Latest / Gladden Longevity Podcast / From Steroids to Stem Cells: Redefining Recovery, Regeneration and Longevity - Episode 264
Transcript
- 0:02Welcome to the Gladden Longevity Podcast with Dr.
- 0:04Jeffrey Gladden, where our passion is helping you to become an age hacker.
- 0:08On this show, we want to help you optimize your life energy, longevity, health, and human performance with impactful and actionable information by answering four questions.
- 0:16How good can we be?
- 0:18How do we make 100 the new 30?
- 0:20How do we live well beyond 120?
- 0:22And how do we live young for a lifetime?
- 0:25Now here's today's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.
- 0:31Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Long Joedy Podcast.
- 0:34I'm your host, Dr.
- 0:34Jeffrey Gladden.
- 0:36And in this particular episode, we're going to be talking with David Carley, spelled K-A-R-L-I.
- 0:46David is an MD.
- 0:49He's also working in the regenerative medicine space, working with PRP for quite some time, ever since it became popular back in the early 2000s.
- 0:59He has a long standing history of working in the orthopedic space.
- 1:04He's done an orthopedist himself, but now he's involved with cell therapies.
- 1:09And I think you're going to find this conversation really fascinating about the state of regenerative medicine and what his take is on it and what my take is on it and how those
- 1:21two kind of.
- 1:24compliment and yet are a little different at the same time and I think you'll really enjoy this conversation.
- 1:32Welcome everybody.
- 1:33I'm your host, Dr.
- 1:34Jeffrey Gladden.
- 1:35And I have the pleasure of having David Carley on the show today.
- 1:39David and I have not met before, so we're going to learn a little bit about each other, I suppose, in the course of the next however many minutes.
- 1:47But David, welcome to the show.
- 1:49Thanks, Jeff.
- 1:49Appreciate you having me on.
- 1:51And as always, the opportunity informed to talk about all the work we're doing and an interesting, albeit controversial space.
- 1:59Yeah, definitely.
- 2:00Definitely has a little controversy swirling for sure.
- 2:03We're going to be talking a lot about regenerative medicine on this particular show, which is kind of near and dear, I think, to both our hearts and maybe many of the hearts of our
- 2:12listeners as well.
- 2:14David, tell us a little bit, how'd you get into this?
- 2:17What's a little bit of your background?
- 2:18Do you have a story that kind of led you down this path?
- 2:21Yeah, it's a long one.
- 2:22I'll give you a more abbreviated version.
- 2:24at this for a long time.
- 2:26So was traditionally trained at University of Maryland Medical School.
- 2:30Harvard residency, initially physical medicine rehabilitation, but it kind of went into the anesthesia interventional pain world, did some fellowship work there.
- 2:40Well, at Harvard, stayed on his teaching doc and then ended up at the Stedman Clinic in Vail, Colorado, where I was for 20 years before recently relocating to South Florida after
- 2:51our practice was acquired.
- 2:53On the region front, interventional pain, everybody's familiar with that route.
- 2:58I was really good at it, but recognized over the course of many years that I wasn't offering solutions.
- 3:07I was offering, everyone says band-aids.
- 3:10I don't know what band-aids, a good term, but I was offering transient symptomatic benefit at best.
- 3:19Temporary pain relief, essentially.
- 3:20Temporary pain relief.
- 3:22we were brought up, steroids was our primary vehicle, what it is.
- 3:28Catabolic pathways and we probably, well, we definitely overuse them over the course of many years and even to date in traditional interventional pain.
- 3:40And we now know that that overuse is horrendous and causes as many problems as it solves.
- 3:46Have they really figured that out because I find that people come to me and they see somebody, let's call it in the orthopedic world or even the spine world.
- 3:58which may or may not be neuro orthopedics, but, you know, they talk about, they always come back and the doctors offer me a steroid injection or this or that.
- 4:06Right.
- 4:06So it seems like nobody's really gotten away from that paradigm.
- 4:10And yet we know that steroids really kind of cause greater deterioration in the joint or the cartilage, then it helps, right?
- 4:18It's short-term pain for long-term loss is the way I characterize it.
- 4:22Well, I think the reason we got away with it, maybe continue to get away with it is there wasn't a better solution.
- 4:27for people who were hurting and people who were hurting are desperate for some relief and they do work.
- 4:32Yeah.
- 4:32Very effective.
- 4:33I'll be it for a very short period of time.
- 4:35So when you're the one in pain, you'll take that two months or three months because there's no other alternative and maybe opioids is your alternative and that has its own
- 4:44issues, obviously.
- 4:45you know, I, we look at someone who's on systemic steroids, what happens to their body?
- 4:51It basically deteriorates.
- 4:54So that's about as good of an example as I think I can give.
- 4:57At a tissue level, same thing happens.
- 5:01If you've trimicinolone or something, it's fairly high dose in concentration for those local tissues.
- 5:07Use cartilage as an example if we put it intraarticulary.
- 5:10And that same catabolic response ensues.
- 5:14And if it's repeated over and over and over again, chase and pain, yeah, it's catabolic.
- 5:19It degenerates and deteriorates tissues.
- 5:21Yeah.
- 5:22Then you end up with a total knee, a total hip or, whatever it is, if, it's correctable in that way.
- 5:28yeah, so it's a model.
- 5:29your steroids until you need the replacement part.
- 5:32Right.
- 5:32And that's an interesting concept.
- 5:34Also this idea of avoiding a joint replacement or avoiding other interventions.
- 5:43I'll weave my story into your story here in just a minute, but
- 5:47But that's an interesting concept.
- 5:49want the audience to hold this because I think we've all learned this from our physician.
- 5:52Well, you know, you're not quite ready for this or that.
- 5:55So we'll give you this in the interim.
- 5:57And when you get to that, then we'll do this, right?
- 5:59It's like, that's like, you know, from medical school on everybody's heard that, right?
- 6:05And, and it's like, well, your knee's not doing so good, but you're still getting around.
- 6:09So we'll see you back in five years because blah, blah, blah.
- 6:13So anyway, I'll weave that back in here in a minute, but go ahead.
- 6:16So.
- 6:16Well, perhaps we're a little short-sighted.
- 6:19There is some systemic uptake.
- 6:21If you put steroidals into a joint or a tendon or a rotator cuff or whatever it might be.
- 6:27And we probably were blind to the systemic repercussions and we're focused more on the local histology and local repercussions.
- 6:36But there's a greater systemic issue here.
- 6:37And if you've ever seen one who's had adrenal shutdown, it's not a pretty thing.
- 6:43And we didn't run into it often.
- 6:45you we were pretty responsible limiting it to, I used to tell patients, if you can manage a problem, this is pre regenerative medicine, but if you can manage a problem with two or
- 6:55less steroidal interventions in a 12 month period, that was a reasonable give and take, right?
- 7:03Yeah.
- 7:04Back in that paradigm.
- 7:05And just so the audience understands what he's talking about is if you get too many steroids, and we're not talking about
- 7:12Anabolic steroids like a Bellity Builder.
- 7:14We're talking about, you know, like things like prednisone and cortisol, know, the steroids your body makes to handle inflammation.
- 7:20And that's how those, those injections work is they decrease inflammation, but they also have a catabolic or break down the tissue kind of effect.
- 7:28But if you get too much of that either orally, because you're taking an immunosuppressant for your asthma and you're on a lot of prednisone or something, or you're getting that in
- 7:37an injection, but you're getting too much of it in the injection.
- 7:41You're basically telling your adrenal glands, which are the little glands that sit on top of the kidney that are responsible for making the cortisol when your body needs it, you're
- 7:49pretty much telling them to just shut down production.
- 7:51And now, you know, it's hard for you to have a normal cortisol response to daily activity, let alone if you should get sick, right?
- 7:59So you end up in this really kind of very depleted space.
- 8:03Well, and you know, Doc, someone comes in for their shoulder, chances are they have a knee and a back and an elbow as well.
- 8:09So what was happening is, know,
- 8:10as a practitioner, maybe I was working with their spine and two other practitioners were working elsewhere and they ended up getting 8, 10 steroidal exposures in a 12 month
- 8:19period.
- 8:20And that's clearly too much.
- 8:22But to get back to your original point, how did that lead me to regen?
- 8:25Well, I was doing this year in and year out and we were keeping patients as happy as we could.
- 8:31But I knew I wasn't offering a solution and that was progressively frustrating me.
- 8:39I practiced at the Sedman Clinic in Bale, Colorado and Dr.
- 8:42Sedman who has passed and rest in peace.
- 8:45But Dr.
- 8:47Sedman had a lot of contacts in Europe and in Europe they were treating some soccer athletes with a licensed product that was basically fetal bovine serum, purified baby
- 9:00cowl.
- 9:00I'm sorry, what was it again?
- 9:01Say that again.
- 9:02It was fetal bovine serum.
- 9:04Okay, fetal bovine serum.
- 9:05So what he's talking about is he's talking about...
- 9:08the serum or plasma from a calf, not from a human, but serum bovine, right?
- 9:17So anyway, okay.
- 9:19So now we're using calf blood minus the red blood cells and white blood cells, right?
- 9:25So that's pretty interesting.
- 9:26Yeah.
- 9:26Well, and it was a licensed product, right?
- 9:28It was purified commercial grade, I knew we couldn't bring that back to the U.S.
- 9:33There was no way.
- 9:35But I like the concept and I saw it applied.
- 9:37I was one of the first US physicians to visit a few docs in Europe that were applying this to football athletes, to soccer athletes with a lot of muscle and soft tissue injuries and
- 9:46so forth.
- 9:48And they were achieving some good results.
- 9:50So coming back, I like the concept of working with the body as opposed to working against it and managing symptoms.
- 9:58And around that time, not just myself, but a number of colleagues
- 10:03stumbled across some old dental literature where they were using a platelet concentration to stimulate gums and oral surgery, gingival disease.
- 10:15long story short, this kind of evolved into a boutique sports medicine application.
- 10:22At the time, this was quite a few years ago, was very, very innovative and cutting edge in the next greatest thing.
- 10:29And we started working with it.
- 10:32our market in Vale was very much a destination market.
- 10:35So we had to stay on the cutting edge to attract people for the latest and greatest.
- 10:41And we did our part to try to establish scientific validation, what we did, but we had to stay on the lead edge.
- 10:47So this was a good fit for that patient population that was looking for the latest and greatest.
- 10:52So what about here?
- 10:53What are you talking about?
- 10:54Just to tell you, it was talking about PRP, right?
- 10:57Yeah.
- 10:57Play Ligurge Plus was essentially what we're talking about, just so you're in the loop here.
- 11:00So this was not...
- 11:02When did this become popular?
- 11:04think it was back in the 90s maybe or something like that we first started to hear about or maybe something.
- 11:08So foundational research was in the late 90s but application in musculoskeletal and orthopedic medicine was really in the early 2000s I would say.
- 11:17That's when we first started working with it.
- 11:19Okay.
- 11:20And very primitive at the time.
- 11:22They were basically centrifuge blood to isolate platelets and stick it in there and let the magic happen.
- 11:28So it was a pretty primitive model but at the time was very innovative.
- 11:33We started working with it in part initially as a research opportunity, but then the demand skyrocketed and people started to seek it out and we started to apply it.
- 11:44But we ran into a problem very early on that led me into my career with this stuff.
- 11:49Okay.
- 11:50What was that?
- 11:51So most of the blood products like PRP are processed with a little tabletop medical device that fits on a counter.
- 11:58So you put a blood sample in and it centrifuges it and it produces your
- 12:02platelet-rich plasma and it comes out the other end, but it's not quantified and there's zero quality control.
- 12:08So you don't actually know what's in there.
- 12:10That's right.
- 12:10assume it's a platelet concentrate, but to the naked eye, we can't actually tell.
- 12:15And I was putting this into patients and we were seeing trends of good results, but it was driving me crazy that I didn't know what my dose was.
- 12:23Where in medicine do we apply something without knowing the dose?
- 12:26Right.
- 12:27And to date, that's still happening routinely.
- 12:31So that led me into my career, which was to solve that problem of creating this concept of a cellular dose.
- 12:39Right.
- 12:40And researching the fact that there's a cause and effect relationship.
- 12:44You apply a dose in medicine, we give a drug, we give a dose, and there's an effect.
- 12:48We applied that same pharma-like model to biologics, and that led me to ultimately found a biotechnology company to research and develop these things, which has continued since
- 12:582010.
- 12:59Okay.
- 13:00And I've been battling a bit of a disruptor early on that was not well received to the communities that were producing these things without any quantification, without any
- 13:09measurement.
- 13:10Right.
- 13:11And we battled and fought that fight for many years on podiums and academic conferences.
- 13:16And I'm pleased to see over the last couple of years adoption that, yeah, we need to be measuring what we're putting into people and studying.
- 13:26Optimization, right?
- 13:27You don't treat every single person the exact same way we're different beings.
- 13:32100%.
- 13:32No, that's a basic tenet of what we do in our space as Yet it wasn't happening.
- 13:38And it still isn't happening to date.
- 13:4099 % of the biologic application, biologic treatments that are done, cell therapies, doctor has absolutely no idea how many cells are going into that patient.
- 13:49And in my opinion, that's unacceptable and is not sustainable.
- 13:53Let me ask you this.
- 13:55When you draw blood from an individual and you send it in for a complete blood count, you get a red blood cell number or a white blood cell number and you get a platelet count,
- 14:07right?
- 14:08You get a platelet number.
- 14:09Does the platelet count that you get from that CBC, does that translate into anything related to the dose that happens when you centrifuge that volume of blood down to get
- 14:21that?
- 14:21Is there any connection between those two or is that?
- 14:24There is, it continues to evolve.
- 14:27So it was kind of a crawl, walk, run approach.
- 14:29So we had to kind of first establish a threshold.
- 14:32So above that threshold is good, below that threshold is bad.
- 14:35That was kind of step one.
- 14:37Yeah.
- 14:37Not bad, but inadequate, right?
- 14:39Correct.
- 14:39But that was our first hurdle, and we did that.
- 14:41Now what we've done from there is to...
- 14:44So basically we measure every platelet, every type of self, different types of white blood cells that are our samples, and that's imported into a database.
- 14:52And we run that...
- 14:53dose, that cellular dose in parallel with patient reported outcomes at different points in time.
- 14:58And then retrospectively looking back, we can say, well, these patients did well.
- 15:02What dose did they receive?
- 15:03Here were some failures.
- 15:04What dose did they receive?
- 15:05That was step two.
- 15:07Identify trends and patterns of success and failure.
- 15:10Predictive value.
- 15:12What predicts failure?
- 15:13What predicts success?
- 15:14Then once we cleared that hurdle, there was a third step, which was customization.
- 15:19I treat you, different than myself.
- 15:22because we have totally different blood, totally different blood numbers.
- 15:28how to treat a patient based on their health and age and body mass index and medications that they're on, and then the problem that we're treating.
- 15:37So patient and indication.
- 15:39So we might treat a 75 year old smoker different from a 23 year old athlete.
- 15:43We might treat an acute problem different from a chronic problem.
- 15:46That was phase three, customization and optimization protocols, which is where we are today.
- 15:50Yeah that makes perfect sense.
- 15:52I can imagine that in the data you're collecting as to who had benefit and who didn't have benefit that there's probably some overlap between the doses that is probably not a clean
- 16:04line between above this point you get benefit and below this line you don't get benefit.
- 16:09I can imagine that there's people that got benefit with a bit lower dose and people that didn't get benefit with a bit higher dose.
- 16:17Do you want to?
- 16:19comment on that?
- 16:19Is that true, not true, or is it just binary?
- 16:22It's evolving, but it's not linear, right?
- 16:25So probably what happens is there's a dose increase, know, increased doses better, better, better, better, and it's going to level off.
- 16:31And that's the point of decreasing return at that point.
- 16:34Okay.
- 16:34there's your threshold.
- 16:36Okay.
- 16:37So it's linear in that sense, but there's not a cutoff if you took all the people that didn't respond and put them at the bottom and all the people that did respond at the top
- 16:46and you looked at their counts.
- 16:49you're saying that those two clouds wouldn't intersect with each other?
- 16:52There was a good correlation with some overlap and some ranges, right?
- 16:56It wasn't a finite number due to this number of platelets.
- 16:59It was a range, you know, as with everything in medicine.
- 17:02what was even more interesting than that is that we lined up 10 people that were fairly similar, similar backgrounds, similar problems, and treat them with a standardized dose.
- 17:12About seven or eight...
- 17:13will respond pretty positively and then there was a couple that would not and there wasn't much difference between them.
- 17:19So what was the why that would explain the non-responders?
- 17:25And that's, we're actually applying for an NIH grant at the moment, which is going to actually take this a step further and start to look at genomics and epigenomics to see if
- 17:37that, is there a genetic reason, i.e.
- 17:39someone's cells are more therapeutic or less therapeutic than someone else's?
- 17:44Or is it the epigenome, which influences the gene expression, as you know, which may be influencing that responder or non-responder?
- 17:51To the same point, how can I put a stem cell, and we use the patient's own stem cells just to clarify.
- 17:58There's a lot of laws and FDA regulations we can talk about.
- 18:02Why can I put some cells into an arthritic knee and that patient feels good for five, six, seven years when those cells are long gone after a matter of weeks?
- 18:12What is the mechanism?
- 18:14And that's kind of where we're at in terms of research to try to understand.
- 18:18just to go back to your prior point, I would imagine that there are probably some genetic predisposition.
- 18:26And of course, epigenetics will tell a lot.
- 18:28Epigenetics, of course, being a combination of the environment that's impacting how the genes are expressed, right?
- 18:35So we have that element.
- 18:37But I would also suspect that there's a metabolic aging component.
- 18:44in this equation also.
- 18:46And what I mean by that is one of the things that we know is that if you take stem cells, for example, and you throw them into a Petri dish and you have old plasma in there, right,
- 18:58which is full of what's called an aging cytokines, maybe from senescent cells that have had that senescence associated secretory status.
- 19:08so now you've got
- 19:09These SAS cells that are basically secreting all these inflammatory cytokines We know that the stem cells don't work nearly as well as if you put them into a young healthy
- 19:20environment and I explain to people all the time that You know before you do any kind of regenerative procedure Which is basically putting your Olympic swimmers into an Olympic
- 19:29sized pool.
- 19:30You got to clean out the pool You got to get the lawn chairs out.
- 19:32You got to get the logs out You can't expect them to set a world record if they got a
- 19:37Swim through all the trash.
- 19:38So one of the things we do is plasma for Esis for people first to kind of clear the clear the slate, if you will, with or without young plasma, but then, you know, trying to trying
- 19:49to get people back to baseline.
- 19:50So I don't know, there may be an aging component to this.
- 19:53I don't know if that's something you're entertaining as well, probably.
- 19:56There's a number of ways to look at that.
- 19:57It's a great discussion in and of itself because I get that a lot clinically and subjectively when a patient's thinking about doing this.
- 20:04Do I still have good cells?
- 20:06I'm in my 60s, I'm in my 70s.
- 20:10This guy named Philippe Ernigo, French orthopedic surgeon, University of Paris, who has been doing research on bone marrow derived.
- 20:18I want get away from the word stem cell, right?
- 20:21It's a little bit taboo.
- 20:22The FDA doesn't like us using it.
- 20:24A better term is probably progenitor cell, which stem cell is indicative of one cell type, right?
- 20:31Progenitor cells are many cell types in our bone marrow, for example, that have therapeutic.
- 20:36So, but anyway, if you look at progenitor cells from 60 and 70 and 80 year olds, and he looked at non-unions and diabetics and really difficult problems, and was able to show
- 20:47that the potency of autologous, meaning from the patients, their own cells, applied to those problems still had very strong effects.
- 20:56I.e.
- 20:57even though you're in your 70s and 80s, if you're in reasonably good health, you still have therapeutic capacity.
- 21:02Now there is, as you know, a natural decline.
- 21:04but we're able to overcome that through concentration, right, in the lab.
- 21:08Yes.
- 21:09By increasing the concentration.
- 21:10That's right.
- 21:10What I'm talking about is the stem cells are remarkably durable, although they do fade out at some point in time, right?
- 21:18But they are remarkably durable in that regard, and they have a way to actually be regenerated.
- 21:24Stem cells themselves can be regenerated, right, from very small embryonic-like stem cells that sort of sit behind them and actually will recreate them.
- 21:32In that case, you still end up with long telomeres and healthy stem cells and things like that.
- 21:37Even later in life.
- 21:38Right.
- 21:38I'm talking about the environment that they're working in that sort of smothers them from being able to do their work.
- 21:44Right.
- 21:44So, and equally as important, Jeff, the environment we're putting them into is a crappy one in that's it in, in orthopedic application, not just the blood that they're coming
- 21:52from, the environment we're putting them in.
- 21:54Now, exactly.
- 21:55We expect them to react to that environment.
- 21:58That's how they produce their effect.
- 21:59Right.
- 22:00They sense what's going on and react.
- 22:02Right.
- 22:02And that's a secretory function.
- 22:04They release proteins and buy an mRNA and exosomal activity that works with the native tissue to try to stabilize a problem.
- 22:12Yep.
- 22:13We don't at this phase of the game, and I'm talking about taking patient cells, concentrating them, and immediately putting them back into arthritis, for example, we
- 22:24don't regenerate much.
- 22:26We call this regenerative medicine.
- 22:28But if you look at histology, MRIs before and after and things like that,
- 22:32we're not seeing a lot of change.
- 22:33Yet, that patient often subjectively, their symptoms are dramatically improved and their function is improved, even though on MRI, the knee still looks arthritic, for example.
- 22:43That's right.
- 22:43Now, everyone wants to get to the point where we can reverse a problem in vivo, inside the body, from the inside out.
- 22:50We're not there today, but obviously that's the goal of where we want to go.
- 22:54for now, what we can do is manage the problem effectively from a subjective standpoint.
- 23:00I feel better.
- 23:01I function better, even though it's arthritic.
- 23:04And we think it's gonna take a long time to look at this data, but we think we can probably slow the progression of these problems as well with these types of treatments.
- 23:13And you know what's interesting is that it's a nice transition that you made from basically treating symptoms, short-term gain for long-term negative consequences into
- 23:26something that has short-term gain, but has long-term positive.
- 23:32Consequences, right?
- 23:33And that's kind of a thing, and particularly if you sort of start to stack these things together, either, you know, repeated injections or stacking them with other other
- 23:42elements, other cofactors, things like that.
- 23:47What's the audience should understand?
- 23:48We're really taking this away from a kind of maintenance of pain until the joint deteriorates and you need a joint replacement into, you know, enhancing activity, not
- 23:59just.
- 24:00reducing pain.
- 24:01And so you're getting somebody back to a more functional state.
- 24:04Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's just what you're saying, And it took a long time to learn this just through doing.
- 24:12that was, when does it, where's the point in overturn?
- 24:15If you use a knee arthritis, for example, is there a point where this model starts to not be appealing anymore?
- 24:22It's just progressed too much and we're better off thinking about a joint replacement at that point.
- 24:27And we've kind of learned where that sweet spot is, but it's deeper into the degenerative process than we originally thought it was.
- 24:33Right.
- 24:34I.E.
- 24:34people with moderate to severe arthritis, not always, but often will still respond very nicely.
- 24:41So the question then clinically is can we push the replacement out or can we prevent it from being necessary completely?
- 24:50Right.
- 24:50And it varies obviously from person to person, but it performed...
- 24:54And this back in the early days when we were experimenting this, we really know how far this could go.
- 24:59And I think for your listeners, most medical technology, as you know, has this huge upsurge in interest in it's, you I found myself in Wall Street Journal in USA Today for
- 25:10applying PRP back in 2005, right?
- 25:13Because it was so innovative back then.
- 25:15Fairly simple thing.
- 25:16But what happens with most technology is it starts to undergo the rigors of scientific.
- 25:21Process and then what happens we realize it's not as good as we thought and it dies and that happens over and over and over again But what happened with these or it its
- 25:30equilibrium?
- 25:30It may not die, but it finds its its actual equilibrium, right?
- 25:33Right, which is what happened here, right?
- 25:36So there was this massive interest and it leveled off came back to earth a little bit But then instead of dying it leveled off and now is showing kind of a slow sustainability And
- 25:47when we saw that I I knew that work
- 25:49probably was worth engaging in long-term, putting more resources into because it had a future as opposed to snake oil that had its time in the limelight and really didn't work
- 25:59as well as everyone else.
- 26:00That's Yeah.
- 26:02I'll just, I want to hear more about the technology, but I want to interject my own story for a moment for the audience's benefit.
- 26:13And to get your comment, I had a knee injury.
- 26:17I tore an ACL.
- 26:18When I was probably in my late 20s skiing, I did my cardiology fellowship at the University of Colorado.
- 26:26And so I would go up and ski occasionally, not very much because I was super busy, but I got up there a few times.
- 26:31Right.
- 26:32So anyway, I tore an ACL.
- 26:34I never knew it.
- 26:35just, you know, last run of the day fell broke, you know, hurt my knees swelled up.
- 26:40And that always a case last right.
- 26:42That's right.
- 26:43Went to work.
- 26:44Went to work the next day, worked through it, you know, blah, blah.
- 26:47Eventually, the swelling went down and got better.
- 26:48And I ended up playing soccer and mountain biking and running and doing everything else on it, right?
- 26:53So never a problem, so to speak.
- 26:56And then snowboarding and everything else.
- 27:00And then I had a crash on an elliptical.
- 27:03I don't know if you know what that is, but it's like an elliptical on wheels.
- 27:06And I was out riding one on a trail close to me and I ended up
- 27:11of getting cut off, very unexpectedly got cut off and ended up falling.
- 27:15So you're falling from a fairly high position, right?
- 27:18You're upright.
- 27:19And anyway, I landed on my right knee, which was the knee in question, and it really hurt.
- 27:24And I limped back and the bike itself was kind of jacked up.
- 27:30So I had to walk at home.
- 27:31But the point was, it was so sore.
- 27:35I mean, I could hardly go down the stairs.
- 27:37I could hardly get up the stairs.
- 27:39So I went in and I got an MRI scan.
- 27:41And and I but I waited two or three weeks and I was using some signaling peptides like BPC 157 you know some of the things we have access to and And it just wasn't getting it was
- 27:55better, but it wasn't that great still difficult getting down the stairs so I got the MRI scan and then You know I could see what the problems were there was you know the menisci
- 28:05were they were there, but they weren't perfect and the ACL
- 28:09had a couple of threads holding it together.
- 28:11And so I scheduled an appointment with a sports orthopedic guy that works on the Cowboys here in Dallas.
- 28:16then I thought, know chronologically I don't fit his mold, but I'm 27.
- 28:21I wake up 27 every day, right in my world.
- 28:23So I was like, no, I want to get this knee fixed.
- 28:26So anyway, I made the appointment to go in to see him.
- 28:31prior to that, I had...
- 28:34done some regenerative work in our office because we do regenerative work in our office.
- 28:38And I did a combination of things, right?
- 28:41We did activated PRP with a very special activation of it with a particular laser.
- 28:46We did some embryonic factors that went in there.
- 28:49We did hyaluronic acid.
- 28:51We did ozone.
- 28:52We did some other things.
- 28:53I put all that in there.
- 28:54was quite a good thing.
- 28:55And quite honestly, I could hardly walk going in there.
- 29:00And the next morning,
- 29:03It was better in the next day.
- 29:04was like walking down the stairs again.
- 29:06So it's like, okay, well, this is good.
- 29:08but I went to see him anyway, because I knew it was a problem and I still couldn't run, still couldn't do some other things.
- 29:16and so I went to see him and he said, well, you know, I wouldn't, wouldn't repair it, know, but, he said, you got, you know, some, some loss.
- 29:25said, had some valgus.
- 29:26He did the X-rays and stuff.
- 29:27have some.
- 29:28Your knee kind of separates a little bit.
- 29:29It's a little bit loose when you move.
- 29:31And I said, yeah, I can feel that.
- 29:32I don't think I could snowboard on it.
- 29:34He said, joint replacements are actually amazingly good now.
- 29:37And he said, if you got it replaced, you could do anything you want.
- 29:39Or you could run, could snowboard, you could do anything you want.
- 29:41And I'm like, well, I hadn't really thought about that, but I'm not opposed to it.
- 29:45So I started to think about that.
- 29:47made an appointment.
- 29:48I have an appointment with a guy to talk about it.
- 29:50In the meantime, I thought I'm going to do another round.
- 29:53and so I went back to my knee about three weeks after the first round and put in a bunch of other stuff.
- 29:58Same stuff.
- 29:59And I started running again.
- 30:01And what I realized was that it was, I had to retrain myself to run because even though I've run my whole life, when your body has an injury, you start to splint.
- 30:14Your body starts to protect that and it, it reprograms your nervous system.
- 30:18Your nervous system is there to protect you.
- 30:20Right?
- 30:20So it's there protecting the way that leg moves.
- 30:23And so it was difficult to actually start running again.
- 30:26And it was pretty interesting.
- 30:28And my point was when I started running, I realized that I'd even though I was exercising, doing lots of other things, I didn't stop exercising.
- 30:34We were doing VASPER and we were doing bicycling and all this other stuff.
- 30:39I had lost a fair amount of function and it's like, okay, I've got to get this back.
- 30:44So now I'm running like every other day to every third day.
- 30:48I'm doing VASPER doing some other things and it's starting to come around.
- 30:51But my point to the audience is that when you have an injury.
- 30:57Particularly as you're later in your chronological years, so to speak, you're not in your twenties anymore.
- 31:02I think it's incredibly important to jump on it as quickly as possible.
- 31:07This idea of give it time to sort of heal, I think is a little bit misinformed because what happens is while you're allowing your hip, your shoulder, whatever else, this three,
- 31:18four, six, eight, 10 weeks to do whatever it's going to do, your body is actually deteriorating very quickly, very quickly.
- 31:26And I think to really preserve function, it makes a lot of sense to say, I've got an injury, let's get an MRI, let's get the x-rays.
- 31:35And if it's something that you don't need surgery for, it's like, well, let's jump in and see what we can do to heal it up.
- 31:40Because otherwise you've got to really kind of recover from this whole decline that's happened, right?
- 31:45So I don't know how you feel about that, but it really kind of changed my whole philosophy around injury and recovery.
- 31:51So that's just it.
- 31:52We have to change our thinking when we have a tool that
- 31:55can augment what the body is trying to do.
- 31:59So there's a lot to unpack there on that story.
- 32:02So I'll try to hit on a couple of points.
- 32:05First,
- 32:09When we treat someone and have a positive response, we treat an arthritic knee that may be hurting for 10 years and all of a sudden it's not.
- 32:15We have a rehab problem still to address.
- 32:18We're not done.
- 32:20And that gets back to your point.
- 32:21If you use ACL injury as an example, after ACL injury and repair, the vastus medialis muscle, the inside muscle of the quad shuts off.
- 32:33And we have a hell of a time getting it to turn back on even though the ACL has been repaired.
- 32:38It's a negative feedback loop.
- 32:40And those things are going on within our bodies all the time.
- 32:43So that's point one.
- 32:44With regards to getting to problems early, I wish we could get to problems sooner.
- 32:52I get them at the end.
- 32:54And that's partly a cultural issue of the medical community and patients.
- 32:58I'm not that bad, so I'm not going to go to the doctor.
- 33:02Exactly.
- 33:03So there's two premises with regenerative medicine I think are applicable to your story.
- 33:07The first is when we can work with an acute injury to enhance the healing process.
- 33:15That's always better.
- 33:17So the body's always going to try to heal, but what tissues do we work with in orthopedics?
- 33:21Avascular tissues, tissues that have a crappy blood supply.
- 33:25So they're lousy healers to begin with.
- 33:28So just waiting, you may improve, but that doesn't mean the process has gone back to normal.
- 33:35And that sets up a...
- 33:37degenerative cascade that continues and that's why we all deteriorate.
- 33:40So if we could intervene early in that process and take a problem that may not complete healing and get it to complete that process with help, that would be huge.
- 33:52That would be incredible.
- 33:53I rarely get that opportunity.
- 33:55I'm always getting them at the end.
- 33:58So that's healing augmentation versus chronic management, management of a chronic problem that we cannot reverse.
- 34:05So your point is very spot on.
- 34:06If we can get to problems sooner, it gives us a much greater opportunity to change the course of a disease process as opposed to just managing it.
- 34:17Very big in my world.
- 34:18Yeah.
- 34:19And that's what I realized because I work out every day.
- 34:21I do something, lots of things.
- 34:25I'm on the road to recovery, but I realized just what a big hole I fell into.
- 34:29And so if you're listening to this and you've got an injury or you
- 34:34have one in the future, you know, God forbid if something happens, if you're going to be active, something's going to happen.
- 34:39Jump on it would be the take home message and realize that utilizing some of these regenerative technologies can be, can be amazing, particularly if you get to it early.
- 34:49Right.
- 34:50So
- 34:53This episode of the Gladden Ongevity podcast is brought to you by the new molecular hydrogen formulas of chill and energy.
- 35:00Yeah, chill and energy were a couple of things that I learned about through NES Health.
- 35:06And we discovered that when you combine their infosutical with hydrogen, you actually get an expanded effect from what you would just using it by itself.
- 35:16So we're very excited to work through the ability to actually
- 35:21infuse, you will, or imprint the hydrogen tablet with the information related to chill and to energy.
- 35:29You can hear more about the physics of how this formulation came about if you go to the interview that we did with Harry Massey on episode 191.
- 35:38You know, when we were trying this in the office, we gave it to some willing clients and also willing staff, and we heard repeatedly how much the chill actually worked for them.
- 35:50if they were kind of anxious or feeling upset about something, if they drop the hydrogen in the water and let it dissolve and drank it, not only did they get the benefits of
- 35:59hydrogen, which is kind of energizing in a way of making your brain kind of wake back up, but they also felt very calm and relaxed.
- 36:07And so we were very excited to bring it forward.
- 36:09And when we started using H2 energy and combining those two together,
- 36:14We found a really nice energy boost before we went to go work out or do a mountain bike ride or go for a run or any of these things.
- 36:21And so this is the first two of a family of hydrogen products, I'll say augmented or advanced hydrogen products that we're bringing forward.
- 36:29So these are really the most advanced hydrogen products I think on the planet.
- 36:33I love taking an H2 chill right before I hop in the sauna and an H2 energy either before I do a podcast with you or afterwards, cause my brain is pretty tired.
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- 37:05Anyway, think about that.
- 37:06Well, you mentioned another really important topic, I think, that we're very excited about.
- 37:10And was happy to talk with you today about this.
- 37:13And that is the convergence of kind of longevity medicine and regenerative medicine.
- 37:18There are so many synergies and parallels as you know, but you described my nightmare.
- 37:24What's my nightmare?
- 37:25You did five different things at the same time and you better, which is fantastic.
- 37:31But in my role, I have to try to figure out how things work so I can make them better.
- 37:36And when physicians do...
- 37:38HA plus cells plus PRP plus something else plus peptides I've got to try to unwind that process to see what actually worked right and it's kind of kitchen sink versus if we're if
- 37:52this field has a future we have to understand the processes that create the effect So I've got to approach it from a little bit different perspective and perhaps were simplistic to
- 38:03a fault for example apply PRP and see if it works
- 38:08That's one intervention.
- 38:09That doesn't mean it's perfect nor best, but my job is to try to understand those mechanisms to predict an outcome.
- 38:19Everyone asks me, when is insurance going to cover this?
- 38:21What's never going to recover it until we can predict its behavior?
- 38:26Because if you can't predict its behavior, you can't translate that into cost savings that a third party payer might be interested in.
- 38:33And that's a lot of our work is trying to create predictive models.
- 38:37So you come in and we say, all right, you're a 75 year old with this medical history and this problem.
- 38:42And based on 10,000 patients data, we need to make that biologic to give you an 82.3 % chance of 50 % improvement lasting three years, right?
- 38:52That's the thought process of where we need to go.
- 38:55Yeah.
- 38:55And I get the thought process and I applaud you for the work you're doing because I think too many times we don't actually fully understand what we're doing, right?
- 39:04And yet in our world of longevity medicine where we want to get the best for our clients, we've tried a thing by itself.
- 39:17We've tried another thing by itself.
- 39:19So we know what peptides alone can do.
- 39:21They can be amazing in certain situations.
- 39:23We know what PRP can do.
- 39:24It can be great in certain situations.
- 39:27We know what some of these other things can do as well.
- 39:29And it brought us to the point though where they're not
- 39:32getting this all the way there.
- 39:33And so when you're not getting all the way there, then you, then you start to think about, what would be an intelligent way to stack these together?
- 39:40Right.
- 39:41If you start to understand them.
- 39:42And so the concept of creating kind of the informed or what we might call intelligent or somewhat intuitive, or maybe it's just pure luck.
- 39:49don't know, but stack of putting these things together because the client wants to get better.
- 39:54Right.
- 39:55And, so they don't want an 82.3 % chance.
- 39:58They want a hundred percent chance for 99.9.
- 40:01So that's kind of where that's evolved from.
- 40:03But I think to your point, being a little bit more reductionist in the thought process to actually get to what is the underlying mechanism, how this works, it doesn't preclude you
- 40:14in the future of saying, okay, now we understand this.
- 40:17What happens if we add this to that?
- 40:19Of course.
- 40:19Now where do we go?
- 40:20That's crawl, walk, run.
- 40:22That's the crawl, walk, run.
- 40:24And also in terms of longevity pathways, it creates the potential for prehab.
- 40:30That's right.
- 40:31Optimization prior to treatment.
- 40:33if someone...
- 40:34Let's use the epigenome as an example.
- 40:36Let's say we were able to run genomics and identify that someone has a really suboptimal epigenome or glycation profile or any number of things, telomere length, whatever it might
- 40:48be.
- 40:49Well, a lot of that, not all, but some is modifiable, especially epigenome, telomere length.
- 40:54That's modifiable.
- 40:56So maybe before we invest in an expensive cell therapy, we might want to do some work for weeks to months beforehand, try to improve that.
- 41:07That should translate into an improved therapeutic capacity of ourselves.
- 41:10Now we're studying that.
- 41:11It's going to take a lot of data to prove that out.
- 41:13But theoretically, it makes perfect sense.
- 41:17And we should be pursuing that stuff aggressively.
- 41:20I think so too.
- 41:21I think the other thing that
- 41:22My own situation really kind of drove home for me is that there's a ticking, there's a ticking clock.
- 41:28So we're actually, we're actually, we're trying to get it right, but we're also racing against the clock because the clock, the longer we wait, the more collateral damage there
- 41:38is to the actual injury, right?
- 41:40Whether with nervous system and the muscle atrophy and the bone atrophy and the way that tendons work and all of that stuff is going downhill.
- 41:47So from my perspective, there's kind of this ticking clock.
- 41:50And what we're trying to do is intervene as quickly as possible.
- 41:53So there's as little decline and as much restoration as possible.
- 41:57And I think in what you're doing, being able to understand the mechanisms, you're going to be able to figure out how to do that is kind of what I'm thinking.
- 42:06It becomes a problem of scale, right?
- 42:08Those issues take large numbers to try to answer those questions.
- 42:14So as a practitioner and as a company, you know, studying and
- 42:19constantly collecting data and with sophisticated algorithmic analyses, we can now look at hundreds of variables at the same time.
- 42:29Whereas before with traditional statistical models, it would have been near impossible to throw all of these things into a database and try to pick the ones or the combinations of
- 42:38things that have that predictive value that we're after.
- 42:42Well, with the advent of AI and machine learning and all these things,
- 42:46it's a perfect application to apply that stuff to move faster.
- 42:50Because our patients don't wait 10 years.
- 42:52They want a solution today.
- 42:53Exactly.
- 42:54And people ask me, why are you working in autologous models?
- 42:57Why not go with the magical cell in a bottle model?
- 43:01And the answer is because my patients want a solution now.
- 43:04They don't want to wait.
- 43:05And that's great for their grandkids.
- 43:07They want a solution today.
- 43:09So we need to work within the parameters of what we can do from a regulatory standpoint.
- 43:14But also,
- 43:15what keeps people safe and what we're able to track, right?
- 43:19As long as there's measurable events, cause, effect, there's an opportunity for us to gather that data and dig into it and try to come up with some answers to the things you
- 43:29describe.
- 43:30Yeah, I agree with that.
- 43:31I think it is interesting in this world of statistical analysis and AI and machine learning and all this kind of thing.
- 43:37It's amazing how you can have data sets that look kind of random on one hand and yet
- 43:44the computer can go in and actually pull out the associations and the things that you would otherwise not see ostensibly, which I think may give us, and I don't know, this is
- 43:54really as much of a question as anything, but may give us the latitude to create trials where we are inherent or initially even stacking some of these things in ways that we
- 44:04think will work and then running that against other stuff and being able to pull it out faster.
- 44:10Cause ultimately, you know, people want to be treated and fixed, right?
- 44:13So.
- 44:14I don't know what you think about that.
- 44:15Well, it's a source of frustration because med tech moves very slowly compared to this.
- 44:23Right.
- 44:24Right.
- 44:25And if you look at the impact that has had on our lives versus our ability to cure cancer, for example, you know, go to Mars, right?
- 44:36These are enormous problems, but other sectors are moving way faster than we are now that our capabilities have improved.
- 44:43For example, our ability to measure cells and actually be accurate in those measurements.
- 44:48Our ability to analyze complex data sets.
- 44:51We better start to move faster as a field because there's no reason with these capabilities that we shouldn't be able to come up with solutions.
- 45:01Historically, medicine, it was sick care.
- 45:04You know this, right?
- 45:05It was a sick care model, but we've transitioned now into more of a...
- 45:09stay healthy as long as possible and we still have the sick care model to fall back on, but we want to stay out of that sick care model.
- 45:15But we need to move more quickly.
- 45:17And one of the benefits to artificial intelligence is that capacity is there.
- 45:23But one of the limitations to artificial intelligence, as you're probably aware, is it requires very large data sets.
- 45:28You can't use little teeny data sets.
- 45:31So we've got to accrue that data.
- 45:33And that's the scaling problem that I'm talking about.
- 45:35in order to come up with those answers.
- 45:37So we're working on that and trying to grow as quickly as we can, but that's not so easy in an expensive cash-based market.
- 45:44Yeah.
- 45:44Right?
- 45:45Yeah.
- 45:45There's also one of the things that we've played with, and I agree with you, one of the things that we've also played with is in silico testing.
- 45:53We did this when we were developing some of our hydrogen products, trying to understand how hydrogen worked and how it could be such a great way to modulate redox and...
- 46:02decrease pain and do all kinds how did it, how could it possibly do that?
- 46:05So we did some in silico modeling with it to figure out what the pathways were that it was affecting and how it was actually working.
- 46:11And, that, that really became very powerful for our understanding, which then we could convey to people and say, no, this actually appears to work, right.
- 46:20And then, you know, and then we would see it work.
- 46:22So I wonder if there's a, going to be an element of in silico modeling for these kinds of things where, you know, we'll have a digital twin of the individual.
- 46:32Right.
- 46:32And then we can actually run, well, what happens if we give you this or that or this or that, or, for you, it's this.
- 46:39Right.
- 46:39And I think that kind of almost real time, digital twin, in silico modeling of what the best solution is going to be could be incredibly powerful.
- 46:50So I don't know if you're involved with that, I think very important.
- 46:55so this is code breaking, right?
- 46:58At the end of the day is what we're doing.
- 47:00That's right.
- 47:00But to break a code, you need a template, right?
- 47:02You need the cipher.
- 47:04So what we're trying to do is to create the foundational models that we can then use artificial intelligence to model and simulate, right?
- 47:13But you have to have the foundation in order to run the simulations.
- 47:16So we're still getting to the point where statistically we have that simulation to the point where we trust the results.
- 47:24And then once we're at that point, then we can run scenarios.
- 47:26Let's test the model.
- 47:28You know, the modeling in this situation, in that clinical situation, let's increase, let's decrease, let's add a second element.
- 47:35We can do those things once we establish the template.
- 47:38We're working as fast as we can.
- 47:40Part of the NIH grant is really to try to establish that template.
- 47:44If we can establish a template, now we can model without having to do animal research and without having to do human clinical research.
- 47:52Run a phase one clinical trial.
- 47:56How long does that take?
- 47:58Sure.
- 47:58My God, that's why we're so slow.
- 48:00But if we can model and create interesting artificial simulations, now when we see positive trends, we can go back and run a smaller, more compact clinical trial and move
- 48:11more quickly.
- 48:11So it's the integration of modern technology into our traditional way of looking at these problems.
- 48:17You know, there's another model out there too that you're probably aware of that we've come across, which is really like organ on a chip type modeling.
- 48:26where you can actually have a liver or brain or a kidney or a heart.
- 48:30And I don't know if they have, orthopedic models there for cartilage, or bone, but, being able to, you know, have a, basically a batch of these organs on a chip where you've got,
- 48:45you know, 80 different livers and you're going to basically try out a bunch of different things simultaneously and you can get your results so much faster.
- 48:54Tony Attala.
- 48:56over Wake Forest is running the Wake Forest regenerative medicine department over there and has gone down this pathway.
- 49:05And it was fascinating.
- 49:07There was a, I forget the name of the chemo drug, but there was a chemo drug that went through the whole FDA process, took 10 years, was released.
- 49:16It was approved for a particular kind of cancer.
- 49:19It was like eight years into its use that.
- 49:22They figured out that there was a lung toxicity to it that they didn't know about even after all the clinical trials and all the other stuff.
- 49:29Apparently he took the drug and put it into the organ on a chip model.
- 49:33He put it in the liver, the kidney, the lung, the heart, to see if there might be toxicity inside of a week.
- 49:40knew that it caused liver toxicity.
- 49:42Yeah.
- 49:42Yeah.
- 49:42It's out of a week.
- 49:43Right.
- 49:44And so the power, the power of these, of moving outside of this very old construct of we got to try this in humans.
- 49:52for X number of years to try to get to the answer, right?
- 49:56I think we're moving into an age when hopefully we can get it right for people, but also move at a much faster speed.
- 50:03Yeah, the folks at WIC and Tony and Julie Alexen when she was there, now Julie's at Mayo, believe, with their organ regeneration program and the bladder work and all the stuff they
- 50:13did, remember, we're talking about really expensive work.
- 50:19Yeah.
- 50:20people may not realize is that the resources and support needs to be there.
- 50:25Where does that come from?
- 50:28Pharma is driving this and a lot of the model you described is used to test drugs because it's less expensive and faster than doing it in human beings or animals.
- 50:37But those are big, robust markets and the resources are there to drive the research.
- 50:42If you look at application of PRP,
- 50:47Now there's a lot of growth in that market has blossomed, but is it there to conduct a hundred million dollar, you know, bench top clinical trial?
- 50:56Probably not yet.
- 50:58But, so, you know, I think part of the limitation in our movement there is the resources from the investment front going into those particular areas, whereas they could be
- 51:09transferred into,
- 51:12more of the genetic engineering model in cancer and IPS in CAR-T or induced potent cells or things like that, which is another area of fascinating research, but that's in the drug
- 51:23pathway, obviously.
- 51:24So much slower.
- 51:25No, that's right.
- 51:27Yeah.
- 51:27And I think these models will get cheaper over time.
- 51:29think, you know, technologies gets cheaper in general.
- 51:32think there are so much interest in this whole longevity, regenerative space that there's, I think there's funding out there for, you know, to run up, you know,
- 51:41$100 million study.
- 51:42don't think that's outside the range of what could be orchestrated.
- 51:47Well, goes back to the concept of your reward is comparable to the magnitude of the problem you solve.
- 51:55That's right.
- 51:56So if you look at osteoarthritis as an example, as a multi-billion dollar market, you solve that problem and the resources will be there.
- 52:03what we're tasked with is doing that early foundational work that leads to the interest.
- 52:10Yes.
- 52:11You've got to do that first.
- 52:12And we're making progress and we're seeing a lot more interest in the space, but we definitely have a long way to go and I hope we can move more quickly.
- 52:23I think, yeah, I hope so too.
- 52:25think all of us working together is what I've found.
- 52:29Nobody knows everything and kind of interdigitating these different...
- 52:33technologies and different thought processes can sometimes accelerate things in a way that's just good for humanity, quite honestly.
- 52:39Well, yeah, some days we don't think we know anything at all.
- 52:42And then other days we think we're pretty smart.
- 52:44The question is, can we outsmart nature?
- 52:46And when we start to talk about genetic engineering, the question is, do we have the capacity to outsmart hundreds of millions of years of evolution?
- 52:55I don't know.
- 52:56Maybe, maybe not.
- 52:58Which is one of the reasons we continue to play in the autologous space is the risk profile.
- 53:02these things are very favorable and you're not going to hurt people.
- 53:07that's comforting.
- 53:09That's comforting to be.
- 53:12If you look at the longevity space though, I wanted to get your take on this.
- 53:15So you're a great person to ask this.
- 53:17I have said on podcasts before, if you look at Sinclair's work and Liz Clotis' work and people like that,
- 53:27where there's a real possibility in the future we're going to have average lifespans in the 120s and 50s and beyond.
- 53:34But we've got a big problem there.
- 53:37If we can get brains and hearts and livers and lungs and kidneys to live that long, the orthopedic system is lagging way behind.
- 53:45So you have a 120-year-old person who's got good organs but a disastrous orthopedic system and they live in a terrible...
- 53:53And we can only replace so many parts.
- 53:55So I believe one of the biggest limiting factors in real foresight longevity is the orthopedic limitations and systems, which we don't have solutions to yet.
- 54:08And we need to get those in order to make that 120 year old still have a reasonable quality of life.
- 54:15I think we can make the other organs maybe move a little faster than we can those avascular orthopedic tissues.
- 54:20And I see it as a big problem moving forward.
- 54:24I think those solutions will come.
- 54:26think it's, know, our vision for longevity is basically when we're a hundred, we want to have a 30 year old body and a 300 year old mind.
- 54:34Right.
- 54:35So it's really a continued expansion of consciousness, equanimity, peace, tranquility, all these things.
- 54:41And, and, and living from that space, right.
- 54:44It's not just about more years of the same.
- 54:47And the 30 year old body is really from a standpoint of function.
- 54:52And I think.
- 54:53I think those solutions will come.
- 54:55But I also think that in the interim, this idea of if you have a problem and it's nagging you, your knee, your shoulder, your, you know, your, your elbow, your ankle, whatever it
- 55:06is, your hip, go get it, go get it taken care of now, because it's not getting better on its own.
- 55:12Right.
- 55:12And the longer we wait, the more associated decline there is.
- 55:17So if you really want to have a 30 year old body, if you're listening to this from a longevity perspective, Hey, I want to have a 30 year old body.
- 55:22So there's a problem.
- 55:23I would say jump in and fix it as best you can right now.
- 55:26Well, and don't know what your perspective is, but we're very interested and in tune with the hormonal axis and its decline as a key mediator of that process across the board.
- 55:38That's right.
- 55:39You got to have testosterone, estrogen, you got to have growth hormone release, you got to have all those things.
- 55:44You got to be able to be anabolic to heal anything.
- 55:46Exactly.
- 55:47We go down that pathway a lot.
- 55:49Well, it just astounds me that it's controversial to fix testosterone in symptomatic men with a low level.
- 55:55It's astounding.
- 55:56for us.
- 55:57Well, it's not for us.
- 55:58But I just can't believe the data, as you know, is crystal clear that risk profile is good.
- 56:05Who doesn't get cancers?
- 56:06Who doesn't get problems?
- 56:07Young men with good testosterone levels, right?
- 56:10Yeah, exactly.
- 56:11So that's another important piece that, you know, do we need to fix or address the hormonal axis when appropriate?
- 56:18when we're thinking about a cell therapy, we haven't proven that out yet, but it's only logical that it would supplement what we're trying to do.
- 56:26Well, that's another thing.
- 56:27I make sure my testosterone levels are good.
- 56:29make sure that I've got the BPC.
- 56:31I make sure I've got the CJC 1295 with a primoral endorelease growth hormone two days on, two days off.
- 56:37I'm doing all, I'm taking other nutraceuticals that augment stem cell function.
- 56:42You basically are kind of...
- 56:45From your perspective, it's the kitchen sink, but from my perspective, it's like, how do we integrate everything we know to actually heal this thing as quickly as possible?
- 56:52So, right.
- 56:53Well, again, we work in tough tissues, right?
- 56:56We're crappy healer tissues.
- 56:58But so if you look at a cartilage model, cartilage regeneration is a holy grail in our space.
- 57:04But there's another problem.
- 57:06Let's say we could regenerate it.
- 57:09Regenerating it and keeping it alive after regeneration are two separate problems.
- 57:14That's right.
- 57:15That's right.
- 57:15So we've got two problems to address, not just one, because part of what leads to cartilage deterioration is the nutrient supply to the cartilage deteriorates over time.
- 57:25So we could regenerate those cartilage cells in your knee, but the blood supply above in the subcontra bone is still not addressed.
- 57:32Right.
- 57:32Then we're not going to be able to keep that cartilage alive.
- 57:34So there's a lot to it.
- 57:37Certainly the body works in mysterious ways, but it is all integrated.
- 57:43But if you look at hormonal axis, we fix a guy with a testosterone deficiency, but if he's got an orthopedic disaster, then it's going to be hard to move that body to get the
- 57:54maximal benefit out of that testosterone optimization.
- 57:58So that's how longevity medicine, hormone optimization, urology, et cetera, works together with what we're trying to do, which is I don't want orthopedics to become the limiting
- 58:08factor between you like the match in that guy.
- 58:11His symptoms are improved, his drive is improved.
- 58:13He has the energy and the gas to go in the gym, but his knee or his back is preventing him from doing so, missing a massive opportunity to reduce his all-cause mortality.
- 58:23That's right.
- 58:24And that's why if you get those things fixed along with his metabolic disorders or whatever you might have, insulin resistance, whatever else, you get all that dialed in and
- 58:34you still have the knee or the hip or whatever it is.
- 58:37I would say jump in on that, right?
- 58:39If you're listening to this, jump in on that because you don't want that holding you back.
- 58:44You don't want to, you want to be...
- 58:45the good news though, Jeff, is even the more advanced stuff is responding pretty well, better than we'd hoped.
- 58:51So it's not all doomsday, right?
- 58:53We definitely want to get to problems earlier, but let's say we don't.
- 58:57It's not just an inevitable joint replacement anymore.
- 59:00There are situations where that's still the best option.
- 59:03You're right.
- 59:03But we certainly like to try to keep your parts as long as we can.
- 59:07Exactly.
- 59:09yeah, fun conversation, David.
- 59:11Really, really enjoyed it.
- 59:13So, likewise.
- 59:14I appreciate you having me on and great work yourself.
- 59:17And we appreciate, we'll keep keeping an eye on the stuff you guys are doing as it certainly helps our efforts on this.
- 59:23Yeah.
- 59:23Happy to collaborate with you going forward on and whatever we can be.
- 59:28Sounds good.
- 59:28Fingers crossed on the NIH grant.
- 59:30Always difficult to secure those things, but really important work ahead if we're able to.
- 59:34The team's done a great job putting that together and we're hopeful.
- 59:37that we're going to be able to pull the trigger on that.
- 59:40Yeah, exactly.
- 59:42We'll wish you the best in that.
- 59:43So if people want to learn more about you or hear more about you, where should they go?
- 59:47How do they do that?
- 59:47Yeah, two places are the company that are recently development company is called Greyledge Biotechnologies or Greyledge technologies.
- 59:54that's for people.
- 59:55Spell Greyledge.
- 59:56G-R-E-Y-L-E-D-G.
- 59:58Greyledge Technologies, just greyledgetechnologies.com.
- 1:00:02And my clinical practice is just Carly Center, K-A-R-L-I Center.
- 1:00:08grayledge is integrated into our center, right?
- 1:00:11So grayledge processes the cells and then we share data back and forth between the biotech company and the clinical.
- 1:00:18And then we have grayledge affiliates across the nation and now in Europe as well, all of whom are collecting data into our central database.
- 1:00:24That's scale problem that we talked about that we're trying to solve.
- 1:00:28So if we can get more people focused on standardizing, counting, knowing what we're putting in there, we have a model that we can actually study to try to
- 1:00:36prove out those cause and effect relationships and then start to customize, move more towards a precision medical model, which you're very familiar with, which is, believe, the
- 1:00:44direction we have to go.
- 1:00:46Beautiful.
- 1:00:46Love it.
- 1:00:47All right.
- 1:00:48I appreciate it.
- 1:00:49Yeah, my Good talking with you, Yeah.
- 1:00:51All right.
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