The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1066 - Mel Gibson & Dr. Neil Riordan

00:00:03.000 Three, two, one.

00:00:05.000 And we're live, gentlemen.

00:00:06.000 Dr. Neil Reardon.

00:00:08.000 Am I saying that right?

00:00:09.000 Yes, sir.

00:00:09.000 And Mel Gibson.

00:00:10.000 How are you, sir?

00:00:10.000 Hey, how are you doing?

00:00:12.000 Welcome aboard, folks.

00:00:13.000 First of all, thanks for coming here.

00:00:15.000 Really appreciate it.

00:00:16.000 Very nice to meet you.

00:00:16.000 No, it's cool to be here.

00:00:17.000 Nice to meet you, too.

00:00:18.000 So you wanted to come in and talk about stem cells.

00:00:22.000 Yeah.

00:00:23.000 So what's your experience been, and what's this calling that you have here?

00:00:29.000 Well, I was initially, it was for my dad, who was, you know, he was 92. And he was doing all the old man stuff.

00:00:40.000 You know, his hip was killing him, and he was like...

00:00:42.000 He had multiple problems.

00:00:44.000 I mean, I won't get into the whole litany of complaints, but hey, you know, your engine starts wearing out, and you've got to replace the carburetor and a few other things.

00:00:53.000 I took him to the Mayo Clinic.

00:00:56.000 Great place.

00:00:57.000 If I ever get into serious trouble, that's where I'm going.

00:01:00.000 And they were fantastic there, but they were able to say, you've got to leave me here, he'll be dead in 48 hours.

00:01:06.000 I'm like, oh.

00:01:07.000 So they clocked every problem that he had.

00:01:11.000 Everything from, you know, the prostate to the hip, to the kidneys, to the heart, to the lung, you know, the whole deal.

00:01:20.000 And he, you know, they stabilized him.

00:01:26.000 They said, okay, we'll do this and we'll do this.

00:01:28.000 And they did some, you know.

00:01:31.000 Orthodox medical procedures all allowed in this country.

00:01:35.000 And they were great.

00:01:37.000 But, you know, I still had reservations about him getting a hip replacement because he was old.

00:01:42.000 And of course, just the recovery from a traumatic surgery at that age is like, it's a big deal.

00:01:49.000 And I thought, oh, what can I do?

00:01:52.000 And my brother says, why don't you look into these adult stem cells?

00:01:54.000 I'm like, eh, you know, I've heard things about this, you know.

00:01:59.000 You grow a spare mouth on your head. 1.00

00:02:03.000 You end up with an extra asshole or something. 1.00

00:02:06.000 But I was like, okay, we'll look into it. 1.00

00:02:08.000 So we did.

00:02:09.000 And of course, a buddy of mine who was a Mayo doc, he said, stay away from those witch doctors down in Panama. 1.00

00:02:17.000 He said, it's like leprosy and banana boats and three-legged dogs, you know.

00:02:21.000 I'm like, can we call him?

00:02:24.000 And so Brad and I got on the phone to Neil, and who else was it?

00:02:29.000 Yeah, it was Dr. Paz, our medical doctor.

00:02:30.000 Yeah, it was the two of these guys.

00:02:34.000 So they're talking highfalutin terms, medical, all being medicos, you know, they sort of, they know what a mesenchymal stem cell, or mesenchymal, how do you say it?

00:02:43.000 Mesenchymal.

00:02:44.000 Mesenchymal, you know.

00:02:46.000 You know, mesenchymal cytokines, you know, out of sight, out of kind, as far as I'm concerned.

00:02:52.000 But 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.

00:03:01.000 So when we hang up, I said, you know, translate, what does all that mean?

00:03:05.000 And he was like, he translated a few things.

00:03:07.000 He says, you know, it sounds kind of interesting, pretty good, you know.

00:03:09.000 And from being a naysayer, he said, let's call him back.

00:03:12.000 And I think we called you right back.

00:03:15.000 And we spend another hour on the phone.

00:03:19.000 Well, to his credit, Brad asked for a bunch of literature and I sent him maybe 30 articles and most physicians wouldn't even look at it.

00:03:28.000 But it was all relevant to what Hutt had and, you know, for the heart problems and kidney problems.

00:03:35.000 And he read all the articles.

00:03:37.000 And he read the upside, the downside, and then we had, to his credit, then we had a very educated talk after that.

00:03:47.000 Conversation, yeah.

00:03:48.000 And he was really, you know, by this time informed.

00:03:52.000 And he just said to me, well, you know, he's 92. He says, what the hell have you got to lose?

00:03:58.000 And I said, no, nothing.

00:03:59.000 Let's go.

00:04:00.000 So I'm up for it.

00:04:01.000 We asked him, is he up for it?

00:04:02.000 He goes, hell yeah.

00:04:03.000 Because he's, you know, they took him into the hospital.

00:04:06.000 He was 92. And they said, what medications are you on?

00:04:08.000 And he said, I'm not on any.

00:04:10.000 And they said, you're 92 years old.

00:04:12.000 How do you account for not being on any medications?

00:04:14.000 He says, it's because I stay away from doctors and hospitals.

00:04:19.000 And he didn't have any problems.

00:04:20.000 He started to have a rough trip.

00:04:23.000 Well, we took him down there and he got, I think it was like a double dose in the hip.

00:04:29.000 So where did you have to go?

00:04:31.000 This is not legal in America.

00:04:32.000 Is that what's going on?

00:04:33.000 Yeah.

00:04:34.000 Right now, there are clinical trials going on in the U.S., but it's not broadly available.

00:04:37.000 And in Panama, they passed a law in 2004, which allowed doctors, actually, to go down there to be able to treat people using adult stem cells.

00:04:46.000 So the bill was actually designed to prohibit the use of embryonic stem cells.

00:04:52.000 And in the same law, they said it's okay to use adult stem cells, including those from umbilical cord.

00:04:58.000 Basically from ethical sources and so in Panama they gave us, we have a license from the Ministry of Health to manufacture and use those cells in addition to doing clinical trials there.

00:05:11.000 So it's one place on the planet where you can get really high quality umbilical cord, this type of cell.

00:05:17.000 There are two major kind of stem cells.

00:05:19.000 We only work with one kind, the mesenchymal or we just call it MSC. It's a lot easier. 1.00

00:05:24.000 So anyway, that's how I think we actually owned apartments in the same building in Panama and never met each other.

00:05:32.000 We met through his brother finding us on the internet.

00:05:35.000 There you go.

00:05:36.000 And then they brought him down to get treatment.

00:05:38.000 We 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.

00:05:47.000 He wasn't in good shape at all.

00:05:49.000 But, you know, as I recall, when he got there, he was in a wheelchair and really wasn't talking a lot and things like that and having a pretty rough time.

00:05:58.000 And then after getting medical clearance for him to actually fly down there and mail for him down there privately, then we did some IVs on him first in the clinic.

00:06:09.000 And then to do the hip, we need to do that.

00:06:12.000 When you said did some IVs, what do you mean?

00:06:14.000 So we give the umbilical cord, these are isolated from basically the meat of the umbilical cord.

00:06:23.000 They're isolated and they're grown in our laboratory, which is ISO 9001 and very high quality and certified by the Ministry of Health.

00:06:33.000 They're grown in the laboratory, and they're certified to be free of everything, any kind of infectious disease.

00:06:40.000 I went into the clean rooms, and they make you put on hats and gloves, and you feel like all Frankensteined out, and you walk into these cold rooms, and you're watching cells divide under the microscope.

00:06:50.000 It's kind of miraculous, really, to look at this stuff.

00:06:52.000 So, intravenous stem cells.

00:06:54.000 Right, intravenous, that's correct.

00:06:56.000 And what's the benefit of intravenous stem cells?

00:06:58.000 Like, what does that do?

00:06:59.000 Well, the good thing is that this kind of stem cell, the mesenchymal stem cell, they're found throughout your body, and normally what they do is they modulate your immune system, they decrease inflammation, and they stimulate regeneration.

00:07:11.000 And the good thing about them is they tend to home to areas where there is inflammation.

00:07:15.000 So intravenously, they do a lot of things, but they can home to areas of inflammation and They really reduce inflammation in the body because they upregulate part of your immune system that controls the inflammatory process,

00:07:31.000 which I can talk more about later.

00:07:33.000 But in his case, you know, his kidneys were in trouble.

00:07:37.000 His heart was in trouble.

00:07:38.000 And the cells, they don't...

00:07:41.000 Unlike what we used to think in the early days, they don't become anything.

00:07:45.000 This kind of stem cell does not become anything in your body, but it homes to areas that need repair and it secretes things that stimulates the repair and decreases the inflammation and helps out with the immune system.

00:07:57.000 So the vast majority of what we treat are autoimmune diseases.

00:08:00.000 And in Hutt's case, we gave him IVs so that he could basically have these things on board secreting The secreting the cytokines and the growth factors that are normally secreted, and when you're 92 and you have multi-organ failure,

00:08:17.000 you're basically running on fumes.

00:08:19.000 And so you put these day zero young healthy cells and they secrete these things that kind of restarts everything.

00:08:27.000 Yeah.

00:08:27.000 And so what was his response to this IV treatment?

00:08:30.000 Well, you know, I can wax lyrical about that.

00:08:35.000 He's almost 100 years old.

00:08:37.000 And from pretty bad shape, it was like bee stings.

00:08:41.000 It was like he got a new lease of life.

00:08:43.000 Like he got a big dose locally in the hip, which fixed all his inflammation and pain and he started walking again.

00:08:52.000 And his kidneys were good, and his heart, he had prolapse valves in there and they healed.

00:08:57.000 And his cognitive powers improved.

00:09:01.000 His eyesight improved.

00:09:04.000 And other stuff improved that he would hate me to talk about.

00:09:11.000 But he had two nurses that reported to me.

00:09:13.000 And it was like, holy mackerel.

00:09:17.000 Using it as a towel rack?

00:09:19.000 Well, Dan Bilzerian was telling me about intravenous stem cells.

00:09:23.000 And so was Bas Rutten.

00:09:24.000 You know, Bas Rutten, the former UFC heavyweight champion.

00:09:26.000 He went down and got some, he's had some pretty significant neck injuries and neck fusions.

00:09:31.000 And he said he got intravenous stem cells.

00:09:33.000 The way he described it is like, with his Dutch accent, it was like, it was like I had lightning coming out of my fingers.

00:09:38.000 Like, wah!

00:09:39.000 Did he go to you?

00:09:40.000 Yeah.

00:09:41.000 Did he?

00:09:41.000 Yeah.

00:09:42.000 He said it was phenomenal.

00:09:43.000 I mean, he said it's one of the most incredible experiences he's ever had.

00:09:46.000 The feeling of a regeneration of energy going throughout his body.

00:09:51.000 I reached out to him by email just to see if it would be okay for me to talk about him on here.

00:09:58.000 And he said, yeah, absolutely.

00:09:59.000 You know, his cholesterol dropped.

00:10:03.000 All his numbers, you know, the basically numbers associated with aging all got better.

00:10:08.000 And like you said, he felt this tremendous energy for some period of time.

00:10:13.000 Why is this not legal here?

00:10:17.000 Well, it's considered to be a new drug by the FDA, and that's the number one reason.

00:10:22.000 There are four countries so far that have approved MSC products.

00:10:28.000 There's Canada and New Zealand were the first.

00:10:31.000 Do you go to Canada and get this done?

00:10:32.000 Well, only for certain conditions.

00:10:35.000 So in Canada and New Zealand, they approved bone marrow MSCs, which are, in my mind, are not as good as umbilical cord, and I explain why.

00:10:45.000 And then South Korea has approved umbilical cord for knee osteoarthritis only, so the cells have to be injected into the knee.

00:10:53.000 And then Japan just recently approved the same product.

00:10:56.000 It's used to treat a very serious acute graft-versus-host disease in children after they've had a bone marrow transplant.

00:11:05.000 Now, are there peer-reviewed studies or anything that shows the efficacy of this intravenous use of these stem cells?

00:11:12.000 Yeah, there are hundreds.

00:11:14.000 There are hundreds.

00:11:14.000 And my book, MSC, which is, you know, you don't want to read it unless you want to go to sleep, unless you're looking for something.

00:11:20.000 You know, it really is purely a research tool.

00:11:25.000 We have 800 references, and we reference every clinical trial that's ever been done with MSCs in human beings, and there are 800 of them.

00:11:32.000 Well, I've had some great results with stem cells.

00:11:35.000 Dr. Roddy McGee in Las Vegas shot a bunch into my shoulder.

00:11:39.000 I was at the door of surgery.

00:11:42.000 I was like, my shoulder's in pain all the time.

00:11:44.000 I can't do a lot.

00:11:45.000 Every time I do something, I have to ice it down for a day.

00:11:47.000 And now I have full function.

00:11:49.000 I mean, it's crazy.

00:11:50.000 I mean, it still clicks. 0.97

00:11:52.000 I've got some weird shit in there, and there's probably some stuff floating around in there. 0.58

00:11:55.000 But as far as the function of my shoulder and the pain, it's like 100%. 0.96

00:12:00.000 I can do basically everything.

00:12:02.000 Yeah, I was 57, 58 years old.

00:12:05.000 And this is like, what, four or five years ago.

00:12:08.000 And both my shoulders, torn labrums, arthritis, bone spurs, like rotator cuff issues.

00:12:14.000 And I went down and I got 10 million cells in each shoulder.

00:12:19.000 I said to the doc, you know, is this going to hurt?

00:12:22.000 And he says, only when it comes out the other side.

00:12:24.000 But he put it in and it was, you could feel him pierce the capsule.

00:12:29.000 And you could feel pressure.

00:12:32.000 And I couldn't flap my wings for three days, but after that, no more problems.

00:12:36.000 And this is different than the stem cells that you can get in the United States currently?

00:12:40.000 Yes.

00:12:40.000 What's the difference?

00:12:41.000 Well, the big difference...

00:12:42.000 Because I had, from umbilical cores, I had, what is it called?

00:12:46.000 What's the kind that you can get here in the United States?

00:12:48.000 Well, the only thing that's legal in the U.S., at least for now, I don't think it's going to last much longer, is from Amnion.

00:12:56.000 Yeah, that's what I got.

00:12:56.000 And there's an exemption in the...

00:12:59.000 It's a federal exemption for the use of amnion for wound covering, and a lot of people have now translated, now they're using it in joints and things like that.

00:13:08.000 You don't think they're going to be able to do that very much longer?

00:13:11.000 I don't believe so.

00:13:12.000 Why is that?

00:13:13.000 Because this commissioner, FDA commissioner, has made it very clear that he doesn't like it.

00:13:17.000 And 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.

00:13:27.000 I don't necessarily agree with it.

00:13:28.000 I just know what's coming down the pike from a regulatory standpoint.

00:13:34.000 And, you know, there have been some regulatory things that have come out.

00:13:37.000 They've gone after clinics.

00:13:38.000 You know, I think they've shut down three places just in the last couple of months.

00:13:42.000 And they haven't gone after Amnion yet, but I think they're building their case for it.

00:13:46.000 And unfortunately, that's what's going to happen.

00:13:49.000 Now, why would they go after it?

00:13:50.000 That's what's confusing.

00:13:51.000 If you've seen all these benefits and I haven't heard anything about negative results.

00:13:57.000 Yeah, I don't understand it myself, to be honest with you.

00:14:01.000 Amnion's been used clinically in the United States for over 100 years without serious adverse events.

00:14:07.000 But I think it's more about the claims that people are making because there haven't been studies For example, of amnion, you know, amnion tissue injected into a joint.

00:14:17.000 And I think that the biggest concern is the claims that are being made and maybe people are being vulnerably, you know, I don't know, vulnerable to the economics of it.

00:14:27.000 I'm not really sure, but I know that I just...

00:14:30.000 I have my finger on the pulse, and it seems like they've gone after fat.

00:14:36.000 We were the first in the world to use fat-derived stem cells in 2006. In 2007, we published on using those to treat rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis.

00:14:49.000 And then a lot of doctors in the U.S. started doing that.

00:14:52.000 Now there's a new guidance in the industry that came out a few months ago that specifically prohibits using it for, for example, taking your own fat, isolating the stem cells out of it, and then injecting them in your bloodstream or even injecting them into a joint.

00:15:08.000 So I don't...

00:15:12.000 I don't really know the motivation behind it, but I know that they very clearly stated that that's not going to fly anymore.

00:15:21.000 So the stuff that you did for Mel's shoulder, what exactly was that?

00:15:24.000 That's basically a new drug product.

00:15:28.000 It could be considered a new drug product in the U.S. And we are in clinical trials in the U.S. We have two INDs for the treatment of Duchenne's muscular dystrophy.

00:15:36.000 And we're just going to start a spinal cord injury trial at the University of Miami and Thomas Jefferson University.

00:15:43.000 We got funding from the Marcus Foundation.

00:15:46.000 Bernie Marcus is one of our clients.

00:15:47.000 And he's seen all these kids with spinal cord injury getting better.

00:15:51.000 And so our product is, we were able to figure out which cells work, which umbilical cords give cells that are really useful, and which ones aren't.

00:16:02.000 So we throw away the vast majority of the umbilical cords that we get.

00:16:05.000 How can you tell?

00:16:06.000 Well, we had the advantage of having thousands of cases.

00:16:10.000 And I'll give you an example of one case of a football coach from Dallas where I live.

00:16:18.000 And he had diagnosed with MS. He was in and out of wheelchair, was on, you know, basically out.

00:16:25.000 And he was out on disability and retired from a very successful three-time state champion in Texas.

00:16:31.000 That's really saying something.

00:16:34.000 And he came down in 2010 for the first treatment and we gave him the treatment and he got much better.

00:16:41.000 He improved for about 14 months and then he came back again in 2011 and got another treatment, improved not as much as the first time.

00:16:48.000 And he came down in 2012 and Boom!

00:16:52.000 All of his symptoms were gone.

00:16:53.000 And now he's back coaching and he is completely normal.

00:16:57.000 He's probably, you know, he's a junior, he's a bit younger than me, but he's probably healthier than me.

00:17:03.000 I mean, the guy works out all the time.

00:17:04.000 He's out there in the field.

00:17:05.000 He doesn't have any heat intolerance, doesn't have any problems.

00:17:08.000 So I wanted to know what's the difference between those cells in 2012 and the ones in 2011 and the ones in 2010. And then we took other cases similar to that where we'd had less than spectacular results.

00:17:20.000 I mean, they're still good results, but they weren't, you know, ba-boom.

00:17:24.000 And so we took cells from those different lots and we grew them up and then we had them analyzed for 1,200 different molecules that they expressed.

00:17:33.000 And we found that these cells, we call them our golden cells because they just seem to work all the time.

00:17:40.000 And we found that they underexpressed certain proteins.

00:17:43.000 And then, so early on in the culture process, we can select for those and say, hey, these are golden cells.

00:17:48.000 These aren't.

00:17:48.000 Throw them out.

00:17:49.000 So we throw a whole bunch out, and we keep the golden cells, and then we grow those up.

00:17:53.000 And those are the only cells that we use.

00:17:55.000 So that's the big difference.

00:17:57.000 And the advantage we have is that we've had all those cases.

00:18:00.000 We're able to look back retrospectively at which cells really worked and analyze them from a molecular basis.

00:18:06.000 And then now we can select using that.

00:18:08.000 So when Mel came in with his shoulder injuries, did you do an MRI first?

00:18:14.000 He had one.

00:18:15.000 We didn't do it there, but he had one, yeah.

00:18:17.000 Did you do a follow-up MRI? We did not, no.

00:18:19.000 Not on him.

00:18:20.000 We do a lot of them.

00:18:21.000 It feels great, so you don't even bother.

00:18:23.000 It feels good.

00:18:23.000 I don't bother.

00:18:24.000 It's like my dad was walking without pain.

00:18:26.000 You know, his hip was dissolved.

00:18:28.000 He was doing okay.

00:18:29.000 Wow.

00:18:30.000 And so are you still no problems with your shoulder?

00:18:33.000 How long ago did you have that done?

00:18:34.000 Oh, when was it?

00:18:35.000 I had it done twice.

00:18:36.000 I went 18 months, and then it started to return the symptoms of discomfort, pain.

00:18:43.000 And so I did it again.

00:18:45.000 And it's been like a couple of years, almost three years.

00:18:48.000 It's fine.

00:18:49.000 Wow.

00:18:50.000 Yeah, I was really impressed with what I was able to get done, but the stuff that, I wish I had Dr. McGee tell me exactly what it was, the stuff that they had done to me about a year and a half ago is no longer available.

00:19:05.000 They decided that it was considered a drug, and they weren't allowing that form of amniotic stem cell treatment, so now there's a less effective but still effective form.

00:19:17.000 So it seems like there's some sort of an effort afoot to diminish this in the United States.

00:19:22.000 Yeah, well I think they just want to control it and they want it all to go through their deal and their processes.

00:19:29.000 But in the meantime, a lot of people are probably suffering from some pretty significant injuries that they could deal with that far easier if this could somehow or another be sped up.

00:19:39.000 I absolutely agree with that, yeah.

00:19:40.000 So when did you start doing this down in Panama?

00:19:44.000 We started there in 2006. And just because of the regulations?

00:19:48.000 Right.

00:19:48.000 Well, we found out about the regulations around 2006, and we went straight there once we found that law.

00:19:54.000 The law was passed in 2004, and then we found out about it, and we went down there, and we built our lab out.

00:20:01.000 We were actually functional in 2007, so we're having our 10-year anniversary.

00:20:07.000 What's it like in Panama?

00:20:08.000 Never been to Panama.

00:20:09.000 Is it weird?

00:20:10.000 It seems like...

00:20:11.000 It's cool.

00:20:12.000 Is it?

00:20:12.000 You like it?

00:20:12.000 Yeah, it's cool.

00:20:14.000 Yeah, it's very, it's real friendly with the U.S. I think that's the currency you spend there is U.S. dollars.

00:20:20.000 Oh, really?

00:20:20.000 Except it goes further.

00:20:21.000 Yeah.

00:20:22.000 They use U.S. dollars?

00:20:23.000 Yeah.

00:20:23.000 Oh, wow.

00:20:24.000 Yeah, they use U.S. dollars.

00:20:25.000 I mean, we kind of ran that joint for, you know, many years until 1999 when they gave the canal back.

00:20:31.000 And that was pretty much the vast majority of the economy.

00:20:34.000 So when we gave that back to them, then they just kept the dollar.

00:20:37.000 And it's been, you know, explosive growth.

00:20:40.000 It looks like Miami now.

00:20:42.000 Yeah.

00:20:43.000 The building I live in is 70 stories tall and it's not even the tallest building.

00:20:48.000 Our clinic is on the 63rd floor of a 65 story building.

00:20:52.000 They're just full of high-rises.

00:20:54.000 Of course, there's a little bit too much traffic if you get that much concentration of people in one place.

00:20:59.000 But fantastic restaurants, movie theaters, malls, shopping, high-end shopping malls, you name it, you got everything that you want down there.

00:21:07.000 I'd love spending time.

00:21:08.000 I spend a third of my time down there.

00:21:10.000 It's friendly and it's not dangerous.

00:21:13.000 Wow.

00:21:13.000 So 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.

00:21:23.000 Yeah, that's right.

00:21:24.000 Not 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.

00:21:32.000 Do you anticipate this moving back to the United States in any way, or is this something that the hurdles are so steep that it's going to take a long time?

00:21:41.000 I think we're going to figure out a way to do it.

00:21:43.000 I think ultimately we're going to do it.

00:21:47.000 We were the first to get an eye to treat a human being in the United States with these cells, and that was three and a half years ago with a young man with Duchenne's muscular dystrophy.

00:21:56.000 And my other book that's hopefully interesting to read, it starts and finishes with his case where we treated him in Panama for a number of years and then we just petitioned FDA and said it's kind of ridiculous for us to do this down there.

00:22:10.000 Please allow us to do it.

00:22:12.000 So we're using the cells that we isolated and expanded in Panama.

00:22:16.000 We're using it to treat him and another, now a seven-year-old, with Duchenne's muscular dystrophy.

00:22:21.000 So that was the first wedge.

00:22:23.000 And then our next wedge is going to be for spinal cord injury.

00:22:27.000 And there are a number of clinical trials that are going on not...

00:22:32.000 Not just outside the US, there are a number going on in the US. The biggest hurdle is that a new drug, if you look at the last several years, cost $2.5 billion to get to market.

00:22:44.000 And unless we do something a little bit differently on the regulatory side, it's going to be kind of hard to do this.

00:22:50.000 Japan has a law that went into effect two years ago that It basically allows you to, once you demonstrate your product is safe, then you can go ahead and start marketing it, and then you have seven years in which to demonstrate efficacy.

00:23:05.000 So safety first, then efficacy.

00:23:07.000 And that's resulted in four new drugs already in less than two years, and we have zero.

00:23:15.000 The only cell product that's approved by FDA is umbilical cord blood for the treatment of when you're doing a bone marrow transplant.

00:23:23.000 That's the only thing that's approved.

00:23:25.000 Now, is there an argument for that?

00:23:26.000 Like, are they just being cautious?

00:23:28.000 They want to make sure that there's no adverse side effects that could really be significant?

00:23:32.000 Yeah, I think there is an argument.

00:23:34.000 There's an argument that they want to err on the side of safety.

00:23:37.000 I mean, that's their number one priority is to create a safe environment for receiving medicines in the United States.

00:23:47.000 I think the model is a little bit antiquated for the cell products just because they are natural products.

00:23:55.000 I mean, if you think about it, every woman that's ever given birth to a baby, they have stem cells from their baby in them. 0.87

00:24:02.000 These MSCs, you can find them 50 years later, and they're not toxic, and we wouldn't exist as a species if there was an inherent toxicity to genetically distinct cells, because the cells are 50% mom, 50% dad, and you can find them in mom for her entire life.

00:24:24.000 And the Cures Act was supposed to address some of that, and we'll see that went into effect last year, and we'll see going forward if that actually does affect things.

00:24:35.000 Now, I know that they're doing some stuff in the United States where they're injecting them into discs.

00:24:40.000 This is a new thing to regenerate disc tissue for people that have degenerative disc disease and bulging discs and disc injuries.

00:24:47.000 And as an alternative to either artificial discs or fusion as a first step before they move into those.

00:24:54.000 Do you do any of that down there?

00:24:56.000 We don't do any right now.

00:24:58.000 We're working with a hospital that we're actually going to...

00:25:03.000 We're going to have a room just for doing backs, just for doing spine.

00:25:07.000 Because there are studies, a study out of Europe just came out a couple months ago, and it showed about 50% of the patients had their discs become normal on MRI after treatment.

00:25:19.000 So it's not every case, but I'd take a 50-50 shot versus having a fusion, right?

00:25:24.000 Yeah, so that's the same sort of situation we're talking about where you're injecting it right into the discs.

00:25:29.000 Yeah.

00:25:29.000 And, you know, you can in the United States.

00:25:31.000 You know, we have a clinic in Dallas that the RMI clinic where we can do bone marrow, right?

00:25:40.000 And so we use autologous bone marrow and we do do the DISC in the United States.

00:25:45.000 And it does help a percentage of people.

00:25:47.000 It doesn't help everybody.

00:25:48.000 And we were talking before about...

00:25:50.000 Not just the disc, but the muscles around the disc.

00:25:54.000 If you take somebody who's had an injury, my partner, Dr. McKenna, is an orthopedic surgeon and he's been talking about this for years.

00:26:01.000 But if you take somebody with a disc injury and you look at the muscles right on the either side of the spine there, And you'll find that they're withered away or they're marbled with fat and that sort of thing.

00:26:11.000 You take an elite athlete, somebody who's super healthy, works out all the time, those muscles, they're like ropes.

00:26:16.000 It's a filet mignon of the human body, right?

00:26:18.000 And you look at that and they're just black on MRI. But you take somebody that's had a disc injury at any level and you can look and there's marbling in there and it's withered and that sort of thing.

00:26:28.000 So, one of the things we do in South Lake and Dallas is we inject the disc, but also inject those muscles along the side.

00:26:37.000 And that's using your own bone marrow, and that's still allowed in the United States.

00:26:41.000 So, the bone marrow draw, concentrate the stem cells and inject them in those areas.

00:26:46.000 Well, that's something that we were talking about earlier when I showed you the reverse hyper, when I showed you that machine and then that Dex back stretcher.

00:26:52.000 I think that's a significant part of the injuries that you see with people with discs, with back injuries.

00:26:57.000 They don't have strong backs.

00:26:59.000 The tissue, the muscle around the back that protects the spine is just very weak.

00:27:03.000 Right, right.

00:27:04.000 Yeah, it's a fantastic machine.

00:27:06.000 I'm going to get one.

00:27:07.000 Yeah, you got to get one.

00:27:08.000 You too, Mel.

00:27:09.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:27:09.000 You got a crazy back, dude. 0.99

00:27:10.000 That picture you showed me of your back is fucking bananas. 1.00

00:27:13.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:27:13.000 No, it's like out of a nursery rhyme. 1.00

00:27:16.000 Hey, is that what I had done down in Texas?

00:27:19.000 Yeah.

00:27:21.000 Mel actually had that done in Texas, yeah. 0.69

00:27:23.000 How many treatments have you had?

00:27:26.000 Well, there was that one, and then I had the shoulders twice.

00:27:30.000 And then I just had him drop it into my vein, you know, just run around.

00:27:34.000 What's that like?

00:27:35.000 It's pretty cool.

00:27:36.000 I mean, you feel a little sleepy for a couple of days, and then you feel pretty energetic.

00:27:40.000 Really?

00:27:41.000 Sleepy?

00:27:41.000 Yeah.

00:27:42.000 I think it takes its toll on you.

00:27:44.000 I mean, I don't know why you feel sleepy.

00:27:48.000 Neil may have an explanation for that.

00:27:50.000 Yeah, well, the cells kind of re-educate the immune system.

00:27:54.000 A lot of what we treat are rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis, autoimmune diseases, and there's a retraining that's going on in the immune system.

00:28:05.000 That involves cytokines and those molecules, those peptides are the things that make you feel sick.

00:28:11.000 I mean, when you get the flu, the flu virus doesn't make you sick.

00:28:14.000 It's your body's immune reaction to that.

00:28:16.000 That's the stuff that's being thrown off from the fight.

00:28:20.000 That's what actually makes you feel sick.

00:28:22.000 And so when you're activating certain parts of the immune system and they're throwing out things that make you a little bit tired, some people, a very small percentage have some flu-like symptoms for one day.

00:28:33.000 But that's kind of like the extent of the side effects that we typically see.

00:28:38.000 But if you look at, like, you ask why isn't it being done in the U.S., for rheumatic drugs, so you see them on TV, they're advertised, Basically, every hour of every day on almost every station,

00:28:53.000 you see these antirheumatics.

00:28:55.000 And, you know, if you have rheumatoid arthritis, if you have psoriatic arthritis or this sort of thing, these are biologics and these are antibodies to a certain molecule called TNF. TNF is one of the commanders of the immune system.

00:29:07.000 It kind of says, hey, let's cause a bunch of inflammation and make you miserable.

00:29:11.000 And so these drugs basically bind up or sop up the TNF that's in your body for a period of time.

00:29:19.000 That's why you have to get retreated like every month, every six months, every two months, something like that, six weeks, two months.

00:29:25.000 And you have to get retreated and retreated.

00:29:28.000 There's a study of rheumatoid arthritis where it was 172 people that were already on medication for rheumatoid arthritis, not adequately controlled.

00:29:38.000 They gave them like the equivalent of what a typical dose we give in Panama is, like roughly 120 million cells.

00:29:44.000 And all of them got better.

00:29:46.000 All of them symptomatically improved.

00:29:47.000 And the cool thing was that TNF-alpha and another molecule similar to it Decreased by 50%, and that decrease persisted for eight and a half months.

00:29:58.000 That was the length of the study.

00:30:00.000 So rather than putting an antibody in to sop up what's being produced, apparently, by your immune system, the cells tell your immune system to stop it, right?

00:30:14.000 They upregulated a certain immune cell called a T-regulatory cell.

00:30:18.000 That says to the immune system, hey, quit making TNF-alpha.

00:30:21.000 Quit making this IL-6 stuff.

00:30:23.000 And they took 30 patients, a sub-cohort, like three months later, and gave them another shot, the same dose, and it dropped their levels another 50% from that baseline.

00:30:33.000 So from baseline to post-second treatment, two treatments, two IVs sitting in a chair, dropped their levels 75%.

00:30:43.000 It just seems like something that would be amazing for overall repair. 0.97

00:30:46.000 Like, 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. 0.95

00:30:55.000 We talked about something in Costa Rica. 0.99

00:30:58.000 We were both there.

00:31:00.000 I had a, you know, they looked at my neck, I had a 50% occlusion in the right carotid, you know, like buildup of stuff, like you don't feel it happening all of a sudden, you know, all of a sudden when your carotid is shut down, they think, well, you have to eat the statins,

00:31:15.000 right?

00:31:16.000 Yeah.

00:31:17.000 Like Crestor or Lipitor, you know, I looked at what the side effects of those things are.

00:31:21.000 Terrible.

00:31:22.000 Yeah, and I said, I'd rather die than eat those things.

00:31:24.000 And they said, well, you, and they try to make you feel guilty for not doing, you got kids, you got, you know, like, eh.

00:31:29.000 But I don't have that stuff now.

00:31:35.000 And I didn't get anyone to go in and remove it.

00:31:38.000 And I don't know if I can attribute that to the cells, but I got a bunch of cells, like, twice.

00:31:44.000 And that went away.

00:31:46.000 Now, talk about that for a minute.

00:31:48.000 Does that sort of...

00:31:50.000 Yeah, well, just in general, your body, you have a certain number of these cells when you're born, and they age just like the rest of your body.

00:32:02.000 They perform more poorly as you age, right?

00:32:05.000 So if you take one of these cells from a newborn, like when you were born, you could pluck one of these cells out, throw it in a petri dish and let it grow.

00:32:12.000 You let it grow for a month, it divides roughly every 24 hours, or that's the doubling rate.

00:32:18.000 So at the end of a month, you have a billion cells.

00:32:21.000 And then if you take from a 35-year-old and do the same thing, doubling times like two days instead of one day, and at the end of the month you have 32,000 cells.

00:32:31.000 And you take them from a 65-year-old who's relatively healthy and they divide every 60 hours, you get 200 cells at the end of the month.

00:32:39.000 So if your problem is 1,000 cells or it's 20,000 cells or if it's a million cells, You can't get it done past a certain age just because the cells don't have the regenerative capacity.

00:32:49.000 And the good thing about the umbilical cord cells is they, if you co-culture them with these older people's cells, with the young cells, they don't even have to touch each other. 0.55

00:32:58.000 Just the secretions of the young cells will make the old cells start Dividing faster and behaving younger.

00:33:05.000 And the mitochondria, you see pictures in my book, you can see a picture of cells from a 65-year-old diabetic without any juice on them.

00:33:16.000 And then you put the juice from the young cells on there, and they look like 18-year-old MSCs.

00:33:22.000 With functional mitochondria all throughout the cell body rather than all bunched up, they look healthy.

00:33:28.000 I mean, as a cell biologist, I know what looks healthy and anybody else would.

00:33:33.000 You can see just from the picture how vastly different it is just to be exposed to the juice.

00:33:40.000 You heard of this parabiosis study they did at Harvard where they took young mice and they sewed them together with old mice and then the old mice actually got younger.

00:33:52.000 You mean they'd use the blood of the young mice and put it in the old mice?

00:33:55.000 Well, they literally sewed them together.

00:33:58.000 They sewed their bodies together?

00:33:59.000 Sewed their bodies together and sewed their bloodstreams together.

00:34:01.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:34:02.000 So the bloodstream is mixing. 1.00

00:34:05.000 That's some Frankenstein shit. 0.99

00:34:07.000 Yeah, that's pretty Frankie. 0.99

00:34:09.000 So at the end of the study, they showed that the older mice, their neurologic system got better, their cardiovascular system got better, their skeletal muscle got better, everything got better.

00:34:21.000 And one of the key molecules in there is called GDF11. And GDF11, when we look at the secretome, what these cells secrete when they're growing, and we pull that out and we quantify it, in the top four every time is GDF11 from the golden cells.

00:34:38.000 So the golden cells are overproducing GDF11, which is one of the key molecules for stimulating regeneration in your body.

00:34:44.000 So what other autoimmune diseases do you think could be assisted by this?

00:34:50.000 Well, we do a lot of MS. That's probably our number one indication.

00:34:56.000 We just finished a clinical trial, prospective clinical trial.

00:34:59.000 We submitted for publication.

00:35:00.000 It should be coming out in the next month or so.

00:35:04.000 And statistically, significantly, these patients improved dramatically.

00:35:10.000 And as far as side effect profiles, it was highly minimal.

00:35:14.000 I mean, you feel headaches and A few flu-like symptoms, things like that.

00:35:18.000 And how many people?

00:35:19.000 This was with 20 people.

00:35:20.000 And one of the individuals actually clinically is perfect, and all of his lesions went away.

00:35:27.000 And we only did one treatment with these.

00:35:29.000 Typically with MS, it's more refractory than rheumatoid arthritis.

00:35:33.000 Rheumatoid arthritis, usually after one treatment, people get a ton of benefit.

00:35:37.000 With MS, Usually see after two or three treatments that they really see the most benefit.

00:35:42.000 We only did one treatment in this trial.

00:35:45.000 But one gentleman had three lesions in his brain.

00:35:48.000 All three lesions completely disappeared.

00:35:49.000 So MS is a big thing.

00:35:52.000 Rheumatoid arthritis is a big thing.

00:35:54.000 And I tell you, there's stories in the...

00:35:56.000 Not stories, but people talking about their responses.

00:36:01.000 And it's pretty incredible.

00:36:02.000 There's one lady that... 1.00

00:36:04.000 Her husband is a PhD physicist.

00:36:07.000 He carried on working just so she could have insurance to afford the medications, which were around $100,000 a year, for her to get treated for rheumatoid arthritis.

00:36:17.000 And she came down about...

00:36:19.000 It's a little over three years ago, November, and she hasn't been on any medication since.

00:36:26.000 She actually started...

00:36:27.000 Walking around the mall when she was in Panama.

00:36:30.000 And then when she got home, she's completely, you know, pain-free.

00:36:33.000 And she's been pain-free for three years.

00:36:34.000 And her husband finally retired because he didn't care about, you know, having the insurance to pay for these very expensive drugs that she was taking.

00:36:41.000 So MS, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus.

00:36:44.000 We don't have a lupus protocol.

00:36:47.000 There's a group in China that's published six really good papers on lupus.

00:36:52.000 It's very, very effective in their trials.

00:36:55.000 We haven't done it yet.

00:36:57.000 And then autism, you know, it's not considered an autoimmune disease, but we have a trial.

00:37:04.000 We just completed our autism trial with 33 enrollees with very good results.

00:37:11.000 Many of those kids became non-autistic after treatment.

00:37:15.000 So that's confusing to me because you're talking about people that are young.

00:37:18.000 Right.

00:37:19.000 So why would it have such a benefit for them?

00:37:23.000 Well, I wrote an article in 2007 about why these cells should be good for autism.

00:37:28.000 And basically, it's the most downloaded article this journal's ever had.

00:37:35.000 Something like 75,000 people have downloaded a scientific journal article, which really doesn't happen very often.

00:37:45.000 People with autism have inflammatory things going on in their body.

00:37:49.000 A lot of times in the gut, at the end of the small intestine, there are these inflammatory nodules that look a lot like Crohn's disease, and they secrete this inflammation that then goes to the brain, inflames the white matter of the brain, the white matter of the brain swells,

00:38:05.000 decreases the blood flow to the brain.

00:38:08.000 All that's intertwined.

00:38:10.000 And then just a few years ago, there was a study that came out, and this is what This is what allowed us to go forward with our clinical trial.

00:38:18.000 They found that there are these two inflammatory molecules that are MDC and TARC, and they perfectly correlate with the severity of symptoms of autism.

00:38:27.000 And so we measured not only those two, but another 30-some biomarkers.

00:38:33.000 We did quantitative EEGs.

00:38:35.000 We did a lot of standardized scoring with a neurologist that read them, you know, Before treatment, during treatment, after treatment.

00:38:46.000 So I believe a lot of the problems with autism stem from the inflammatory status, and these cells are definitely anti-inflammatory.

00:38:57.000 Yeah, they've had some benefit with changing the diet and changing the gut biome of kids with autism, and they've made some benefits for that, which they believe is also connected to inflammation.

00:39:09.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:39:10.000 If your immune system is freaking out every time you eat a piece of bread and that immune system is throwing out molecules that are swelling your brain and inflaming your brain, then it makes complete sense.

00:39:21.000 I think, in general, the people with autism that do the best are the ones that get that addressed before they come down.

00:39:31.000 You know, there's some other doctors that do functional medicine.

00:39:34.000 They look at their diet.

00:39:35.000 They look at see if they have any heavy metals and that sort of thing.

00:39:38.000 And the ones that just are slam-dunk, do the best, have been cleaned up before they come down.

00:39:43.000 Wow.

00:39:44.000 So what about heart disease?

00:39:45.000 You were talking about people that have heart issues?

00:39:48.000 Yeah, we have a number of patients with heart failure that have responded quite well.

00:39:52.000 Heart failure?

00:39:53.000 Heart failure, yeah.

00:39:53.000 So heart attack, need of a transplant, that kind of thing?

00:39:56.000 Yeah.

00:39:57.000 Yeah, on transplant lists and that sort of thing, yeah.

00:39:59.000 So I have a friend who's on a transplant list.

00:40:02.000 Yeah, right.

00:40:03.000 So there are different kinds of heart failure.

00:40:07.000 The interesting thing about heart failure is the cells don't need to go to the heart and to actually become new heart cells and that sort of thing.

00:40:16.000 It's actually the secretions of the cells.

00:40:19.000 Like I said before, there was a study at University of Buffalo where they injected cells IV in a hamster model of heart failure and then they looked in the heart and there were very few cells, but the heart failure got better.

00:40:32.000 And then they said, oh, let's inject those same cells, these are umbilical MSCs, inject them into the hamstring muscle.

00:40:39.000 And they demonstrated that none of the cells came out of the hamstring muscle, and yet the heart failure got better.

00:40:45.000 So then they took just the juice, the liquid that the cells secrete, and they simulated the amount of juice that the cells would have produced in the body and just injected the juice and the heart failure got better.

00:40:56.000 So it's really the secretions of the cells stimulating the natural repair, augmenting the natural repair process of the body that has been stretched to its limit.

00:41:07.000 You know, if you have a 65-year-old, those cells aren't dividing very well.

00:41:10.000 The juice can help the cells divide faster and produce more repair molecules and make it better.

00:41:16.000 So do you think that it could take someone who's on a heart transplant list and literally fix their heart?

00:41:22.000 I've seen it happen time and again.

00:41:24.000 Wow.

00:41:24.000 And there are clinical trials using similar cell types that also have demonstrated that.

00:41:30.000 There's a molecule called BMP, which is high in heart failure.

00:41:33.000 The BMP came down in every single case.

00:41:35.000 The injection fraction, which measures kind of like the efficiency, how much blood your heart's pumping on each stroke.

00:41:42.000 It went up in every single patient.

00:41:44.000 I think in the book, the craziest case was a gringo who was down in Costa Rica. 1.00

00:41:53.000 I don't know, he was probably 20-25% routinely, but he got a viral disease or something else and he was 11% ejection fraction.

00:42:01.000 Normal is about 60. And the regular hospital who worked a lot with us with our spinal cord patients and seeing results, seeing people walking again, they just said, you can't get on a plane.

00:42:17.000 You're at 3,700 feet.

00:42:19.000 If you get on a plane, you'll be dead.

00:42:21.000 You might as well go see these guys over at the stem cell place and see if anything can happen.

00:42:24.000 And I think his case is in the book as well.

00:42:26.000 But he went from, I don't know, 11 to...

00:42:29.000 42 or something like that.

00:42:31.000 But he wasn't the first case.

00:42:32.000 The first case was a doctor who's a friend of Georgie's, a friend of Dr. Paz, our medical director, who had congenital.

00:42:40.000 So his mother had died of heart failure.

00:42:43.000 His sister had died.

00:42:45.000 His brother had died.

00:42:47.000 And he was, you know, not even 50 years old, and his ejection fraction was, you know, hovering around 30 percent.

00:42:54.000 And a lot of people at, you know, at an advanced age, You're not even going to get on the list because if you're a 50 or 60-year-old and there's a 20-year-old ahead of you, a 20-year-old's going to win.

00:43:06.000 And so he begged and begged to come down.

00:43:08.000 He was our first patient.

00:43:09.000 We didn't really want to take him because we didn't know what was going to happen because nobody had ever done it.

00:43:13.000 And we treated him and he went back and he had an ejection fraction, he had an echocardiogram, and it was 52 percent.

00:43:22.000 And then the doctor didn't believe it, so he redid it a month later and it was 55 percent.

00:43:28.000 So, you know, it's not, I don't think it's for every case.

00:43:32.000 I mean, you have people with like a super bad heart attack and there's not enough to repair and you really need a heart transplant.

00:43:37.000 But I think you're going to see that it's ultimately, I think in 20 years, you're probably going to see standard of care for diseases, chronic diseases like Any chronic degenerative disease for which there's no good treatment, you're going to see standard of care is going to be young,

00:43:55.000 healthy mesenchymal stem cells.

00:43:57.000 Because if you look at the root cause, I get a question a lot, how is it these things work for so many things?

00:44:04.000 Well, when the root cause is a lack of or dysfunction of those cells, then it makes sense that replenishing those or restoring them with young, healthy ones could be a useful treatment.

00:44:15.000 Mel, this is so important to you that you wanted to come on and talk about this. 0.99

00:44:19.000 You wanted to let people know about this shit. 0.99

00:44:20.000 Yeah, I think it's amazing, and it seems a crime to me that, you know, it isn't easier to do in this country. 0.99

00:44:27.000 We're an advanced country.

00:44:29.000 I mean, they should look a little harder at it, and it's a mystery to me why it isn't the case, but, you know, hey, if there are places where one can go and get some help.

00:44:38.000 It's good.

00:44:39.000 I mean, I know another gal. 1.00

00:44:41.000 She's a good friend of mine.

00:44:42.000 She tore her shoulders up because she was like an athlete. 1.00

00:44:46.000 And she had her shoulders down and she got some dropped into her and it actually helped greatly with an autoimmune disorder that she had.

00:44:55.000 And then she was able to have kids.

00:44:58.000 It was that kind of thing.

00:45:00.000 Yeah, there's some really good animal data showing that you can inject these cells and you can take ovarian failure and reverse it.

00:45:09.000 And in her case, she had an autoimmune disease and she was unable to have children, told that from a very young age.

00:45:18.000 After treatment, she got pregnant pretty quickly.

00:45:21.000 This sounds almost too good to be true.

00:45:23.000 This is almost like skeptical people that are listening to this right now are probably like, what? 1.00

00:45:26.000 This fucking shit cures everything? 1.00

00:45:28.000 Yeah, it sounds like the old spooker on the corner. 1.00

00:45:31.000 Good for moles, holes, and pimples. 0.93

00:45:34.000 But you've got studies.

00:45:35.000 I mean, you've got real trials to back this up, and you've got a host of patients that are healed up and healthy.

00:45:42.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:45:44.000 I don't even have anything wrong with me. 0.93

00:45:45.000 I want to go down there and get shot up.

00:45:47.000 Well, if you see a 92-year-old man who's about ready to kick the bucket, and he's almost 100, he's going to celebrate 100 years in August.

00:45:55.000 That's incredible.

00:45:57.000 He's better off than he was, let me tell you.

00:46:00.000 Yeah, this young guy with Duchenne's muscular dystrophy, you know, the cells don't last forever.

00:46:04.000 This is also an important point.

00:46:06.000 With Duchenne's, it's a genetic defect, so they're missing a protein.

00:46:11.000 And these cells go in.

00:46:12.000 In animal models, these cells, you give them to the animal, they go into the muscle, and then they They start secreting that molecule that they're missing, but they only last for about four, five, six months.

00:46:23.000 And then they start maturing, and then the immune system clears them.

00:46:26.000 It's a real important point.

00:46:28.000 You don't have that with embryonic stem cells because they cause tumors and things like that.

00:46:32.000 And the great thing about these cells, they don't cause tumors because they differentiate.

00:46:37.000 They don't want to be a baby.

00:46:38.000 They're just there to do their job, which is to keep homeostasis, keep the immune system controlled, help with regeneration, all that sort of thing.

00:46:48.000 But the embryonic stuff, because I find this interesting.

00:46:51.000 The embryonic stuff is full of weird anomalies and stuff, right?

00:46:54.000 Yeah.

00:46:55.000 A few of us got together and wrote an article when they finally put the clamp on the last embryonic stem cell treatment.

00:47:02.000 And we've been saying for years that embryonic stem cells aren't going to work because they want to become babies.

00:47:07.000 The number one problem is they want to become babies. 1.00

00:47:09.000 They don't want to...

00:47:11.000 The cells that we start with, they don't want to become babies.

00:47:14.000 The babies are already born.

00:47:15.000 They're mature.

00:47:16.000 They're mesenchymal.

00:47:17.000 And that's what they are.

00:47:19.000 And they're never going to be anything else.

00:47:21.000 Whereas the embryonic stem cells, the biggest problem with them is they always form tumors.

00:47:26.000 They form teratomas.

00:47:27.000 And so in order for them to be functional, you have to grow them out.

00:47:30.000 And if you want them to have MSC-like qualities, you have to force them to become MSCs. 0.88

00:47:35.000 And then you have to make darn sure that there aren't any...

00:47:39.000 It only takes one.

00:47:41.000 If there's one left, then it's going to form a tumor.

00:47:44.000 So that was the big problem, that the expense, you know, it's $300,000, $400,000 a dose just to make sure that they didn't have one in them.

00:47:51.000 And then they weren't as beneficial, and they've been monkeyed with in the lab from...

00:47:55.000 When they were embryonic and then converted and converted and converted and then grown up in huge numbers.

00:48:02.000 And so they were monkeyed with.

00:48:04.000 These cells, you don't have to monkey with them.

00:48:05.000 They just do it naturally.

00:48:06.000 You just take them out.

00:48:08.000 You digest them.

00:48:09.000 You put them in a nutrient broth in the right temperature and humidity and oxygen levels and they just grow.

00:48:16.000 And so we wrote an article about embryonic stem cells.

00:48:23.000 The king is dead, long live the king, because the California voters knee-jerked $3 billion towards embryonic stem cell work against the Bush administration's restriction of spending money on embryonic stem cell research.

00:48:41.000 It wasn't banned, as most people said.

00:48:44.000 All they said was, we're not going to use taxpayer money, federal taxpayer money, to go towards that.

00:48:49.000 And what people heard was they don't want progress.

00:48:53.000 Well, what's happened is, at last count, I think they spent $2.75 billion.

00:49:00.000 They've got $250 million left.

00:49:02.000 And guess what they're studying now?

00:49:04.000 Adult stem cells.

00:49:05.000 They're studying umbilical cord stem cells.

00:49:07.000 They're studying mesenchymal stem cells.

00:49:09.000 They've completely cut out everything on the embryonic side because it just took that long.

00:49:15.000 There was so much misinformation out there.

00:49:18.000 And now, thank God, it's gone.

00:49:21.000 And we've regained our sanity.

00:49:24.000 But we blew a lot of dough on the whole embryonic thing.

00:49:28.000 Oh, yeah.

00:49:28.000 It was a lot of money.

00:49:29.000 And we paid as taxpayers in California for that.

00:49:33.000 You know, because people were misinformed.

00:49:35.000 So, if a person's listening to you right now and they've got some issues, what's the first step they should take?

00:49:42.000 Well, um...

00:49:44.000 I say a guy's got a blown knee and is thinking about getting surgery.

00:49:48.000 Yeah.

00:49:49.000 Well, they could go, you know, our website is cellmedicine, C-E-L-L-Medicine.com for Panama.

00:49:54.000 If, you know, if it's something that can be addressed with bone marrow in the U.S., rmiclinic.com, that's our...

00:50:00.000 But the bone marrow is just not as effective.

00:50:03.000 Well, it can be.

00:50:05.000 It's hard to say because everybody's bone marrow is different, your age is different.

00:50:10.000 You know, if you're 85 years old, even if you're 65 years old and you're a smoker or you're diabetic, I don't think it's worth typically using your bone marrow because it's just not going to do a lot.

00:50:21.000 But younger people, healthier people, a lot of times when it's in a joint, because That's the only thing we can do in the U.S. is orthopedics.

00:50:30.000 But if it's an orthopedic problem, then, you know, they could check out, see if they could, you know, we could do something for them in Dallas.

00:50:37.000 If it's not orthopedic and you need systemic treatment for autoimmune disease, if you have a spinal cord injury or autism, any of those conditions, then they go to cellmedicine, C-E-L-L-Medicine.com, and that's where we have, there's all the information there,

00:50:53.000 and they can fill out an application.

00:50:54.000 Doctors get back with them and get in the system.

00:50:56.000 Now, how difficult is it to go down to Panama and get treatment?

00:50:59.000 How do you schedule that?

00:51:01.000 Well, that's all taken care of.

00:51:03.000 There's a whole team of people that do that.

00:51:05.000 The only thing is you need a passport, and there's no visa required or anything like that.

00:51:09.000 How long is that flight?

00:51:11.000 From L.A., it's six hours.

00:51:12.000 It's way far east.

00:51:13.000 So it's like going to Miami.

00:51:15.000 It's like two hours.

00:51:15.000 Yeah, it's actually a little over two hours from Miami because it's way east.

00:51:21.000 It's almost due south of Atlanta.

00:51:23.000 It's closer to New York, right?

00:51:25.000 Yeah, it's four and a half, five to New York, probably something like that.

00:51:30.000 So cellmedicine.com, they go there, contact you.

00:51:33.000 Now, do they need to have some sort of a consultation with a local doctor, an MRI, or anything like that before they go to see you?

00:51:39.000 Oh, yeah.

00:51:39.000 They need to have a diagnosis from a physician for what they have.

00:51:43.000 And then, you know, we have a team of doctors there, and they'll talk to them and see what they need.

00:51:47.000 If they need any other information, any other, you know, x-rays or MRIs or whatever, they'll sort all that out.

00:51:53.000 This is all fascinating stuff, man.

00:51:55.000 And I never thought about going to Panama until about an hour ago.

00:51:58.000 Now I'm thinking of taking a trip.

00:52:01.000 Be there in six hours.

00:52:03.000 It's worth it.

00:52:04.000 Yeah.

00:52:04.000 I just want to feel the intravenous stuff.

00:52:06.000 I want to feel what Boss Rubin was talking about.

00:52:08.000 The lightning bolt's coming off my fingers!

00:52:11.000 He's a little dramatic.

00:52:12.000 Yeah.

00:52:12.000 Well, he's definitely dramatic.

00:52:13.000 I wouldn't say that to his face.

00:52:15.000 I wouldn't either.

00:52:16.000 I would with a smile only.

00:52:17.000 Yeah, right.

00:52:20.000 But yeah, when you treated him, he was going through some pretty significant issues with his neck.

00:52:25.000 Yeah.

00:52:26.000 What benefits did he find off of that?

00:52:28.000 Well, 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?

00:52:36.000 A lot of people...

00:52:38.000 He's had several fusions in his neck.

00:52:41.000 If there's nothing...

00:52:43.000 Structurally to do anything.

00:52:45.000 A 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.

00:52:53.000 You can't stimulate a nerve to regrow.

00:52:56.000 There's not even a thread left.

00:52:58.000 I 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.

00:53:10.000 Yeah, one of his issues is that he has some atrophy on one of his arms because his nerves in his neck were being pinched for a long time and he didn't address it quick enough.

00:53:21.000 And it got to the point where his arm was shrinking.

00:53:24.000 And that's one of the reasons why he went down there.

00:53:26.000 Did he experience any benefit from that?

00:53:27.000 I don't believe he did, no.

00:53:29.000 That's a tough one, right?

00:53:30.000 Regeneration of nerves?

00:53:31.000 Well, especially a really long time out.

00:53:33.000 For spinal cord injury, we did a cohort analysis and basically if they're within one year of injury, 100% of the patients had restoration of some neurologic function.

00:53:49.000 If it was between one and two years, it was 82%.

00:53:52.000 If it was after two years, it was 50%.

00:53:54.000 So the longer it is, and also the older you are, the less oomph you have left.

00:54:00.000 The reason these cells work for spinal cord injuries, they don't become nerves or anything like that, but the spinal cord is one of the most replete Areas of the body, when it comes to blood vessels, there's barely enough blood vessels to keep it alive.

00:54:16.000 And your liver, on the other hand, has just tons of blood vessels in it.

00:54:20.000 And your liver, you know, you can cut 80% of your liver out and it will regrow itself.

00:54:24.000 With your spinal cord, you just kind of ding it a little bit and it won't repair itself.

00:54:27.000 That's because there are no blood vessels and therefore there are no MSCs or very few MSCs.

00:54:32.000 So like 1 50th the number of MSCs reside in your spinal cord because we built this wonderful cage around it to protect it.

00:54:39.000 And so all we're doing is we shoot the cells in there.

00:54:43.000 We also give them an IV. And the cells secrete the things that are necessary for the spinal cord to regenerate itself.

00:54:49.000 But the longer it is from injury, the more scarring there is and all that sort of thing, the less benefit you're going to see.

00:54:57.000 So do you anticipate a time where they'll be able to regenerate spinal tissue or someone has got a spinal cord injury where they have partial or some sort of paralysis and they can be able to regenerate that?

00:55:09.000 I do, and we have many cases that it's already happened.

00:55:13.000 Really?

00:55:13.000 Yeah.

00:55:13.000 Like what cases?

00:55:15.000 Well, you know, Juan Carlos Murillo is a commercial pilot from Costa Rica, and he was one day flying as a National Geographic photographer around in his private plane in a pancake, and both of them got spinal cord injuries.

00:55:29.000 When you say pancake, do you mean crashed?

00:55:31.000 Crastic plane, yeah.

00:55:32.000 Yeah, they were up on a volcano, and it was like some crazy winds and stuff, and it just dropped out of the sky and landed on the ground.

00:55:40.000 And he had no function and no sensation below the injury, basically from his belly button down.

00:55:50.000 He had no erectile function, no bowel function, bladder function, any of that stuff.

00:55:54.000 And, you know, the first time we treated him...

00:55:56.000 And how are you treating him?

00:55:58.000 We're giving them IV cells and intrathecal, so into the spinal fluid.

00:56:03.000 So the first round of treatments, after that, he described it as like a 10 out of a 10 pain scale.

00:56:13.000 So he had this neuropathic pain that was just like he was shoveling down narcotics like nobody's business.

00:56:19.000 And after the first treatment, he didn't get any restoration of the function or anything, but his pain dropped from a 10 to a 3. And so he got off the narcotics.

00:56:28.000 Then the second time we treated him, he got his left leg back.

00:56:32.000 And he could move it.

00:56:33.000 How long after the treatment?

00:56:35.000 Okay, we started treating him six months and three days after his accident.

00:56:39.000 And then so he got the first round of treatments was in, you know, the first month.

00:56:44.000 And it was about three months later, we did the second round.

00:56:46.000 Three months later, he got his right leg back.

00:56:48.000 And then three months later, so it was over about a year, a 15-month period probably in total, he basically got everything back.

00:56:55.000 He got erectile function, he got bowel, bladder, all that sort of thing.

00:56:58.000 And, you know, I just had dinner with him the other night in Costa Rica, and he can walk in here, and he got his commercial pilot's license back, and, you know, he started a new business, and, you know, he has...

00:57:08.000 So he's 100%?

00:57:10.000 I wouldn't say 100%, because he does have a bit of a limp, but he broke his leg when he was four-wheeling, so... 1.00

00:57:18.000 He's a fucking maniac. 1.00

00:57:19.000 I don't know. 1.00

00:57:20.000 Yeah, he can't get enough.

00:57:21.000 Jesus Christ.

00:57:23.000 Is this before or after the accident that he broke his leg?

00:57:26.000 Yeah, so he got all better, and he was perfectly fine, and then he goes out in four-wheeling and breaks his leg. 0.98

00:57:35.000 So he was 100%, and then he fucked himself up again. 0.50

00:57:38.000 Yeah, so he limps a little bit, but most people don't know that he ever had a spinal cord injury. 0.99

00:57:43.000 That's incredible.

00:57:44.000 So you feel like with conventional treatment, that guy would still be in a wheelchair?

00:57:48.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:57:49.000 Yeah.

00:57:49.000 I mean, he made zero progress.

00:57:51.000 So when we were designing this study that we're doing at Miami that's being funded by the Marcus people, there are two neurosurgeons that are on that. 0.74

00:58:01.000 So we wanted to, okay, we're discussing at what time point should we accept them?

00:58:08.000 And these very prominent neurosurgeons said, let's do six months, because at six months, you've got 98% to 99% back of everything you're going to have.

00:58:16.000 So let's do patients or subjects that are from six months to two years.

00:58:20.000 And so those are the inclusion criteria.

00:58:22.000 That's the timing that we're going to do for the study at Miami.

00:58:26.000 This is phenomenal.

00:58:26.000 So is that study published online?

00:58:28.000 Is there anything, or this case rather, published online?

00:58:31.000 That case is published online, yeah, absolutely.

00:58:32.000 It's referenced in my book.

00:58:34.000 Which book?

00:58:34.000 You have two books here.

00:58:35.000 Yeah, well it's referenced in both books, but in the spinal cord chapter, so Stem Cell Therapy Rising Tide is the one that, it's written for the lay person.

00:58:45.000 There you go.

00:58:49.000 So it's referenced in there and the whole story about Juan Carlos and his journey and how he got started and everything's in there as well as a reference to the published article that's in a scientific journal about his case.

00:59:01.000 And then MSC is the one that you read if you want to go to sleep or if you're a super nerd.

00:59:05.000 Exactly.

00:59:07.000 And cellmedicine.com, that's the website?

00:59:11.000 Yep, cellmedicine.com.

00:59:12.000 Well listen man, this is fantastic stuff and I mean, I'm very intrigued.

00:59:18.000 And I really, I hope people that have issues can reach out to you and try to see if you can get some treatment.

00:59:23.000 And I would love to hear back from them.

00:59:25.000 I mean, what happened with you and what happened with your dad is just incredible.

00:59:28.000 And the stuff that I've experienced in the United States seems like it's not nearly as potent as the stuff that you're using down there.

00:59:34.000 And I've had some pretty dramatic results.

00:59:36.000 Yeah.

00:59:37.000 So it's incredible stuff.

00:59:39.000 Cool.

00:59:40.000 T.J. Dillashaw says hi.

00:59:41.000 Oh, you know T.J.? Yeah, he came down there and...

00:59:43.000 Did he?

00:59:44.000 Yeah, he came down there like three months before the last fight and he got his belt back and he's really happy.

00:59:48.000 What did he have done?

00:59:49.000 Well, he told me I could tell you everything.

00:59:52.000 He got IVs and he got his shoulder done because his shoulder was really bothering him.

00:59:56.000 So that was it.

00:59:59.000 And he went down to Panama to get all that done.

01:00:01.000 How did you find out about him?

01:00:02.000 Or how did he find out about you?

01:00:04.000 Frankly, I don't know.

01:00:06.000 Maybe Boz or somebody else in that.

01:00:09.000 We've had a few MMA guys.

01:00:11.000 And Boz and he both said it is okay to talk about him going down there.

01:00:15.000 Yeah.

01:00:16.000 Yeah.

01:00:16.000 Well, listen, man, it was a real treat, real pleasure.

01:00:19.000 I'm so fascinated about this stuff because of my own personal experience with the limited amount of stem cell treatments that I've gotten, but I've had great results.

01:00:27.000 I had a knee injury that was bothering me forever.

01:00:29.000 I don't feel it at all anymore.

01:00:31.000 The shoulder doesn't bother me at all anymore.

01:00:33.000 I mean, it's pretty amazing stuff, and from what you're saying, I'm getting a very watered-down, not nearly as potent version of what you have in Panama. 0.99

01:00:41.000 Yeah.

01:00:42.000 Wow.

01:00:43.000 Okay, so CellMedicine.com.

01:00:46.000 Yes, sir.

01:00:46.000 And then the books again are MSC, say that word again, Mesenchymal Stem Cells.

01:00:52.000 Mesenchymal Stem Cells and Stem Cell Therapy, A Rising Tide.

01:00:57.000 Mel Gibson, thank you very much.

01:00:58.000 Thank you.

01:00:58.000 Thanks for bringing this man in here.

01:00:59.000 Appreciate it. 1.00

01:01:00.000 All right, fuckers, read into this. 0.99

01:01:02.000 Look it up. 1.00

01:01:03.000 Get healthy.

The Joe Rogan Experience - January 17, 2018

Joe Rogan Experience #1066 - Mel Gibson & Dr. Neil Riordan

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript