Dr. Neil Reardon talks about stem cell research and his experience with stem cell therapy for his father, a 92-year-old man with multiple heart, kidney, and hip problems. Dr. Reardon and his brother Brad discuss how stem cells can be used to treat a variety of medical problems, including heart, hip, and kidney problems, in order to improve the quality of life of a patient. This episode is brought to you by Stem Cell Revolution, a non-profit organization that provides free stem cell transplants to patients in need of life-support and treatment. To learn more about Stem Cells and their use in medicine, visit stemcell.org/support/stemcell and use coupon code: CROWN10 at checkout to get 10% off your first order of stem cell products! Thank you so much for your support of this podcast and stay tuned for more episodes in the coming weeks and months! Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Holidays! Cheers, EJ & Mel! - The EJ Crew - EJ and the EJ Team Music: "Goodbye" by Suneaters, "Happy Holidays" by Shadydave and "AstroFabulous" by Mr. & Mrs. Squared Earth, by Jeff Perla and "Outro: "Sole Lady" by The Weezer, "Thank You" by Fuzzywonderful Things (featuring: "The EJ Family and Friends) in tribute to the late father, Dr. Brad Reardon, "Hutch and his late son, Hutt, and his amazing daughter-in- in honor of his late wife, Brad's Dad, Brad and his beautiful daughter, Billie, Jr. . . . and how he was a great Dad. and much more! in this episode featuring: "Thank you, Mr. Brad and Mel Gibson" by EJ Reardon. in the background music: "Happy Thanksgiving! " by The Good Morning America and EJ's Dad: "Benni" by Dr. , "Happy New York City, " & "Thankyou're a good old day! . Thanks to EJ, Brad & EJ is a very special thanks you're a great friend of mine, Ej's Dad and Ej & Ej is a good friend of my Dad:
00:00:44.000I mean, I won't get into the whole litany of complaints, but hey, you know, your engine starts wearing out, and you've got to replace the carburetor and a few other things.
00:02:34.000So they're talking highfalutin terms, medical, all being medicos, you know, they sort of, they know what a mesenchymal stem cell, or mesenchymal, how do you say it?
00:02:46.000You know, mesenchymal cytokines, you know, out of sight, out of kind, as far as I'm concerned.
00:02:52.000But it's like they give us the wristwatch show over the phone for about an hour, and the doctor's asking him questions that I can't even think of.
00:03:01.000So when we hang up, I said, you know, translate, what does all that mean?
00:03:05.000And he was like, he translated a few things.
00:03:07.000He says, you know, it sounds kind of interesting, pretty good, you know.
00:03:09.000And from being a naysayer, he said, let's call him back.
00:04:34.000Right now, there are clinical trials going on in the U.S., but it's not broadly available.
00:04:37.000And in Panama, they passed a law in 2004, which allowed doctors, actually, to go down there to be able to treat people using adult stem cells.
00:04:46.000So the bill was actually designed to prohibit the use of embryonic stem cells.
00:04:52.000And in the same law, they said it's okay to use adult stem cells, including those from umbilical cord.
00:04:58.000Basically from ethical sources and so in Panama they gave us, we have a license from the Ministry of Health to manufacture and use those cells in addition to doing clinical trials there.
00:05:11.000So it's one place on the planet where you can get really high quality umbilical cord, this type of cell.
00:05:17.000There are two major kind of stem cells.
00:05:19.000We only work with one kind, the mesenchymal or we just call it MSC. It's a lot easier.
00:05:24.000So anyway, that's how I think we actually owned apartments in the same building in Panama and never met each other.
00:05:32.000We met through his brother finding us on the internet.
00:05:36.000And then they brought him down to get treatment.
00:05:38.000We were quite hesitant to take him because the last thing you want is Mel Gibson's dad to drop dead in your clinic and he wasn't in great shape.
00:05:49.000But, you know, as I recall, when he got there, he was in a wheelchair and really wasn't talking a lot and things like that and having a pretty rough time.
00:05:58.000And then after getting medical clearance for him to actually fly down there and mail for him down there privately, then we did some IVs on him first in the clinic.
00:06:09.000And then to do the hip, we need to do that.
00:06:12.000When you said did some IVs, what do you mean?
00:06:14.000So we give the umbilical cord, these are isolated from basically the meat of the umbilical cord.
00:06:23.000They're isolated and they're grown in our laboratory, which is ISO 9001 and very high quality and certified by the Ministry of Health.
00:06:33.000They're grown in the laboratory, and they're certified to be free of everything, any kind of infectious disease.
00:06:40.000I went into the clean rooms, and they make you put on hats and gloves, and you feel like all Frankensteined out, and you walk into these cold rooms, and you're watching cells divide under the microscope.
00:06:50.000It's kind of miraculous, really, to look at this stuff.
00:06:59.000Well, the good thing is that this kind of stem cell, the mesenchymal stem cell, they're found throughout your body, and normally what they do is they modulate your immune system, they decrease inflammation, and they stimulate regeneration.
00:07:11.000And the good thing about them is they tend to home to areas where there is inflammation.
00:07:15.000So intravenously, they do a lot of things, but they can home to areas of inflammation and They really reduce inflammation in the body because they upregulate part of your immune system that controls the inflammatory process,
00:07:41.000Unlike what we used to think in the early days, they don't become anything.
00:07:45.000This kind of stem cell does not become anything in your body, but it homes to areas that need repair and it secretes things that stimulates the repair and decreases the inflammation and helps out with the immune system.
00:07:57.000So the vast majority of what we treat are autoimmune diseases.
00:08:00.000And in Hutt's case, we gave him IVs so that he could basically have these things on board secreting The secreting the cytokines and the growth factors that are normally secreted, and when you're 92 and you have multi-organ failure,
00:12:59.000It's a federal exemption for the use of amnion for wound covering, and a lot of people have now translated, now they're using it in joints and things like that.
00:13:08.000You don't think they're going to be able to do that very much longer?
00:13:13.000Because this commissioner, FDA commissioner, has made it very clear that he doesn't like it.
00:13:17.000And they really haven't liked it for quite some time because the exemption is for one thing and doctors are using it for all kinds of other things.
00:13:51.000If you've seen all these benefits and I haven't heard anything about negative results.
00:13:57.000Yeah, I don't understand it myself, to be honest with you.
00:14:01.000Amnion's been used clinically in the United States for over 100 years without serious adverse events.
00:14:07.000But I think it's more about the claims that people are making because there haven't been studies For example, of amnion, you know, amnion tissue injected into a joint.
00:14:17.000And I think that the biggest concern is the claims that are being made and maybe people are being vulnerably, you know, I don't know, vulnerable to the economics of it.
00:14:27.000I'm not really sure, but I know that I just...
00:14:30.000I have my finger on the pulse, and it seems like they've gone after fat.
00:14:36.000We were the first in the world to use fat-derived stem cells in 2006. In 2007, we published on using those to treat rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.
00:14:49.000And then a lot of doctors in the U.S. started doing that.
00:14:52.000Now there's a new guidance in the industry that came out a few months ago that specifically prohibits using it for, for example, taking your own fat, isolating the stem cells out of it, and then injecting them in your bloodstream or even injecting them into a joint.
00:15:28.000It could be considered a new drug product in the U.S. And we are in clinical trials in the U.S. We have two INDs for the treatment of Duchenne's muscular dystrophy.
00:15:36.000And we're just going to start a spinal cord injury trial at the University of Miami and Thomas Jefferson University.
00:15:43.000We got funding from the Marcus Foundation.
00:15:47.000And he's seen all these kids with spinal cord injury getting better.
00:15:51.000And so our product is, we were able to figure out which cells work, which umbilical cords give cells that are really useful, and which ones aren't.
00:16:02.000So we throw away the vast majority of the umbilical cords that we get.
00:17:05.000He doesn't have any heat intolerance, doesn't have any problems.
00:17:08.000So I wanted to know what's the difference between those cells in 2012 and the ones in 2011 and the ones in 2010. And then we took other cases similar to that where we'd had less than spectacular results.
00:17:20.000I mean, they're still good results, but they weren't, you know, ba-boom.
00:17:24.000And so we took cells from those different lots and we grew them up and then we had them analyzed for 1,200 different molecules that they expressed.
00:17:33.000And we found that these cells, we call them our golden cells because they just seem to work all the time.
00:17:40.000And we found that they underexpressed certain proteins.
00:17:43.000And then, so early on in the culture process, we can select for those and say, hey, these are golden cells.
00:18:50.000Yeah, I was really impressed with what I was able to get done, but the stuff that, I wish I had Dr. McGee tell me exactly what it was, the stuff that they had done to me about a year and a half ago is no longer available.
00:19:05.000They decided that it was considered a drug, and they weren't allowing that form of amniotic stem cell treatment, so now there's a less effective but still effective form.
00:19:17.000So it seems like there's some sort of an effort afoot to diminish this in the United States.
00:19:22.000Yeah, well I think they just want to control it and they want it all to go through their deal and their processes.
00:19:29.000But in the meantime, a lot of people are probably suffering from some pretty significant injuries that they could deal with that far easier if this could somehow or another be sped up.
00:20:54.000Of course, there's a little bit too much traffic if you get that much concentration of people in one place.
00:20:59.000But fantastic restaurants, movie theaters, malls, shopping, high-end shopping malls, you name it, you got everything that you want down there.
00:21:13.000So you have people that hear about you from the United States, and they find out about your treatment and then fly down to Panama to get treated.
00:21:24.000Not just the U.S., but probably the majority of the clients are from the U.S., and then we have people from all other places around the globe.
00:21:32.000Do you anticipate this moving back to the United States in any way, or is this something that the hurdles are so steep that it's going to take a long time?
00:21:41.000I think we're going to figure out a way to do it.
00:21:43.000I think ultimately we're going to do it.
00:21:47.000We were the first to get an eye to treat a human being in the United States with these cells, and that was three and a half years ago with a young man with Duchenne's muscular dystrophy.
00:21:56.000And my other book that's hopefully interesting to read, it starts and finishes with his case where we treated him in Panama for a number of years and then we just petitioned FDA and said it's kind of ridiculous for us to do this down there.
00:22:23.000And then our next wedge is going to be for spinal cord injury.
00:22:27.000And there are a number of clinical trials that are going on not...
00:22:32.000Not just outside the US, there are a number going on in the US. The biggest hurdle is that a new drug, if you look at the last several years, cost $2.5 billion to get to market.
00:22:44.000And unless we do something a little bit differently on the regulatory side, it's going to be kind of hard to do this.
00:22:50.000Japan has a law that went into effect two years ago that It basically allows you to, once you demonstrate your product is safe, then you can go ahead and start marketing it, and then you have seven years in which to demonstrate efficacy.
00:23:34.000There's an argument that they want to err on the side of safety.
00:23:37.000I mean, that's their number one priority is to create a safe environment for receiving medicines in the United States.
00:23:47.000I think the model is a little bit antiquated for the cell products just because they are natural products.
00:23:55.000I mean, if you think about it, every woman that's ever given birth to a baby, they have stem cells from their baby in them.
00:24:02.000These MSCs, you can find them 50 years later, and they're not toxic, and we wouldn't exist as a species if there was an inherent toxicity to genetically distinct cells, because the cells are 50% mom, 50% dad, and you can find them in mom for her entire life.
00:24:24.000And the Cures Act was supposed to address some of that, and we'll see that went into effect last year, and we'll see going forward if that actually does affect things.
00:24:35.000Now, I know that they're doing some stuff in the United States where they're injecting them into discs.
00:24:40.000This is a new thing to regenerate disc tissue for people that have degenerative disc disease and bulging discs and disc injuries.
00:24:47.000And as an alternative to either artificial discs or fusion as a first step before they move into those.
00:24:58.000We're working with a hospital that we're actually going to...
00:25:03.000We're going to have a room just for doing backs, just for doing spine.
00:25:07.000Because there are studies, a study out of Europe just came out a couple months ago, and it showed about 50% of the patients had their discs become normal on MRI after treatment.
00:25:19.000So it's not every case, but I'd take a 50-50 shot versus having a fusion, right?
00:25:24.000Yeah, so that's the same sort of situation we're talking about where you're injecting it right into the discs.
00:25:50.000Not just the disc, but the muscles around the disc.
00:25:54.000If you take somebody who's had an injury, my partner, Dr. McKenna, is an orthopedic surgeon and he's been talking about this for years.
00:26:01.000But if you take somebody with a disc injury and you look at the muscles right on the either side of the spine there, And you'll find that they're withered away or they're marbled with fat and that sort of thing.
00:26:11.000You take an elite athlete, somebody who's super healthy, works out all the time, those muscles, they're like ropes.
00:26:16.000It's a filet mignon of the human body, right?
00:26:18.000And you look at that and they're just black on MRI. But you take somebody that's had a disc injury at any level and you can look and there's marbling in there and it's withered and that sort of thing.
00:26:28.000So, one of the things we do in South Lake and Dallas is we inject the disc, but also inject those muscles along the side.
00:26:37.000And that's using your own bone marrow, and that's still allowed in the United States.
00:26:41.000So, the bone marrow draw, concentrate the stem cells and inject them in those areas.
00:26:46.000Well, that's something that we were talking about earlier when I showed you the reverse hyper, when I showed you that machine and then that Dex back stretcher.
00:26:52.000I think that's a significant part of the injuries that you see with people with discs, with back injuries.
00:27:44.000I mean, I don't know why you feel sleepy.
00:27:48.000Neil may have an explanation for that.
00:27:50.000Yeah, well, the cells kind of re-educate the immune system.
00:27:54.000A lot of what we treat are rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, autoimmune diseases, and there's a retraining that's going on in the immune system.
00:28:05.000That involves cytokines and those molecules, those peptides are the things that make you feel sick.
00:28:11.000I mean, when you get the flu, the flu virus doesn't make you sick.
00:28:14.000It's your body's immune reaction to that.
00:28:16.000That's the stuff that's being thrown off from the fight.
00:28:20.000That's what actually makes you feel sick.
00:28:22.000And so when you're activating certain parts of the immune system and they're throwing out things that make you a little bit tired, some people, a very small percentage have some flu-like symptoms for one day.
00:28:33.000But that's kind of like the extent of the side effects that we typically see.
00:28:38.000But if you look at, like, you ask why isn't it being done in the U.S., for rheumatic drugs, so you see them on TV, they're advertised, Basically, every hour of every day on almost every station,
00:28:55.000And, you know, if you have rheumatoid arthritis, if you have psoriatic arthritis or this sort of thing, these are biologics and these are antibodies to a certain molecule called TNF. TNF is one of the commanders of the immune system.
00:29:07.000It kind of says, hey, let's cause a bunch of inflammation and make you miserable.
00:29:11.000And so these drugs basically bind up or sop up the TNF that's in your body for a period of time.
00:29:19.000That's why you have to get retreated like every month, every six months, every two months, something like that, six weeks, two months.
00:29:25.000And you have to get retreated and retreated.
00:29:28.000There's a study of rheumatoid arthritis where it was 172 people that were already on medication for rheumatoid arthritis, not adequately controlled.
00:29:38.000They gave them like the equivalent of what a typical dose we give in Panama is, like roughly 120 million cells.
00:29:47.000And the cool thing was that TNF-alpha and another molecule similar to it Decreased by 50%, and that decrease persisted for eight and a half months.
00:30:00.000So rather than putting an antibody in to sop up what's being produced, apparently, by your immune system, the cells tell your immune system to stop it, right?
00:30:14.000They upregulated a certain immune cell called a T-regulatory cell.
00:30:18.000That says to the immune system, hey, quit making TNF-alpha.
00:30:23.000And they took 30 patients, a sub-cohort, like three months later, and gave them another shot, the same dose, and it dropped their levels another 50% from that baseline.
00:30:33.000So from baseline to post-second treatment, two treatments, two IVs sitting in a chair, dropped their levels 75%.
00:30:43.000It just seems like something that would be amazing for overall repair.
00:30:46.000Like, just go down there and let your body just get a little dose of healing to figure out what the fuck is wrong with it.
00:30:55.000We talked about something in Costa Rica.
00:31:00.000I had a, you know, they looked at my neck, I had a 50% occlusion in the right carotid, you know, like buildup of stuff, like you don't feel it happening all of a sudden, you know, all of a sudden when your carotid is shut down, they think, well, you have to eat the statins,
00:31:50.000Yeah, well, just in general, your body, you have a certain number of these cells when you're born, and they age just like the rest of your body.
00:32:02.000They perform more poorly as you age, right?
00:32:05.000So if you take one of these cells from a newborn, like when you were born, you could pluck one of these cells out, throw it in a petri dish and let it grow.
00:32:12.000You let it grow for a month, it divides roughly every 24 hours, or that's the doubling rate.
00:32:18.000So at the end of a month, you have a billion cells.
00:32:21.000And then if you take from a 35-year-old and do the same thing, doubling times like two days instead of one day, and at the end of the month you have 32,000 cells.
00:32:31.000And you take them from a 65-year-old who's relatively healthy and they divide every 60 hours, you get 200 cells at the end of the month.
00:32:39.000So if your problem is 1,000 cells or it's 20,000 cells or if it's a million cells, You can't get it done past a certain age just because the cells don't have the regenerative capacity.
00:32:49.000And the good thing about the umbilical cord cells is they, if you co-culture them with these older people's cells, with the young cells, they don't even have to touch each other.
00:32:58.000Just the secretions of the young cells will make the old cells start Dividing faster and behaving younger.
00:33:05.000And the mitochondria, you see pictures in my book, you can see a picture of cells from a 65-year-old diabetic without any juice on them.
00:33:16.000And then you put the juice from the young cells on there, and they look like 18-year-old MSCs.
00:33:22.000With functional mitochondria all throughout the cell body rather than all bunched up, they look healthy.
00:33:28.000I mean, as a cell biologist, I know what looks healthy and anybody else would.
00:33:33.000You can see just from the picture how vastly different it is just to be exposed to the juice.
00:33:40.000You heard of this parabiosis study they did at Harvard where they took young mice and they sewed them together with old mice and then the old mice actually got younger.
00:33:52.000You mean they'd use the blood of the young mice and put it in the old mice?
00:33:55.000Well, they literally sewed them together.
00:34:09.000So at the end of the study, they showed that the older mice, their neurologic system got better, their cardiovascular system got better, their skeletal muscle got better, everything got better.
00:34:21.000And one of the key molecules in there is called GDF11. And GDF11, when we look at the secretome, what these cells secrete when they're growing, and we pull that out and we quantify it, in the top four every time is GDF11 from the golden cells.
00:34:38.000So the golden cells are overproducing GDF11, which is one of the key molecules for stimulating regeneration in your body.
00:34:44.000So what other autoimmune diseases do you think could be assisted by this?
00:34:50.000Well, we do a lot of MS. That's probably our number one indication.
00:34:56.000We just finished a clinical trial, prospective clinical trial.
00:36:07.000He carried on working just so she could have insurance to afford the medications, which were around $100,000 a year, for her to get treated for rheumatoid arthritis.
00:36:27.000Walking around the mall when she was in Panama.
00:36:30.000And then when she got home, she's completely, you know, pain-free.
00:36:33.000And she's been pain-free for three years.
00:36:34.000And her husband finally retired because he didn't care about, you know, having the insurance to pay for these very expensive drugs that she was taking.
00:37:19.000So why would it have such a benefit for them?
00:37:23.000Well, I wrote an article in 2007 about why these cells should be good for autism.
00:37:28.000And basically, it's the most downloaded article this journal's ever had.
00:37:35.000Something like 75,000 people have downloaded a scientific journal article, which really doesn't happen very often.
00:37:45.000People with autism have inflammatory things going on in their body.
00:37:49.000A lot of times in the gut, at the end of the small intestine, there are these inflammatory nodules that look a lot like Crohn's disease, and they secrete this inflammation that then goes to the brain, inflames the white matter of the brain, the white matter of the brain swells,
00:38:05.000decreases the blood flow to the brain.
00:38:10.000And then just a few years ago, there was a study that came out, and this is what This is what allowed us to go forward with our clinical trial.
00:38:18.000They found that there are these two inflammatory molecules that are MDC and TARC, and they perfectly correlate with the severity of symptoms of autism.
00:38:27.000And so we measured not only those two, but another 30-some biomarkers.
00:38:35.000We did a lot of standardized scoring with a neurologist that read them, you know, Before treatment, during treatment, after treatment.
00:38:46.000So I believe a lot of the problems with autism stem from the inflammatory status, and these cells are definitely anti-inflammatory.
00:38:57.000Yeah, they've had some benefit with changing the diet and changing the gut biome of kids with autism, and they've made some benefits for that, which they believe is also connected to inflammation.
00:39:10.000If your immune system is freaking out every time you eat a piece of bread and that immune system is throwing out molecules that are swelling your brain and inflaming your brain, then it makes complete sense.
00:39:21.000I think, in general, the people with autism that do the best are the ones that get that addressed before they come down.
00:39:31.000You know, there's some other doctors that do functional medicine.
00:40:03.000So there are different kinds of heart failure.
00:40:07.000The interesting thing about heart failure is the cells don't need to go to the heart and to actually become new heart cells and that sort of thing.
00:40:16.000It's actually the secretions of the cells.
00:40:19.000Like I said before, there was a study at University of Buffalo where they injected cells IV in a hamster model of heart failure and then they looked in the heart and there were very few cells, but the heart failure got better.
00:40:32.000And then they said, oh, let's inject those same cells, these are umbilical MSCs, inject them into the hamstring muscle.
00:40:39.000And they demonstrated that none of the cells came out of the hamstring muscle, and yet the heart failure got better.
00:40:45.000So then they took just the juice, the liquid that the cells secrete, and they simulated the amount of juice that the cells would have produced in the body and just injected the juice and the heart failure got better.
00:40:56.000So it's really the secretions of the cells stimulating the natural repair, augmenting the natural repair process of the body that has been stretched to its limit.
00:41:07.000You know, if you have a 65-year-old, those cells aren't dividing very well.
00:41:10.000The juice can help the cells divide faster and produce more repair molecules and make it better.
00:41:16.000So do you think that it could take someone who's on a heart transplant list and literally fix their heart?
00:41:44.000I think in the book, the craziest case was a gringo who was down in Costa Rica.
00:41:53.000I don't know, he was probably 20-25% routinely, but he got a viral disease or something else and he was 11% ejection fraction.
00:42:01.000Normal is about 60. And the regular hospital who worked a lot with us with our spinal cord patients and seeing results, seeing people walking again, they just said, you can't get on a plane.
00:42:47.000And he was, you know, not even 50 years old, and his ejection fraction was, you know, hovering around 30 percent.
00:42:54.000And a lot of people at, you know, at an advanced age, You're not even going to get on the list because if you're a 50 or 60-year-old and there's a 20-year-old ahead of you, a 20-year-old's going to win.
00:43:06.000And so he begged and begged to come down.
00:43:09.000We didn't really want to take him because we didn't know what was going to happen because nobody had ever done it.
00:43:13.000And we treated him and he went back and he had an ejection fraction, he had an echocardiogram, and it was 52 percent.
00:43:22.000And then the doctor didn't believe it, so he redid it a month later and it was 55 percent.
00:43:28.000So, you know, it's not, I don't think it's for every case.
00:43:32.000I mean, you have people with like a super bad heart attack and there's not enough to repair and you really need a heart transplant.
00:43:37.000But I think you're going to see that it's ultimately, I think in 20 years, you're probably going to see standard of care for diseases, chronic diseases like Any chronic degenerative disease for which there's no good treatment, you're going to see standard of care is going to be young,
00:43:57.000Because if you look at the root cause, I get a question a lot, how is it these things work for so many things?
00:44:04.000Well, when the root cause is a lack of or dysfunction of those cells, then it makes sense that replenishing those or restoring them with young, healthy ones could be a useful treatment.
00:44:15.000Mel, this is so important to you that you wanted to come on and talk about this.
00:44:19.000You wanted to let people know about this shit.
00:44:20.000Yeah, I think it's amazing, and it seems a crime to me that, you know, it isn't easier to do in this country.
00:44:29.000I mean, they should look a little harder at it, and it's a mystery to me why it isn't the case, but, you know, hey, if there are places where one can go and get some help.
00:46:12.000In animal models, these cells, you give them to the animal, they go into the muscle, and then they They start secreting that molecule that they're missing, but they only last for about four, five, six months.
00:46:23.000And then they start maturing, and then the immune system clears them.
00:46:38.000They're just there to do their job, which is to keep homeostasis, keep the immune system controlled, help with regeneration, all that sort of thing.
00:46:48.000But the embryonic stuff, because I find this interesting.
00:46:51.000The embryonic stuff is full of weird anomalies and stuff, right?
00:47:41.000If there's one left, then it's going to form a tumor.
00:47:44.000So that was the big problem, that the expense, you know, it's $300,000, $400,000 a dose just to make sure that they didn't have one in them.
00:47:51.000And then they weren't as beneficial, and they've been monkeyed with in the lab from...
00:47:55.000When they were embryonic and then converted and converted and converted and then grown up in huge numbers.
00:48:09.000You put them in a nutrient broth in the right temperature and humidity and oxygen levels and they just grow.
00:48:16.000And so we wrote an article about embryonic stem cells.
00:48:23.000The king is dead, long live the king, because the California voters knee-jerked $3 billion towards embryonic stem cell work against the Bush administration's restriction of spending money on embryonic stem cell research.
00:48:41.000It wasn't banned, as most people said.
00:48:44.000All they said was, we're not going to use taxpayer money, federal taxpayer money, to go towards that.
00:48:49.000And what people heard was they don't want progress.
00:48:53.000Well, what's happened is, at last count, I think they spent $2.75 billion.
00:50:05.000It's hard to say because everybody's bone marrow is different, your age is different.
00:50:10.000You know, if you're 85 years old, even if you're 65 years old and you're a smoker or you're diabetic, I don't think it's worth typically using your bone marrow because it's just not going to do a lot.
00:50:21.000But younger people, healthier people, a lot of times when it's in a joint, because That's the only thing we can do in the U.S. is orthopedics.
00:50:30.000But if it's an orthopedic problem, then, you know, they could check out, see if they could, you know, we could do something for them in Dallas.
00:50:37.000If it's not orthopedic and you need systemic treatment for autoimmune disease, if you have a spinal cord injury or autism, any of those conditions, then they go to cellmedicine, C-E-L-L-Medicine.com, and that's where we have, there's all the information there,
00:52:26.000What benefits did he find off of that?
00:52:28.000Well, you know, I don't think for his neck, structurally, we weren't able to get the cells there, and I don't know if there's enough left, you know?
00:52:45.000A lot of people talk about hair loss, and these cells work for hair loss, and yeah, they do a pretty good job, but you can't grow grass on concrete.
00:52:53.000You can't stimulate a nerve to regrow.
00:52:58.000I don't believe he got any benefit from his accident problem, but the metabolic benefits were fantastic for him, energy-wise and things like that.
00:53:10.000Yeah, one of his issues is that he has some atrophy on one of his arms because his nerves in his neck were being pinched for a long time and he didn't address it quick enough.
00:53:21.000And it got to the point where his arm was shrinking.
00:53:24.000And that's one of the reasons why he went down there.
00:53:26.000Did he experience any benefit from that?
00:53:31.000Well, especially a really long time out.
00:53:33.000For spinal cord injury, we did a cohort analysis and basically if they're within one year of injury, 100% of the patients had restoration of some neurologic function.
00:53:49.000If it was between one and two years, it was 82%.
00:53:52.000If it was after two years, it was 50%.
00:53:54.000So the longer it is, and also the older you are, the less oomph you have left.
00:54:00.000The reason these cells work for spinal cord injuries, they don't become nerves or anything like that, but the spinal cord is one of the most replete Areas of the body, when it comes to blood vessels, there's barely enough blood vessels to keep it alive.
00:54:16.000And your liver, on the other hand, has just tons of blood vessels in it.
00:54:20.000And your liver, you know, you can cut 80% of your liver out and it will regrow itself.
00:54:24.000With your spinal cord, you just kind of ding it a little bit and it won't repair itself.
00:54:27.000That's because there are no blood vessels and therefore there are no MSCs or very few MSCs.
00:54:32.000So like 1 50th the number of MSCs reside in your spinal cord because we built this wonderful cage around it to protect it.
00:54:39.000And so all we're doing is we shoot the cells in there.
00:54:43.000We also give them an IV. And the cells secrete the things that are necessary for the spinal cord to regenerate itself.
00:54:49.000But the longer it is from injury, the more scarring there is and all that sort of thing, the less benefit you're going to see.
00:54:57.000So do you anticipate a time where they'll be able to regenerate spinal tissue or someone has got a spinal cord injury where they have partial or some sort of paralysis and they can be able to regenerate that?
00:55:09.000I do, and we have many cases that it's already happened.
00:55:15.000Well, you know, Juan Carlos Murillo is a commercial pilot from Costa Rica, and he was one day flying as a National Geographic photographer around in his private plane in a pancake, and both of them got spinal cord injuries.
00:55:29.000When you say pancake, do you mean crashed?
00:55:58.000We're giving them IV cells and intrathecal, so into the spinal fluid.
00:56:03.000So the first round of treatments, after that, he described it as like a 10 out of a 10 pain scale.
00:56:13.000So he had this neuropathic pain that was just like he was shoveling down narcotics like nobody's business.
00:56:19.000And after the first treatment, he didn't get any restoration of the function or anything, but his pain dropped from a 10 to a 3. And so he got off the narcotics.
00:56:28.000Then the second time we treated him, he got his left leg back.
00:56:35.000Okay, we started treating him six months and three days after his accident.
00:56:39.000And then so he got the first round of treatments was in, you know, the first month.
00:56:44.000And it was about three months later, we did the second round.
00:56:46.000Three months later, he got his right leg back.
00:56:48.000And then three months later, so it was over about a year, a 15-month period probably in total, he basically got everything back.
00:56:55.000He got erectile function, he got bowel, bladder, all that sort of thing.
00:56:58.000And, you know, I just had dinner with him the other night in Costa Rica, and he can walk in here, and he got his commercial pilot's license back, and, you know, he started a new business, and, you know, he has...
00:57:51.000So when we were designing this study that we're doing at Miami that's being funded by the Marcus people, there are two neurosurgeons that are on that.
00:58:01.000So we wanted to, okay, we're discussing at what time point should we accept them?
00:58:08.000And these very prominent neurosurgeons said, let's do six months, because at six months, you've got 98% to 99% back of everything you're going to have.
00:58:16.000So let's do patients or subjects that are from six months to two years.
00:58:20.000And so those are the inclusion criteria.
00:58:22.000That's the timing that we're going to do for the study at Miami.
00:58:35.000Yeah, well it's referenced in both books, but in the spinal cord chapter, so Stem Cell Therapy Rising Tide is the one that, it's written for the lay person.
00:58:49.000So it's referenced in there and the whole story about Juan Carlos and his journey and how he got started and everything's in there as well as a reference to the published article that's in a scientific journal about his case.
00:59:01.000And then MSC is the one that you read if you want to go to sleep or if you're a super nerd.
01:00:16.000Well, listen, man, it was a real treat, real pleasure.
01:00:19.000I'm so fascinated about this stuff because of my own personal experience with the limited amount of stem cell treatments that I've gotten, but I've had great results.
01:00:27.000I had a knee injury that was bothering me forever.
01:00:31.000The shoulder doesn't bother me at all anymore.
01:00:33.000I mean, it's pretty amazing stuff, and from what you're saying, I'm getting a very watered-down, not nearly as potent version of what you have in Panama.