#417 Tomasz George from Freyr Health: What Does Real Longevity Science Look Like?

16:46Tomasz George:trained we were trained to the full extent and could perform it really yeah of course i'm joking so uh um so we performed numerous operations and i actually uh got a load of my mates in paid them 20 quid and said oh yeah like sit down we'll give you a local anesthetic in your leg yeah uh take a tiny bit of your muscle extract the stem cells from your muscle called satellite cells which are the ones that regenerate your muscle after they uh after you damage it okay and that those were the ones i was looking at as a model for aging right and uh but we could perform these operations get people healed up pay them literally nothing like 20 quid at the time and uh send them on their way wow so i had a load of my friends but those cells perform but the the young the young cells perform just as well as the old cells you said yeah so it's it's down to the environment that you put the cells in in terms of how stands and how they respond in terms of regeneration

17:41James:and what so what what parts of the environment so this is the this is one thing i was looking at so

17:46Tomasz George:i was taking the stem cells the satellite cells which are the muscle stem cells from elderly and young people yeah then you culture them in a petri dish and treat them with either elderly or young blood and when they're treated with the elderly blood they perform really poorly in terms of their regeneration when they're treated with the young blood they perform really well and this is regardless of the age of the cell so you have the young cells that perform really poorly in the elderly blood and the elderly cells that perform well in the young blood so then I was kind of I was intrigued by this so I was looking at what factors were changing in the blood that of course yeah either going up or down with age that's then influenced the regeneration of these cells yeah and so and I kind of highlighted a few of them initially but now I think there's more and more being identified each day there's like 50 plus factors now that people have identified that really affect the aging process that are in your cellular environment right and you can influence these through diet and lifestyle in lots of instances as well or you can take supplements and things like testosterone patient therapy and things like this as you age a growth hormone and these kind of things that are done at the high level of longevity treatment do go somewhat to changing your cellular environment back to an earlier stage interesting but then a lot of people after my research and other people's research at the time showing that these kind of that the young blood regenerated the cells they decided that oh i i can

19:31James:afford it i'm going to pay for a blood transfusion i was going to say is this now going to be a thing

19:35Tomasz George:yeah okay yeah so at the time there was kind of a bit of a fad in silicon valley and places like this where people were taking younger blood and injecting themselves with it and not always in the most healthy of ways because some people didn't really match the blood effectively got kind of sepsis or immune conditions from it god i know i actually heard as well that um Robert Mugabe started doing this after people like myself and others researching in this area. So unfortunately, we might have gone some way to improving his life. Wow. Wow.

20:14James:So before we move on in your journey, just a couple of questions on this because it's fascinating. What then happens at the age of 75 that's, you know, correlating with the sharp decline then? What is it about the, not the quality of blood is the wrong phrase, but what are the physiological processes in the body that then start happening or not happening or increasing in speed or reducing in speed? What happens at 75 then that causes such a sharp decline?

20:46Tomasz George:Well, there's a number of factors that really affect it, I think, but we still don't know exactly.

20:52James:Right.

20:55Tomasz George:so there's telomere length that plays a role in kind of regulating just explain that for people that might not know right so telomere length is the on the end of your dna so each cell in the body has has dna and they're split into two strands and when it when a cell replicates itself those two strands come apart and they replicate next to the kind of separate strands to form two separate copies of the full DNA. But on the end of the DNA there are these kind of caps called telomeres that are part of the replicative process but they get reduced by a small amount each time with every replication.

21:43Tomasz George:So they don't code for anything on the end, they're just It's basically like a bit of, if you look at a kind of rope that's coiled up, and if you were to uncoil the rope and then coil it up again, you might not be able to coil it up exactly the same as it was before each time, and you might get a bit of frayed end on the end. But every single time you get that more, you uncoil it and coil it back up, you'll get a bit more fray on the end. so that's that's what the telomere is to stop that kind of fraying end so and it's a part of DNA it doesn't code for anything in the body but it's just there to kind of protect the DNA that does code so when you get that frayed end and it becomes for like too long and it gets close to the DNA that actually would code for something and could cause a mutation if it was to replicate again then the cell programs itself to die because it doesn't want any any of that dna that is trying to replicate causing any mutations that could really affect the body as a whole so it's kind of like a it's a protective mechanism on the end of your dna essentially the telomere but the shorter it gets the more chance that cell is not going to be able to replicate again it will just die.

23:05Tomasz George:But you do get certain cells that kind of go into apoptosis, which is like cell death, and they die straight away. But you get some cells with the aging process that become kind of senolytic cells. So what they do is they go into a state of where they're like a zombie cell. Instead of dying, they're half alive. But they produce lots of negative factors that influence the cells around them to also die. So you'll have healthy cells that are next to these senolytic cells that are influenced by them to go through the death process as well. So one of the best treatments for aging is actually to target these senolytic cells and kill them off so they're not infecting other cells around them.

23:57Tomasz George:and there's various things so there are certain drugs now that are being developed primarily for that but also things that you can do in your diet and lifestyle seem to have a senolytic like an effect on these um these senolytic cells as well right this is really interesting man so i'm learning loads here so so the um so one that's quite kind of quite quite good is green tea as a as one of these um kind of like uh good compounds that uh kills off these cells interesting interesting so that's one um and also kind of these these cells add to the inflammatory process with age and the inflammation is one of the key elements that affects the entire body as you age and increases in everybody along with the aging process and this then affects the cells in a negative way by exposing them to negative factors in the body and causing them to dysfunction as well wow so the more inflammation you accumulate over the aging process um the more it's going to affect your body's aging and that that's one of the factors that causes that decline as well wow um so there's there's a few things but we're still in early stages of exactly knowing the full process but we are we are now developing certain drugs that can kind of help combat that but there's certain things you can do in your diet and lifestyle to really help combat it

25:29James:also so i think that's worth touching on now so just pausing your your personal journey at this point to focus on some of this so diet and lifestyle versus drugs I think this is a really interesting thing in longevity because diet and lifestyle obviously accessible to everybody um and we'll we'll sort of generally it will feel like oh okay that makes sense that's what we've always sort of thought so there's a lot of those things I'm interested in sort of going into that in a bit more detail with you as to maybe some mechanisms there and some interesting things you could pull out of there but then there's also the drug side like you've said and the drug side is funny as as me coming from this from a doctor i'm going to be like as honest as i can here of we're taught in medicine broadly that you've got a problem and you can fix that problem with lots of things one of them is a you know pharmacological intervention and and that's aimed at the problem and and that's that the idea of using drugs in this what feels like really experimental way that might affect senolytic cells that are absolutely fine as they are by the way and aging is normal so to then start using medication to affect these not even pathophysiological but physiological things that are happening in the body that you might define that as pathophysiological so you might define aging as a problem i don't know that's an interesting philosophical debate um so it's it's weird to me like it's weird like i find myself like current like now i feel like a bit like oh that seems a bit odd and a bit weird but there's people that obviously really like this and think there's value in this and are feeding this to their dogs so that their dogs can like which for some reason seems okay i don't know why why this is all of a sudden okay in veterinary medicines just like anti-hate your dog but interestingly you know another business i'm involved with is a pet log yeah yeah nice yeah just about this so there we go and we can definitely talk about in more detail but talk to me about that then talk to you about um the the diet and exercise components and how important is that and yeah just talk to me about that side of the world

27:38Tomasz George:first so um exercise has been shown to be one of the key things uh well probably the most influential exercise and kind of sleep and stress and inflammation on the aging process so if if someone exercises um to a certain level not not overdoing it but exercises to the right level as they're aging it's one of the key differentiators to reduce that risk of the aging process and this doesn't have to be extensive exercise you'd have to be running marathons every day but in fact like the more marathon if you are a marathon runner or someone who pushes themselves over that limit and to the extremes that's actually quite detrimental in the long run

28:25James:i actually saw the link between sorry i actually saw the link between um marathon running and i think it was was it was it polyps that can then turn cancerous and things like that because you're really significantly affecting the blood flow to your colon and they get a lot more kind of pr bleeding and stuff like that because of various different mechanisms and actually yeah that i think that was ultras that was the ultra marathon runners that yeah does i mean again there's like a common sense there as well like running 100 kilometers like five times in a week or whatever that ridiculous challenge is just obviously he's like okay that that probably is a bit far but yeah no there are like clear mechanisms to this but that's not an excuse to not go running your body's not designed for that most most people's bodies may not you couldn't possibly push yourself that far so like i think that the message still has to be like go and go go and go for a run you'll be fine you're not you're not going to hit the detrimental part without doing that but clearly the mechanisms here are interesting to me about like you know when people think about exercising especially as they get older and into aging they might think about it as you know stop stopping gaining weight and and it's quite rudimentary i think when when you look into this kind of research research i imagine that like the losing weight thing is is probably paling into insignificance when you're thinking about things like even sunalytic cells or whatever it's you know you you tell me but that's what's interesting to me i think the weight is just a the weight is a kind

29:50Tomasz George:of outward symptom of a lot of the elements that are happening internally that are detrimental right so it's not it's not the fact that you're overweight that's the key it's the inflammation that's related to being overweight right it's also i think the diet that leads to you being overweight causing like you're causing gut dysbiosis and like things to be coming over the gut uh the gut barrier between the barrier the blood and explain gut dysbiosis to me oh okay so it's like

30:21James:where you don't think i've ever heard the word dysbiosis before which is quite interesting okay

30:25Tomasz George:So basically, in your gut, you have a number of cells that open to allow for nutrients to come through from your food into the blood where it can be used by the body. but if there's inflammation in the gut that's been caused by eating certain foods like processed foods and like other other kind of conditions like inflammatory bowel diseases this kind of thing that can be caused by food but can be caused by genetics as well and then if you're not eating enough fiber this can affect your your gut in the negative way by like not preventing some of that inflammation and whenever you get inflammation in the gut so the cells that form the gut lining they're not quite as tight together as they should be interesting when they're inflamed they can actually cause gaps that appear in between the cells that where nutrients that you might want to keep out of the blood then can transfer through into the blood and this can then lead to the body reacting to those nutrients in an inflammatory way so it causes systemic inflammation right so the ideal gut system would be to have your gut cells that are very close together and then the gut cells have their own channels that allow for the transfer of nutrients that you want in the blood through them right so if you allow the gut to function as it should do where it's kind of gating what nutrients come in and what nutrients don't then you have a healthy gut and that's not a dysbiotic gut if you've got gut inflammation if you've got kind of large junk larger gaps between your cells that are causing some of these negative factors to travel from your food into your into your body then that's that's what uh gut dysbiosis is and that's causes negative connotations in terms of information and uh your body is constantly having to fight against these elements that you don't want there i see i understand and then this is also linked into your microbiome so if you are eating the correct diet that feeds good bacteria in your gut they can produce factors that help you to break down the food better so that your body can absorb the nutrients more efficiently but then there are other negative bacteria that sit in the gut as well that can be fed by certain other foods uh like bad well foods like processed foods and things that you don't want to be eating and those can cause these inflammation factors that then act on the gut cells to cause them to like uh like split apart and allow um allow these

33:23James:nutrients through that you don't want to be there it's really interesting to me how i think a lot of the messages that we receive about for example not eating processed food i am partial to a bag of a big bag of doritos every now and again like very very partial and this is not an advertisement for doritos but if if it's a saturday and i've been eating really well and exercising and i want a cheat day like that's what I'm gonna go for I'm definitely gonna go for that I don't think I've ever had that I obviously get the messaging through that you shouldn't eat processed food or you shouldn't eat this you shouldn't eat that I shouldn't eat the other I've I don't think I've ever passively had the explanation of what you've just talked about or any kind of actual cellular or tissue level explanation as to what's actually going on with that stuff and i think that research is so so so important because it also works both ways because one of the companies that jessica and i in fact we've just done our very first angel investment into a company called booby biome which they are four phd scientists that have that have mapped the breast milk microbiome they've isolated what the good bacteria and inverted commas are they've first of all realized that the best ones are anaerobic so that we're storing breast milk completely incorrectly and that they've developed now anaerobic storage for breast milk so it can sit in the fridge for four days and be absolutely fine and they're developing a supplement so that every baby globally can benefit from breast milk even though not every family can give that to their babies which is obviously incredibly important.

35:10Tomasz George:Just on a slight tangent. Yeah, yeah. I was very premature when I was born. Really? So I was six weeks premature. And in 1983, that was quite early. It was punchy, yeah. So it was kind of, it was touch and go whether I would survive.

35:24James:Wow.

35:25Tomasz George:And because it was really early, my mother had struggled to produce milk.

35:31James:Yes.

35:31Tomasz George:So I actually had breast milk from all of the other mothers in numerous hospitals. given to me and i don't know if that would happen these days but uh i think that's probably helped me because i've had like all those nutrients and all those different uh kind of like bacteria and all that microbiome from each of those other mothers that was given to me which like probably helped me yeah like to survive when i was a premature kid definitely and i think what

36:00James:i'm most excited for in this as we go forward in health care is that i think the information about something like the microbiome is starting to permeate into society more broadly as we all get more interested in our health and as information just does start to get more democratized that it's i i think the you know however we want to define this the quality in inverted commas of the microbiome or how good it is or better or i don't know what the right words are going to be or balanced or whatever it is but i think we're gonna end up probably on some level or at least some people with a framework that's around keeping the best possible microbiome up which is then a great framework for me not reaching for that bag of doritos knowing full well that some cells are going to pull apart in my gut and i'm going to get some dodgy proteins that end up in my blood that i didn't want and that's going to cause an inflammatory reaction all these different things and i think it's going to be a really interesting frame because we're so willing to talk about it in terms of you know infant health and neonatal health and it obviously being so important and as a new parent myself man like you can sort of feel it like you know the colostrum conversation that they have with you they know those first drops are so so so important because they're packed full of this that and the other and you're looking at this little tiny thing and you're like oh my god like if you get it right immediately now we might we might prevent lasers down the line so there's this like almost instinctual thing to it as well as a as a new parent that i think if we can start piggybacking on this to introduce some of the longevity science that you're talking about and and actually telling people that certain mechanisms are at play i think it can really help

37:41Tomasz George:no i i certainly agree yeah and and actually i i think it's not as detrimental as you think to have the odd bag of doritos thank god thank god because that's not stopping because let's also be realistic because well i i personally think that the uh like one of the primary things that affects longevity and health is stress and if if someone if someone gets super stressed because they've had a cheat day and they've had a few doritos or they've had a burger then that's actually more detrimental to you than having the burger itself interesting especially if you've if you've developed a gut microbiome that isn't influenced by that burger so if you have a burger every day just your gut microbiome in a negative way right if you have a burger once every two months your gut microbiome isn't going to be adjusted that much and then it's going to kind of go back to the the level that it was before when you're when you continue healthy eating the next day so it's not as if every single meal causes that inflammation in the gut and causes that interesting change in your gut microbiome as much as you think and your gut microbiome and and the inflammation is constantly being adjusted so if you're if you get a slight inflammatory effect from eating your doritos but then counteract that with loads of good fiber and like good nutrients the next day that inflammation is going to be very very like transitory and just kind of like you'd have a very small effect of it maybe just after eating sure but it's not going to last sure and and it's the long-lasting effects of that inflammation that causes this gut dysbiosis that we're talking about interesting okay okay so thank you for the

39:39James:dysbiosis lecture that was really good so stress you mentioned as well um i'm not assuming that you're an absolute expert in all of these different things but again i think i'm not and i'm sure you'll have lots of no no no come in and say look we definitely you you're you're misrepresenting the audience of this podcast if you think that's true um i so the the stress component as well we learn about stress in anesthetics um in in a very sort of physiological way for those exams um and you know we'll learn about cortisol and adrenaline and we'll learn about you know short-term impacts and some long-term impacts and things but the stress that we're talking about with longevity i assume is probably slightly different this kind of fluctuating between low and high grade stress that we get in the modern western world you know over the course of decades is going to be slightly different to you know the oh i'm sorry i'm so worried about this thing this saber-tooth you know the classic saber-tooth tiger chasing me response that we might learn about in terms of how you metabolize your sugars so what what really is

40:44Tomasz George:happening with stress and longevity so i i think it's one of the key elements and uh a lot of company well uh my first company was a longevity company so after the uh after the phd yeah i figured out that actually there are things that we can change in your diet and lifestyle to improve your longevity yeah so the first company that i had was called soza health and we were using physiological parameters to determine your rate of aging and give you kind of a health number that was relating to various different elements of your health okay using kind of a functional medicine approach where it's like taking different elements of your health so like your cardiovascular health your gut health your stress your nutrition looking at kind of your kidneys and liver and all these different elements of the body and kind of weighing them together as opposed to treating them as isolated systems to see how they're functioning as a whole and one of of the key elements to this was stress and we used a uh a system that looked at your sympathetic and parasympathetic balance of your nervous system okay so your nervous system split into kind of two elements so when when you say that you your stress kicks in to kind of take you away from the tiger that's chasing you that's part of your sympathetic nervous system response so when your sympathetic kicks in it raises your heart rate raises your blood pressure it takes the blood away from things like your digestion that's not really needed when you're when you're running away and puts it towards your brain and your muscles so that you can function better and run faster away from the tiger and your other there's a equal part of the nervous system that's contradictory to that so there's your sympathetic which is the stress response the parasympathetic is your rest and relax and digest response.

42:47Tomasz George:So this kicks in when you're sleeping, when you're sitting down digesting your food, after you've run away from the tiger and you're in a safe place, your sympathetic nervous system should switch off and your parasympathetic should take over to allow your body to recover from that exertion and also digest your food and kind of provide that nourishment for the rest of your body so normally these things work in balance so whenever your sympathetic kicks in your parasympathetic then kicks in to balance it out so immediately you have this kind of homoregulation of your nervous system that's happening on a millisecond by millisecond basis where they're kind of in balance going one's one's dominating then the other kicks in to dominate over it and when you're in a healthy stress response that's what should be happening in today's society where we've been exposed to so many different stresses and even things like being on screens all the time is a stress that we don't even think about and kind of environmental factors from being living in london and being exposed to traffic and to like tourists and all this kind of thing that stress you famously incredibly stressful yeah a walking pace oh if you if you ever try and walk down oxford street and try to get somewhere quickly very stressful very difficult yeah yeah exactly they can't pedestrianize that street any sooner honestly i agree completely so so yeah there's all these stresses that are just of everyday life that you don't even think about but what they're doing is promoting your body into a state where your parasympathetic is at a lower level and your sympathetic is always at a higher level and you can actually train your nervous system to respond better so one of the tests that we did within this uh kind of suite of tests that we had at um at my company was looking at your sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system balance so we looked at it while you're at rest and we could see if you're in a state of anxiety how by the way how are you measuring that so we looked at uh so um we can look at it from your heart rate and your changes in heart rate over time so um so something called heart rate variability and if anyone's got a like wearable like a fitbit or an apple watch or aura you can look into the app and see your heart rate variability and that those companies and those wearables they look at it over time normally while you're sleeping so you don't really it's not influenced by your everyday activities but you can get a level for your heart rate variability that relates to how well your nervous system is functioning and the higher level in general the better for heart rate variability but when you look at it in a short-term response you can see actually how those how the balance between your parasympathetic and sympathetic are working because you can see if there's a large amount of variability in like your heart rate kind of going up and then and then uh slowing down within say a five minute period and you're constantly seeing it speeding up then slowing down speeding up then slowing down and it shows that your two elements of your nervous system are working very well together oh interesting um and so that that's what things like heart rate variability when you look on your wearable tech is telling you right how well your nervous system's working and uh at rest they should be in complete balance so if your parasympathetic is depressed and your sympathetic is elevated it shows that you're in a state of anxiety and stress that you should probably work on and you can do breathing exercises to help this or often people might be a bit deficient in magnesium and magnesium helps boost your parasympathetic as well and this is one thing actually that declines quite a lot with age is magnesium and it's a supplement that a lot of people should be taking then what you can also look at is how your nervous system responds to certain activities.

47:09Tomasz George:So one of the things we did as part of this test was having you at rest to look at your nervous system balance, then asking you to go from like lying down to standing, which is called an ortho test. And ideally, when you go from lying down to standing, this is putting kind of a mild stress on your body. So your sympathetic should kick in and your parasympathetic should back off to allow your blood pressure to cope with that uh the blood pressure to increase to cope with that kind of change in your orientation so the blood gets forced up to your brain where it where it's needed and um if that doesn't happen effectively this is why when some people get up uh from seated standing they can get kind of lightheaded and that might be because your sympathetic nervous system is not kicking in as effectively as it should do but also with other people when you stress the body their sympathetic does kick in but it also lasts a lot longer in terms of a stress response so when you look at this ortho test you can look at over time and say actually you stress your stress kicked in but did it go back down to normal in the appropriate time for you as a 40 year old yeah um and if it doesn't if it takes a lot longer then it's that it means that your stress your nervous system isn't

48:33James:functioning quite as effectively as it could do so the modern world causes those issues basically

48:39Tomasz George:and there's yes exactly and there's a but also diet and lifestyle but also kind of you can you can train your you can train your way of thinking and your kind of um your there's a there's a test a kind of treatment called biofeedback that allows you to kind of associate your breathing to your heart rate a bit better. So when you do breathing exercises and yoga and meditation and these kind of practices, that teaches your breath work to work with your heart rate so that actually when you're breathing in, your heart rate is slowing down. And when you're breathing out, your heart rate is increasing and this helps to train your nervous system to work in an effective way because it's essentially activating your parasympathetic and your sympathetic in line with your breath to train it better so then it will work better in situations where it's where

49:36James:it's needed for stress or for relaxation i love i i have just a very like personal moment of delight it whenever I see like ancient wisdom collide with modern science and this seems like one of those moments where you've got these like thousands and thousands of years old practices that researched in 2025 turn around and go like oh we should just be doing these things yeah we've been doing that yeah yeah don't worry about it we've been we figured this out quite a while ago

50:06Tomasz George:well yeah but what I love though is like people figured it out ages ago and it's kind of been lost and people people think oh like yeah that's an ancient practice like there's no evidence for it like we're just going to disregard it but then what i love is when the evidence comes in to prove that that was actually something we should be doing yeah and then and then it kind of comes in a cycle where people think oh i'm going to be doing this practice again um like whereas in fact you probably should have just been doing it all the time yeah so quite quite and trusting that

50:39James:ancient wisdom i guess um what happened with that company then uh so we it was a bit early in terms

50:46Tomasz George:of uh longevity company so we started this in 2009 if it had been like 10 years later i think it would have done wow that that is early um yeah so and now there's been a huge longevity boom since then yeah but we had to kind of pivot the company at the time to being more of a kind of corporate wellness assessment so we were we were working like reasonably successfully for a time with kind of corporates doing health screenings that kind of thing and um but then then i kind of i didn't see the company progressing the rate that i wanted to wanted it to so i moved on to a different one after that um actually went to work for a cancer company after that so they ran a load of cancer clinics globally it was called a verita healthcare group so they had supplements that they were offering for cancer cancer treatments in i think six or seven clinics globally and also they wanted to set up a digital arm that was utilizing my expertise in like ai and health tech to develop an app that would help patients optimize their diet and nutrition around any cancer treatments to get the most out of their treatment with the least side effects so that was developed in uh well actually that was scuppered a bit by covid unfortunately because we had to have all of the cancer patients that were being treated in clinic we had to spend a load of money to get them actually the same treatment but in their homes instead of in clinics because we couldn't afford to get covid yeah yeah so so actually myself and a few other people on the management team had to basically take zero salary for six months there and uh while the company hopefully got back on its feet but it never did and they had to scrap the uh the digital arm of the business so but thankfully in the meantime i'd moved on to doing another two

52:42James:businesses so um it was hard to keep down aren't you honestly so so yeah the first the first one i

52:51Tomasz George:kind of um i noticed during covid that one of the key elements of the immune system that's actually works to um fight off covid was with t-cells in the immune system so i developed a test for t-cells you developed a test for t-cells yeah yeah so um so how it works is you take a blood sample you treat it with a proxy for a virus yeah so we had a proxy for covid right which looked like basically all of the cell surface markers on covid so you could see how your blood was reacting to that proxy and then it would hopefully react in a similar way if you actually got the covid virus itself so then we treated the blood with this proxy and we could see if your t cells were being activated in response to the covid proxy when you say you could see it are you talking down a microscope or are you talking through a different so you so you uh you looked at kind of the t-cell activation as so t-cells when they get activated they release certain

53:59James:markers that you can detect in the blood so so we can we can provide a kind of a blood detection

54:06Tomasz George:system that see could see how many of these activation markers were being produced by the t-cells so um if your t-cells were very active in response to the covid or the covid proxy um we could assume that actually if you got the virus you would fight it off pretty quickly and you might not get serious um effects from covid so we were designing this for use before an outbreak when you identified that a virus could be an issue wow yeah so so that actually if there was a virus in say like china that had been identified as potentially causing a pandemic we can quite quickly create a proxy for that virus adapt the test so that we can treat someone in the uk to say like uh take a blood sample treat it with this viral proxy yeah before the virus gets

54:58James:to the uk and there's an outbreak to say actually look um you're going to respond quite well to this

55:04Tomasz George:So you probably should be further down the line in line for a vaccine, whereas other people don't respond very quickly to this virus. They should be front of line for a vaccine.

55:16James:In marketing, that's the way around you want to sell it. Like these people really need it. So they go first. That's definitely the messaging. But no, that's incredible.

55:23Tomasz George:But also some people like there's been a big backlash on vaccines now.

55:28James:Of course.

55:28Tomasz George:So if you can have a test prior to the vaccine to say, actually, you don't need it or you do need it, people are going to be more inclined to take up the vaccine. You are right. That is correct. And actually, it's going to be people who are informed in a way that makes them want to have the vaccine rather than feel like they're obliged to have it.

55:49James:Yes, that's so interesting. That's unbelievable. So is that now active? Could that now be done for the next possible pandemic?

55:59Tomasz George:So it's still in production. So I devised the test and it was going into production. We're now in clinical trials for that, but I've moved on to that company.

56:07James:But you've moved on, of course you've moved on. Yeah, yeah. You and your attention span, honestly.

56:13Tomasz George:A little bit, yeah.

56:14James:So that, but just before we, just pull me on for that. So that IP is yours? That is your test that you developed?

56:21Tomasz George:Yeah, I developed it, but it's part of the company though. It's not my specific IP. That's a shame. But on the back of that, we were able to float the company on NASDAQ, which is really quite a positive thing.

56:32James:Right. This is what we spoke about before. So, yeah, tell me that story, because that must be awesome to go through that. Floating a company is not afforded by the many, is it, to float a company? So, yeah, tell us what happened. It was mad, actually.

56:47Tomasz George:And it was quite quickly since I joined the company. Sure. So the company originally was a COVID test distribution company and PPE distribution company. And they had supply chains out of Malaysia and China of really high quality PPE and testing. And we went for... I love, by the way, that you have to actually...

57:11James:It's sort of a serious point that you do have to kind of say, no, no, no, we were one of the high quality ones that was doing things properly. Like we weren't trying to steal from everybody or do anything weird or we didn't take any dodgy government contracts. It's like bizarre that we live in a world where you actually have to like caveat that.

57:25Tomasz George:I know, it's kind of, it's mad.

57:27James:What did you do next?

57:28Tomasz George:So at the same time, I was kind of doing another job as I was doing the NASDAQ one. Because after the cancer one, I was scrambling around a bit because I was like, obviously not getting paid and like jumped on whatever opportunities I could. thought this potentially could be a good opportunity in the nasdaq one which it did turn out to be but also wanted to kind of follow something that was a bit more secure as well and so i joined a company called connected life and they're based out of singapore okay um i was their chief scientist and product officer so developing a product that allowed for patient monitoring outside of the clinic so when you um when you're with a doctor they can give you a care plan they can give you everything you need to be doing to improve your health in a specific area but once you leave that clinic stores they've got no idea as to whether you're being adherent to that plan and how you're doing until you come back in correct and see them in six months or a year and often people might be extremely motivated in the first week or two to follow the doctor's orders take their medications do whatever the doctor said in terms of like exercises and this kind of thing but after two weeks time it drops off and sometimes it drops off significantly enough that like the next time you come in to see your doctor you've you've not improved or you've even got worse yeah and it's like a constant cycle of trying to get patients to adhere but then eventually they'll just get worse and worse when they're not adherent between visits so develop the platform that can use wearable tech to help monitor patients between clinic visits okay and also deliver a care plan to them so they can be adherent like measure their adherence and also alert themselves anyone who's monitoring their platform so you can have like your spouse or friends involved as well to keep you on track and also um alert your clinician if it gets to a stage where you're slipping yeah further further further than you can manage yourself it's a heck of a red thread to start

59:46James:pulling i say red thread it's just it's just a heck of a thread to start pulling but when you when you start pulling on adherence and and where adherence becomes about you know behavior and it becomes about psychology and it becomes about motivation and it becomes about so many different things and and it becomes about the quality of information the delivery of information the touch points the the human interaction the app interaction that like there's so much that that ends up that that ends up becoming like what was your particular angle on it would you say where was your kind of expertise as a company like approaching that from we were we were solely

1:00:28Tomasz George:looking at things from kind of a non-medical standpoint initially but using kind of uh consumer grade technology like wearable technology to to determine as much as you can on someone's health in between those clinic visits to keep them keep them on track as much as possible so

1:00:47James:So was that a closed loop between them, the device, and them, and then you would just fire off insights back to the clinician where it was needed so the clinician wasn't responsible for the feed of data or anything?

1:00:59Tomasz George:No, the clinician wasn't responsible at all for that. And actually, the clinician had to opt in as well for receiving the alerts and things because clinicians are very much overworked anyway. and so that that was one of the kind of sticking points with working with like large hospital groups is actually getting the adherence from the clinician side because they're like stretched as it is um so it's more kind of it was more focused on trying to keep that patient involved and in the loop of uh like adhering to a care plan that was set and then nudging them at specific points and also we were kind of we were developing some tools that could help the patient report on their kind of outcomes a bit better through the app as well and also link in with things like their calendar and their kind of lifestyle to say to give them nudges at the right most appropriate times so for instance you wouldn't get a nudge to exercise if you're on the tube to work in the

1:02:05James:morning that kind of thing because the detail of that that stuff is so important the nuance of that stuff is so important and that's where i think so much of it there's a huge boom of it when you know there was the first apps and the first this and the fact like it was it was very clear that we were so rudimentary in our thinking like everyone trying to solve those problems that there were so many assumptions made about you know you nudge someone and they do a thing it's like no no it's

1:02:29Tomasz George:not it's it's nowhere near as straightforward as that no and it's like often like you have to have something in it for the patient as well absolutely if they're if they're going to be adhering yeah so it either needs to be a peer pressure from your uh from your family or your friends that try to keep you in line so if you can add them as a as a viewer on your platform to say that you haven't taken your medication for three days what what are you doing um then they keep them

1:02:57James:they keep patient in line that would 100 be enough for me 100 be enough for me because you don't yeah yeah it's just yeah you don't you don't want to give away any leverage there to to those people so yeah absolutely you just do the thing but then but then it's it's either that kind of pressure from people that they trust in in their network or it's a financial reward for doing something

1:03:24Tomasz George:or even even a punishment on the other side but i prefer the rewards yes absolutely yeah so what

1:03:31James:are you up to now tell me about your longevity company that you've got in the space and everything you're doing in the like future of longevity stuff my most recent company um is called freya health

1:03:42Tomasz George:and it's more it's more involved with population health management and medical data rather than longevity but it's all a continuum that feeds into each other so if you're if you have a fuller more richer data set that you can look at longitudinally from when you're younger and then see any changes and kind of trends that link into your health as you age this is the most important thing that you can be doing to identify areas you need to focus on for your longevity by the way

1:04:18James:just just to interrupt you sorry tomash what's that what that has just made me think of is you know i have a i have a nine month old son and he is born now and he he was born into a world where chat gpt exists and we're even in the rudimentary stages of what chat gpt even is but even if it was to stay exactly as it is now forever he would literally have an ai companion that knows absolutely and remembers absolutely everything about him from the moment he is born and in sort of LLM terms to help him with decision making or like whatever it is like he literally would have the data all the data of of everything he's ever told it from from birth onwards and so this is really interesting to me of like this this vision of what if all healthcare data of someone was captured and you could query it and you could run experiments on it and you could use that population level.

1:05:17James:So please continue.

1:05:19Tomasz George:Just on a tangent with AI at the moment. So I think at the moment, the way our AI is being used is potentially the most dangerous point in time for AI.

1:05:32James:Oh, wow. Interesting take.

1:05:34Tomasz George:A lot of people are concerned about AI in the future and how it's going to affect their lives. but i i think putting too much weight into ai right now is more concerning because ai is only only as good as the training set data sets that you put into it and at the moment those training data sets aren't good enough right so for what are we talking about health care here for health care for for anything okay and and i think you see you see this in social media as well where you You have kind of your AI generated content that you're delivered all the time. But this becomes a bit of an echo chamber based on what you've been feeding it before.

1:06:15Tomasz George:And it's not broad enough to expand to the wider remit of data that it needs to take in to really get you as a person and what you want to be viewing. Because most people, they fall down these rabbit holes of content. And I think they find it difficult to step out of that rabbit hole of content because the AI has learned what it wants to be giving you and it follows that same route. But it's the same with healthcare, actually. And if you have set data sets from a population that aren't representative of the global population or aren't representative of a disease population group, the AI is going to learn on that data set, but it won't be representative of the population at all.

1:07:05Tomasz George:so the more data we can feed in the more relevant data shall i say that we can feed into an ai the better it's going to become and then the more we can rely on it down the line and this is especially true for healthcare where even like even 99 accurate of an ai isn't good enough in healthcare because that one percent can't can't happen and there's and if if the ai is recommending something in that one percent that's completely wrong then who takes responsibility for it and that's the problem with healthcare ai it needs to be 100 or it's not good who should take the responsibility for that do you think i think it needs to have that oversight from a clinician um so if ai at the moment and i think for a long time down the road can only should only be used as a clinician support tool but the clinicians need to have the final say and it should be on them if they're not picking up that the ai was wrong in that one percent of times it's hard

1:08:09James:though that i i totally hear what you're saying and and i probably would say exactly the same thing if asked to be perfectly honest because you don't want to stifle the innovation and you want to you want to make sure it's a problem though i think when at the moment the major application of that is well yeah the major application of that is obviously you know let's take summarizing notes right summarizing clinical notes and providing you know action plans and all the rest of it the goal of that is obviously to take the cognitive load off clinicians and to increase the speed and to reduce the administrative burden and it's funny because the the and i'm speaking from personal experience now part of it is an administrative burden part of it is also you would always you were told or i was told anyway to always write your medical notes on a patient as if you're reading them out in court and when you outsource both of those loads the administrative burden and the fear of legal burden happy days but if you would but if we're outsourcing the admin burden and saying okay ai ai is now going to write all your notes for you but you've just got to check them and make sure that you didn't miss anything i'm i'm gonna be like i've still got now the legal burden and it's like has that actually solved my problem and that that for me is really difficult because did i ask about pr bleeding like ah it's not in the like it's not in the notes like did i well i've mentioned it here but did i ask the ah like ah now like so now i've got to think in the moment i've got to remember all of this and if i need to remember it i'm gonna have to write it down so now i'm back at square one so it's a really interesting time and then of course if you're if you're expecting the ai to do complex calculations and you're going to trust the signal then now we're in medical device territory so it needs to be regulated medical device and now it's not the support tool so it's a minefield but back to your original point it backs up it backs up what you said that we're in a very dangerous potentially quite dangerous point of ai with this and i'm i'm i'm really really really trying to like push hard on put AI where it's good and where we trust it and where it's okay so that we can be freed up to do the other stuff it's just that you know I've been sat on that thought for a long time actually I'm glad I've actually finally now said it out loud that I do think that it feels to me like a

1:10:34Tomasz George:bit of a problem I don't know yeah so well one of the one of the things with my latest business actually is trying to solve that problem to a certain extent interesting so um so when you look at the health data that's available at the moment for a patient for clinical decisions clinicians make their decision on about three percent of health care data that's available from a patient and when you look at the rest of the data that can be captured from things like your like risk determinants from from kind of your health your living just like real world outcome measures like wearables and health apps genomics and metabolomics then all of the other data that you can capture in everyday life from a patient including patient reported outcomes and things like this that makes up 97 of a patient's health data and just on that just if you could if you

1:11:35James:could just talk briefly about genomics and metabolomics so yeah so genomics is looking at

1:11:43Tomasz George:your genome and how that affects your risk profile for diseases. And metabolomics is looking at your basically the proteins in your body and how they're interacting and how they increase your risk for disease as well.

1:12:01James:So for things like diabetes

1:12:03Tomasz George:development, metabolize, things like this, yes. And we can detect and test all of these things, but it's not something that's done in a five-minute conversation with your doctor when you go and see them no so so in that five minute conversation the doctor has to get as much information as they possibly can from you to make a diagnosis and that's often on information that may not be true that you've remembered you often remember the last kind of few days where you might have had a symptom and that that caused you to go and see your doctor but you don't remember what you were doing six months ago that could have they actually affected your health today in a more longitudinal fashion and so that doctor is doing the best with the information they have but essentially that's only three percent of the health data that's available for that patient so what we're trying to do at Freya Health is to allow that patient to aggregate all of their health data into one place to form a single complete portable medical record or universal patient health record is what we're going to call it and this allows that patient to unlock access to that full data set and get insights it allows them to share it and leverage it and earn rewards from sharing that data as well so we're essentially empowering patients to aggregate all their data into one place and then utilize it to its full extent either by sharing it with their clinician so that the clinician gets 100 of their data as opposed to just three or you can share it with pharma companies like clinical trials companies governments insurers and they you can actually sell your data to those companies but also for those companies themselves they can access the data as a full data lake and use a anonymous access protocol that allows them to ask questions of the data without the data being shared without any of your personal details being shared and without the data actually moving from its location where it was captured so the pharma company can get an insight from your data without actually any of the data being compromised then if they want to access your full data set they can send a request to you to opt in then you can opt in immediately share your data and immediately get

1:14:41James:rewarded for sharing that data as well i think it's super interesting and it's i mean it's certainly not the first time i've heard something similar and it won't be for you either because there was a there was a group of companies that were that were talking about this in the kind of web 3 blockchain era that I know you and I've spoken about before um and I can remember back then there were these nebulous concepts around web 3 and things existing in a in a something with a crypto key and people giving access to certain things based on that and I remember it being talked about then but never being seen through even like Tim Berners-Lee like the founder of the internet kind of thing was being talked about that time as well as being part of this thing.

1:15:27James:Like it was a strange sort of movement, but seemingly with the same goal of like, how do you basically, now that we're in a world where people understand that data is valuable and they can understand and appreciate some more transparency around this and everyone can kind of get on board with that. Well, is there a model now where we can go, okay, I'm now choosing that my genomics, my metabolomics my heart rate variability data from my in fact all my wearable data from my phone and my my watch and my all sorts i'm going to put this all in a vault and then that vault can be accessed by whoever it is but i'm in control of the deal i'm in control in in what you pay for it and all the rest of it to some extent obviously um but the point is i'm always in control of that and i own it and i think that's that's a really really really interesting concept that i think having not actually heard about that in four years i think was the last time i seriously heard about four or five years ago like a credible boom in that come a long way i think the world's got a lot further large language models now exist and everyone's more comfortable with ai and data and all these different terms that it seems like now feels like a good time i guess if you could explain you said all that unified data in one place i'm interested what is that one place where does that exist and and and yeah like what what what weird dimension stranger things upside down does that

1:16:54Tomasz George:live in like so so actually that's the um i think one of the issues with the adoption of this on the in the web3 space is the kind of the one place idea okay that uh in in that actually it costs a lot of money to store things on blockchain and using web3 yes and all the regulation costs a lot of money as well okay um so it becomes kind of a bit cost prohibitive when you store it in that one place okay but if you store it in the area of origin for those data points so the data points maintain their sovereignty and security in the data where in the place where they were captured yeah so if i if i travel globally and i go to new york one day and i went to a clinic there I have my majority of my records in London but then I also go like to Dubai and visit a clinic

1:17:52James:over there yeah and your step count I would have my data in three separate places yeah okay

1:17:57Tomasz George:but actually the way that I would then aggregate them and look at look at them as a longitudinal health record is I would have on my Freya Health app a a token essentially with blockchain that identifies using hashes on the blockchain which is like basically hash is a kind of a location tool that identifies what data point should be at what point on your blockchain yeah so you can use those hashes to then say like i've got um 10 000 data points in dubai um 20 000 from new york and 200 ,000 from the UK on that chain that's on my device I can see exactly which point is where and which order they come in then I can use a peer-to-peer sharing mechanism that allows for that data to be streamed to my device without it actually having to be stored elsewhere separate from where it was originally captured but then you can still view it and you can choose to share it from your device and it kind of that maintains GDPR and HIPAA compliance which is the key kind of compliance factors for data security interesting and capture within its area of origin but then it also allows for the patient to view that data longitudinally share it with whoever they want to and gain insights from it as a whole as opposed to it being siloed in these disparate places wow so when we talk about one

1:19:30James:place we're not talking about metaphysically one place where all of this stuff is uh sat and at risk of attack or anything like that you're actually saying keep it keep it where uh its origin is but i aggregate is probably the wrong word but ultimately you're accessing it from one place and the access of it comes from one place from the sounds of things but you obviously know where it all is and it's all queriable etc etc and the interesting part is that it's part of then this data lake now that's a really interesting element to this where then you're not having to think about or maybe you are thinking about anonymization or pseudonymization or any of that sort of stuff you can actually just let people query the database and never have access to the data so they can ask their research question but you're not having to hand over at all of the data and actually that can then in your model come at a higher price if indeed they

1:20:29Tomasz George:want that if i've understood that correctly that's exactly it so so as a pharma company if i was doing research on diabetes for instance i could say i could um tailor a query within the platform to say actually i want to look at all patients who are between 30 and 40 who have diabetes type 2 and are taking Wagovi to try and manage it and also have been reporting on their glucose levels at least once a week for the past three months. So you can actually tailor it in a way that allows you to find the population of patients that are going to be most beneficial to you. Then it will access that data lake using that query and you can ask a question about data, how many patients fit that criteria and it will then query the data without any of the data moving being shared or any of the personally identifiable information being shared from those patients and the pharma company will get a response to their query to say actually there are 100 ,000 patients that fit your criteria on the Freya platform do you want to set up a study for these patients then if the pharma company is running a study on 10 000 of those patients you can send a notification to all 100 000 to say there's a study running from like pfizer would you like to opt in and share your data and you will get rewarded for sharing your data with a hundred dollars per year and then immediately those patients can choose am i going to opt in or not if they choose to opt in they become one of those 10 000 patients when the 10 000 patients are filled um the rest of the patients who hadn't opted in say gets a notification to say archie recruitment's finished like welcome to try on the next one i really like it man the question i have is that how do you get

1:22:29James:how do you get the clinical clinical how do you get the critical mass of people on this to make it then valuable to those enterprises those organizations and to actually because i imagine there's obviously the key bit here is getting people on the platform because then ultimately there's a point at which you get to clinical critical mass where the insights are valuable beyond like you know before which it's not really but beyond which it then just like takes off so there's like a point of takeoff isn't there i imagine do you know where that is and how you

1:22:59Tomasz George:intend to get there it comes in stages actually okay so uh initially like we're we're partnering with a number of healthcare companies to access to allow them to access all of their data but then we're also contacting governments specifically for this as well so i'm actually working with the un at the moment i'm setting up a commission to um i promote this kind of data access to all 193 countries in the un and we're going to basically promote them to adopt a more more

1:23:35James:digital health reform using our platform interesting and an initial kind of investment

1:23:41Tomasz George:for that digital health reform can then be offset by the data sales and the revenue that you get from selling that data to pharma companies and to research organizations so essentially it'll be setting up a new revenue stream for these countries and which will offset any digital health reform that they need to pay initially to kind of set up so so that's the idea and we're working with UN at the moment for that we're working with a number of NGOs in Africa where we're negotiating access to the Pan-African Parliament's medical records so they potentially will be giving us access to 1.2 billion records from Africa but then we're also focused on individual healthcare companies to access their data that they have sitting in these siloed cloud repositories and not really knowing how to monetize it or do anything with it.

1:24:38Tomasz George:So we can provide that platform for them to actually gain more from their data, get more insights on their data. And if you're a healthcare company, say, in the longevity space, where you're capturing lots of longevity data for patients, but you may only have 10 ,000 patients on your platform, we can aggregate your 10 ,000 patients with another 10 longevity companies who also have 10 000 patients to give a 100 000 patient a pool of data that then becomes more valuable for pharma and then when pharma buys that data packet you can share the profits between the different companies and patients that have originally donated that data yeah and fair to say there's

1:25:22James:there's like a global health piece there as well around like the data gap of the lack of data around you know underrepresented communities basically which clearly yeah clearly this helps to solve the latest research i was reading on this was that uh like 80 percent of the global health data

1:25:41Tomasz George:is um attributed to people of like western european origin 80 80 80 and and they and people of that origin only take up 16 % of the global population. So there's a big data gap here in terms of the data that's being used to influence medical terminologies and processes and also train AI models. All the clinical processes that are derived aren't really derived on a representative population globally they're derived mainly on western european populations so if we can go somewhat some way to addressing that data gap and making it more representative of the global population by aggregating data from some of these underserved populations globally it's going to go quite far to improving they improving the models that we can use globally for healthcare and again linking back to the ai points that we mentioned earlier i we need the right data to be training these ai models to make them effective and if it's trained on the data lakes that we have currently it's going to be effective maybe for european populations but not

1:27:00James:globally absolutely very true and thank you for saying that um so i know that we've run over massively here so i need to start wrapping this up and let you go it's been fun but before i let you go one more question is around uh can i can i ask you to uh help me with making my dog live

1:27:20Tomasz George:forever actually yeah so i'm working with it i'm working with another company so one of my one of my colleagues from the nasdaq business a guy called cameron shaw he's set up a company called panio and it's based in uh based in uae but it's a dog longevity company so uh i'm i'm involved with adapting longevity treatments from humans to dogs wow that we're going to we're going to have in clinics in dubai initially and then in geneva and other places but we're also in um studies at the moment that uh are looking at the effectiveness of a drug for longevity in dogs and it's been tested in rats and mice so far and in rats and mice it's improved the longevity by 30 to 40 percent what and insane but this is small studies so far i have to caveat and now we're testing it in dogs and the initial results show about 10 improvement but we're we're now going to look at it across different breeds and then take it to take it to market it's probably going to go to market in about two to three years but it's uh it's looking quite promising and then after the after using this in dogs effectively we hope that it's going to be

1:28:43James:translatable to humans too wow unbelievable can i ask you what metabolic process you're going after or which aging process you're going after oh it's kind of uh so it it helps with the

1:28:56Tomasz George:senolytics okay like i was talking about earlier but also it can act like a fasting mimic as well interesting because because when people fast they improve longevity but if you can have a drug that makes the body think it's fasting as opposed to you actually fast it's uh it's going to be a lot

1:29:19James:easier to adhere to absolutely why do the work if you don't have to um exactly dude it's been an absolute pleasure having you on this uh this has been a very long one so congratulations to anyone that's made it to this point uh listener wise um for people that want to get in touch with you mate or they want to learn more about anything you're up to what's the best way for them to find you like find my latest business so it's freya health.com f-r-e-y-r um and yeah feel free to

1:29:49Tomasz George:send me a message on freya health.com please amazing it's been a pleasure mate all right

1:29:53James:lovely thanks james hey everyone thanks for listening and making it all the way to the end of this episode remember to subscribe rate us and leave a review and you can head to the description of this episode to follow me on all of my social media so you don't miss out on any of the latest health tech content