Leading Stem Cell Expert: Stem Cells 101 - The Future of Medicine w/ Robert Hariri | EP #147

30:54It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning. When it's solvable, you're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. we look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife .com, backslashpeter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30 ,000 people who reached out to us for fountain life memberships.

31:41If you go to fountainlife .com, backslashpeter will put you to the top of the list. Really it's something that is for me one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades onto our healthy life spans. Go to fountainlife .com, backslashpeter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. Alright, let's go back to our episode. I love this. Okay, so I want people to realize that you can get stem cells from the placenta. Some companies will give you stem cells from the embilical cord and then the cord blood, right?

32:26And cord blood. But there's a few other options for where people get stem cells. Can you run through those? Yeah, so in an effort to make stem cells available to people, technologies like induced pluripotency was created. Yamannaka won the Nobel Prize for figuring out how to take one of your mature specialized cells and reprogramming it so it acts like a stem cell. That was because not everybody had their placenta stored in birth or their cell stored early in life. But I'm here to tell you, as phenomenal and exciting as that technology is, it's going through a lot of acrobatics to make an adult cell behave like a placental cell.

33:11And even though you might turn on pluripotency, you don't change the age of that cell. And there are other parts of the cell besides the parts that can reprogram that age might the condria age, cell membranes age, et cetera. And so I am here to say the placenta is the ideal alternative, even if you don't have your own cells bank. And that was one of our seminal breakthroughs and discoveries in Leon, which is that low and behold, aside from the fact that the placenta is the stem cell factory, the cells in the placenta are nature's universal donor cells. And you've heard me talk about this, Pete.

33:48Absolutely. So I often say mom and dad contribute 50 % each of the DNA of their offspring. So the fetus and its placenta growing inside mom's womb is only a 50 -50 match to mom. Yet she doesn't reject it and it doesn't reject her. That's pretty cool, right? Well, what about surrogate pregnancy? In surrogate pregnancy, mom's not even related to the placenta or the fetus that is being developed, and she doesn't reject it. So it's proven by nature. And I often say mammalian evolution could not have occurred without the placenta becoming a perfect universal donor tissue able to tolerate the existence of a different phenotype and different serotype.

34:39And so that's the elegance of having the placenta is I can use those cells in a completely unrelated recipient. So there is those and then let's talk about where, so there's autologous and allergenic. Let me explain those concepts. Autologous means the cells come from you. Autoselph. You can get stem cells from your blood, from your bone marrow, you from your adipose tissue, there's lots of places you can get stem cells that are your own. Or you can take a mature cell like a fiberglass from your skin, you can subject it to Yamanaka's methodology and you can induce pluripotency. And that's now a stem cell that has the versatility to divide, etc.

35:27So those are two of the types you can get stem cells from parasites, from the not parasites, but pericytes. These are the cells that line blood vessels, okay? You can get stem cells from bone marrow, from peripheral blood that you mobilize the stem cells from bone marrow into. And you can get stem cells from virtually any tissue if you're willing to take a scalpel to that tissue. Nice contrast. There's no risk to collecting cells from the placenta. It is it is waste material the baby is already born and off enjoying its its life when the placenta is expelled Goes into the waste basket comes to our laboratories and gets processed and from one placenta we can produce tremendous quantities of stem cells and then Allogeneic is refers to Allogeneic means the cells come from somebody else.

36:25And in those cases, if they're not derived from an allogeneic placenta, you have to make certain that there's no immunologic conflict between the donor and the recipient. Now, allogeneic therapy is really the hallmark of efforts to create off -the -shelf self -therapy products. Autologous self -therapy products, like for example, immunotherapy for cancer, or means you got to collect your own cells, process them and then get them back at some point in the future. So Bob, there's been a lot of controversy over the years about stem cells, a lot of fear and concerns. Where did that originate from?

37:04What do people heard about that cause this concern that you can swage their fears about? Well, you remember from medical school, embryology is the study of how we originate from a single cell into an embryo and then form a fully functioning human being. It was that original work that led to scientists looking at the leftover embryos from in vitro fertilization program. These are the ones that are going to be discarded because they're not used to see if they could isolate some cells and then grow them up into a population of cells that could potentially be used in therapy. That means you have to destroy an embryo.

37:49And early on, the controversy that erupted was that at the stage of when you can isolate stem cells, that embryo still has the potential to go on to become a human being. Does it constitute a life that you should not be allowed to compromise or sacrifice? That was the fundamental origins of the controversy. Then, because you can get stem cells from a few stages down in development from the fetus, and as a byproduct of abortion scientists show you could isolate stem cells from the leftovers of the abortion process, these put a very, very significant part of the community under great concern that there could be a very perverted incentive to create human life in the form of an embryo or a fetus, just to destroy it.

38:46And so the pro -life, pro -choice debate was the foundation upon which the controversy around stem cells really emerged. And I'm very happy to say that our discovery of the placenta as an ideal alternative to that. And by the way, the placenta is pro -life and pro -choice. Yes. So there is no objection to using the leftovers of the full -term healthy pregnancy to derive stem cells. It's abundantly available. The economics are better. And if I can get a dozen cells from an embryo I'm lucky. I can get a billion cells easily, multi -billion cells from a placenta. So the sheer, the sheer logistical convenience of using the placenta, all of the characteristics I'm telling you about, the immune tolerating ability of the placenta, the universal donor characteristics, all that make the placenta just an ideal source to obviate the need to use embryos or fetal material.

39:52Yeah, so I just want folks to understand the original controversy and concerns originated from the idea of using embryonic stem cells from an abortion, from a fetus. And today, the stem cell industry under Bob's leadership, and others has matured far past that where we can now identify, we can give you back your own stem cells, we can extract them, we can concentrate them, we can manipulate them in a number of ways, we should talk about that again because that's not yet FDA approved hopefully under a new administration it will be or we can give you placental or umbilical cord stem cells allergenic from somebody else which are safe and have been done.

40:43How many how many total allergenic stem cells treatments do you think your best guess have been done around the world? Oh, millions. Millions. Okay. So, yeah. So, I mean, I just, this is not like a wild frontier of an idea. Someone came up within their garage and is trying on you. Exactly. Here's bad news travels fast. Yes. If self -therapy, and I make this argument all the time, and I sometimes pit myself against others in the field, if bad things happen from self -therapy, if bad things happen from using stem cells in treating different diseases. The bad news would travel fast. Now there have been a few isolated situations where people with irreversible hopeless diseases sought self therapy from, let's admit it, from certain unscrupulous opportunistic provide.

41:36And is a therapy of last resort for them because they're trying everything. That's right. And listen, I have such a lot of respect for the FDA. The current head of the division of the FDA that oversees self -therapy, Dr. Peter Marks, has an incredibly complicated, difficult job. He has done an amazing, amazing job in focusing attention. He wants to see these therapies approved. He wants to make sure they're approved the right way, and he wants to make sure that there's never a shortcut in producing the products. I salute that completely and I celebrate it completely. It's important that people know there are a lot of mom and pop shops around the country that will promise you stem cell treatments and you need to really understand the origin their experience because they're not legally doing it that's begin with that.

42:34But they're operating in the gray zone between a fully developed regulated therapeutic that meets the high standards of safety and efficacy prescribed by the FDA. They try and go around that. Boops like ours do the hard work of taking these candidate therapies through the process of clinical development, clinical trials where we are controlling the treatments, we're controlling the analysis, we're controlling the manufacturing, because that's the best way to ensure that no one takes a shortcut to transforming the way a disease is treated. But I'll tell you this much, I do believe that there is room here.

43:19I do believe there's room here, and I'm in the dialogue. There's room to be more receptive and more open to accelerating the process of review for cell therapies and also, and this is a little pet peeve of mine, taking advantage of the long safety track record of cell therapy and allowing some of the evaluation to take place on the run. In other words, have some form of a provisional approval process were cell therapies that need a high standard for safety, they are allowed to be tried, particularly in some of these hopeless diseases. Let's talk about ALS, right? Lou Gehrig's disease. Nothing works there.

44:02You're gonna die if you had ALS. I don't see a downside to using a number of cell therapy products that meet that safety standard and then collecting rigorously collecting the data. It'll actually do us a big favor to open up the number of programs where we're very rigorous about collecting data in order to make better decisions about what is acceptable or not acceptable to be moved into the therapeutic armamentary of doctors. Let's talk about this social proof here. There have been a number of success stories, right? Again, I mentioned the opening of the Lifeforce book where Tony calls me up and he goes, man, I've just had the worst snowboarding accident and I have just massively injured my shoulder.

44:51What should I do? And I say, Tony, you need to talk to Bob Hurley. He says, okay, I say, a Bob is, you know, for me, my world's expert in stem cells. And I think, you know, these types of injuries could benefit. And he called you. And at that time, you know, we were both recommending utilizing the Panama Stem Cell Institute. I think now we've seen the emergence of down in Costa Rica, RMI, the Regenerative Medicine Institute, under Vince Gianbapa, and most everybody that we recommend who needs this level of allergenic stem cells goes down there until we have them operational here in the U .S., perhaps at Fountain.

45:40But take the story from there. And I'd like to use some other success stories that you could share. So Tony is an example. And by the way, you and I formed the same category. We're at that age where we break stuff, we tear stuff. And our body makes a great attempt to mobilize our own stem cell populations and get them to the injury to participate in their repair. But sometimes it's too little too late. And so in Tony's case, and let's face it, Tony's like a professional athlete times 10, right? It's like from being 6, 8 and 260, 220 pounds into physical specimen, he taxes his body to the absolute limits, right?

46:21I mean, you and I are going away when we're with him at his house and he's got basically a professional gymnasium where he works out in a like a maniac. When he tore up his shoulders, tore up his hips and hurt his back, he either had to go for prosthetic replacement type surgery or he had to attempt to turn up the regenerative power of his body and the only way to do it because his own cells were either too limited, too little or too late, was to augment it with newborn cells. And we all know, as it's covered in the book, he had a life -changing response. I have had 30 some odd orthopedic procedures in my life.

47:09My shoulders have been torn up. I have no rotator cuts. The only thing that keeps me active is I have range of motion. And I can do so is I have used cell therapy and the byproducts of cells to stimulate the repair process and damp down the inflammation that causes the functional decline. Yeah, I'll give a quick aside there for myself. I had I ran an experiment not on purpose, but in retrospect where I had the same surgeon do the exact same surgery on my two shoulders about 10 years apart. And it was a I had a bone spur and rotator cuff injury and pain, why couldn't sleep. And on one side my left side originally that had no regenerative medicine impact.

47:59On the right side after the surgery, I had two injections of exosomes and I was 10 years older and my recovery time was a fraction. And my pain was a fraction of what it was my other shoulder. Now listen, this is subjective, but it was like, wow, that was different. Yeah, yeah. Listen to me too. I mean when I tore my my shoulder up and and I couldn't sleep the pain was unbearable. I couldn't move it. I couldn't load the the bicep. When I went and got first placental cells injected into one shoulder and within a matter of days had considerable reduction in pain and improvement in function. and then when I tore the other one up, I used exosomes just like you did and got very noticeable, quantifiable relief.

48:55And most importantly, it turned off the processes that would lead to long -term dysfunction like scarring, like changes to bone and cartilage and all that. So look, we're We're proof in proof in practice that this stuff actually does work. And by the way, people wouldn't be seeking these therapies if they, if there wasn't enough evidence from other people as well as rolling evidence in individuals themselves that this stuff actually is an alternative to other forms of therapy. You know Bob two things. One first off, can you explain what an exosome is? Yep. And secondly, why haven't the clinical trials been done yet that allow the FDA to say yeavarily this is safe and efficacious?

49:51Well, first of all, let me say this. There have been a lot of clinical trials that I don't necessarily agree with how the data has been analyzed and interpreted. it. I believe the bar for proving efficacy in cell therapies has been unusually high. The best example in the treatment of heart failure after my hearted infarction, where again, once you damage your heart, it's damaged and you can't fix that unless there's a regenerative event that's taking place. So I think the bar has been very, very high. I think we're using, we're using 20th century methodology to evaluate clinical trials in self therapy that's a 21st century technology.

50:41And so the metrics have to be re -evaluated. And I think the time course of looking for changes has to be lengthened. And by the way, you know what the rate limiter for clinical Trials is, it's the time and cost of the trial. And so if you need to have a lens that's looking at the results of self -aeropathy that six months a year, two years down the road and is also six months a year, two years, and over multiple treatments down the road, it becomes cost for prohibitive for the companies who are in this field to do those studies. Listen, there are no big companies doing stem cell clinical development work.

51:24They're all developmental stage biotechs. The developmental stage biotechs can do only as much as the capital they raise to do those studies. So, the odds are against getting to the point that you're going to meet those very high regulatory standards. But I do believe, I do believe in partnership with the regulators. We have to say, look, let's agree that no doubt quality products that are assured to be made under the quality systems of GMP and go through the right kind of release specification testing and so on with the right kind of evidence of safety, acute and even long term safety should be allowed to be introduced into the treatment regimens because by the way, here's the other thing.

52:18There's probably a very high likelihood that cell therapy in combination with some other elements of conventional therapy is where you get the real return on investment, the real benefits patients need. We're not doing that because the regulatory system isn't designed to look at things that way. But I personally think we're at a stage right right now, where regulators can be more permissive, allow for real world evaluation of the long -term benefits of cell therapy in products that meet a high quality standard and that have the fundamental assurance of safety, acute safety that is necessary to get into the clinic.

53:04If we do that, we can build the database. And by the way, we live in the world of AI and machine learning. What does AI and machine learning need? It needs big data sets. not 10 patients, not 100 patients, but 10 ,000 patients with it. So, Bobbi Kennedy is confirmed. Is he pro stem cells and pro regenerative medicine? So, you know, I know that there's a great deal of concern. You know, Bobbi Kennedy is a very outspoken proponent of looking at therapeutics differently than the conventional views out there. But he is very much a proponent of the US having to advance and innovate in therapeutics among which cell therapy is one of the categories.

53:50And I do believe that he will find the way to work with partners in the FDA and NIH and and so on, that will be willing to be far more inclusive and receptive to development models where you have a longer lens on the patients' results that you are looking at a range of different outcome variables and that you're testing in the context of finding ways for these therapies to fit the conventional treatment regimen. And that may include using with drugs and other components and so on and so forth. Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. Truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called one skin.

54:43It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a synthetic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin. And I think it's one of the most incredible products. I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes. I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. All right, exosomes. Give us a one -on -one, and exosomes real quick. People have heard about them. They've heard about them treating for your skin, for your hair, for all kinds of things. So an exosome, think of an exosome as a packet.

55:21of materials that include signaling molecules, growth factors, microRNAs, all the ways that cells communicate with each other chemically gets packaged in what's called an extracellular vesicle. It's a membrane wrapped little delivery package. And that contains important molecules that can be anti -inflammatory, pro -regenerative, and even help stimulate the expression of certain genes in an individual's genome. And the way they work is that they are released by cells, they can be processed and collected in a manufacturing system. And then when administered to an individual, because they're a membrane bound, they fuse with the membrane of a person's cells and deliver that information into the cell.

56:14It is like a special delivery package of an anti -inflammatory growth factor or a pro -regenerative peptide. That's what you would do the way to think about it. Okay. So, I want to continue, Tony is a great example. You and I have both benefited here. What are some of the other stories that you've been involved in or seen in this stem cell success story? just for folks to have some sense of the broadness here. Well, people would be surprised to know that many of our most celebrated theater and movie celebrities who are aging, but are still facing the demands of a very active physical life and so on and so forth, have sought out self -therapy in one form or another, some go to clinics in Europe, leprary, for example, has been a clinic that has been delivering cell therapy.

57:15It is not human cell therapy. It's a cell therapy derived from other species, but they know that the benefits for anti -aging, for preservation of performance, for aesthetic benefits are there. So people have sorted out, I have taken a number of well -known people to different clinical environments in Central to South America, even in Mexico, Bahamas, and these folks have seen very tangible improvements in a particular need they have. And the most common, I'll tell you right now, the most common thing people go to is for joint problems, right? arthritis. And we're very, very active in advancing these approaches to treat something that plays us all as we age, which is the loss of muscle mass.

58:10So, sarcopy. Let's talk about that because you pointed out to me the Carolenska studies that muscle mass and longevity are highly correlated. I worked diligently on putting on 10 pounds muscle mass last year, really through your inspiration and encouragement. So please talk to me about that. So people don't recognize how important skeletal muscle is. It's kind of like a forgotten organ. People don't think of it as an organ, right? But muscle makes up 50 % of the wet body mass of the average individual, and that means it's the largest synthetic organ in the body. The cells in your muscle make up a whole array of chemicals called the myocinome, and And those chemicals influence every cell in tissue in your body, including your brain.

58:56And so that's why exercise and getting those muscles working actually is good for your brain health, for your immune health, etc. Now in addition, in addition, muscle is the largest venous capacitance organ, which means it's got the largest network of small blood vessels, low flow blood vessels, low pressure blood vessels. And that's where a lot of our STEM and immune cells take up residents. They sequester there, laying in weight to be called upon to traffic and do their job. Now I, for you probably remember 20 years ago, I said that muscle is the forgotten frontier for the therapeutics and pharmaceutical industry.

59:39And if you remember, I got very active at finding ways to modulate myostatin, a protein that is designed to control how much lean muscle mass you make. And I saw that as an opportunity to enhance muscle quality and growth with this blockade of this negative peptide. And we actually were able to do that with nutritional products. And there's even a number of pharmaceutical approaches as well. It turns out that this is incredibly important because of the study you just quoted. The Carolinsky Institute, which is the Mayo Clinic of Europe, okay? The Carolinsky Institute followed 9 ,000 men for 25 years.

1:00:22And what they found, what they found was that men who maintain healthy lean muscle mass and strain. Even if their body mass index was considered to be obese, had a higher resistance to dying from cancer or heart disease than any other indicator. So muscle mass is a better predictor of longevity and health than body mass index, weight, any of those metabolic markers. Yeah, and I love that. For me, I keep on saying any company that will increase muscle mass is a company I want to look at investing in. Bob, you and I are co -founders along with Tony Robbins and Bob and Bill Cap of Fountain Life. Fountain Life has done an amazing job in the diagnostic side.

1:01:23We upload about 200 gigabytes of data through full body and brain MRI, Dexascan, coronary CT, the AI overlay, low dose lung CT, all the blood biomarkers, your full genomics, metabolism, mix of microbiome, a lot. And that's been great. And the goal is can we answer two questions? Is there anything going on inside you right now? You need to know about and what's likely to happen to you that we can prevent by optimizing you. But that's half of the objective. All right, it's finding disease at the earliest stage when it's most treatable. UNI've always had the vision. We had this back in HLI, but it didn't materialize there.

1:02:11So it's materializing it found that the diagnostics are important, but the therapeutics are as important. So how do we deliver our fountain life members? the highest reward, lowest risk therapeutics, and really search the world for those and then deliver them at the centers. So I wanna talk a little about that. I wanna get your thoughts because I think we're just at the brink of a lot of these very exciting longevity therapeutics. I mean, that's the goal is to restore function and you've taught me. It's, you know, are you thinking clearly? Are you looking good? are you moving well, right? That's what people want through their 99th birthday.

1:03:00And so the question is, are we going to be able to deliver some of these therapeutic stem cells, excessomes, and other things through found life? What's your vision there? Well, listen, you and I have talked for a long time about what's meaningful? The concept of anti -aging and longevity has been a bit perverted over the years, right? It seemed to be kind of the folly of the wealthy and not necessarily, you know, there weren't in some cases morally justifiable reasons for wanting to live to 150 and so on and so forth. When I was a kid, there was a TV show called The Immortal and I used to love that show.

1:03:43You might remember it. Yeah. that bloody, he had blood to live forever and say he was hunted by the billionaires who wanted to take his blood, etc. So look, here's the bottom line. Meaningful long life requires preservation of performance. And I always say it's about high performance mobility. Like you said, high performance cognition, you got to think high performance immunity and youthful aesthetics. Those four things, in my mind constitute meaningful long life. Those are all achievable using many different approaches. Nutrition, exercise, etc., maintaining muscle mass, but it is the perfect target for the regenerative therapies available through cellular medicine.

1:04:31And when you and I first built human longevity and then we decided that we were going to now perfect it in fountain life, our objective was to do two things. We wanted to use a proactive approach in healthcare. Like you said, identify and eradicate causes of premature death. That's the obvious low hanging food. You know and I know life expectancy is an average lifespan of everybody, which means that if it's 80, if it's 78 or 80 years of age, and we know people lift at 95, 100, etc, a lot of people are dying early. So step number one, eradicate causes of pre -premure death. One of the causes of pre -mure death that get away from us, they're cardiovascular, they're cancer.

1:05:20Okay? The cardiovascular ones are the explosive things like aneurysmal ruptures, right? Like cardiovascular failure due to electrical issues that cause sudden cardiac death. Undiagnosed cancers that before you know it, And when you first find out you have them, they're so advanced they can't be managed. So anything that can identify stuff early enough to be intervened with, that's a principle target of fact in life. And we've all proven it works, right? We know it works. We've saved hundreds and hundreds of lives. Yes. And we're saving lives in the first community who are making access to this, which are the informed, educated, affluent people who are already getting the best healthcare.

1:06:07Look, how many people do you and I both know? People we know who have religiously pursued healthcare with the best physicians and they have a clean bill of health. They come into fountain life and we identify a... Yeah, I mean, San Luzarian, who's made this public, who's one of our new partners building out centers around the world. I said, listen, Sam, come down and see the Thoutin Life facility. I was taking them through to meet Richard Branson at Neckar Island and we stopped through and he went through and upload here and his wife. And this is a guy who has built the greatest hotels in the world.

1:06:47He is, you know, I don't know how close he is or how much of a billionaire or multi -billionaire he is, but best physicians. And he comes through and at the end of this upload, we find two brain aneurysms. And he's insurgere a week later. And he's cured now, but those were ticking time bombs. And it's like really? It's like your other doctors didn't find these that have been around for so long. That's insane. I mean, the truth of the matter is, we now have at our disposal high resolution imaging technology, which the cost has come down with the advent of AI and so on and so forth, the ability to interpret is going to improve.

1:07:31And aneurysms are relatively easy to spot as long as you have the imaging study. And so if for a relatively modest amount of money, you can ensure yourself that you don't have one of these ticking time bombs, it's worth it, right? Likewise, if the same imaging study can tell you whether or not you have a smoldering malignancy in your thyroid or in your kidney, you know how many of our friends were in perfect health, living the dream, and they found out that they had a subclinical kidney cancer, which fortunately is easily address when you catch things early. By the way, this is not new. The American Cancer Society said 30, 40 years ago early detection is the key to survival in cancer, right?

1:08:23So the faster you find something, the more options you have to treat it. And exasional procedures for cancer, we know our life saving. And so just what fountain life does in identifying and eradicating these premature causes of death is enormous. But more importantly, more importantly, and this is our aviation background is coming out. What if I said to you for 25, since we've known each other? I said the reason we fly airplanes that can be 20 years old is because we go through a process that was developed by engineers and that's why I like having that engineering background where because of root cause analysis we figure out what is the source of a mission critical failure And if it's a mechanical component, you inspect and replace at 50 % lifespan so that you never have a mission -physical failure.

1:09:17And you learn over time what those are. We already know what the mission -physical failures are in biology. We can use the same pro -active approach. and we can, I believe, prevent the intramedis cost of care. Look, we identify kidney cancer and somebody reclinically and treat them. You have saved potentially millions of dollars in care that they need. Yeah. Right? You know, it needs to be said as well. You know, we have a couple of friends in Dean Cayman and Martin Rothblatt who are doing something extraordinary magical and you've spoken about this and you did the lot of the early work as well, which is re -growing organs or re -manufacturing organs, going from a stem cell or even going from a skin cell to a pluripotent stem cell with the ammonocca factors, growing up billions of those cells, differentiating them into heart liver, lung kidney, and re -manufacturing a brand new organ with your own DNA and your own certain surface antigenism.

1:10:26It's like, it's the reason that airplanes and board model T's 100 years ago are still operating today as you can replace the parts. I often tell families who are thinking about banking their kid stem cells at birth, they say, look, if your baby was born with an extra -city kidney, is extra -subtle lungs and extra heart, would you throw them out at birth? And that's what you actually have when you have a supply of stem cells that can be used in these purposes. And by the way, Peter, you know, Well, I was the first guy to actually take an organ. Yeah, tell the story, but I love it. So over 20 years ago, I was the first guy to take a solid organ and remove all the living cells from the organ.

1:11:05What organ did you choose? We originally started with the placenta, we did it with hearts as well. Basically, wash out all of the cells, the living cells in that organ, leave behind a beautiful three -dimensional architecture template of the organ and then injects it. Can I, can I, can I, one second just to give people a visual here? If you have a heart and you use a detergent, right, this is a detergent, it actually will desegularize the heart, in which the cells are falling away. Right. But what's left is, and it's hard to imagine this, but there is a massive structure, it's collagen structure, right?

1:11:53It's a combination of different structural proteins, but it is basically the architecture of the organ. So it looks like a ghost organ there. That is... It translucent. They're beautiful. They look like they look like a like a glass cast of the of the actual organ and it has all the blood vessels structures in place, it has all the mechanical structures, the valves, and so on and so forth. But you know, when I first did this with the placenta, I basically washed out all of the cells of the placenta and then I could repopulate the organ anywhere, anywhere I wanted to, based on the stem cells, I implanted into it.

1:12:28So my original invention, my original patent, which was entitled, the renovation and repopulation of cataviric organs and tissue matrices with stem cells, was the roadmap app for what's being done now by Martin and Dean, where they're basically using that approach to create a repopulatable template and then using cells that are either fake driven cells from IPSEs or their donor cells. And here's the really cool thing. If you inject Clurry potent versatile stem cells into a perfectly preserved matrix of the tissue, they actually know where they are and they differentiate appropriate. GPS locations.

1:13:11GPS. Yeah, amazing. But I want to wrap with just a quick conversation about cellularity and people who look up your bio and you are one of the most brilliant scientist entrepreneur engineers that I know and I love you as an older brother. I'm always thankful that the fact that you're a couple years older than me so that you're the one that's going to be pushing harder than I am on the regenerative medicine side. But so, used to run the cellular medicine division at Cell Gene, which was how big was Cell Gene? 100 ,000 ,000 something billion. We grew to a $120 billion market cap at RPK and Cell Gene was a remarkable place.

1:13:58The best people, I got to say, I was blessed to be part of that organization, the best leadership, of science driven and courageous. And it was a great environment to be risk -taking, risk tolerant, and innovative. Yeah, well, so at one point, I remember our conversations, and we said, listen, it's great environment, but you would thrive better if we could spin out the cellular medicine division. And that became cellularity, and folks gets can look it up. It's now a public company, CELU. And you built an extraordinary manufacturing facility that you're in the midst of right now in New Jersey. But it's worth taking the moment to say, when you harvest a placenta, and I do want to put in the show notes here, folks can go to lifebankusa .com.

1:15:00Cause again, I'm just shouting this from the from the noun tops. As I was as we're recording this, this podcast, I got a text from my my sister and my mom that Christina has delivered. So her welcome to plan it earth. I'm gonna let the lab know that the placento will be here shortly. Yes, and so in her, the placenta, her placenta and her child's placenta will be there. And you'll, what do you do with the placenta once you get in? What are the products that you create? Take a second to speak about that. So the placenta is procured under very rigorous controls, transported under controlled logistics.

1:15:44And then in our laboratories, it is processed to separate the cellular side of the organ from the tissue side of the organ. And from the tissue side of the organ, we make whole range of surgical appliances. These are products that are used in wound healing, orthopedics, ophthalmology. And they are basically using the natural architecture of the placental tissue itself to come up with replacements for skin ligament, tendon, cartilage, etc. and they are increasingly popular as the basis for treating diabetic foot ulcers, venous stasis ulcers, burns, etc. The cells go on to be used to produce immune cells, pleuropotent stem cells, and a whole range of other products.

1:16:35And people can go to our website, salarity .com, C -E -L -U -L -A -R -I -T -Y .com, and see all these programs and products. But the bottom line is is that we're a leading company in cellular and regenerative medicine and We are we are perfectly poised to deploy all these therapies in the future of longevity therapeutics Amazing amazing Bob. I am grateful for you in my life Thank you for the work that you're doing and you've been an incredible scientists, CEO, engineer, and brother for me. I hope folks will check out what cellularity is doing, what Fountain Life is doing, and you know start to understand the power that stem cells have and that it is part of our regenerative toolkit.

1:17:31It is part of our future. And it's, you know, we hear about the idea of adding decades of health to our life. This is a health span extension, right? And we hear of epigenetic reprogramming, but the other big area is cellular medicine stem cells. We haven't even talked about really supplementing your immune system with NK cells and T cells and so forth. We'll leave that to another episode. But love you, brother, and thank you, always, for our time together. Peter, I love you. Thanks so much for having me. and you're the inspiration that has gotten us here. So keep it up, man. Thank you, pal. See you soon.

1:18:10See you soon. Может.