure.
The BMP came down in every single case.
The injection fraction, which measures kind of like the efficiency, how much blood your heart's pumping on each stroke.
It went up in every single patient.
I think in the book, the craziest case was a gringo who was down in Costa Rica.
I don't know, he was probably 20-25% routinely, but he got a viral disease or something else and he was 11% ejection fraction.
Normal is about 60. And the regular hospital who worked a lot with us with our spinal cord patients and seeing results, seeing people walking again, they just said, you can't get on a plane.
You're at 3,700 feet.
If you get on a plane, you'll be dead.
You might as well go see these guys over at the stem cell place and see if anything can happen.
And I think his case is in the book as well.
But he went from, I don't know, 11 to...
42 or something like that.
But he wasn't the first case.
The first case was a doctor who's a friend of Georgie's, a friend of Dr. Paz, our medical director, who had congenital.
So his mother had died of heart failure.
His sister had died.
His brother had died.
And he was, you know, not even 50 years old, and his ejection fraction was, you know, hovering around 30 percent.
And a lot of people at, you know, at an advanced age, You're not even going to get on the list because if you're a 50 or 60-year-old and there's a 20-year-old ahead of you, a 20-year-old's going to win.
And so he begged and begged to come down.
He was our first patient.
We didn't really want to take him because we didn't know what was going to happen because nobody had ever done it.
And we treated him and he went back and he had an ejection fraction, he had an echocardiogram, and it was 52 percent.
And then the doctor didn't believe it, so he redid it a month later and it was 55 percent.
So, you know, it's not, I don't think it's for every case.
I mean, you have people with like a super bad heart attack and there's not enough to repair and you really need a heart transplant.
But I think you're going to see that it's ultimately, I think in 20 years, you're probably going to see standard of care for diseases, chronic diseases like Any chronic degenerative disease for which there's no good treatment, you're going to see standard of care is going to be young, healthy mesenchymal stem cells.
Because if you look at the root cause, I get a question a lot, how is it these things work for so many things?
Well, when the root cause is a lack of or dysfunction of those cells, then it makes sense that replenishing those or restoring them with young, healthy ones could be a useful treatment.
Yeah, I think it's amazing, and it seems a crime to me that, you know, it isn't easier to do in this country.
We're an advanced country.
I mean, they should look a little harder at it, and it's a mystery to me why it isn't the case, but, you know, hey, if there are places where one can go and get some help.
It's good.
I mean, I know another gal.
She's a good friend of mine.
She tore her shoulders up because she was like an athlete.
And she had her shoulders down and she got some dropped into her and it actually helped greatly with an autoimmune disorder that she had.
Yeah, this young guy with Duchenne's muscular dystrophy, you know, the cells don't last forever.
This is also an important point.
With Duchenne's, it's a genetic defect, so they're missing a protein.
And these cells go in.
In animal models, these cells, you give them to the animal, they go into the muscle, and then they They start secreting that molecule that they're missing, but they only last for about four, five, six months.
And then they start maturing, and then the immune system clears them.
It's a real important point.
You don't have that with embryonic stem cells because they cause tumors and things like that.
And the great thing about these cells, they don't cause tumors because they differentiate.
They don't want to be a baby.
They're just there to do their job, which is to keep homeostasis, keep the immune system controlled, help with regeneration, all that sort of thing.
A few of us got together and wrote an article when they finally put the clamp on the last embryonic stem cell treatment.
And we've been saying for years that embryonic stem cells aren't going to work because they want to become babies.
The number one problem is they want to become babies.
They don't want to...
The cells that we start with, they don't want to become babies.
The babies are already born.
They're mature.
They're mesenchymal.
And that's what they are.
And they're never going to be anything else.
Whereas the embryonic stem cells, the biggest problem with them is they always form tumors.
They form teratomas.
And so in order for them to be functional, you have to grow them out.
And if you want them to have MSC-like qualities, you have to force them to become MSCs.
And then you have to make darn sure that there aren't any...
It only takes one.
If there's one left, then it's going to form a tumor.
So that was the big problem, that the expense, you know, it's $300,000, $400,000 a dose just to make sure that they didn't have one in them.
And then they weren't as beneficial, and they've been monkeyed with in the lab from...
When they were embryonic and then converted and converted and converted and then grown up in huge numbers.
And so they were monkeyed with.
These cells, you don't have to monkey with them.
They just do it naturally.
You just take them out.
You digest them.
You put them in a nutrient broth in the right temperature and humidity and oxygen levels and they just grow.
And so we wrote an article about embryonic stem cells.
The king is dead, long live the king, because the California voters knee-jerked $3 billion towards embryonic stem cell work against the Bush administration's restriction of spending money on embryonic stem cell research.
It wasn't banned, as most people said.
All they said was, we're not going to use taxpayer money, federal taxpayer money, to go towards that.
And what people heard was they don't want progress.
Well, what's happened is, at last count, I think they spent $2.75 billion.
They've got $250 million left.
And guess what they're studying now?
Adult stem cells.
They're studying umbilical cord stem cells.
They're studying mesenchymal stem cells.
They've completely cut out everything on the embryonic side because it just took that long.
There was so much misinformation out there.
And now, thank God, it's gone.
And we've regained our sanity.
But we blew a lot of dough on the whole embryonic thing.
It's hard to say because everybody's bone marrow is different, your age is different.
You know, if you're 85 years old, even if you're 65 years old and you're a smoker or you're diabetic, I don't think it's worth typically using your bone marrow because it's just not going to do a lot.
But younger people, healthier people, a lot of times when it's in a joint, because That's the only thing we can do in the U.S. is orthopedics.
But if it's an orthopedic problem, then, you know, they could check out, see if they could, you know, we could do something for them in Dallas.
If it's not orthopedic and you need systemic treatment for autoimmune disease, if you have a spinal cord injury or autism, any of those conditions, then they go to cellmedicine, C-E-L-L-Medicine.com, and that's where we have, there's all the information there, and they can fill out an application.
Yeah, one of his issues is that he has some atrophy on one of his arms because his nerves in his neck were being pinched for a long time and he didn't address it quick enough.
And it got to the point where his arm was shrinking.
And that's one of the reasons why he went down there.
For spinal cord injury, we did a cohort analysis and basically if they're within one year of injury, 100% of the patients had restoration of some neurologic function.
If it was between one and two years, it was 82%.
If it was after two years, it was 50%.
So the longer it is, and also the older you are, the less oomph you have left.
The reason these cells work for spinal cord injuries, they don't become nerves or anything like that, but the spinal cord is one of the most replete Areas of the body, when it comes to blood vessels, there's barely enough blood vessels to keep it alive.
And your liver, on the other hand, has just tons of blood vessels in it.
And your liver, you know, you can cut 80% of your liver out and it will regrow itself.
With your spinal cord, you just kind of ding it a little bit and it won't repair itself.
That's because there are no blood vessels and therefore there are no MSCs or very few MSCs.
So like 1 50th the number of MSCs reside in your spinal cord because we built this wonderful cage around it to protect it.
And so all we're doing is we shoot the cells in there.
We also give them an IV. And the cells secrete the things that are necessary for the spinal cord to regenerate itself.
But the longer it is from injury, the more scarring there is and all that sort of thing, the less benefit you're going to see.
So do you anticipate a time where they'll be able to regenerate spinal tissue or someone has got a spinal cord injury where they have partial or some sort of paralysis and they can be able to regenerate that?
Well, you know, Juan Carlos Murillo is a commercial pilot from Costa Rica, and he was one day flying as a National Geographic photographer around in his private plane in a pancake, and both of them got spinal cord injuries.
We're giving them IV cells and intrathecal, so into the spinal fluid.
So the first round of treatments, after that, he described it as like a 10 out of a 10 pain scale.
So he had this neuropathic pain that was just like he was shoveling down narcotics like nobody's business.
And after the first treatment, he didn't get any restoration of the function or anything, but his pain dropped from a 10 to a 3. And so he got off the narcotics.
Then the second time we treated him, he got his left leg back.
And he could move it.
How long after the treatment?
Okay, we started treating him six months and three days after his accident.
And then so he got the first round of treatments was in, you know, the first month.
And it was about three months later, we did the second round.
Three months later, he got his right leg back.
And then three months later, so it was over about a year, a 15-month period probably in total, he basically got everything back.
He got erectile function, he got bowel, bladder, all that sort of thing.
And, you know, I just had dinner with him the other night in Costa Rica, and he can walk in here, and he got his commercial pilot's license back, and, you know, he started a new business, and, you know, he has...
So when we were designing this study that we're doing at Miami that's being funded by the Marcus people, there are two neurosurgeons that are on that.
So we wanted to, okay, we're discussing at what time point should we accept them?
And these very prominent neurosurgeons said, let's do six months, because at six months, you've got 98% to 99% back of everything you're going to have.
So let's do patients or subjects that are from six months to two years.
And so those are the inclusion criteria.
That's the timing that we're going to do for the study at Miami.
Yeah, well it's referenced in both books, but in the spinal cord chapter, so Stem Cell Therapy Rising Tide is the one that, it's written for the lay person.
There you go.
So it's referenced in there and the whole story about Juan Carlos and his journey and how he got started and everything's in there as well as a reference to the published article that's in a scientific journal about his case.
Well, listen, man, it was a real treat, real pleasure.
I'm so fascinated about this stuff because of my own personal experience with the limited amount of stem cell treatments that I've gotten, but I've had great results.
I had a knee injury that was bothering me forever.
I don't feel it at all anymore.
The shoulder doesn't bother me at all anymore.
I mean, it's pretty amazing stuff, and from what you're saying, I'm getting a very watered-down, not nearly as potent version of what you have in Panama.