Why Mitochondrial DNA Damage May Be the Actual Root Cause of Aging

You've actually, from what I understand, created something that sounds like it's out of a science fiction novel, bioreactor-grown mitochondria. Tell me about this.

Mitochondria are about 10% of our body by weight, which most people don't realize. If they were to shut down tomorrow, you literally would collapse into a—

My guest on this show is the CEO and founder of Mitrix, and they do mitochondrial transplantation.

They literally grow new mitochondria mitochondria in bioreactors, which is crazy.

And we're going to talk about that and the future of mitochondrial transplantation.

So, what we do is we grow your stem cells and we also make the mitochondria younger during that growth process. I can't talk about how we do that. That's our—

The shownotes are at BenGreenfieldLife.com/Mitrix, M-I-T-R-I-X. We had a connectivity issue, which is why halfway through I changed my wardrobe.

But, that is a total aside.

BenGreenfieldLife.com/Mitrix. Let's dive in and talk with Tom.

Alright, mitochondria.

They're not really new in terms of them being talked about all of a sudden in the health industry, but it does seem like there is—

Yeah, right, right. They're kind of in style now. Yeah, they're in style.

It seems like they've been in style. I mean, I mean, it's such an odd word when we're talking about a key aspect of cellular biology, but I took biology classes and anatomy and physiology and everything back in college 24 years ago. And, of course, we were talking about mitochondria. We still are, but as you and I will talk about later, Tom, there's a lot of new science about mitochondria. But, before we even get into any of that, even though I'm sure a lot of people listening have heard of mitochondria and what they do, I want to hear in your words why mitochondria are so important.

Well, yes, great question. So mitochondria are about 10% of our body by weight, which most people don't realize. They are these tiny little, um, blobs of stuff that float around inside our cells. We have about maybe I don't know, 100 to 500 mitochondria per cell depending on whether it's a muscle cell or a fat cell, right? Muscle cells are pretty much just all mitochondria. And what you wanna think of is the mitochondria is the part of the cell where all of the energy generation is done. So fats and sugars go into the cell, they float around, the cell doesn't have any way to deal with them. And the mitochondria is where those sugars and oxygen are actually combusted, and they literally are covered with tiny little spinning molecular rotors that are going at 3,000 RPM, and they are literally jet turbines. They're molecular jet turbines.

And then, by the way, quick interruption, 3,000 RPM, those of you who say work out at the gym when you're pedaling a bike really fast and it's hard to hit maybe 130, that'll help you contextualize what 3,000 RPM is.

Well, that's, that's what your car engine runs at. That's what You know, if you go to a, if you go to a gas generating plant that's making electricity for your city, that's what they have. They have jet turbines that are creating electricity. Well, mitochondria are the equivalent of the generating plant that's generating our electricity. And so literally, and that's 96% of the energy in our cells is generated by those mitochondria. So if they were to shut down tomorrow, you literally would collapse into a little pile of goo on the sidewalk.

That's it. Kind of begs the question, what's the other 4% coming from?

It comes from a very kind of what's— what actually is a fairly ancient style of chemical energy generation, which is what we all— cells a billion and a half years ago, all the cells on the planet use this ancient style of very low efficiency energy generation. And that wasn't enough energy to do much. And so we just had this floating ocean of back— really, they were like bacteria. They just floating around. They didn't have any male or female sex. They didn't— we didn't have multi-cell animals. We didn't have any nucleus. It was just really primitive life. Those early cells a billion and a half years ago merged with this other thing called a mitochondria, which was a type of cell that had developed these little spinning turbines. And they came inside and they kind of formed this partnership. And so that's what we are. We are actually— and the mitochondria have their own tiny DNA and they're just as important to the operation of the cell as the big nuclear DNA that has all of your assembly instructions in it. So what I was telling people is we're actually a dual genome species. We're not just one DNA, we have two DNAs and they're completely different.

Yeah, that's super interesting. So, so 96% comes through like cellular respiration. Respiration via the mitochondria, 4% is coming from just strict glucose utilization?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. And, think of those 96% mitochondria, think of them literally as being these little super hot, super stinky little power plants where things— they have a very hard time not getting burned up all the time. They're rebuilt every 2 months, the mitochondrial DNA tends to get degenerated. It's a compromise. It's a very kind of— it's stinky and smoky. I'll say it's like being in the belly of the Titanic and being the guy who's shoveling coal in there, man. It's messy.

Yeah. If I'm reading a research article on longevity, I don't know, like 2 I saw in the past year, one was on a peptide called epitalon. Another one was on exosome infusion in mice, and both claimed that the increase in lifespan observed in response to the use of those compounds, I believe in rodent models, was due to an improvement in mitochondrial health, either energy efficiency or helping to slow down the drop in mitochondrial energy decline. So, it seems like like the mitochondria kind of fit into the center of much of our pursuit of longevity or healthy aging. But, but is that true? Like, do they actually get less efficient at making energy as we age?

They absolutely do. However, the problem is that that's because the— primarily the main reason they get less efficient because the mitochondrial DNA is actually beginning to get what I call sector errors. It's like, think of a hard disk getting bad sectors, right? Over time. And so the mitochondrial DNA acquired deletions and there is no way to fix it because that kind of, there's nothing better than that. The mitochondrial DNA is the source of truth. And so the body is struggling trying to, it does have a little bit of quality control, but not much. It's just, they're so primitive. They're very hard for the body to deal with. As we age, the reason we age, we think, is because the mitochondrial DNA gets worse and worse and worse. By the time you're 65, that really, it starts to kind of go exponential. By the time you're, if you lucky enough to make it to 90, by the time you're 90, your mitochondrial DNA just starts to fall apart. And that's really a very reliable number. 90 to 95 years old, they start to just collapse. And, if you've ever seen an old person, both of my parents are 95, and it's amazing how quickly it goes at that age. Just suddenly, they start losing muscle, they start losing vision, cognition, everything, and then they just kind of— they die. Their immune system goes bad and they die of pneumonia. That is a very common thing.

So, before you rolled up your sleeves and started to tackle this problem, what existed or what exists to attempt to halt that decline or halt the DNA damage or the accumulation and inefficiencies?

The problem is that it's a really hard problem. And, you know, it's also really new. As I, as I already said, this is, this is so recent. And, you know, it's— I talk to doctors all the time who say, you know, we, we weren't even taught about mitochondria in medical school. That was just not something that was even covered. So all of a sudden, there's all this focus, as we know, a huge amount of focus on it. The thing about all these various treatments that people have been proposing is that many of them are designed to, for instance, strengthen the membrane of the mitochondria. Uh, there's been people working on doing mitophagy, which is improving the amount of turnover, the amount of cleaning out of the bad mitochondria. The problem with that is that That's like kind of putting a new coat of paint on a car when the engine is bad. Okay. If the mitochondrial DNA is fundamentally broken or mutated, really is what it is, your mitochondrial DNA as you get older gets more and more and more mutated. And you have a certain quantity of those mitochondrial DNA in your body. And yes, the body can make more of them, but if they get mutated, then it's taking the old DNA that's mutated and replicating it. And again, it's also mutated.

Okay. So, real quick, what you said makes sense in terms of why would we just focus on bolstering mitochondrial membranes if the DNA is impaired because that would be working on the paint job of the car instead of the engine. But then, with what you're saying about mitophagy, the natural cellular cleanup of mitochondria, what you're saying is that as old mitochondria die, and new ones arise, that those new ones still carry with them the same impaired DNA?

Yeah, because mitochondrial— the creation of new mitochondria, it's just duplicating whatever mitochondrial DNA it has sitting around. Okay, okay.

So, so as you get older, you're making new mitochondria, but they're, for lack of a more precise scientific term, just as crappy.

That's, that's about as scientific as it needs to get. Yes, right there. So, um, you are— you're replicating. It's like saying, oh, I've got this I've got from an old computer. I'm going to make a complete copy of it. Well, that doesn't do you any good. You're just bringing over all the bad code that's on that hard disk. I say, okay. And so, what you really need to do is rewrite the operating system from scratch from a superior copy of that information. But, there is no— like in your body, there are reference sources of perfect mitochondria, but even those begin to get old and worn out after a while.

What you're describing, some people's ears may have perked up there and they may be thinking, "Gosh, that sounds a little bit like gene therapy or DNA editing." Is that what you're alluding to?

That's exactly right. Now, I want to say something. I'll just go back to mitophagy for a second. There is quality control that happens in our body. The problem is twofold. First of all, it's not perfect. And so, there's a little leakage. And that's why if it wasn't for mitophagy, we'd probably only live to be 25. So, We're already using all these tricks. The human body is extremely heavily optimized for long life already. And everything we're doing, we're already doing pretty much. And evolution's been working on that problem for a billion years. Long life is a really big survival thing for the human race because of our, how we are as a species. So, you know, that gets into the whole question of evolution. We evolved to have elderly elders in our tribe because they pass on the information. So, what that means is we're already really, really well optimized. And, if mitophagy could be done better, sure, we could live to 100 and live to 150, but our bodies would have already been doing that. Okay. And, that's the terrible saying that we have around here at Mitrix is as follows. It's what I call the first law of aging. And, the first law is, well, if it's that simple, why didn't Mother Nature already do it 100 million years ago?

Yeah. I was I first became familiar with the term Mitrix. I was at dinner with a mutual acquaintance of ours who runs a fund that invests in longevity companies called Dark Matter. And, he said, "Well, have you seen Mitrix?" And, I'm like, "No, but I've seen a lot of companies in this sector." So, I didn't expect to see much new. And then, I went through your website. And so, This is where I'm a little bit excited, at least I'm super excited to talk about this because it's not just all doom and gloom and your mitochondria suck and they'll suck even more as you get old.

Yeah, you're screwed. Sorry, go away.

Yeah.

Okay. So, let's get into the sexy stuff here. You've actually, from what I understand, created something that sounds like it's out of a science fiction novel, bioreactor-grown Mitochondria. Tell me about this.

It's bioreactor-grown stem cells that are optimized to produce healthy mitochondria. That's the actual better phrase. And look, there's lots of companies in the world, there are lots of people in the world who manufacture stem cells. They have whole manufacturing lines to create stem cells for cancer therapies and for all kinds of different reasons. And you can go to different parts of the world, there's lots of— it's called stem cell expansion. It's not that it's that science fictiony, okay? People are doing this all over the map. The difference is that we're focused on the mitochondria. Everybody else just focused on stem cells. Our focus is, hey, we're just growing the stem cells in order to be factories to produce the mitochondria. And so, we've optimized it for that, okay?

Ben Greenfield: Walk me through how this works. I don't even know what a bioreactor is, I guess, if I was sitting next to someone on an airplane. There's no way I could describe it. But, what is a bioreactor and how does it make stem cells that produce mitochondria?

It's a big vat. A bioreactor is a big vat and you put growth media in it, then you put in some seed stem cells. And, you know, you can get your stem cells harvested at any number of locations. You can get MSCs, which are the stem cells that you usually get those from from your adipose fat. You can get HSCs, which are bone marrow stem cells. They have companies where you can go and just get this done. You get them frozen for future use.

Gosh. Your 30-year-old me exists in both bone marrow form and fat cell form in the states of California and Florida.

Bone— 30-year-old you is a good thing to have because when you become 65, you can go back. And of course, for all these years, The people who bank those stem cells have said, "Well, someday we'll have something really good we can do with them." Right? Well, that's what a mitochondrial bioreactor is. That's where we say, "Okay, now we can use your bank stem cells to create mitochondria, which we then pump back into you in order to boost your body back up." And, by the way, the first thing people always say is, "Well, why don't you just re-inject stem cells?" The game that we've learned that the kind of the math is the hard part with stem cells. If you get a typical stem cell treatment of, let's say, 150 million stem cells, that's very typical, right? And you can either get them from this bank or you can get donated from somebody else, maybe from, you know, cord tissue or someplace like that. And there's, of course, you can go all over the world. 150 million is the equivalent of maybe, I figured out it's about equivalent of 1 day of youth, maybe 2 days at best. So, great. Yes. I mean, stem cell therapy, $150 million.

And you spent 3 to 4 days flying to get all this done and injected and protocol to get back to 1 day.

It's not that there's anything wrong with stem cells. They're great. It's just not enough.

To clarify, specifically for longevity because certainly, there's some people who have had stem cells, including myself, injected into a bum knee so we can play better tennis and pickleball.

If you're going to concentrate in one area, Great. Okay. But, if you're talking about— think about trying to do that same therapy on your knee multiplied by what? What's the ratio between the knee and the rest of your body? It's probably 500 or 1,000 times more tissue. So really, what I'm saying is if you wanted to use your stem cells or let's say you grow some of your stem cells from that sample that you had packed away, you grow them, you have to get 1,000, maybe 5,000 stem cell transfusions over the course of a year to get 10 years of age reversal. Okay.

Okay. So, let's say that I'm listening and I'm, I don't know, 60 or 65 or 70. Am I just screwed because I don't have the young stem cells to make young mitochondria in your bioreactor?

Think of it this way. There must be a way of making young mitochondria because Mother Nature does it because that's where we get babies from. I mean, if we couldn't make young mitochondria, we wouldn't exist as a species, right? So somewhere in the female reproductive system, there is a way of making young mitochondria, which really, by the way, just means you're just sorting out the good ones and the bad ones, and you're just keeping the good ones. You put those into the egg cell, you start the whole cycle over again. That's the cycle of youth and age and death. Okay? So there is a way to do it. It's just the reason that we aren't doing it when we're 80, 90 years old is that our bodies have run out of energy And it's a very energy-intensive process. And so we're, our bodies are working, working, working, working to keep our mitochondria healthy. And they just eventually, it just runs outta steam. And that's when you get old and it really starts to decline fast. Okay. That's why, as I said, if you look at someone who's 90 years old, like my dad was skiing until he was 90, he was the most dedicated. He's like you, he'd be on the, he'd be on there running on the treadmill while talking on the phone. He did that his whole life. He was in the best shape. But, at 90 years old, he just couldn't keep his leg muscles up enough to ski anymore. He just gave up. And, that's because his mitochondria finally just started really declining really hard.

Now, you make the mitochondria in the bioreactor. These are new young mitochondria, which is great.

So, what we do is we grow your stem cells and we also make the mitochondria younger during that growth process. I can't talk about how we do that. That's our technology that we've been working on.

The secret sauce.

The secret sauce. And people say, "Well, why don't you just do that in the human body?" Well, because you don't have enough energy in your body to make this process work. We have to do it outside where we can have a giant vat, lots of nutrients, lots of technicians fussing over it, and unlimited sources of external energy. So, we're basically supplementing your body with external energy in order to rebuild your mitochondria.

Now, when you say supplementing my body with extra energy, you have actually figured out a way not only to produce the young mitochondria from stem cell precursors, but then to get them into the body?

To get them into the body, we use a thing called mitochondrial transplantation, which was not invented by us. That's been around now for about 10 years. It's a very, very hot field. You'll start seeing it popping up all the time. If you go on Google, look it up, you're gonna see a lot. Mitochondrial transplantation is based on this discovery that somebody made about 10 years ago that mitochondria don't just sit in cells, they move around constantly between the cells. They move through the bloodstream. They're being loaned. That's how stem cells bring other cells back to life. Stem cells actually come along and they find a, a cell that's kind of in trouble. That is low on energy or maybe it got damaged because you got bitten or whatever, you know, whatever thing has happened to you that has caused some damage or injury. Stem cells come over, they see that that cell is in trouble and they actually inject new mitochondria into that cell in order to improve its energy level so it can rehabilitate itself faster. That's how you get regeneration. You need more energy. That's what mitochondrial transplantation is.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. So, real quick clarifying question here. In the case of something like stem cells, there's a discussion of so-called paracrine signaling, right? How do the cells communicate with one another to know where they're supposed to go? And so, some people in regenerative medicine will propose the use of exosomes as signaling vesicles. Others will say, well, if there's inflammation or reactive oxygen species in a specific area, those are used as signaling, those draw the cells to the location they're supposed to go to. Other people are even using things like red light therapy or electrical modalities to try and draw cells into an area. In the case of mitochondria, how do they know where to go?

First of all, when a stem cell is creating all of these exosomes, it's creating exosomes that contain mitochondria. Okay? Your bloodstream is absolutely packed to the brim with exosomes containing mitochondria that are being transferred. And, they're also transferred from your platelets, by the way. So, you have a trillion platelets in your bloodstream. Every platelet generally has about 5 mitochondria. And, when those platelets get to the end of their 10-day lifespan, the last thing they do before they get recycled is they spit out those 5 mitochondria in exosomes, inside little membranes, and they have targeting molecules on them that cause them to be absorbed instantly by the rest of the immune system. Okay, we've— since we've had this talk, you've had a billion mitochondria transplanted through.

My cells are just spitting out exosomes that contain mitochondria.

Your stem cells in your, in your bone marrow are creating platelets that contain mitochondria. Platelets also have all these signaling molecules. They have proteins in them that are, that are pre-manufactured proteins. So what I always tell people is there's signaling molecules and there's raw materials, construction materials, okay? Like the truck pulls up to your house and it's got lumber and it's got boards and it's got instructions and it's got workers. You know, all that stuff is needed to rehabilitate the cell.

Okay, so truck pulls up to my house, in terms of mitochondria and you figured out how to get the house full with what's in that truck. Have you actually done this in people or is this all worms in vitro, rodents, et cetera?

Mitochondrial transplantation has been going into people for 10 years on a limited scale. And so, there are certain universities, certain surgeons who use mitochondrial transplantation, for example, for children who are born with heart defects. When they go in to operate on the neonatal heart to rewire the plumbing, you know, and save their life, which they do, the problem is a lot of those hearts, they end up with a bunch of damage to the heart muscle which never comes back. And these surgeons learn that if you take mitochondria and inject them into that heart muscle really quick before you close up, it actually brings the heart muscle back to life. And then they, they end up with almost 100% heart function afterwards. That's been done in dozens of people. They've done mitochondrial transplantation after strokes. They've done it for people to do wound healing. You know, like if you've got an ulcerous wound that won't heal, you can put mitochondria on it.

Is this, uh, is this, by the way, all under like investigative research, like an IRB, or is this commonly done in like as, as I guess what you would call like an FDA-approved clinical treatment?

Yeah. And then the final thing is we actually did a series of what, you know, what you call whole body, full body mitochondrial transplants about a month and a half ago. We just finished. We did 4 safety, early safety trials just on 2 elderly people. That was as much resources as we did, we had. So we did 2 people and we did a full series of safety trials and it was perfectly safe. We had no problems whatsoever.

And what happened? Did they just full on Benjamin Button or—

No, no, because that's just safety. We weren't looking to make them younger. We were just making sure that they didn't have a negative reaction. It wasn't enough.

Yeah, but I mean, did you test anything just to see like it— like what happened when you put the mitochondria into them?

No, no. When you do safety trials, you specifically do not look at efficacy because that would be— that'd be mixing your, your— and plus it wasn't enough. It was nowhere near enough.

So get all hypothetical with me here. Like, what would you— like, non-disease states, so diseases aside, you know, like, like a, you know, like a cardiovascular issue such as you were just talking about, what would you expect to see in just like a healthy person who wants more energy or wants to stave off mitochondrial decline if they got a mitochondrial transplantation?

Well, first of all, if they're healthy, they probably won't get the transplantation because right now it's still at the same place where you might have a heart transplant. And you have to have a doctor do this. This is not something— it's not a pill, it's not something you can pop at home. You have to go to the hospital. And the doctor is not going to do a mitochondrial transplant for you unless you need it for a specific reason.

Okay. And by the way, not to derail you, but if they were to do it, is this like an IV infusion?

Everything. We've done direct injections into the eye fluid, which is really useful for glaucoma and for macular degeneration. We've done direct muscular injections. We've done intravenous injections. People have tried inhaling mitochondria into their lungs. It all works. Mitochondria are slippery little bastards. They go everywhere, okay? And they travel like crazy through the cells. Think of the mitochondria as kind of having the master key to the whole body. They can go anywhere they want. And so, and none of the mitochondrial transplantation trials, and of course, we've done lots of animals. I mean, everybody's done animal trials. We did a series of mouse injections where we were injecting the mice with up to 1% of their total mitochondria per injection. And we did 10, 12 of those. So we upgraded them by 12% of their total bodily mitochondria in theory. And they were very, very happy mice.

Translate happy for me. What happened?

Well, these are old, old, old mice that we did these injections on. And the day after we gave them these injections, they were climbing the walls. I mean, literally.

Whoa.

That the technicians are like, "Wow, they don't look old anymore." They're running around, little mice, they're climbing around and doing doing their mouse thing.

By the way, did you say Mitrix or Mitrix? Mitrix. So is it your goal at Mitrix to get to the point where this would become something someone could do like at their doctor as a standard clinical practice for just helping with, with energy?

Yes. So, so step one is we cure people who are dying of diseases, right? So, you know, if you have a bad kidney, for example, well, let's give you a bunch of mitochondria and see if we can bring back enough kidney function to get you off the dialysis. Like, this is an obvious thing to do, okay? And people die of kidney dysfunction all the time. What if you have a bad heart valve? What if you have a bad aorta? What if you have, you know, wounds on your legs that won't heal? What if you have peripheral neuropathy, which is horribly painful? Okay, so there's a lot of diseases out there that we can't cure, and mitochondria seem to be really good cures for that. What if you have a heart attack? Okay. This is being studied at Northwell Health in New York, which is the biggest hospital chain in New York, has a whole program of looking at what would happen if they could use mitochondria for people after a heart attack. And then, the results are great.

So, let's say somebody's listening and they do have a heart issue or kidney issue or some other medical reason that would potentially justify a mitochondrial transplantation. Are we at the point right now where they could talk with their doctor and their doctor would know what they're talking about, or do they need to go to your website, or how's that work?

We're kind of at that hard point in the medical system where the doctors don't know about it yet because it's so new. And, you know, this is true of so many diseases and so many new treatments. I mean, the doctors don't know because it is so new and it hasn't spread yet. So, we're slowly getting the word out there. And again, this is a transplant procedure. So yeah, you need a doctor to do it. And, you know, you need probably, you know, I talk about, for instance, doing kidneys. Well, but nobody's done kidneys yet. So there's somebody who's gonna have to be the first, you know, it's like the first ever heart transplant or the first ever kidney transplant. Somebody had to, somebody had to go in there and get a doctor to do them first. Yeah.

So, so basically pull, pull open your feed reader or your XFeed right now and start a search term for mitochondrial transplantation to, stay up to date on the legality and the rollout, basically.

I mean, we know in the field that it's really, really safe because we've seen it for so many years be perfectly safe. But, you know, it's— doctors are very conservative. So probably the people who are going to get this first are the ones who are really in trouble. Also, unfortunately, the whole medical system right now, there's no funding for anything new. I mean, the whole system has kind of come to a to a screeching halt. So that's the other problem.

Yeah, but, but you guys are able to raise money. I mean, back to something like that Dark Matter Fund, you guys are able to raise money privately to help with things like the bioreactor research and, and some of these tests that you're doing, right?

Right. But that, that's been very, very— it's very skimpy. So like people say, well, are you going to do a larger set of trials? Well, not until we can find a way to raise more money, and that's, that's challenging.

Hopefully, hopefully getting the word out with shows like this will help. Back to the idea though of the mitochondria, I noticed when I was kind of looking through some articles you've written and some details on the Mitrix website that you have this theory called the mitochondrial cycle of the body, the mitochondrial cycle of the body. Can you explain that in a little more detail?

Absolutely. So, the mitochondrial cycle of the body is a theory that says— and by the way, I'm just going to back up for a second. Remember, everything I'm talking about during this podcast is a theory, okay? And, and many, many other established scientists will say, oh, this guy's full of crap. So, you know, take it with a grain of salt. This is our theory. Other people may not agree.

It's, it's a, it's a theory, and yet you do have old mice climbing up the walls of their cages.

That's the thing. It's a theory, but so far, the, the sign of a good theory is that when you try it in real life, it works. The concept of mitochondrial cycle in the body is that not only do mitochondria move around the body all the time, which we know they do, but that they're actually being directed intelligently by the body in order to bolster certain areas and lead to long life and supplements. An infection, if you get— I'll tell you where this comes from. If you get an infection, let's say you get pneumonia or you get cancer, and your immune system is in there fighting to try to save you from that infection. They've done a study, and this is very well— this is very well shown, that the number of mitochondria per platelet almost doubles. And so that means when the platelets go out there and they start releasing these mitochondria and these little vesicles, which are being absorbed by the white blood cells, what that means is that the body is intelligently responding to the infection by giving it more fuel. It's giving the white blood cells more fuel. You actually, well, those white blood cells can actually absorb additional mitochondria and it makes them stronger and they can fight longer. So, it's almost like having a, you know, in World War II where they had to have big trucks full of diesel fuel to keep the tanks going, right? They had to keep supplying the front. The body is doing that intelligently and it's doing it, you know, with, design. And then the next question is, well, why doesn't it just supply all those mitochondria all the time? Because it doesn't want to do it all the time because it wants to keep them in reserve for other uses. It's rationing as needed. Okay, see, and that's what the— that's what we call the mitochondrial cycle of the body. Another example that's just amazing is what happens inside your brain. Your brain, the mitochondria in your neurons are actually not made by the neurons. They're made in other cells nearby called astrocytes. And there's another type I forgot. They're manufactured in support cells and they're put— these young mitochondria, these new mitochondria are put into little vesicles and they float over to the neurons and the neurons grab them, put them into use in the neuron. Of course, neurons have a huge amount of mitochondria in them. And then if they get burned out, a neuron puts it back into a different vesicle and floats it back to the astrocyte to get refurbished. Okay. That's happening in your head all the time. That's how we're built.

Interesting. And I'm assuming that the mitochondrial cycles would be upregulated in someone who might be battling inflammation, exercising excessively, or putting some other type of chronic or acute stress on their body.

That's why stress— everybody knows stress kills you, right? Well, now we know why stress kills you.

But stress kills you, but arguably small amounts of stress would probably upregulate the mitochondrial cycle to to, to allow for healthier, more efficient mitochondria.

Yeah, that will— except here's the deal. There was a guy in, in New York, professor, just a few years ago, who did a study on this. He found that if you took any stress hormone and you put it in a test tube full of replicating cells, that the quality of the mitochondria started going down really fast because the stress hormone causes the mitochondria to be replicated really quickly. But then it does a sloppy job, okay? Because the body's like, "Oh, you're under stress. I just have to give you more mitochondria." Well, it's giving up on its quality control at that point because it figures you're running from a leopard and trying to escape being eaten. You don't care about quality at that point. So, if you're under stress for 10 years, your mitochondrial quality goes down, which is fundamentally means you are prematurely aging your mitochondria.

Yeah, another feather in the cap for proper recovery cycles. Absolutely.

I don't have to tell you that— well, I'm not talking about just Physical stress. It's— have you got continuous loads of cortisol in your bloodstream? That is not healthy, and we all know it. If you smoke, smoking just rips the hell out of mitochondria.

It is—

it has been proven over and over again.

Yeah, you heard it here first. Don't smoke.

All this stuff is common sense. It's all common sense, right? Don't, don't eat crappy sugary food. Terrible for your mitochondria. You know, don't be under a huge amount of stress. Get exercise. Red light therapy is nice because red light therapy helps bolster the mitochondria a little bit. It's not going to fix the DNA damage, but it helps them run a little better. So, you get a little benefit out of that.

Okay. I've got a clarifying question about these extracellular vesicles. Before I ask my question, are these the ones that are called Mitlets?

We call them Mitlets. That's just the name we made up. So, yeah.

Alright. So, back to the stem cell analogy, sometimes people won't get stem cells, they'll just get exosomes. With the theory that, well, exosomes are going to allow the stem cells that are already in the body to communicate better and for some amount of regeneration and even lowered inflammation to occur. In the case of mitochondria, could you potentially infuse or deliver Mitlets instead of just the mitochondria themselves to get some kind of a mitochondrial signaling amplification?

Thank you. That's actually an excellent question. We— there are two— there are multiple flavors of mitochondria for transplant. Our group at Mitrix is based on the work of a guy in Quebec, a scientist in Quebec who's our chief scientist, who discovered the mitelets. He discovered these extracellular vesicles containing mitochondria. So that's what we put up most of our effort into learning how to use. There are other groups who are using what we call naked mitochondria, where they just take Like, they could take a little bit of your leg muscle and scrunch it up and extract the mitochondria just by themselves and inject those into the site. And so, both of those things work. They work in different ways. The vesicle mitochondria work really well for immune system regeneration. The naked mitochondria work really well for muscle, direct injection into the muscles. So, that's where your doctor eventually will have a whole toolkit of mitochondria and they'll know how to get them to the right place to fix whatever your problem is.

What about evaluating whether the mitochondria are healthy in the first place? I interviewed Shawn Fetch from Versaia a few months ago. He has a test called the MiScreen. Dr. Chris Masterjohn has talked about another test that he has. I forget the name of it.

Yeah, I know about both of them. Yeah.

So, where do we stand right now in the field of mitochondrial testing? Accuracy or utility?

First of all, it's, it's really complicated. And the problem is, once you understand the mitochondrial cycle of the body, what you realize is that depending on where you are, you may get really good mitochondria, you may get really crappy ones. Like, if you go to the kidney or the skeletal muscle— skeletal muscle mitochondria are notoriously low quality because they're getting burned up, whereas the mitochondria in your bloodstream that you get from your platelets are high quality because they came from the bone marrow. So, the quality of mitochondria depends on the source. So, you better know what you're doing. Okay? The second problem is, let's say you're 80 years old, there could be a massive difference between your skeletal mitochondria and your blood mitochondria, huge difference. And if you don't understand that, you may not make the right decision.

Wait. So, are you saying, for example, that in some— let's say you've got a bodybuilder or someone who lifts weights quite a bit. And you were to do a muscle biopsy and get skeletal muscle mitochondria and test that, if they were to get a blood mitochondrial test, the blood mitochondrial test might indicate good healthy mitochondria, whereas a skeletal muscle mitochondrial evaluation might indicate that there's a lot of beat-up and damaged mitochondria.

Premature aging in the skeletal muscles, right. Again, that's mitochondrial cycle of the body. The bone marrow is supplying the best mitochondria it can to supplement all the other parts of the body that have low quality. Kind of keeping them up to speed. It's kind of rationing out the good ones. And so, that's where, you know, the science is evolving. And so, if you look at Chris Masterjohn's test, if you look at MeScreen, I mean, I love these tests, they're all good, but none of them are really 100% accurate because it's just so complicated and you really have to know how to interpret the results.

Yeah. You'd think with enough proxy data, like if someone were to do fat biopsy, you know, muscle biopsy, perhaps get access to bone data, et cetera, then compare that to blood data and get enough big data over time, you could get to the point where a blood spot test, for example, could give you a clear idea of what's going on at the mitochondrial level, but you need to do a lot of tests and gather additional data from other areas of the body first.

We actually developed our own internal test which we call Mitoclock. Okay. Which is kind of a dumb name. But we, we look directly at the DNA itself, the mitochondrial DNA, and we count the number of deletions in the mitochondrial DNA for a sample of mitochondria. And we use urine. That's one of my little— I'll, I'll give this secret away cuz it's, it's kind of common knowledge now. If you get mitochondria that have come off of the bladder and gone into the urine, they're reliably bad. And so if you just stick with those, you know, you're gonna have a, a good baseline of data for, elderly people and you can look at how bad they are by looking directly at the genetic code itself. And, that will give you the most accurate.

Got it. So, you're just basically getting the most beat-up ones first.

That's equivalent to a muscle. I don't want to do a muscle biopsy because that means I have to go in and chop out muscle.

Yeah, do the whole guillotine thing, yeah.

I can do a pee sample and I can send somebody a box. They pee in a cup, they send it to the lab. So, that's a really, really good system. And I personally advocate for testing everybody in the United States with that. I think that there's so much mitochondrial damage that we don't know about. And, uh, I've, I've been saying this, I think we should test everybody, really.

The Mitoclock test, is that something that you can get right now on your website, or is that also through a doctor?

Not yet, no. We're working on it. We've, we've done it with a few people, but the problem is that it's all— we have to do it all manually, and it's so It's super expensive. Yeah.

Have you compared it to any of these other tests?

Yeah. It's just much more accurate because it's looking at the right thing and it's looking at the DNA directly. All these other tests, what they do is they look at the enzymes that are feeding the DNA and they can kind of interpret like, "Well, how is the mitochondria look based on the quality of these enzymes?" Which would, however, be dictated by the DNA quality. It's dictated by the DNA quality, but it's still— You know, it's not direct one-on-one data, it's still extrapolation from these other factors. And if you have other things, like somebody said the other day, well, if you have a biological age test that can be changed just by a couple nights of bad sleep, it's probably not a very reliable test. You know, if you're going to test somebody's biological age, you have to look at the really the core.

Is there a good reason that you went after creating new mitochondria or new stem cells that produce mitochondria in a bioreactor versus what some people in the field are doing right now, which is gene therapy to address the DNA that's already in the body?

Yes, very good reason. And it's, it's kind of an existential question. If you're 85 years old and your cells are already energy depleted, you're barely hanging on, your cells are barely hanging on by the time you're 85. I put a gene therapy in there and say, hey, rebuild all your mitochondrial DNA, and the cell says I don't have that energy to do that. Your cell doesn't have enough energy to do the work. If it had that energy, it would be doing it already. That's the old— that gets back to, if it was that simple, Mother Nature would've done it 100 million years ago. The reason we get old is because the body can't do it under any circumstances 'cause it doesn't have the spare energy available.

Right. That would be kind of the equivalent of putting like a chassis on an old engine.

Yeah, exactly. So, or, you know, yeah. And so, The other analogy is you're trying to rebuild the engine of your car while you're driving 70 miles an hour down the freeway. You know, it's like, no, you got to stop. You got to go into someplace. You got to take the engine out and put a brand new engine in that you've built somewhere else.

Yeah, between the rotor and the paint and the engine and the wheels and the chassis, we are crushing the car analogies today.

Exactly. Well, you know, that's because I'm 65 and I grew up when it was all about cars. You know, the other analogy you could do, the laptop refurbishment analogy, which is more modern stuff.

Well, this is all just fascinating. This whole field is super exciting. Mitrix, what is it? Mitrix. You know what I'll do is if you go to bengreenfieldlife.com/mitrix, M-I-T-R-I-X, I'll just make show notes for everything that Tom and I talked about and I'll link to some helpful articles on their website and I think photo of the bioreactor on there and some other super interesting information. Tom, anything else you wanna share before I let you go?

No, I just think, you know, as I said, I know there's a lot of people out there. There's so many people who need this kind of stuff. And we feel bad because it's like we're so small and it's so new and there's so many people who are desperate. And so I, and I have some of those people in our user group now. And my message is to people is, you know, we are, we are working on it. The world is working on this. It's not just us. There's a lot of other people too. So, I have a lot of hope for the future. It's just going to take time.

Awesome. Well, hopefully, this helps move things along in terms of interest because I would love to be able to get a mitochondrial transplantation when I'm 50 and climb off the walls.

Look how healthy you are. You don't need new mitochondria. Your mitochondria are in great shape.

I feel great. And then, I find out about stuff like this and I'm like, "Hey, I wonder if I could feel even better." It's about age 55 where the oldie will say, "Oh, no, I need my mitochondria now." All right, folks. So, BenGreenfieldLife.com/ bit.ly/Mitrix, M-I-T-R-I-X, is where the show notes reside. And thank you so much for listening in. Tom, thanks for doing this, man.

I had a great time. Nice talking with you.

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