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This Peptide Burns Fat and Builds Muscle — But the Man Who Discovered It Won't Take It - Yet · The LIVING Room Podcast | Inside The WNDR Lab

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: GLP1 family of drugs are a remarkable advance in heaven.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_03: However, there are some major downsides of GLP1.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_03: The biggest one is muscle loss.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_03: Up to 30% of the weight people lose on GLP1 is muscle.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_03: MATC, by the way, maintain muscle mass in various models, but also prevents osteoporosis in various mass models.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_03: A lost weight, they improve their blood sugar.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Helps with fat loss.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Helps build, if not the least, prevent the loss of limitation.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: Helps metabolic health mitochondria function.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds too good to be true, right?
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_03: The beauty of allowing people with a lot of people will access to potentially valuable.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of money.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: For a whole host of reasons.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Peptides is the thing that everyone is talking about right now.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: There is so much confusion, so much misinformation.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I think despite everyone having an opinion on it, there's probably not that many people who are qualified to do so.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that a really good place to start would be why you are so qualified to do so.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I know you spent your career studying um uh these mitochondrial derived peptides specifically, and then maybe give us like a really high-level definition of what they are.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we hear differing opinions here too.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: A nice, easy one to start.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_03: First of all, Chris, it's great to be here.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_03: And I really think this is a very important vision uh to communicate.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I'm an endocrinologist by training, and my entire career I've been poke has been focused on hormones and how they can be used to improve human health.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_03: And before the concept of peptides became a thing, many of the hormones that we worked with were in fact peptides.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: The best example is insulin, which is a peptide that has profound effects on blood sugar and uh metabolism.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: And my career transitioned from working on the standard hormones like insulin and growth hormone, which was my area of expertise uh in the 20th century, to working specifically on peptides.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_03: Because in the turn of the century, I was working on an obscure molecule known as IgF BP3, which was a regulator of IgF1, which is also a peptide.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: And in fact, there are forms of IgF1 that are among the different peptides people tend to use these days.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: IGF being insulin growth.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_03: Insulin-like rofactor.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_03: And we were intrigued by the fact that this IgF BP3 molecule seemed to have done all sorts of things beyond binding the insulin-like rolefactor IGF.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_03: So we used a technique called yeast to hybrid system, which is a very complicated genetic screen for protein-protein interaction, and we cloned a new molecule that later became known as humanin, which the intriguing part about it, it wasn't supposed to be there.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_03: It came out of the area in the mitochondrial DNA that was not thought to be encoding genes or peptides.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_03: And that was the first recognition that beyond the standard peptide that we knew of, there might be a whole number, and now we know they're in the thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands, of peptides that are hiding in places in the DNA where people didn't expect them to be.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_03: Now, if you Google today how many genes there are in the human genome, you might get 20,000, sometimes it tells you 25 or 30,000, which always seemed like a very low number to me.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_03: And the realization that these small mini genes, also known as open reading frames, encode their own little proteins or microproteins or peptides, open up the scope of our understanding of biology, of the human genome, and of the potential uh molecules that can be understood and potentially utilized to improve human health.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_03: And that brings me back to what is a peptide?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I like to think of peptides as three different types of molecules.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_03: The first are the ones we knew about for many decades.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_03: Insulin, GLP1 is a peptide.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: It's the most successful peptide we ever encountered as a pharmaceutical, and a number of other peptides, all of which are fragments of larger proteins.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_03: So we knew about the large proteins, they can get cleaved in various situations.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_03: GLP1 is a product of a larger gene called preproglucagon that also encodes another peptide known as glucagon, which is modified to uh in, for example, in the new retatrotide peptide includes the ability to bind the glucagon receptor in addition to the GLP1 receptor and the GIP receptor.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_03: But we knew about the fragments of larger protein being peptides.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: For decades.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_03: For decades.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_03: So that's the second category.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: And that, unlike the fragments of peptides that we know, of proteins that we know about as peptides, there might be a hundred of those, maybe a couple of hundreds.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_03: These microproteins of small peptides like humanin and MOTC, potentially there are many thousands of those.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_03: They expand the repertoire of the genome and of peptides.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_03: And we only understand a very small minority of them, but we know there are many of them.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_03: The third category, which has recently emerged, are completely artificial synthetic peptides that people are designing, typically with the help of AI, to have predetermined biological activities.
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_03: You know, that's the next generation of science, where you identify a target like a receptor, and you create, you design with this sequence of amino acids that comprise a peptide, you design a designer peptide, essentially, that meets your need as a drug or whatever it is you're trying to create.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_03: So they're like engineering an out.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_03: Engineered peptides.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_03: These are the three general types of peptides.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_03: The word peptides is such a buzzword these days, right?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: And when people think about peptides, they say, oh yeah, there are like a couple of dozen of them.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_03: They're all kind of part of the same thing, you know, lifestyle or wellness or weight loss.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_03: Uh and I think that it's really important to realize that first of all, there's many, many thousands, maybe tens or hundreds of thousands.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_03: And two, they're so diverse, and each one is unique, and you can't really lump them together, even though they've become sort of a an industry.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you know.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_03: But it's like saying drugs, you know, not all drugs are the same.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: There are many different medications out there.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_03: You can't just lump them together, yeah, apart from the fact that it's what we use to improve our health, and it's how the pharma industry makes money.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_03: But I really hope that your listeners will recognize how this is far more complex than what you might think.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Not all the peptides are created equal.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: Can we go to that second category of peptide that you mentioned?
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's, you know, there's a general understanding of the first one and the ones that are already being used and successfully used.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: For this second category, specifically for the ones that you discovered and have worked with for so many years, these mitochondrial derived peptides, I think I'm getting that right.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: Can you, to begin with, give us a just a really quick 30-second explanation of what the mitochondria is?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think we we all had some experience with that word at high school biology and you know, the powerhouse of the cell, but beyond what actually are we talking about here?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_03: It's commonly said that in fifth grade you learn about mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_03: When I went to fifth grade, I don't think it was mentioned, and I don't think we really knew a lot about mitochondria at the time.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_03: Mitochondria were first recognized about 150 years ago.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_03: There have already been three Nobel Prizes awarded for scientists who study mitochondria.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_03: And we've learned more and more about them.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_03: And I would say up until 30 years ago, they were exclusively considered the powerhouse of the cell.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_03: And people thought their only function is to create energy in the form of so-called ATP.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_03: This has been transformed over the last few decades to understand that mitochondria have many other functions.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: For example, they're critical in controlling the cell fate and cell death.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_03: So when you, for some reason, need to get rid of a cell, it undergoes a process called apoptosis or cell death.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_03: And when that fails, you can get cancer that grows uncontrollably.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a very important function.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_03: The mitochondria is critical for that.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_03: It oversees cell death.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: Also, we've learned over the last decade that mitochondria are really important in immune function.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_03: And many immune processes get connected to the mitochondria.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_03: There's something called a mitochondrial NLRP complex that coordinates immune uh processes in the body.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_03: And finally, over the last two decades, we recognize that a mitochondria doesn't just sit there and does what it's told.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_03: And of course, we think about the nucleus as being the command center of the cell.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: And the nucleus sends signals to various parts of the cells, including the mitochondria, and tells it make more energy, don't make as much energy, start killing yourself, or stop killing yourself, or whatever those necessary functions are.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_03: But now we've started to understand that the mitochondria talks back and communicates with the nucleus and the rest of the cell by delivering signals.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_03: And these signals can be small metabolites, uh, including NAD, for example, and other uh uh uh you know reactive oxygen species that the mitochondria makes.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: Some people thought that the past that they were just byproducts, but now we know they're signaling molecules as well.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: But the real transformative uh concept around mitochondrial peptides is they're they're very specific, sophisticated signals, essentially similar to hormones, that come that are encoded in the mitochondria, get synthesized into peptides.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_03: They go out of the mitochondria, sometimes they go straight to the nucleus to coordinate cell order processes, and many times they get secreted out of the cell, and then they serve important functions, just like hormones, just like GLP1.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_03: Mozzi is a great example, so is humanin.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_03: They have their own pathways of signaling receptors, acceptor molecules, downstream signaling, controlling very specific processes in the cells in the body.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_03: So, really, the discovery of mitochondrial peptides created a new understanding of how mitochondria functions to coordinate processes in the body, particularly related to those things that I mentioned as mitochondrial functions, mainly, indeed, is metabolism and energy.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah and many uh Moth C, for example, is a very sophisticated way for the body to utilize energy to target it for muscle function as opposed to other things.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, other peptides direct energy and metabolism in the brain, which of course is a very important uh uh aspect of health.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_03: So, and and the more we know, the more we discover mitochondrial peptides, the more we understand how each one of them has a very specific role.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: I want to get on to Motzi.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Motsi, you discovered uh in your lab in at USC.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: But before we do that, can you just take me back to this, the human end discovery or co-discovery, and maybe give us a high-level understanding of why that is not something that we're talking about becoming a sort of mass consumer product and how that then led to the the Moxie progression.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: So just to give you a perspective on the science, Matsy, which of course I'm super excited about, and it's having a moment.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: And just to be clear to the audience, Motzi is one of the seven peptides, or one of the six that just got reclassified.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Correct.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_03: It's having a moment.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_03: And when we discovered MOTC, we had no idea what it does.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_03: And that that's one of the problems.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of people today have learned how to identify and discover peptides.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_03: Because the roadmap for these peptides is the existence of this whole open reading frame in DNA.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_03: And as I said, we knew there are 20,000 genes.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_03: Those 20,000 genes comprise just 3% of the human DNA.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_03: 97% of our DNA was not thought to serve any function until 20 years ago.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: It used to be called junk DNA.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_03: That never made sense to me.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_03: Then people started realizing, oh, it contains actually areas that encode the small open reading frames, encode things known as non-coding RNA, which is sometimes a misnomer because many of the non-coding RNA molecules actually do code for small peptides.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's confusing.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_03: So now we don't use the term junk DNA anymore.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_03: We changed a few years ago to call it the dark genome.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_03: Beta.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_03: Which is kind of a cool term, I think.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_03: Much beta.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: And now that we know that much of the function of the dark genome is to encode peptides, we're using the term the dark proteome, which means all the thousands of peptides that sit there are ripe for discovery.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_03: The problem is, and people have not a problem, but what people have done, and I have many friends and colleagues who are in the nuclear microprotein field, they developed, you know, large tools to identify these peptides with sophisticated techniques known as riboseq, where you see if the RNA for these microproteins or peptides is in fact being transcribed and translated.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_03: And then they also use tools like mass spec uh proteomics to detect these peptides and show that they actually exist.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_03: And folks, I think the leader in that field is a guy named Alan Segatillion and uh the Salk Institute.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_03: They can identify a thousand peptides in one big experiment with zero understanding of what any of them do.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_03: Right, yeah.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_03: And then you say, So what did they do?
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: You have to take one by one and test them.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_03: That's where we were 20 years ago with the mitochondrial peptides.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_03: And we did something kind of primitive, and we said, here's humanin.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_03: What are the open reading frames that we can find next to it?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: We just kind of marched through it, made a peptide, started throwing it on cell lines.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_03: Does it do anything?
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: What does it do?
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_03: How do you test it?
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_03: We were making it up as we went along.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's the spirit.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: And and when we got to Math C and uh postdoc, who just joined my lab in 2010, a guy named David Lee, who was the co-discoverer of Mod C, you know, worked really hard and showed that this peptide has potent metabolic effects.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_03: And very soon after that, we started injecting it into mice, not really knowing what to expect.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_03: But we said it probably has something to do with metabolism.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_03: Lo and behold, it prevented weight gain in mice that were given a high-fat diet.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_03: It completely prevented the development of fatty liver, which is one of the complications of diabetes, is the technical term is NASH or NAFOLD.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_03: But essentially, when you're a pre-diabetic, obese individual, your liver gets full of fat, which is not good.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_03: Matsy completely prevented that in mice.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: And when we moved forward to clinical development, that was the indication we went after.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: So just before you move on from that, NAFL, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: Did you try it with alcohol for the mice?
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_03: We haven't.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_03: That's an interesting thought.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_03: We might go back to testing that.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for suggesting.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there's a market for that.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_03: And again, at the time we thought about Mazzi the way people today think about GLP1.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: A weight loss agent.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_03: Which really was you know emblematic of how clueless we were, how we were operating in the dark.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_03: Because today, uh our belief that Mazzi is primarily a muscle modulator that also prevents weight gain and you know basically shuttles energy from fat to muscle, and therefore it does reduce fat and weight loss.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_03: But MOTSI doesn't work to you know reduce weight.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_03: GLP1, for example, reduces your appetite.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: That's the main effect of GLP1.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: With Matsy, you don't change your food intake.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_03: And presumably you don't change your Appetite.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_03: You just take energy, calories from fat, and send it to build muscle.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_03: We didn't really understand that even 10 years ago when we started clinical trials with Matzi.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_03: And that brings me to the concept that as our thinking evolved about mitochondrial proteins, we changed our process of discovery from, oh, here's potentially a peptide, let's see what it does, like you know, with our eyes covered, sure, to systematically looking at the omics of the mitochondria, with the omics that most people have heard of as genomics, and using a technique that your listeners may or may not have heard of called GWAS or genome-wide association study, which was developed uh in the beginning of the century, where you look at the entire genome, all your DNA, you look for many, many genetic variants, and you see if any of them is associated with a particular condition.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 23:20
  SPEAKER_03: So they did that for diabetes.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_03: They found several dozen genes involved in diabetes.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_03: Surprisingly, even though that was a great discovery, no new intervention has come out of it yet.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_03: So we thought, uh, and and by the way, when people were doing that, they completely ignored the mitochondrial DNA for a number of reasons.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_03: Mostly because they didn't think it was important, also because mitochondrial DNA is transferred only from your mother.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_03: All your other chromosomes come from your dad and your mom.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_03: The mitochondria, the mitochondrial DNA only come from your mother.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: For everyone, every time.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_03: Everyone, every time.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_03: Who knew?
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_03: So the only other thing is the Y chromosome only comes from your father.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: The other chromosomes come from both parents.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_03: So that confused the statisticians that were working on this.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_03: So they left the mitochondria on the table.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_03: I thought, great, it's there to study.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_03: And we developed this technique that we called MIWAS that really allowed us to make important advances in the field.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_03: I mentioned the variants we discovered was human in.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_03: The other thing about the mitochondrial DNA is because it never undergoes recombination, which all the other genes in the body do.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: So if you get uh one chromosome from your dad, one chromosome for your mom, they do combine, and your kids might get a new combination of genes than you had or your parents had.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: The mitochondrial DNA, it goes down with no change except new mutations that occur.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_03: So all the variants in mitochondrial DNA are ethnospecific.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_03: I mentioned the Jewish variant in humanin.
• 25:17
  SPEAKER_03: And if you study the genetics of the mitochondria in a specific population that does not have variants in a particular peptide, you're never going to find that.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_03: So with MOT-C, we looked at some very large cohorts.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_03: There's one called the Health and Retirement Study.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_03: 30,000 people followed Americans who were followed for decades that had their DNA sequenced.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_03: Nothing we found humanin, we found other peptides, nothing on MOTC.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_03: We looked at the UK Biobank.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_03: There are close to a million people that were genotypes.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, very hard to identify anything there in the MOTSI region.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: And then one of my colleagues, a gentleman, a scientist called Hiro Kumagai, who was from Japan, who is originally a PhD in exercise physiology.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_03: And he wanted to study muscle biology and exercise physiology.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_03: And by then we had some clues that Matsy is involved in muscle biology.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_03: And he identified a large cohort of Japanese people that also had their DNA sequence and ran this analysis of DNA variations, and lo and behold, we discovered a variant in the MOTSI gene that's found in 8% of Japanese people, and probably in some Koreans and Northern Chinese.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_03: Those 8% of people who carry this MOTSI mutation are more likely to develop diabetes and they have lower muscle mass or sarcopenia.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_03: And this variant completely inactivates Mazin.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_03: So we have a population of people who don't make functional MOSI.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_03: So that's a great experiment of nature.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_03: It's not great for them, but it teaches us that MOTSI is important in prevention of diabetes and it's important in maintaining muscle mass.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: Hasi, with with that in mind, I think the big the big thing that we think about in correlation to GLP, the GLP agonist is this concept that if you reduce overall appetite, and then in turn you reduce overall weight very quickly, especially with some of these, with this triple agonist now, is the the numbers are huge, that you will see a decrease in lean tissue.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: Given that we, you know, knowing knowing that lean tissue is effectively the currency of longevity, and as we age, we see this rapid decline.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's the scariest thing, I think, when we think about long-term use of GLP1.
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Am I right in then saying that the proposed upside of MOTC from what we know so far is that we could not only retain but build lean tissue, and therefore this could be a really incredible companion to the GLP agonists in that it could offset some of that lean tissue loss.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: Or is this a just a replacement for it?
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_03: So this is almost a drop the mic moment for me.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I love it.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_03: Um but let me first say that GLP1 family of drugs are a remarkable advance in human health.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, they basically solved the biggest problem Western societies have been facing in the last few decades, which is obesity.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_03: The causes of which I don't need to go into, but it's sedentary lifestyle, uh ultra-processed foods, hyper-availability of food everywhere.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, the majority, the majority of Americans are obese or white.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_03: Not where we want to be.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_03: GLP1 made a big dent in that.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_03: It reduces in the first five to 10 years of usage, reduces heart attacks, reduces strokes, and reduces overall mortality.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_03: However, there are some major downsides of GLP1.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_03: As you said, the biggest one is muscle loss.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_03: Up to 30% of the weight people lose on GLP1s is muscle.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_03: And well, and you have a lot of weight to carry around, you need more muscle.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_03: So maybe some of that muscle is just because proportionally you gotta lose some muscle, but not all of it.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_03: So the muscle loss or the sarcopenia associated with GLP1 is a major issue.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: And when you go beyond five to ten years and you want to make it for many more decades, this muscle loss, as you said, the currency of longevity could be a real serious issue that if it's not addressed, could actually lead to health issues rather than solutions.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I would go as far as saying it will for everyone if you continue on that trajectory, right?
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: Like you we can't afford to lose functionality, and functionality is tied very closely to the ability to produce force, right?
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if you have no lean tissue to perform your day-to-day activities, what does 8019 beyond look like?
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 30:52
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, the muscle mass obviously is super important, but there are secondary things, which is bone density and uh the risk of risk of osteoporosis.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_03: And there's already evidence that GLP1 use is associated with osteopenia, osteoporosis, and fracture risk.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_03: So that's an emerging issue.
• 31:18
  SPEAKER_03: And uh MOT-C, by the way, maintained muscle mass in various models, but also prevents osteoporosis in various mouse models.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_03: And when the FDA committee PCAC, which last week met to review peptides and mentioned the potential indications for MOT C, one of them was osteoporosis.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that that's a really important aspect of what it could help with in the context of the GLP1 companion idea that you just talked about.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, did you just on a quick side note, did you present at the hearing?
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: I did.
• 32:00
  SPEAKER_03: And in fact, it is uh in the public domain now.
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_03: I think there's a YouTube link for the entire full two days of discussions.
• 32:10
  SPEAKER_03: And I will probably identify my five minutes and uh people can look at that.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_03: But I was trying to make the case that Mozzi has a remarkable function and is really appears to be one of the safest molecules that we've ever encountered.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: Did that feel like a proud moment for you?
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_03: It did.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, I think that as I mentioned, I started a company uh 15 years ago to develop mitochondrial microproteins.
• 32:42
  SPEAKER_03: First it was a human company, then it became a MOTSI company.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_03: And we made important advances.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_03: We engineered the slightly modified form of MOTSI that was longer acting.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_03: We took that drug candidate into what's known as IND enabling studies, IND investigational new drug.
• 33:05
  SPEAKER_03: So every drug that the FDA allows you to put into people has to be proven safe in animal models.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_03: So that's a long and expensive process where Masi in this case was injected into three different species of animals, and all kinds of things were tested, and it was demonstrated that there was no evidence of safety issues at that level.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_03: Then the FDA allowed us to do a phase one study, which is essentially a safety study.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: But it was two components.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's called a phase one A and a phase one B.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_03: In phase one A, we gave people ascending doses of MOTC as a single dose, all the way up to 200 milligrams, which is more than it's an order of magnitude more than what in humans.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_03: In humans.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_03: And there was no safety issues.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_03: And then we were allowed to proceed with the phase 1B, which was a randomized placebo-controlled trial of MOT C in obese individuals with pre-diabetes and fatty liver.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_03: 23 of them were randomized, and we were able to treat them for four weeks, and we showed that they lost weight, they improved their blood sugar, and they most importantly then improved their liver function, their liver enzymes normalized, showing that there was improvement in the fatty liver.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_03: Um at that point, uh a business decision was made not to proceed with MOTSI delivery uh development, mainly because the evidence for the incredible benefits of GLP1 was overwhelming, and MOTSI just couldn't compete as a weight loss drug.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_03: And everything I said about weight loss, blood sugar improvement, and liver enzymes is also accomplished with GLP1.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_03: At the time, we didn't really understand the real advantage of MozC is the maintenance of muscle mass and bone mass.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_03: Now we're shifting to that frame of mind.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_03: And the benefits of a muscle preserving peptide, and there are no other intervention that's approved right now that can do that.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um the benefits, the potential utility is incredible.
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: So you so you've shown though that it it does elicit some kind of fat loss as well.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_03: Correct.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: So this molecule, at least in the data that we have so far, helps with fat loss, helps build, if not at least, prevent the loss of lean tissue, and helps metabolic health, mitochondrial function sounds too good to be true, right?
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I've seen this data and I know that it exists and I know that it's real and I know you well.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_00: It feels like that doesn't need to be a uh in competition with the GLP1 agonist, and that that is a sensible business decision because there is such a huge market for people, A, that you know, want to lose a little bit of fat, but also are very protective and um cognizant of building lean tissue, but also because so many people that are on the GLP one agonists should, if not already, be concerned about lean tissue loss.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so where are we now with it?
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because I I suspect a lot of people listening, you know, if we could prove its safety and efficacy, would be interested in it in exploring that.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: But I know that there is so many hurdles when when it comes to getting FDA approval of these drugs.
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: So maybe maybe a good um uh place to start there is like what what this decision means from the the hearing recently and the recategorization, because people are already using it, right?
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_03: As a scientist and drug developer that I like to think of myself, um the ultimate goal is to take a drug candidate and take it all the way to FDA approval, the way you'd have done for GLP1 and many other drugs.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_03: Unfortunately, that is a process that costs hundreds of millions of dollars, sometimes a billion dollars.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_03: And investors really want to make sure that they will get their money back.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_03: So it's very hard to raise that kind of money.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_03: Sure.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um, which is one of the reasons Matssi did not proceed so far.
• 38:07
  SPEAKER_03: And there's just not enough money to develop all these drugs.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that we're living through a transformation in healthcare.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_03: And this transformation really involves the change from how health was managed in the 20th century, which was patients went to doctors, doctors made all the decisions, insurance companies paid for whatever interventions doctors decided.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_03: And if they decided not to pay for it, it wouldn't happen.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_03: But the last couple of decades allowed us to witness a new trend where first people have a much better understanding of what's going on with health and interventions for improving health.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_03: They like to take control over their health.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_03: They like to lead the decision-making process.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_03: Many people are willing to pay their own money to get interventions that they want.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_03: So the insurance companies are being kept out of the system for some degree.
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_03: And the doctors, as a doctor, it's gonna feel weird to say, but the doctors begin to play a more minor role in the process.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's not necessarily the ideal thing.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_03: The ideal thing is a partnership between doctors and patients.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_03: But in the case, you know, I think the first time this happened in a big way was with the ED drugs like Viagro, yeah.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_03: Where you could go to a doctor, go through the whole process, get the doctor to prescribe it.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_03: But many men just wanted to get the medication.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_03: Just buy it online.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_03: And and just bought it online.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_03: There was a physician prescription involved, but it was a minimal interaction with a very questionable sort of thing.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_03: And that created the concept that you can really bypass your doctor.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_03: And it's not ideal because you know there's certain people who might not respond well, might have a side effect.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_03: It's good to keep the physician in the picture.
• 40:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_03: But that showed that it's possible to bypass it.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: Then came the GLP1s.
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_03: And again, for many people, they just want to lose a little weight to have to go to the doctor and get checked and come every three months and pay for every visit and just the parking can keep people away from going to doctors.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_03: Suddenly they can get their GLP1 online.
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_03: So there was this new reality that healthcare can be delivered in different ways.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that it's it's allowing us to be proactive, you know, that prevention can be proactive.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: Like we have more agency now, and we speak about this a lot on the podcast.
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_00: That I think is the real green flag that we can do these things and we have more control.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: I think, though, when it comes to the peptide field, because as you quite rightly say, it's all being bunched into this one catch all tub, and we still don't have reputable sources to get them from.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we have there is an appetite for these things, but we don't have the ability like we do with Viagra, for example, or or even the GLP ones, we can't get them knowing that they will be both effective and safe.
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so how do we reconcile for that?
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_03: So this obscure path known as the 503A, which is essentially compounding pharmacies, being able to take a product and create a particular way for people to use it by compounding in a very specific way, has become a really big business when during the pandemic and the early 2020s, people discovered GLP1s.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_03: There was a shortage of GLP1.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_03: Novonordisk and Eli Lilly, the main producers, couldn't make the amount of drug that was needed by the market.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_03: And there was a way for people to manufacture these peptides, these GLP1s, outside of the way the large companies were making it, and for the compounding pharmacies to produce some kind of a product that was probably just as good but not as well tested, and offer it to people legally because there was a shortage.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_03: Once Elizabeth to increase supply.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly, because people wanted it, it was a medical need.
• 42:59
  SPEAKER_03: So the FDA approved that path.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_03: When Eli Lilly and Navanordis were able to bring up capacity and production, then there was no longer a shortage.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_03: The company pharmacies lost the right to sell GLP1 products.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_03: But that created an opportunity to offer more products that are not easily available to patients.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_03: And that's where the peptide story has emerged in the last few months, because as you said, people are using peptides.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_03: In fact, it's been estimated that hundreds of thousands of people are taking peptides to the tune of many billions of dollars.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_03: And clearly there's a big demand.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the safety is not clear for all of these peptides.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_03: The quality of production, the safe the the the sterility, uh The purity and in fact the content of the peptides that are used in the black market, which I want to say is illegal, and I don't endorse that at all.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_03: Mainly because I don't know what people are taking.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_03: And uh that created a situation where if you accept that people want these products, it makes sense to have them available at least in a safer way.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_03: Now that's not at the level of FDA approval.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's sort of an intermediate path to allow people access to these products that may have benefits.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_03: The efficacy hasn't been proven at the level that the FDA typically expect.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_03: But there needs to be evidence of safety to make sure that uh people are not going to be harmed.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then I assume by allowing them to compound them safely, we can then conduct better research.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_00: Would that be right?
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_03: I think that so in this new universe that we have now walked into as a as a society, there will be opportunity for people to have access to various products, primarily peptides, that could have benefits that are not proven, but will also make it possible for people to do clinical trials, which of course will have to be registered.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_03: There's some called clinicaltrials.gov, which is a process, a website that all legal clinical trials have to register in and give information of what the trial is.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_03: It will require uh IRB approval and HIPAA.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_03: So the there'll be a human rights committee that will make sure that the study appears appropriate and will not endanger people's life, the safety of the administration of the product, the uh privacy of the patients are going to be protected.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_03: But now these peptides or whatever else is going to be included, are available for these clinical trials, which would be legal and hopefully done properly.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that will advance the field substantially.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_00: So when people are buying, because you can buy peptides online now, um, and they always come with a warning and you have to tick a box to say, you know, you understand that these are for research purposes only.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_00: But then you say we don't really know what's in them, right?
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: And and more often than not, is not the active ingredient in there that you're paying for.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_00: So I assume then that that's not valid or reliable for research.
• 47:02
  SPEAKER_00: So how are we you what are we using for research purposes?
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_03: So right now we're not doing any research.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_03: Once this 503A path will be completely approved, and these new batch of peptides will be available, which will be made in certified facilities, either in the US or in countries that we can very closely supervise the production.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_03: And the compounding will happen in certified pharmacy uh locations.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_03: But the product that people will be using will be to a very large degree guaranteed to contain what it's claims to have.
• 47:45
  SPEAKER_03: Now, for Mazi, which is the peptide, of course, that I work on for the last many years, we've developed assays to measure Mazzi, both in the blood and in solution.
• 47:59
  SPEAKER_03: And I have various friends who take Matsy.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_03: And they come to me with questions, and you know, to the best of my ability, I respond.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_03: And several of them have given me the syringes with the Mazzi that they take.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_00: The proposed Mazzi.
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_03: And I measured the actual Mazzi.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_03: And in some cases, there was no Mazzi, in other cases, it was 10% of what was advertised.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_03: And some preparations had, you know, almost as much as they claim to have.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 48:36
  SPEAKER_03: But you don't know.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_03: And also, we're not able to really verify this claim of 99.9.5% purity, which you know you want in a product like this.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_03: That's a very complicated uh assay to run, which we don't routinely run, but will be done when people will be making it for compounding, there will have to be some kind of quality control, yeah.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_03: That the quality is is guaranteed.
• 49:07
  SPEAKER_00: This might sound like a naive question, but if if we're not doing research now and we can't guarantee that, how are you testing it on the mice?
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: Like what were you using to I I used the research use only reagent.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_03: And by the way, you know, when we buy our peptides for mouse use, uh, we do buy from China, which is where almost all the peptides that come from.
• 49:30
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, but you can then test them in the lab before you administer them.
• 49:33
  SPEAKER_03: We buy from a very legit Chinese producer.
• 49:37
  SPEAKER_03: You know, China has a very advanced biotech uh industry now, rivaling the US.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_03: So we have a producer that we work with that we trust.
• 49:47
  SPEAKER_03: That producer does not sell in the black market.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 49:51
  SPEAKER_03: They have a reputation.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_03: And also in China, they're now implementing some rules about the production of some peptides, which are forbidden by Wada, the Olympic Doping Committee.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_03: And the Chinese authorities have said we don't want to make banned products.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_03: So we get our peptides from this very legit Chinese producers, but most of the black market peptides out there are from people's garages.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's not that hard to produce peptides, it is very difficult to produce them well.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's also not hard to then create a snazzy-looking website and make the packaging look good.
• 50:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: There is just so much money to be made, um, especially if you're not putting the thing into the vial.
• 50:43
  SPEAKER_00: The margins are out of control.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_00: Hassy, last night when we were at dinner, I asked you if you take Mozi.
• 50:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought your answer was very compelling, actually.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but maybe you can tell the audience the answer.
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_03: I don't believe in just taking things because they're trendy.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_03: I think I have a lot of health issues, don't get me wrong.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_03: And I take a number of drugs that I work with my physician to facilitate.
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_03: I have one issue.
• 51:15
  SPEAKER_03: I'm 69 years old.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_03: And like many people my age, my muscle mass has gone down over the years.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_03: And my physician, who's very aware of that, has a very sophisticated tool for measuring muscle.
• 51:30
  SPEAKER_03: And every year he tells me you lost another kilogram of muscle, and that's disturbing.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm very aware of that problem.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_03: And I would love to be able to take something to maintain my muscle mass, let alone increase it.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_03: And I believe in Mazi.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_03: And I would take it if I knew that I'm getting quality material that's pure and that uh I can trust.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_03: Right now, none of the products out there in the black market I feel comfortable taking.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_03: So I will not take it until A, and by the way, it is illegal.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_03: And the last thing I want to do is break the law.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_03: I have a, you know, I'm a medical professional myself.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_03: I have a license to protect.
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_03: I want to go completely above boards.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_03: There are many peptides out there.
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_03: I personally would only consider taking MOT-C because I'm addressing an issue that I have.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I believe in the molecule.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_03: I would love to see an investment in the MOTSI fields that will lead in five years or so to an optimized approved product.
• 52:47
  SPEAKER_03: But that's the beauty of the 503A path that it will allow people to have access to potentially valuable products, peptides, that aren't proven to be really effective.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_03: They may be, but they're at least considered safe.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is just so telling that, you know, we live in the world where there are lots of medical professionals as well as influencers and biohackers that are preaching the benefits of these peptides whilst also taking them, unknowing what's in them.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 53:27
  SPEAKER_00: And I think what's really refreshing for me getting to spend time with you and the other incredible scientists on our council is that you're willing to say, we're not quite there yet, to the point where I would take the thing that I actually need and would benefit from, but I'm willing to spend my career and time and reputation to build that proof, that burden of proof, right?
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think that is exactly what we need as consumers is to listen to the people that are actually doing the work and are willing to not overreach or or overpromise before we actually have enough data, right?
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: But it's looking incredibly promising.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, you know, five years from now, we'll be looking back thinking, you know, a number of these peptides have been incredibly beneficial, but just not quite there yet.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 54:17
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a term I want to bring into the conversation.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_03: There's this movement that people may have heard of called the right to try.
• 54:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 54:26
  SPEAKER_03: And that is really that's a 21st century concept.
• 54:29
  SPEAKER_03: And it really started with the cancer community, where there are a lot of cancer drugs in development.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_03: For example, people may have heard of this new discovery about pancreatic cancer.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_03: A terrible killer.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_03: My own brother-in-law died from it, and it took six months from the diagnosis to his death, and it was tragic and painful to look at.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_03: We have a new drug in development now that really makes incredible improvements and prolonging the life of patients with pancreatic sphinx.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_03: There's so many patients out there who are dying to get it, they don't have access.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_03: And that's just one example of many cancer drugs that take many years because of the FDA process and hundreds of millions of dollars to be developed, that maybe or maybe not could save lives or prolong life.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_03: So the right to try movement, which has gained a lot of uh momentum in recent years, says as long as there's some evidence of safety, people have the right to try.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: My body, my choice.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_03: That, by the way, has been legally approved in several states.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's not nationally approved yet, but I think all of the states are in the West Coast, if I remember correctly.
• 55:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um and and it's a new way of thinking about this.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_03: Um in some ways, you know, if you're talking about a lifestyle peptide, I don't know if it's appropriate.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_03: The issue with some of the peptides is that they may actually be life-saving eventually or life-extending.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, you know, if you're dealing with sarcopenia, at some degree I am, this could extend your life.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_03: If you're on a GLP1 and you're losing muscle mass and this could lead to osteoporosis and fractures, could be very important.
• 56:30
  SPEAKER_03: You know, mozzy in mice extends their life by 10%.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_03: Now, we don't know that it will do it in humans, but some people want to take it and they have the right to try perhaps for that very purpose.
• 56:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I am not in any way suggesting that MOTSI is a longevity drug.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 56:53
  SPEAKER_03: But people might want to try it because in animal models it has shown increased lifespan.
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_03: So that is again another concept that the traditional medical community establishment is very weary of.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_03: But the world is changing.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_03: And as a physician, I myself was very skeptical about this, but I realized, you know, I can't stop it.
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 57:23
  SPEAKER_03: So I feel the role of doctors now is to ensure that when patients choose to try a product, a peptide that isn't FDA fully approved, that isn't entirely demonstrated to have efficacy, that they do it in a rational, safe, reasonable way and get monitored and assessed for benefits and potential risks.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_03: You know, because if the doctors keep themselves completely out of this universe, the way it is now for the most part, although there are some longevity doctors, of course, who are involved with this.
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_03: But for the most part, many people get their peptides from their trainer or from their gym bodies.
• 58:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_03: And that's just not right.
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_03: You know, so doctors have the choice.
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_03: Are we going to still be involved in our patient's management?
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_03: Or are we going to say, oh, this is not for me, I'm not going to be part of it.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 58:28
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's wrong to pretend that we're so much better that we don't want to be involved.
• 58:37
  SPEAKER_03: Because there is a need for this partnership to happen at every level, not just at the approved drug level.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I guess if the if the real medical professionals do not have a say or have input or get involved, then by default, who do we turn to?
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: The people that are talking about it or are shouting very loudly on social media and so on.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_00: Can I ask you a personal question?
• 59:01
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we about three years ago, I sat in your office with you in LA.
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you remember this, and you told me this was going to happen.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I wasn't familiar with, you know, I knew what a peptide was.
• 59:14
  SPEAKER_00: I had no concept of how right you would be, um, no understanding of how quickly that would happen.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_00: But you told me, and I remember it really vividly, from your perspective, you know, being a proper academic, a scientific purist, you know, doing the right thing when you see or when you have seen over the last, you know, year or so, people taking or pulling on a thread of evidence or or research that was done in your lab and then making big bold claims and assumptions and overreaching to make financial gain.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_00: That must have been hard to see other people taking credit for something that you've spent so much time and energy on.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_03: Well, you know, I'm less worried about the credit.
• 1:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_03: And and let me say, first of all, I talked to you about this three years ago because I was aware that people are taking, people doctors are prescribing, people are producing Maz C and other peptides.
• 1:00:21
  SPEAKER_03: At the time, it was more of a curiosity for me, like, that's funny.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:00:27
  SPEAKER_03: And you know, some of those clinics were a block from my house.
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_03: Um, when I learned about the scope of the peptide usage and the Mazzi usage only a few months ago, I was stunned how many people are taking it.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_03: I had no idea that it's in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's got to be top three most popular gray market peptides.
• 1:00:54
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_03: If not, uh, you know, I was very conflicted about what my position should be.
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm still a little bit conflicted, yeah, Chris.
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_03: And and, you know, first and foremost, as somebody who took the Hippocratic oath, I want to make sure that people's health isn't in danger, that safety is first.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_03: First, do no harm.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_03: That's what Hippocrates said.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that once we move to the 503A path, safety is pretty much there to a certain degree.
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_03: Although, with some of the other peptides that I'm less familiar with, we still have to make sure that that's the case.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_03: And the reason I think it's important for doctors to be involved is because there may variable be types of patients or situations where you don't want to take peptides at all or any particular peptides.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_03: We as a medical community have to get involved here to define contraindications, you know, what people shouldn't do, maybe not to say exactly what people should do because it's not fully FDA approved.
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:02:10
  SPEAKER_03: But the medical community has to stay involved.
• 1:02:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, create some guardrails at least.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_03: So so I've gone through a transition over the last few months from my traditionalist thinking as a physician to a more practical, this is the reality.
• 1:02:28
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_03: How do we make the best out of it for people?
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_03: And how my role has to be in this universe, right?
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_03: You know, I could have chosen to just stay in my lab and maybe raise money to develop it as a drug, but people come to me, people look to me as the discoverer of Moxie to provide insights and oversight and uh suggestions for the best use.
• 1:02:58
  SPEAKER_03: So I've decided to carefully accept that role to make sure that there isn't ridiculous use, abuse, wrong people using it, people using it for the wrong reasons, and try to offer some sensible uh uh approach in a very chaotic universe.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_03: And by the way, one of the things I've decided to do, regardless of what happens, is to create a registry of peptide use for regardless of where people get their peptides, hopefully legally now, they will be able to give their information anonymously about what they're using, why they're using it, what their results are, if they're seeing any side effects.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that there are ways to make this field responsible and to move science forward and uh provide the best possible care for people.
• 1:04:06
  SPEAKER_03: And I'd certainly be willing to be part of that once it's legal.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: The reason I say it is that I think I would, that's where I I don't think there would be a source that I would trust more than the person who discovered it and is then setting the guardrails.
• 1:04:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't imagine it's as economically profitable.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_00: You it would cost more money to run, right?
• 1:04:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like it would, especially if you're funding money back into the research.
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_00: But long term, I think that is how you would gain consumer trust, at least.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_00: You know, I just think the field is just and I say this all the time now, and I I think it's just so much misinformation.
• 1:04:41
  SPEAKER_00: And and this this specific domain within this captured term of longevity seems to be, you know, one of the most polarizing.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 1:04:50
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, I think that there's a need for a responsible entity that does both production, distribution, monitoring, clinical research, data collection, and whether how much money can you make when instead of just selling the peptides, you really do it well, I don't know.
• 1:05:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that from my long-term vision perspective, people have said one of the arguments against the 503A path is that it will squash clinical development.
• 1:05:31
  SPEAKER_03: So the argument is that if you allow these peptides to be marketed, why would a drug company invest money into making it?
• 1:05:39
  SPEAKER_03: Because they're not going to be able to make money.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_03: And my argument is quite the opposite.
• 1:05:44
  SPEAKER_03: In the case of MOTC, for example, if you can show that people want to take a product like MOTC, that it provides some benefits, and that you're into 503A created.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_03: hundreds of millions of dollar product.
• 1:06:04
  SPEAKER_03: And at the same time, you could engineer LUTSI to be more potent, longer acting, take it through the full FDA approval, and create a drug that will either be a GLP1 companion or a treatment for age-related muscle loss.
• 1:06:26
  SPEAKER_03: Drug companies can make billions.
• 1:06:29
  SPEAKER_03: So I think that actually the four the 503A path is a way to test what could be a financially beneficial product.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:06:44
  SPEAKER_03: That the comp the the drug companies can say, okay, people like this Mart C stuff.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_03: Let's take move it all the way forward.
• 1:06:55
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's also like a huge economic benefit for building like a legacy business.
• 1:07:01
  SPEAKER_00: Something that is you know has a 10-year ambition rather than a one year ambition.
• 1:07:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think in this field that's going to prove out you know my co-founder Jeffrey who you know very well always says you know when when we're talking about any investment or or our business itself is always look to do good, doing good.
• 1:07:18
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:07:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that term.
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_00: I love it too.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is a great application of that term.
• 1:07:23
  SPEAKER_00: Can we pull on a thread that you just mentioned quickly, which was you know if we can invest more money in the research, we will find more potent, more efficacious versions of this.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_00: When I think about the evolution of these GLP agonists, we now have a triple agonist, I believe there's a quintuple agonist being worked on um uh I won't mention whose name it is, but that that's happening now.
• 1:07:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so like it almost feels like Moore's law of GLPs has applied in that we seem to get a more effective version each year, right?
• 1:07:58
  SPEAKER_00: Do you envisage the same thing happening for MOTC?
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I I know you've already kind of know the answer for that, but I'm teeing you up here because I I I think some of the data that you showed me yesterday was pretty wild.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_03: So I give a lot of lectures that's kind of what I do besides the research and the administration.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I've put together a slide which I think I've not seen anybody else use yet which is on the x-axis is the number of pounds people lose.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_03: The y-axis is the time from 2005 to 2027 and the first GOP1 product uh xenitide all people only lost a couple of pounds yeah the next one liraglitide or victoza came out five or six years later people lost five to ten pounds it was real weight loss but not a lot Ozemic came five or six years later suddenly you could lose 15 20 pounds 24 easily yeah yeah then Munjaro came out you know 25-30 pounds with kind of the expectation for tatrotide is coming out later this year or early next year you know people lose up to 30% of their weight which for an obese person we're talking about 60 pounds so it's the Moore's law of GLP1 for Modzi the native form which is what the 503A has approved has effects you want to call them modest or not but clearly we've already tested in the lab several versions of Mazzi that are obviously more potent.
• 1:09:50
  SPEAKER_03: We're working now on a long-acting weekly version that you know maybe that would be the Zempic version of Modsi.
• 1:09:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah yeah and you know with the help you know that's as far as I can take it but with the help of really experienced drug developers and people who know how to tweak peptides and create long-acting forms and whether or not we can create a product that hits more than one pathway or not it's all remains to be determined but if you put your mind to it and make an investment you can definitely create superior products that have commercial value and health benefits.Feels like that would be is only going to become more necessary as the the GLP1s become more effective right if you're losing 30% of your body weight the the capacity to retain and build muscle becomes even more urgent.
• 1:10:47
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely can you can I ask you about like some other domains of health because I think one thing we we talk about a lot because I think people I hope people want to to know more about is cognition is brain function because you know when I think about aging that to me feels like the most frightening thing that I lose the ability to you know um think clearly remember people you know my sense of self um and you know now that we're surviving some of the things that used to kill us we're seeing a lot more of that is there anything on the horizon that looks promising for cognition in terms with regards to peptides?
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_03: So first let me say your personal perspective on this is really capturing what's happening out there.
• 1:11:39
  SPEAKER_03: That's the number one thing that people worry about when they retire is losing their cognitive ability, becoming a burden on their families, you know, not quite being there even though they're still alive and a lot of money has gone in to develop interventions for Alzheimer's disease.
• 1:12:00
  SPEAKER_03: Tens of billions of dollars with really nothing that works.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_03: There's one drug that was approved a few years ago the Neelai Lilly product that has really tiny effects in the very small sliver of the population.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a pretty hard harsh side effects as well.
• 1:12:21
  SPEAKER_03: A lot of side effects you know it was approved against the recommendation of the FDA panel that looked at it and uh the use of this uh uh uh antibody is very limited and for a problem as big as Alzheimer's that drug makes perhaps a billion dollars a year which is nothing in a market like this yeah so clearly we need solutions and I was saying that people come and talk to me about this condition or that condition and I like to say oh we have a peptide for that yeah I'm sure yeah and and you know and I have a little bit of scientific ADD and I'm interested in a lot of things and our discovery platform starts with identifying a problem.
• 1:13:13
  SPEAKER_03: So if the problem is Alzheimer's disease we do scans in these genetic databases that I talked about looking for a potential peptide involved in that.
• 1:13:25
  SPEAKER_03: So we discovered one such peptide that we call schmooz of Europeans have a mutation in schmooze that makes it less active and they have a 50% increase in the risk of Alzheimer's disease.
• 1:13:43
  SPEAKER_03: When we synthesize schmooze we add it to brain cells we protect them from damage by amyloid beta which is sort of the business end of the the pathway of Alzheimer's we've given schmooze to mice that have been engineered to get Alzheimer's disease we can improve their cognition and their health in general so that's an example of a potential solution uh humanin as I said also has tremendous uh potential in Alzheimer's and we have a couple of other candidates uh because the brain is so complex and the systems in the body that control brain function it's not like one thing there's so many different pathways that might be able to be modulated to protect cognition so I really believe there might be solutions in the microprotein peptide universe for cognition and uh if we were to convince investors or a drug company to take one or more of these all the way that's a billion dollar commitment.
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_03: And with all the failures that have happened in this field very few people have the appetite for that.
• 1:15:05
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah and there's a lot of research being done and it's supported by the NIH and by foundations devoted to to this uh but large drug companies are very hesitant.
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:15:22
  SPEAKER_03: So could the 503a path be a way to test the feasibility of such a peptide?
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely of course first and foremost it will need to go through the IND enabling studies the phase one studies to be proven safe and possibly maybe have some benefits but that's a new path forward for developing interventions.
• 1:15:52
  SPEAKER_03: And I might add uh there was another peptide we worked on uh quite a while ago called schlepp or schlep two in that case and we kind of felt this is involving the brain but we because we didn't know anything about it we threw it on this cell on that cell we threw it on brain cells neurons it seemed to protect them and uh a friend of mine uh in Einstein a colleague uh uh has uh you know was working on Alzheimer's disease and said well maybe let's try and this guy this wonderful person Derek Hoffman great scientist spent months and months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to take these Alzheimer's mice treated them with schlep too no benefit at all very disappointing I still owe him a big favor because he did that meanwhile another one of my colleagues um uh uh uh Su Jan Kim was her name a brilliant scientist did this genetic approach her interest was Parkinson's disease she didn't know about any particular peptide she discovered a variant in Schlep II that renders it more potent another gain of function mutation yep and people who have that variant have a dramatically reduced risk of Parkinson's and Parkinson's is another disease that we don't have any good interventions for we've been able to show that using the Schlep II especially the naturally occurring modified version improves both mice and cells the relevant cells and maybe a potential intervention in Parkinson's disease but what it shows is that you have to be very specific.
• 1:17:48
  SPEAKER_03: So the Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are kind of somewhat related yeah but they're very different pathologically and there's a peptide for each maybe more than one peptide and I think that our ability to get hits that lead to candidates is really tremendous.
• 1:18:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah how to pick the most promising ones and invest you know I like to say all my students want to have their own peptide yeah so they come to my lab and they go and they work on a peptide hopefully a good one but I say for me when I let somebody run with a peptide I make an at least a million dollar commitment.
• 1:18:37
  SPEAKER_03: Yes yeah you can't just say oh you know let's do it for$10,000 see what happens if you're gonna go after something it's a million dollar commitment.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_00: What an exciting time to be alive I think there's so much to be hopeful for Hassie I could talk to you for hours about this and I would love to and we have in fact I'm gonna if it's okay with you move on to some quicker fire questions okay no specific time limit as long as it's not over a minute.
• 1:19:06
  SPEAKER_00: So first one what's one thing in your field that you wish people would stop saying peptides.
• 1:19:14
  SPEAKER_03: Just the word peptides what would you rather they said name each one specific oh you mean stop generalizing huh what's one of the biggest myths about peptides that people should know I think the myth is that peptides are a lifestyle intervention I think I think of peptides as drug candidates and if we're to put it in our bodies they better address the medical problem.
• 1:19:46
  SPEAKER_03: The lifestyle thing gives me the the hippie jeebies do you think there is ever a world where we replace some of these major lifestyle interventions with a peptide so I'm a big believer that lifestyle is the most important thing for longevity and with lifestyle people talk about diet most important exercise equally important and sleep and a few other things but these are the three big ones that you can without any medical drugs you can improve your longevity substantially so can we substitute diet with a drug we already have GLP1 yeah can we substitute exercise with a peptide Mazzi is a promising candidate.
• 1:20:38
  SPEAKER_03: Sleep do we have a peptide for that not yet but that's one of my goals to identify that we're working on it right now.
• 1:20:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know depression is one of the biggest issues facing Western society.
• 1:20:55
  SPEAKER_03: We have a peptide for that very early but I'm excited about that.
• 1:20:59
  SPEAKER_00: But would you would you say supplement rather than substitute I don't know if there's ever going to be a mimetic that completely replaces them.
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_03: No supplements is a I don't like that term either business and I'm not sure what exactly is the definition of supplement.
• 1:21:16
  SPEAKER_03: I mean would you use do you envisage a world where I mean you use the word substitute would you substitute exercise for MOTSI or would you supplement your exercise with absolutely I would supplement just like already we know that GLP1 is not a substitute for diet it's a way to help you get to a place when you can follow a diet.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah yeah yeah and I think MOTC would emerge as a way to help you exercise better.
• 1:21:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah you know it improves your exercise capacity we believe probably adherence as well adherence and you know I have a good friend that says I don't want a drug that would make my body feel like it exercised.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_03: No, I agree.
• 1:22:00
  SPEAKER_03: I want a drug that would make me want to exercise we haven't found that yet but I think Matsy is definitely part of an exercise vision.
• 1:22:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah you know we like to think of it as exercise mimetic yeah it's also exercise induced the levels go up when we exercise naturally and it's exercise enhancing you give it to mice they run twice as long and I think some of the reports that I hear from people who have been taking black market Nazi is that they can exercise more.
• 1:22:34
  SPEAKER_03: I would wager to prove that we'll need to prove that I would wager as well it does act as a motivator to exercise because if you are progressing it's a mo it's a natural if you're seeing a difference or you're feeling an improvement in your energy levels or the way that you look and feel that is inherently motivating in and of itself how is how has studying these peptides affected the way that you manage your own health you know I would put it in perspective that I was an endocrinologist at UCLA running the Diabetes research center you know my career was going in a certain direction and then I discovered human and Mod C and they're so important in aging and longevity that my entire focus changed from you know diabetes and other endocrine disorders to healthy aging and longevity and I got a call in 2011 from USC recruiting me to be the dean of the School of Gerontology.
• 1:23:41
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't even know how to spell gerontology at the time I still occasionally misspell it.
• 1:23:46
  SPEAKER_03: And you know I said are you sure you got the right guy and I said yes we want you to interview for this job and eventually I accepted it and I took on the challenge of leading this unique institution which is entirely devoted to healthy aging and longevity and I realized the messaging that I have to put forward is that it's all about healthy lifestyle.
• 1:24:14
  SPEAKER_03: That's where it all starts then I recognized oops I have to start following some of the things that I said so I started following a much more appropriate healthy diet.
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_03: I became an incredible olive oil enthusiast they call me the olive oil Nazi because every time we go to any kind of meal I said you know olive oil for the table even big events I insist they'll have olive oil you know all these things because I have to tell people that they should do it, I started doing it is what you preach.
• 1:24:53
  SPEAKER_03: And then the peptides it's just part of that.
• 1:24:56
  SPEAKER_03: But really it's all about the lifestyle first.
• 1:24:58
  SPEAKER_03: Hasi, given that you've been doing this for such a long time is there anything that you wish you knew earlier like something that you discovered that really shocked you that you wish you knew earlier so you know I was a physician dealing with patients and I transitioned into a researcher working with mice and then when I moved to USC I wish I knew earlier this concept that transformed my career.
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_03: I mean I was doing okay then I met this woman called Eileen Cremens who is the leader I don't want to say the mother or grandmother that kind of doesn't sound right but she started this field of biodemography by pioneer the biodomography aging and she created these cohorts and empowered them with all these genetic and ohmic tools.
• 1:25:58
  SPEAKER_03: And that's where I kind of came to the realization that instead of testing those peptides you know with my eyes covered to go and do the genetic analysis to find the peptide solution for a condition.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_03: If I knew that five or 10 years earlier my life would have been different we've developed we would have developed MATC differently for muscle rather than obesity but better late than never.
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:26:27
  SPEAKER_00: Where do you see this field in 10 years' time?
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_03: I think things are moving so quickly now where do you think we are in a decade so I think I anticipate two things will really transform this area.
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_03: The first is that the standard FDA model is unsustainable.
• 1:26:48
  SPEAKER_03: We cannot throw three four five hundred million dollars on every drug we develop the 503A pass is not sufficient.
• 1:26:58
  SPEAKER_03: So I think we hopefully will find ourselves in an in-between place where you can develop a drug for$50 million, where we can do clinical trials with smaller numbers driven by AI and genetic uh selection of patients and personalizing healthcare precision approach that can allow us to develop drugs faster and cheaper.
• 1:27:28
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's critical the second thing is that people already talking about how AI will transform drug development it's not quite happening yet fully but the first AI kind of developed drugs are beginning to be looked at I think that all drugs will be heavily influenced by AI in a decade including peptides you know so A the engineered peptides that are not naturally caring are going to happen and AI will help us make them to really fit exactly where they're supposed to in the molecular receptor structure and things like MOTC or whatever peptide you want can be engineered really well to be longer acting more potent and we talked about the GLP once it's now from the first accenatide to retatrotide was 21 years.
• 1:28:34
  SPEAKER_03: This could be two years.
• 1:28:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah so I think these are the two things that will change this world.
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_00: Hassi I'm mindful of your time and we could go on for hours um I can come back in a few months.
• 1:28:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah well I'll make sure of it I want to say two things one I'm incredibly proud to have you as part of this council and like you've been one of the OGs right at the beginning when we were starting out on this journey and put your faith in us and I really appreciate that.
• 1:28:59
  SPEAKER_00: And secondly I'm just happy that there are people like you that are really sticking to this scientific credence and actually we can rely on and trust in to give us the the information that's true.
• 1:29:14
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we should be incredibly proud of that as well.
• 1:29:17
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you for having me Chris anytime