The Secretome: The Next Frontier in Regenerative Medicine with Dr. Drew Taylor of Acorn Biolabs

0:00Hey guys, welcome back to Skin Anarchy. This is a very, very special episode because we're finally going to be diving into the world of secret tones. I know a lot of you are very confused in this whole regenerative aesthetic space and understanding, obviously the terminologies, but more importantly, the actual biological impact that a lot of the really great products that are coming out have on the body. So without further ado, I'm so excited to introduce you guys to the CEO of Acorn Labs, Drew Taylor. Dr. Drew Taylor, welcome. I'm excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me on. Definitely been looking forward to this conversation.

0:34No, likewise. You know, I've gotten a lot of requests to interview you and, you know, rightfully because Acorn is truly making a name for itself. And I can't wait to learn about the technology. You know, like I said in the intro, like I feel like a lot of our listeners don't understand, you know, what is a secret tone? What is an exosome? Like all of these words have kind of popped up, I feel like, in the last five years, especially in the beauty and aesthetic space. and nobody really understands. So before we dive in, I'd love for you to walk us down memory lane. What made you want to start a company?

1:04I know your background is in engineering, biomedical engineering. If you could kind of tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, well, I always wanted to go into medicine. My dad was a doctor. My mom was a nurse. So grew up around health care and the other side of what I grew up in was baseball. So my dad actually played professional baseball and so totally followed in his footsteps, went off to the University of Michigan, played baseball there and did an undergrad in biology. Worked hard and finished up that a little bit ahead of schedule. So I jumped into a master's program in molecular cell developmental biology, which was a great introduction to stem cells for me at that time.

1:50and then I finished up playing baseball there and applied to medical school and was going to head off. I was actually registered to stay in Michigan for med school and I got an offer to play professional baseball from the Blue Jays, my hometown team. So that was pretty exciting for me, obviously. That's the dream. I did take a meeting with the Dean and foolishly tried to convince them to let me stay let me stay registered and try to balance both and anyway when the laughter stopped it was it was explained that that would have been a little bit too much there's too much in person required and obviously like C-Page you know better it's just an impossible task to balance both those things but I think he did really appreciate what I was trying to accomplish and so he actually suggested I look into other programs to continue my education because I was very passionate about trying to do that and so I ended up very quickly applying to PhD programs ended up accepting an offer from University of Toronto so I thought that made sense because I had signed up the J's and and I was able to do a PhD in biomedical engineering and play at the same time and And worked it out with my professors that I would be gone for, unfortunately, a lot of the time because I was traveling around in the minor leagues.

3:15But it ended up being an amazing opportunity for me to continue to pursue both passions. And I would say that baseball ended up being a really big part of my life. Played for a few years in the minors with the Blue Jays and the Phillies and loved every minute of it. some arm injuries slowed down the progress there and led to my eventual end of my baseball career. But every baseball player at some point, you know, very few get to retire. Most are told that they can't do it anymore. And so for me, then I was able to, you know, really leave that scenario, being thankful for baseball at the very least of pushing me down this road of actually creating treatments because that's exactly what I had done for my PhD.

4:00I was investigating opportunities to use stem cells and a patient's own cells to develop regenerative medicine strategies for connective tissues. And of course, that covers skin, hair, but then into orthopedics, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage and bone. Wow. That's interesting that you did such a reroute, but that's really exciting about baseball. I didn't know you had a baseball background. That's cool. Yeah, I was, you know, definitely had an amazing experience with baseball. But, you know, in the end, looking back on it, I'm really grateful for it because I was going to head off to medical school and that would have been an amazing opportunity.

4:35But I really do feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. And on the development side of regenerative medicine is where I'm most happy. yeah no that's i have so much respect for biomedical engineers because i've always like i remember being in medical school and had a few friends that were in biomedical engineering i it's just to blow my mind you know how much like knowledge and just like innovation like i think a lot of these programs teach you how to become more i don't know think outside the box kind of in a lot of ways and so i don't know i'm not surprised that you went into biomedical engineering because acorn is so unique in what you guys are doing so yeah yeah biome is a special program because it's very diverse.

5:15You've got the people that are just basic engineers, right? That is their bread and butter. And then you've got people with biology and physics and chemistry backgrounds coming into the biomedical side from that. So you end up having this very diverse class of people that had probably, in my opinion right now, it's one of the most diverse postgraduate degrees where you have from people's bachelors being just across the board it's so differentiated. And that provides a lot of collaboration and coming at things with different perspectives. So I was really grateful to be able to do that program. That's really cool.

5:54Now, I want to actually dive into ACORN because I think that what you guys are doing, obviously, it's very cutting edge. And as you know, regenerative medicine, it's a vast, vast field. And I think the applications are almost endless. But when I look at it, especially in aesthetics, more than anything, I see confusion, you know, and I see a lot of like questions not being answered. And I think that it would be great if we could start by maybe some definitions, you know, for our listeners, because I know that, you know, for example, secretone, like what is a secretone? Why should people care about that versus like an exosome or any other term that's being thrown around right now?

6:32Yeah, I think there's a lot of terms being thrown out right now and I would include stem cells in that as well right so I think the the way that I think of all cells in the human body is is like a pyramid and so at the very top of that pyramid you have sperm meets egg all the potential in the world to become any different cell type and that's exactly what happens during development and so that cell at the top can decide to roll down any of those three faces. Once it's picked one of those faces, it can't go back up naturally, right? So it's chosen a path. And so we've got those three germ layers in our body.

7:10And then from there, it continues to differentiate at the bottom of that pyramid. You have all of the finite end cell types that are doing a job in our body. It's a kidney cell, a liver cell, a skin cell, a hair follicular cell, all of these different cells. What people call stem cells is often a very broad word because halfway down that pyramid, we have adult stem cells that reside in pockets in our body that have the ability to become a multitude of different cell types. So they're multipotent cells. The only true pluripotent cell is that moment where sperm eats egg. And then we now have a technology called reprogramming programming that allows us to take one of those end cell types you know at the bottom part of the period or even halfway up and push it back up to the top of that pyramid and when you do that and you reprogram that cell it now gains the ability again to choose a different face and roll down that and that was a noble prize winning discovery so we have all of these cells around and we call stem cells many different things but being more specific about what those cells are i think is important.

8:20And so what most of the excitement around connective tissue regeneration that is being leveraged today, and that work is really focused on mesenchymal or mesenchymal stem cells, MSCs. Now these are like halfway up the mountain. They're on the mesoderm side of that pyramid. And essentially they can become things like cartilage and bone, fat, right? They have that mesoderm capacity. And so those cells reside in a few different areas in our bodies. They're in our bone marrow, they're dispersed through our fat, and they're also at the root and the bald region of our hair follicle. And so it's an amazing cell source that has really driven a tremendous amount of the potential we see in delivering value to patients.

9:10Now thinking about how we can deliver on that value today, there's a number of strategies to try to create opportunities to capture the value in stem cells. One of those is to take exosomes, which are released by stem cells. They're released by all cells almost, but they're released by in higher concentration of stem cells. Because when we think of, for instance, that MSC stem cell in an adult patient, most people think they're patrolling around the bodies becoming different cell types but the actual reality is in our bodies what stem cells typically do is move around in general vicinities they're not traveling super far unless they get into our circulatory system but they're locally releasing molecules that are stimulating and promoting what the body needs from a production standpoint in the cells in that environment locally and so for instance in the hair follicle, these MSCs really drive a lot of released molecules that then stimulate the dermal pathway, which is actually what produces the hair follicle, like the hair shaft.

10:21Yeah. And so they have a job where they're stimulating these other cells. Exosomes is one of the things that is released by these cells in high concentrations to deliver those signals. But it's important because the exosome itself is not the signal. It's the contents of the exosome. It's like packaging. And so if you want to describe what stem cells are doing, they're like the Amazon Prime truck driving through our neighborhood, releasing packages to homes or our cells as needed. And those packages are exosomes. And it's a little bit more elegant than that because essentially these exosomes have the ability not only to get to our front door, but they have the ability to actually get inside our cells or inside that home.

11:07So they actually unbox themselves inside. And so that efficiency is what makes exosomes really exciting because you have a great degree of confidence that the contents of those exosomes are going to get delivered and have the opportunity to actually get delivered to that cell. The caveat is what's inside that package really matters. And I think that's where a lot of the confusion and questions come into play, because there's a massive flood in the space of all of these different products and all of these different avenues that are using words like exosome and secret tone. But unfortunately, defining it further is really required for us to understand the value that we're truly delivering.

11:46Yeah, no, that's a really great explanation. Thank you for walking through that, because I think that's really, really lost in translation. And, you know, just take it a step further. I mean, you talked about exosomes specifically, but I know that obviously cells are secreting a lot of things, right? Like there's a lot coming out of cells. If you look at something in a petri dish, I mean, this is where I think it gets more complicated because then you have the conversation around growth factors come in, cytokines and, you know, other proteins and peptides. And so, So, I mean, can you kind of help us parse through all of that?

12:18You know, what's really relevant there? So what we're really talking about is the entire spectrum of things that are released by our stem cells to actually stimulate cells in that niche. And that entire secreted population of things is the secret tome. So the root word there is not secret. It's actually secretion. And so all of those elements, inclusive of exosomes, is what the secret tome is made of. So that's definitely a major part of our work in understanding the secret home and identifying the different areas that are delivering value to ourselves. I would say that there's been a huge history of us trying to purify a singular compound, very much like pharma.

13:03And that singular compound, obviously, you can define it very carefully, right? And you can dose it very accurately. and there's some advantages there but it's a very simple thing that is going to hit a receptor or a pathway and our cells are very complex and so with with the advent of regenerative medicine we now have this opportunity to actually collect this pancia of opportunity from our own cells which is what we do and that secret home is what we collect and deliver back to physicians for them to apply with their patients the secret home includes exosomes as the delivery vehicle right so they are there.

13:38But there's also free molecules that are outside of those exosomes, either because they're larger or just produced separately. Those include matrix molecules, the building blocks of our cells and the tissue in between them, like hyaluronic acid, collagen, fibronectin, right? All of these elements that are important for the structure and support around ourselves. there's growth factors some of which we know pdgf igf1 um you know like vgf egf all of these different growth factors that hit different receptors on our cells and provide value and i think that there's also adjacent to them these things called binding proteins now binding proteins are a different pathway of production but they enhance the affinity or sometimes completely unlock the ability for the actual growth factors to bind to receptors.

14:31And those are really important for some specific growth factors like IGF-1 as an example. And so those are an essential piece that's sometimes neglected. Beyond that, you have other proteins and peptides that are a big part of the conversation today. You have these elements called cytokines and cytokines that actually modulate our inflammatory response. And so when they come from our own bodies, we have an ability to temper over inflammation as well as maintain a base level of activity. And that's important because inflammation is always about balance, right? Too little or too much, you're out of balance.

15:05And so these things help modulate that. And then finally, you have PDR admin. And we know this is popular from producing it from salmon and other sources. In our case, it can be derived from your very own cells. And so we actually get those building blocks, those polynucleotides that are so important for our cells' ability to divide, right? So providing those nucleotides to actually reassemble that genetic code. So it's important for repair and it's important for cell division and it's a resource. And so delivering that resource is also part of this. So that entire spectrum of a lot of hot topics right now are contained within the secret home.

15:42And that's why we've targeted that really as an opportunity to deliver all of these multiple channels of value back to patients. that's so fascinating to me because i think for some reason science always gets siloed you know and i think we get siloed because exactly what you said you know like pharma studies one compound one molecule and then figures out here's the cascade that's being elicited you know but then when you look at physiology it's like an orchestra it's always happening at the same time and so for me personally as a like a physiologist i look at that i'm like yeah that's the normal way the body response, you know?

16:18So if certain receptors get turned on, the other ones are probably going to be more inclined to kind of marry and turn on together, you know, that whole idea, like, I feel like it's gotten lost in biology for some reason, although that's just how the body functions, you know? We're very complex systems, right? And so there's so many different areas. And so this is why I'm a big proponent of having this entire orchestra instead of a singular instrument, making sure that these things are working in concert together is very important. And everything needs to be in balance. The fact that, you know, our approach is to try to make these from your own cells, right?

16:55So we're producing them from your own cells, which means we're in a biological sphere that not only is identical to you, but also is physiologically relevant and not in excess. Because I think too much of anything is a bad thing. And so all of these things want to be in balance. And so I think one of the ways that we achieve that is actually having your own cells do that in an optimized way, obviously offsetting some of these effects of aging and other things. And we've got strategies to do that in the lab to make sure you get the best out of your cells. So now, Drew, this is a question that comes up a lot, and it's about the age of an individual.

17:32When you're working with anything autologous, people ask, you know, if somebody's like, say, 60 years old and their cells are also 60 years old, you know, they've been through so much. How does that work? I would love for you to debunk this concept because there's so many people that are like, oh, it just doesn't work. If you get a result from a six-year-old, they're not going to help you regenerate anything. What is the real science there? So that premise is based on mostly the greatest body of work around there is in PRP. So PRP, Play-Literate Plasma, is a snapshot of our blood. We do a blood draw of specific volume.

18:09it's a generalist right so we're not going straight to the source of a stem cell right it's it's the the the blood delivering these things around our body and it can be very effective and there's there's certain protocols that are better than others but essentially you're still taking a photograph of that patient's blood so however much growth factor is present in that plasma after you get rid of the red blood cells and the platelets you're keeping that is a finite amount even those platelets are not producing exosomes and growth factors they become they become preloaded right so however much is in that it's immutable that's what you're delivering in a system where you're actually taking that patient's cells and you are producing these factors over a period of time you have the opportunity to skim that media that production and constantly collect them to amass higher volumes this allows for older cells that might not be as efficient or producing as much volume because they still produce these things just in a lower efficiency or lower amount you still are able to collect those things over time and amass significant volumes in studies we've shown if you do this method and that that we've patented and protected around generating secret tome you're able to actually offset about 85 percent of the loss over a 30 year period of age difference.

19:32So it's pretty significant. Still, the advice is if you have the opportunity to lock in your cells, do it as early as possible. But we've treated patients with their own secret tomes as old as 87 and seen clinical results because we're really working hard to make sure they get the best out of their cells and have mass quantities that actually hit thresholds before we release that product so they know that they have a potent product that they're receiving back, still made from their own cells. Just may take the older cells a little bit of time to create the volumes that we really want to deliver back.

20:02See, that's the missing piece. No one talks about that. Like actually concentrating the components, the point of like they're going to now, you know, deliver the results that we want. No one speaks about that. I think it's a really important part. I think equally important, there's this entire other side. You know, when you're doing autologous medicine, you're working one-to-one. You're dealing with that one patient, got one goal, one person receiving that value. When you start to look at allergenic approaches where we're looking for donor cells, yes, you can go to a younger cell source that might be a little bit more efficient at producing these molecules.

20:39But unfortunately, in order to use those cells effectively, what is happening are these protocols to expand those cells essentially and multiply them many, many times over. Yeah. That idea of, you know, what we're creating here is a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, right? Things do get blurry. And ultimately, if you take this one sample of donated cells and you try to expand that to treat, you know, thousands and thousands of patients and hundreds and hundreds of doctors' offices, things are diluted very quickly. The thing that's really important to understand is how fast that aging process occurs.

21:17When we age our human bodies, that demand, it's obviously the exposure that we have, the exposome. But on top of that, it's the demand that we put on our cells to turn over. And so the more times we're asking ourselves and the more time that goes by of us continuing to ask ourselves to refresh and renew and divide, that is the aging process. Every time our cells divide, the telomeres are shortening, like all of these different hallmarks of aging are accumulating. when we do that in the laboratory and expand these cells we're basically taking decades worth of aging in the human body and fast forwarding through that in a matter of weeks or months of the lab and so there's a great study um that came out by hartman et al to track this process they looked at obviously the the commercial endeavors to expand these cell lines to treat a multitude of patients with allogenic cells and they actually show that even if you take cells from a young individual like two to nine years old going through those commercial processes with these cells to actually generate volumes to treat patients those cells are now performing like 75 and 95 more like so most patients we're trying to treat are still under 95 right so this is this there's a very select few patients that might be benefiting from this process everybody else is losing yeah and so i think this is really important because everybody from a marketing perspective is talking about where the cells were sourced from yeah these are age zero cells but what is even more important is how those cells were treated between the capture of them and the delivery of that product because that in between is actually determining the value that you're saving the age that's been induced onto those cells and what the end product truly is and so to me the the the source of those cells is less interesting than what is actually the contents and the molecules that are still present and the performance of those cells at the time of capture and that's that's a big part of our work that's where we have focused so it's um you know and there's a we we did publish this work and it's readily available online um so it's we've defined that that process and that content that we actually are able to capture from your own cells um with a lot of detail that's so that's really really interesting because yeah i've never heard about that.

23:36What you're saying makes a lot of sense in that you do have to preserve the cells in the way that they're going to actually be in the most physiological compatible environment when they're dividing and they're continuing. Now, when it comes to, I mean, you spoke about this, when it comes to passage number, this gets spoken about a lot as well. They talk about either the source or they talk about, okay, MSC's maximum passage four, that's about it. That's what we hear. What is your opinion on that? Like in terms of like how many times can we realistically have these cells divide and still maintain their efficacy, you know, for producing what we want?

24:14Yeah, I think a lot of it is, you know, based on predicated work. There is some variability out there. But there are studies that have shown that two passages is the lemon. a lot of the work that hartman worked i showed that four past after four passages it drops off right and and you see it continue on to like eight nine but most commercial processes are passaging a dozen times or more on the other side not only in the cellular performance but in if if truly the end product that we're collecting is the exosomes or the secret tone we have to look at that because just looking at the cells performance there might be differences downstream in the production of these molecules and that's actually what we see in cells that have been passaged and it happens much faster than in cells that age the passaging the rate that you'd expected in relative to the aging of the cells it happens even faster because when you pass your cells there are differences these cells tend to either de-differentiate which which means they change right their morphology and their function uh there's there's changes during that evolution.

25:24And so there's one really interesting study by Patel et al that actually tracked this and they looked at the exosomes specifically after passaging cells. And passaging is just a nerd word for replication events. But they showed, and this is the work that showed after P4, you had a massive drop-off. After the fourth passage, you have a massive drop-off in the performance of the exosomes. The exosomes and their ability to actually help skin cells regenerate dropped significantly the other interesting part was the number of exosomes that those cells produced did not change only their ability to actually influence regeneration in the skin so if you think about that from a product perspective advertising on a number of exosomes means very little.

26:17Yeah. Right. As an example, um, we did some analysis in the lab where we took a product that was boasting a trillion exosomes with a T, right. And we, we evaluated the amount of protein. So exosomes are mostly fat, right. They're a lipid layer. And then the contents, the growth factors of the protein and the total protein in this one trillion exosomes was about three milligrams per microliter and when we looked at the secret home um which only when we did our evaluation again and i think that you know we're very rigorous with this we had about five billion exosomes different ways of counting exosomes and that's a whole other topic but if you do it right we have five billion exosomes in our products yet we had 15 milligrams of protein per millilitre so we have three times as much protein and a massive fraction and less amount of exosomes.

27:08So when you think about the products you're receiving and the actual deliverables that are potentially inside these exosomes or outside of them, that's the value that I think I care much more about than the specific number. Because unfortunately, we've seen that that number is less important than the content. That's really, really interesting to know that. I mean, I think, you know, I would love to see these companies, a lot of the companies in the exome space now show us that data? You know, like, did you quantify it? Because I know some are now saying that, like, yeah, we've looked at the contents, we've done the, you know, like, just simple tests, like, you know, qPCR or whatever, but like, they don't really disclose that information.

27:51And also, I mean, I guess a follow-up question for me is like, it should also matter what's there, right? It's like, you can't just say like, we have cytokines, we have growth factors, like which ones and why do they matter you know and what application is it being utilized and that's a huge topic yeah it's something we're committed to continue to learn more about right because you know we're at the infancy right now this this regenerative medicine space right and it is happening very quickly in aesthetics partially because you can apply these things topically as cosmetic applications and that allows for groups to get some data as well as some sales right but that allows them to understand their product more and more and so it is happening in aesthetics first and i think that's part of the confusion is because you see this flood in a category of topical applications um but again i think that that you know there are great companies out there you know i definitively include us in that that are trying to continue to expand to the knowledge around how these things are being delivered understand better dosing strategies understand um you know the the frequency of applications and how these things are best paired with other modalities, right?

29:03Especially when they're being applied topically. So there are a number of groups that I think are really committed to making sure that they're taking the technology that they have and understanding how that can benefit patients in the best categories and deliver the most amount of value. And there's lots of companies, in fact, unfortunately, there's more that are literally just looking to exclusively try to capitalize on an exciting area of regenerative medicine and sell a product and sell it at scale and and not necessarily um work to continue to increase the the value of what the patient is getting um but that's in anything right it's not exclusive yeah you're gonna have taxisms or secret zones yeah we did that with niacinamide i mean you know like when we started any ingredient i feel like in the in the statics or beauty space we just we blow it up to the point of like, you know, it just goes crazy.

30:00But no, it's very interesting though, because I guess like really where this leads me to is understanding for ACORN specifically, where do you guys educate the physicians, you know, and the providers in how to utilize this platform, you know, because this is very, very exciting. It's, you know, autologous, the autologous side of regenerative medicine to me is like, I think the most, you know, logical way to approach this. But like, I think a lot of physicians, we don't get training in any of this. Let's just be honest. We don't get trained in residency. We don't get trained in medical school. And so I just wonder, like, where is that like knowledge gap or have you seen a knowledge gap with providers and how do you guys fill that, you know?

30:40Yeah, there definitely is. And I think a big part of what, you know, I definitely am trying to do is be a source of education. Obviously, we are trying to deliver value to patients, and obviously we have a commercial company. But at the same time, I think from a moral perspective, we are very much top to bottom at Acorn, making sure that we're putting the patient first. And we want physician partners that are working with that endeavor in mind as well. And so there's a lot of things out there, unfortunately, that we get asked about all the time. And I like to talk about our stuff more than other approaches, but it does come up.

31:19So education is a big part of what we try to do. Not just for the physicians on some of the molecular science and things, but patients as well. Patients are coming in more educated than ever. And we try to equip our medical partners to make sure that they can answer some of these questions, right? Because we have so much information at our fingertips these days with phones in our hands and now AI and all of these things. So we can ask a lot of questions really quick. All of that being said, I think that the end of where this regenerative medicine space is going is truly exciting. And so we try to make sure that we are grounded in the principles that are going to unlock value today, but also tomorrow.