Latest / The Scene Projects / Len May on EndoDNA, Cannabis Science, and the Endocannabinoid System

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Len May on EndoDNA, Cannabis Science, and the Endocannabinoid System · The Scene Projects

• 0:02
  Welcome in to another exciting episode of the scene.
• 0:04
  I'm your host, Bubba Starts, and with me today is CEO and cofounder of Endo DNA, Len May.
• 0:11
  Welcome to the show, Len.
• 0:12
  Appreciate it, brother.
• 0:13
  Thank you.
• 0:14
  We've already been talking off camera.
• 0:16
  This is gonna be a thrilling conversation, but, why don't you give us a little bit maybe of
• 0:21
  your own backstory and a little bit of the company as well?
• 0:24
  And then we're gonna get into all this awesome stuff that you guys are doing for the world.
• 0:28
  Yeah.
• 0:29
  I mean, my my backstory is, I was the kind of kid I'm an immigrant, by the way.
• 0:34
  I came over, to, this country when I was, like, six years old.
• 0:39
  But I was a I was a kid that would sit in class.
• 0:41
  He should call me, and my mind would be elsewhere.
• 0:44
  It would be daydreaming.
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  So, you know, kind of became disruptive here and there.
• 0:51
  My parents started taking me to a doctor, and then I got diagnosed with ADHD.
• 0:56
  But, no.
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  Not hyperactive, just kind of, the the dreamer type, and I was put on prescription medication.
• 1:02
  I can't say that the prescription medication didn't work if you're talking about just
• 1:06
  helping to focus, but I took away all my sense of self.
• 1:10
  So all the emotions that I had were sort of numb.
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  And you go through the motions, but you're really lifeless.
• 1:16
  And I was hanging out with some older kids before class, and they asked me if I wanna
• 1:20
  smoke a cigarette.
• 1:21
  I'm like, cool.
• 1:21
  I'll be one of the cool kids.
• 1:23
  I'll smoke a cigarette.
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  Never asked them why they had only one.
• 1:26
  They passed around a cigarette, took a drag of it, and it didn't taste like a cigarette to me,
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  and they were laughing.
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  It would they put cannabis in it.
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  So I went back to class, and all the windows are open.
• 1:37
  My head sort of narrowed, and that became my my medicine of choice.
• 1:42
  My parents didn't really care for that too much.
• 1:44
  So at some point, I was, like, 17.
• 1:47
  They ended up kicking me out, but actually calling the cops to have me arrested.
• 1:52
  The irony of this, my parents both take formulations of my company as patents on now
• 1:56
  for their conditions.
• 1:58
  And, yeah, I pursued, like, corporate America.
• 2:01
  I did all that stuff to work for Pricewaterhouse, a venture capital company.
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  I was a commercial real estate broker, moved from Philadelphia where I was from to Los
• 2:11
  Angeles, got into the dispensary space, and I started seeing two people consume the same
• 2:16
  varietal and have a complete different experience.
• 2:19
  So I got into plant genetics.
• 2:21
  And from plant genetics, I got into human genetics and said, alright.
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  Well, we have plant genetics here.
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  We have human genetics here.
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  Let's bring those two together and guide people to a personalized experience.
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  So we built launched our company 2017.
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  That was our mission.
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  But my bigger mission was to create the world's largest efficacy repository.
• 2:42
  So we started working with doctors and asking them why genetics are important, and a lot of
• 2:47
  doctors didn't really know.
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  So, you know, that's what we created EndoDNA for is to create this platform that allows
• 2:56
  doctors to do genome, interrogate the genome, create a personalized treatment plan, and then
• 3:01
  measure how well that treatment plan works based on a feedback loop.
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  With AI, it learns much quicker and helps us to really get personalized health care instead of
• 3:10
  sick care.
• 3:11
  See, I told you guys this was gonna be awesome.
• 3:15
  Incredible.
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  A little bit about me.
• 3:18
  A longtime cannabis user.
• 3:20
  I have a medical card now here in South Dakota.
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  We have a medical program.
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  Thank goodness.
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  So I can speak to a lot of, the things that you do.
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  I've been around the space for a long time.
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  Lot of my friends work at dispensaries.
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  Lot of friends, I was on the West Coast for a time in my early twenties around, the state of
• 3:37
  Oregon.
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  I was in California a little bit as well.
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  So really got introduced to it and then moved back to South Dakota, and it was another decade
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  until we had a medical program.
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  Did a couple of years in prison for selling marijuana, because I realized what this plant
• 3:52
  was and what it was not.
• 3:54
  And, you know, now here I am with a license to grow or or smoke however much I want, and I
• 4:00
  just had to, you know, donate two years of my life to the state of South Dakota.
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  Awful.
• 4:06
  Yeah.
• 4:07
  Well, you know what?
• 4:08
  It made me a better person, so I I don't regret the time.
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  My mother feels a little bit differently about it, posthumously here, but, love it.
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  Love what you're doing.
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  Just the the full circle of kinda going from, you know, a a a little bit of a a bad kid,
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  right, to the whole corporate world and living through that and then finding yourself back in
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  the cannabis world and and really digging into the I mean, humans have been tied with this
• 4:38
  plant, and we have these endocannabinoid receptors for a reason.
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  Right?
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  It's crazy to think that this plant can't do something for you when the human body has
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  evolved next to it.
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  Right?
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  Like, it it it's crazy to me that we still have people that are kind of culturally conditioned
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  to the stigmas, but that's maybe a conversation for another day, Len.
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  Well, I I just don't think people understand the endocannabinoid system, and that's the
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  biggest challenge is they equate something with a plant that grows in nature, but doesn't
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  really understand that we have a a whole system that creates our own endogenous
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  endocannabinoids.
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  And when we have deficiencies in what we naturally produce, we're lucky that we have a
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  plant in nature that we have, as you were just saying, that we have receptors for, and it can
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  bind to those receptors and actually release more of our endogenous endocannabolies, which
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  helps us maintain balance on homeostasis.
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  And it's like every single drug that that is used is used as a ligand.
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  We have a receptor for that drug, like even even cocaine, which is odd because it's
• 5:44
  schedule two where cannabis is a schedule one.
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  But when you're consuming, you know, cocaine, it binds to your we use it as medicine, binds
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  to your dopamine receptors, quirks a bunch of dopamine into your bloodstream, blocks the
• 5:58
  reuptake of that dopamine, and then then it there's a reuptake in your brain.
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  It's like, wait a second.
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  I don't have to crave my own dopamine.
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  I love dopamine.
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  It's great.
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  It's the most, you know, addictive substance that we have.
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  Let me send a signal to get me more some of that exogenous dopamine ligand, which is
• 6:16
  cocaine.
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  So we get on this habitual cycle.
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  It doesn't work the same way with cannabis, and the and the the ligand of getting that delta
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  nine THC to bind to your c b one receptors, released more anandamide, that's great because
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  it it's our bliss molecule.
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  Right?
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  It create when we run, when we work out, we get that bliss molecule.
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  But the the trick is very narrow therapeutic window.
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  So finding the right dose, the right profile for you, that's the tricky part, and that's
• 6:45
  what we're there to help people figure out.
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  Just incredible.
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  So EndoDNA is working, I'm assuming, mostly with doctors and physicians.
• 6:57
  Are are, I guess, consumers, people able to come to your company and to use these just to
• 7:05
  find out more about themselves rather than having to go through a physician to get there?
• 7:10
  Yeah.
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  We have a direct to consumer version, especially our endocannabinoid system test.
• 7:14
  So you can go to endodna,uh,.com and purchase that.
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  We have, you know, thousands of consumers have used our test.
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  But the idea, we shifted, to a b to b platform.
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  And the reason why is because when we leave people alone and and this not necessarily has
• 7:33
  to do with cannabis per se, the end of the cannabis system.
• 7:35
  But looking to genome, it has to be a collaborative experience with your health care
• 7:40
  professional.
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  Your health care professional is not there to cure you.
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  They're there to be to do no harm and to work in collaboration with you to find something
• 7:51
  that actually works for you, with mitigating risk.
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  So in looking at your genome, looking at your baseline biomarkers, creating a treatment plan
• 8:01
  with a feedback loop, it allows health care professionals to collaborate with you.
• 8:05
  So if you have a pain or some of that and we're very conditioned in this country to be pain
• 8:10
  averse.
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  You go to a doctor, they say, alright.
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  Well, I can give you a pill for that.
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  I can give you an injection for that instead of saying, maybe there's a root cause of that
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  pain.
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  So we have to be more aware of that and say, we're not there.
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  It's a signal.
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  We're not there to turn the signal down.
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  We're there to follow it and see what's causing that.
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  So if you're collaborating with your health care professional, everything's transparent.
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  Maybe you have a genetic predisposition to something that's based on your lifestyle
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  choices has been epigenetically turned on.
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  So now what do we do together to turn that down?
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  Your pain can be caused by cortisol release and inflammation into your bloodstream where your
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  immune system is overreacting to that.
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  So instead of numbing the pain, let's follow it and find out what's really the root cause.
• 8:56
  God.
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  Big pharma hates you.
• 8:59
  Well, big pharma should be using this anyway.
• 9:02
  They all look.
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  We genetics have been used for diagnostics for years.
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  We have BRCA one, BRCA two breast cancer genes.
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  It's all collaboratively.
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  The the challenge big pharma doesn't hate us per se.
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  They just under we're we're not covered by insurance.
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  We're not in the system.
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  And when we're outside the system, they're looking at us and saying, well, they're not
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  competing with us.
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  It's a parallel path.
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  We're not against big pharma if there's a medication.
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  So I'll give you an example.
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  We talk about cognitive health and wellness.
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  I have a buddy of mine, very successful entrepreneur, and he, had a business deal that
• 9:41
  didn't go well.
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  Now we did his genome, so I know there's a couple of things.
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  First of all, he's predisposed to depressive feelings.
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  So he started getting depressed, and he ended up going to a psychopharmacologist and getting
• 9:52
  antidepressant.
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  Now he he doesn't live in California, but he was back in California.
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  He was driving with his wife and his kid around the canyons.
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  We have these these areas of canyons, and he said, had an overwhelming desire to drive off
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  the cliff.
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  And he goes, it was so real.
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  I had to pull over.
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  I was scared.
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  I pulled over.
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  My wife came out and said, are you okay?
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  He said, I'm not okay.
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  I shouldn't have been driving, which is great that he recognized that.
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  And when he went back to the psychopharmacologist, he did something called a
• 10:22
  PGX test, which is pharmacogenomics.
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  He saw that that drug that he was prescribed was red.
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  It shouldn't be he shouldn't have been consuming this drug in the first place.
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  In addition to that, because we know this, he has treatment resistant depression.
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  So that drug may not be efficacious for him anyway.
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  It wouldn't have worked.
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  But he would get the side effects, and the side effects, one of the big ones is suicidal
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  thoughts.
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  So this is where we need to collaborate with big pharma.
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  We need to do everything together for the health and wellness of the people so they
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  mitigate those risks and avoid those, potholes down the road.
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  But the way to know this is by doing your genome.
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  You know what your personal GPS of life is, and you know which sharp corners to avoid.
• 11:07
  Yeah.
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  Life is hard enough.
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  We don't need a pill that's gonna make us wanna kill ourselves.
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  That's just wild.
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  And and it seems like it's more and more of these pharmaceuticals go by and the list of
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  side effects get longer and the efficacy gets smaller and smaller and smaller because of
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  what, I mean, what you're exposing here with endo DNA and getting to the root causes these
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  problems.
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  It's just incredible work.
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  I I commend you so much for getting, into it in the first place.
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  I'm sure it's not an easy space to to work in.
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  Can you talk about some of the challenges that you guys have faced as a company kinda moving
• 11:44
  through?
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  Obviously, working in health care at all, there there's bound to be hurdles to have to climb.
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  Well, I mean, the first hurdle is cannabis, the endocannabinoid system.
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  So now that we're working when we first started with the endocannabinoid system, I mean,
• 11:58
  marketing has been the biggest challenge.
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  We're getting, you know, flagged and and, on all the social media platforms and shadowban,
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  etcetera, we're not plant touching.
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  We're telling you about a system that's in your body.
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  But the way that the all these platforms are set up, they're like, wait a second.
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  Endocannabinoid cannabinoids.
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  Let's flag that.
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  So that's the first hurdle.
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  The second hurdle is the stigma that's associated with that as we just went over.
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  The third one is the FDA.
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  So when we met with the FDA, they asked us, what is the purpose of your test?
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  And we said to help people either avoid or mitigate a possible adverse event.
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  And they said, great.
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  There's two things.
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  You can't make any claims, which is fine, and you can't talk about a disease.
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  So if I'm selling directly to consumer, for instance, I can't talk about Parkinson's, but I
• 12:51
  can talk about the tremors that are associated with Parkinson's.
• 12:55
  But since this is a platform for health care professionals as well, now they can use that as
• 13:02
  to help them with their diagnosis, also.
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  But we're classified what's called RUO, research use only, so it can be used in helping
• 13:10
  you to diagnose, but it's not necessarily a diagnostic test.
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  And one of the reasons is because we have an endocannabinoid system test, the FDA will not
• 13:19
  approve, you know, a five ten k diagnostic device because there is a schedule one
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  substance that is associated with the testing that we do and has nothing to do with really
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  what we do.
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  And the last the last hurdle of that is the understanding of DNA.
• 13:35
  I mean, you may be surprised that a lot of doctors don't understand genetics.
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  They studied it in medical school.
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  They had a class, but they don't really understand.
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  So getting past that hurdle and making it easy for health care professionals to really
• 13:48
  understand and interrogate the genome and ask you questions help them prescribe what they
• 13:53
  need to, that's the last part of it.
• 13:57
  Sadly, I'm not surprised, Len.
• 13:59
  And I hope that a lot of this is going to change, obviously, with the, you know, growth
• 14:04
  of the MAHA movement and what we're already seeing at, you know, department of, you know,
• 14:11
  health and human services.
• 14:13
  So things are changing.
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  Right?
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  The the culture is changing.
• 14:16
  The everything is changing right now, and I hope it's for the better, especially for
• 14:23
  systems like like you've developed here and a great many other things that we really need to
• 14:28
  address as a human species if we expect to continue evolving and and becoming the best
• 14:35
  versions of ourselves.
• 14:36
  We've been kind of working against I I feel like pharma and these massive, you know,
• 14:42
  billion, trillion dollar companies have been in a different business altogether.
• 14:47
  They're not in health care.
• 14:48
  They're in sick care, I believe, is the way that you phrased it.
• 14:52
  So what is the what is the future of EndoDNA look like, for the next, you know, couple of
• 14:59
  years?
• 15:00
  I mean, the future is, we have a patent on, an AI patent.
• 15:07
  So we're implementing our machine learning algorithm that that is gonna allow you to have
• 15:12
  a full conversation with your genome and also, to measure the efficacy of the protocols.
• 15:19
  So I'm just looking at I'm looking down so I can get the right title of the patent.
• 15:24
  Well, the patent is machine learning based efficacy predictions based on genetic and
• 15:29
  biometric information.
• 15:31
  So we're building a platform that allows you to do your genome, interrogate your genome.
• 15:37
  So you can ask it, show me of all LENS inflammatory markers.
• 15:43
  Cross reference them with how LENS metabolizes.
• 15:46
  It'll give you baseline biomarkers of blood draws, biological age, etcetera.
• 15:51
  Then it's gonna give you a suggested protocol, a treatment plan, the health care professional
• 15:55
  has that.
• 15:56
  So, like, right now, our biggest selling test is female hormone health test, menopause
• 16:01
  biotype, which is very, you know, underserved as a community in general.
• 16:08
  But so the treatment plan will say, okay.
• 16:11
  I recommend the this supplementation, this hormone optimization, bioidentical hormones,
• 16:17
  and I recommend, you know, transdermal patches.
• 16:21
  And the doctor can say, I like everything, but I'm gonna modify the suggested treatment plan
• 16:26
  because I like pellets instead of transdermal patches.
• 16:29
  That's what we do in our office.
• 16:31
  So I'm gonna modify that.
• 16:32
  Now there's gonna be a feedback loop.
• 16:34
  So meaning how well patient reported outcome.
• 16:37
  In addition to that is other biomarker changes and changes in your methylation, so that
• 16:42
  biological age.
• 16:44
  Now if it's not efficacious, if that pellet's not working for you, then the treatment plan
• 16:49
  will be modified.
• 16:50
  But what if it's working better than the transdermal patches?
• 16:53
  Now the AI just learned, so the next person comes in and says, hey.
• 16:57
  There's a 100 people similar to you that took this protocol and that showed that was
• 17:01
  efficacious.
• 17:02
  So it all goes back into building the world's largest repository in efficacy and helping us
• 17:07
  have this collaborative experience with our health care professionals.
• 17:11
  Just incredible.
• 17:12
  I'm I'm blown away by everything that you're saying.
• 17:15
  It probably should have been done twenty, thirty years ago.
• 17:18
  I'm assuming the tech, is that old.
• 17:20
  Right?
• 17:21
  And but now you're able to, teach this AI that is getting more powerful every single day and
• 17:28
  to let it go to work and to really dig into this really amazing stuff, Len.
• 17:33
  I I'm thrilled that you've been in this, in this arena and been a champion for the
• 17:40
  endocannabinoid movement.
• 17:43
  Right?
• 17:43
  Getting people in tune with this, this part of our bodies and our DNA, the building blocks of
• 17:48
  ours and learning so much about this.
• 17:51
  And not just learning it to to know it, but learning it so that we can help people.
• 17:56
  And I think that's, just commendable at the very least.
• 18:00
  Well, thank you.
• 18:01
  I appreciate it.
• 18:02
  We're we're a science based company.
• 18:04
  Everything is supported by peer review references of PubMed or equivalent to PubMed.
• 18:08
  It's always learning, and we have citations in in PubMed.
• 18:13
  We're in a phase two clinical trial at Harvard.
• 18:16
  We have, six clinical studies at Wayne State.
• 18:20
  We have, three in Chelman, Montreal, and then we have one in The UK that we're starting.
• 18:25
  So, we're all about doing it right and doing it scientifically.
• 18:28
  So I appreciate the platform that you're, providing us, but everybody everybody needs to
• 18:34
  know at least what their genome looks like so they can use that, to help them, you know,
• 18:40
  navigate through their life challenges.
• 18:44
  Well, and I appreciate you taking some time for us today.
• 18:47
  It'll probably take me three or four times of watching this back to actually absorb all the
• 18:51
  things that you've said.
• 18:53
  It's it's a lot smarter than some of the conversations we have on our show, but I've
• 18:58
  really appreciated it, Len.
• 19:00
  Go ahead and plug the the website and everything one more time and anything else that
• 19:04
  you need to.
• 19:05
  Yeah.
• 19:05
  I mean, our website is endodna, end0dna.com.
• 19:11
  I'm on all the social platforms, Lenmay.
• 19:15
  I think on Instagram, lenmay DNA.
• 19:18
  I have a book.
• 19:20
  It's called making cannabis personal.
• 19:23
  Put up here.
• 19:24
  You can get it on Amazon.
• 19:25
  So it talks about, you know, a lot of these stories and people who can't see me.
• 19:29
  There's pictures of me with hair in here.
• 19:31
  So if you wanna see that, that's pretty cool.
• 19:33
  And then I have my own podcast.
• 19:35
  It's called everything is personal.
• 19:37
  You can get that wherever you get podcasts.
• 19:40
  Fantastic.
• 19:41
  Well, I'll need a copy of that book to put on our beautiful display here behind me and add it
• 19:46
  to the Scene Projects book club list.
• 19:48
  And, Len, thank you so much for coming in and giving me a quick education on the company, and
• 19:54
  I I'm thrilled to know you.
• 19:55
  And I look forward to hopefully, having my own tests run and finding out a little bit more and
• 20:01
  why I've had this love affair with this plant for, you know, twenty some odd years now.
• 20:07
  Let's do it, brother.
• 20:08
  I'll I'll give you a test kit, and I'll go over your results with you.
• 20:12
  You can do another show if you want.
• 20:14
  Yeah.
• 20:14
  Well, that would be cool to kinda show the whole process for people too and to come on and
• 20:18
  do it live.
• 20:19
  So I love that idea.
• 20:21
  And, Len, I I really appreciate you being a part of the scene.
• 20:25
  Thank you, man.
• 20:26
  Appreciate it as well.