EP #40 No More Waiting on Heart Transplants? w/ Dr. Doris Taylor

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Heart disease is the number one killer on the planet. Why don't we talk about that? There are a lot of reasons, but my opinion is let's build the heart. How hard can it be? 350 people in this room have heart disease. If it's not them, it's you. The good news is I can fix it. The bad news is someone has to die for someone else to live. Every 34 seconds, someone on the planet has a heart attack.

That really hit me hard.

Lifestyle has an impact, but that's not the bottom line.

But if you need a pediatric heart, where do you go?

I'm committed. In the next five years, I'm gonna change that.

And so the work that you're doing is nothing short of extraordinary.

I wanna leave the world, and this is the way I've chosen to do it.

Welcome to moonshots and mindsets. You know, there are some extraordinary people on this planet who are doing things that up until now have just been in the pages of science fiction novels. And one of those individuals is Dr. Doris Taylor. She is building new hearts, literally and figuratively creating brand new hearts. Starting with a skin cell from you, creating what are called pluripotent stem cells, and then growing you a heart. She's beginning by looking at the hearts needed for children. Where do you get a heart transplant for a child? You know, we don't have many children volunteering their organs. Dr. Doris Taylor is a regenerative medicine researcher, previously a professor at the Texas Heart Institute. She's just joined Dean Kamen at the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute called Army in New Hampshire. And her work is extraordinary. Today you're going to join me in a conversation with Doris from Abundance360, which is my annual private summit. Enjoy this conversation. The work that she's doing is literally saving lives and reinventing how we think about our health and, and our health span. And if Abundance 360 is of interest to you, you can check it out at a360.com all right. Enjoy the episode.

First of all, thank you. Wow, what a great few days this has been. And now I kind of have some bad news and some good news. The good news is I can fix it. The bad news is 350 people in this room have heart disease. And if you look around, look to your left and look to your right. And I'm serious, look to your left and look to your right. If it's not them, it's you. Because 48% of the people in the US have heart disease. 48%. And heart disease is the number one killer on the planet, one third of all deaths. And in fact, every 34 seconds, someone on the planet has a heart attack. And over the course of this session, Already this morning, 105 people on the planet have had a heart attack. Now, that's the bad news. And it affects men, women and children. So I have a question. How many of you know a woman with breast cancer? Quite a few of you. How many of you know a woman with heart disease? Many fewer. And yet five times more women. Not three times, as you heard yesterday. Five times more women have heart disease and breast cancer. But we don't talk about that. Why don't we talk about that? There are a lot of reasons, but my opinion is because we blame people for their heart disease. If you ate right, if you lived better, if you didn't smoke, you wouldn't have heart disease. The reality is lifestyle has an impact, but that's not the bottom line for the people who do have heart disease. And if you're one of the people who has a heart attack, 10% of people die within an hour and everyone else loses heart function over the remainder of their life. Now that's all the bad news. Except for the fact that kids are being born every day with complex congenital heart disease. It's estimated that 1% of the US population is going to need a heart. Of babies born are going to need a heart transplant in their lifetime. 1%. If that were my child or grandchild, I'd Sure. Want that heart to be available. But today the reality is that in our line of work, someone has to die for someone else to live. Now, the good news is in the next five years, I'm going to change that. I'm committed to curing the number one disease affecting humanity, heart disease. And I can do it with the people in this room. So in fact, organ transplant isn't just about hearts. The number of people who die every month waiting for an organ transplant equals the equivalent of two jumbo jets with no survivors. In the US we transplant 10 hearts a day. And what that means. And there are 2,700 people on the waiting list, what that means is that you have to be really sick to get a heart. If you're too young, you don't get one. If you're too old, you don't get one. If you're not sick enough, you don't get one. If you're too sick, you don't get one. Again, if you're lucky enough to be one of the people who gets one, then you take drugs every day for the rest of your life to keep from rejecting that. And those drugs not only cost a lot of money, up to $32,000 a month. A month. But they make you sick every day. You have to take that drug. I had a young woman call me after she heard me give a talk, and she said I had a heart transplant at 18. And every day, every. It's been nothing but biopsies, medical tests and drugs every day since then. And she said I've gone from being. It's true, I don't have heart failure anymore, but I walk around every day terrified that because I got busy and forgot to take my drugs, I'm going to die. She's 24 years old. That's not okay. The status quo is over. We have to change that. So I want to build personalized, on demand human hearts. And if they're personalized, that means you don't need those drugs. Now, Big Pharma doesn't love that, but let's not go there right now. But it also reduces your risk. It's going to reduce the lifetime cost of a heart transplant by 49%. And transplant can become that Hollywood story that we all hear about. That's a new lease on life instead of the way it is today. It'll improve the quality of life. And more than that, what I forgot to mention a minute ago is if you can't afford those drugs, you don't make the waiting list for a heart, which means that people of color are 90% less likely to get an organ transplant than the rest of us. How do you say that to a mom or a dad or a son or a daughter who reaches out to you and says, my dad's sick, Help. We can change that. So in 2005, I basically said, okay, let's build the heart. How hard can it be? How hard can it be?

Everybody, it's Peter. Want to take a break from our episode to talk about a health product that I love? It was a few years ago. I went looking for the best nutritional green drink on the market. So I went to Whole Foods and I started looking around. I found three shelves filled with options. I looked at the labels and they really didn't wow me. So I picked the top three that I thought looked decent, brought them home, tried them, and they sucked. First of all, they tasted awful. And then second, nutritional facts actually weren't very impressive. It was then that I found a product called AG1 by Athletic Greens. And without any question, Athletic Greens is the best on the market by a huge margin. First of all, it actually tastes amazing. And second, if you look at the ingredients, 75 high quality ingredients that deliver new nutrient dense antioxidants, multivitamins, pre and probiotics, immune support, adaptogens. I personally utilize AG1 literally every day. I travel with an individual packet, my backpack sometimes in my back pocket. And I count on it for, you know, gut health, immunity, energy digestion, neural support, and really healthy aging. So if you want to take ownership of your health, today is a good day to start. Athletic Greens is giving you a free one year supply of vitamin D and five of these travel packs with your first purchase. So go to athletic greens.com moonshots that's athleticgreens.com backslash moonshots. Check it out. You'll thank me without question. This is the best green drink product, the most nutritious, the most flavorful I found. All right, let's go back to the episode.

Unfortunately, I didn't know what I was doing because if I'd known what I was doing, I wouldn't have believed it was possible. What I said is, okay, let's take cells. What do you need to build a heart? All you really need is heart cells and a place to put those heart cells and then a way to make those heart cells grow up and become a heart. So I started that process. At the time, I had no idea what I was getting into. Because let me tell you about the human heart. It's the most amazing machine in the body, it's phenomenal. The heart's about the size of your FIST. It contains 1 billion cells for every gram it weighs in an adult like me, I probably have a 125 gram heart. And some of the people you've seen on this stage, they probably have a 350 gram heart. They're a little bit taller. A little bit, yeah. That means we have to grow 350 billion cells for every one of those hearts that we build. And we have to build them personally to match you or you or you. We also have to build a heart that's going to beat 60 to 80 times a minute, every minute. People have said, gosh, that sounds expensive. And I'm like, I can build you a cheaper heart. I kind of want the one that's going to be 60 to 80 beats per minute, every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of my life. But in addition, the heart is such an amazing machine that over the course of our lifetime, it generates enough power to literally power an 18 wheeler to the moon and back. And it pumps 1.5 million barrels of blood throughout our lifetime. So we have to build a machine that can do that every day for the rest of your life. And so on the bottom here, you see a heart, and you see a heart that I'm going to show you we can wash the cells out of to create a scaffold that we call a ghost heart. We basically use baby shampoo to do that. That should scare you a little bit, but that's a different issue. Baby shampoo. So we can wash all the cells out of this heart. And at the end of the day, we have a ghost heart. And one of the rate limits, everybody says, okay, you 3D print a heart. No, we don't. We use this scaffold. Why? Because this scaffold has the blood supply for a heart in 3D printing. Today, you can't create that blood supply. And this is nature. Nature knows how to build a blood supply for a heart. Let me show you. There's 60,000 miles of blood vessels in one of those hearts. And if you hook it up to the blood system, those blood vessels work. So we can now build something that gets food, clothing and shelter and put cells in there. So I'm going to go so fast forward 10 years, we started building a 3 gram heart, and it took me 14 years to solve the problems of building a heart double that size. At that rate, it was going to take me 42 years to build a heart to even fit a kid. Not okay, so a year ago, I said, screw this. I'm going to figure out how to automate this process. I got smarter. We started a company, and we began automating. So we were able to take cell production from something we did by hand, removing the cells from an organ from something we did again by hand in a Rube Goldberg garage, to something we could automate and take the re cellularization, injecting those billion cells into something done by a robot. And with Dean Kamen's assistance at Army Biofab in Manchester, New Hampshire, we were able to shorten 14 years to less than a year for creating a beating human heart. Less than a year. I have a five year plan. We're going to succeed within the decade. We're going to be in people in five years with the right partners. It's not just about building hearts. It's about curing heart failure. I'm going to stop here so that Peter and I can talk about this. But we have also developed a number of biologics because we've learned what heart cells need to be happy, and we can also deliver those. My group was the first group to do stem cells in the Heart, 1998. I've learned a lot since then. The main thing I've learned is we can cure this with the right people in the right room, at the right time, with the right tools, and we can save lives.

This episode is brought to you by Levels. One of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose. More importantly, the foods that I eat and how they peak the glucose levels in my blood. Now, glucose is the fuel that powers your brain. It's really important. High, prolonged levels of glucose, what's called hyperglycemia, leads to everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's to sexual dysfunction to diabetes, and it's not good. The challenge is all of us are different. All of us respond to different foods in different ways. Ways like for me, if I eat bananas, it spikes my blood glucose. If I eat grapes, it doesn't. If I eat bread by itself, I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels. But if I dip that bread in olive oil, it blunts it. And these are things that I've learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the Levels app. So Levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what's going on in in your body. It's continuous monitoring 24, 7. I wear it all the time. Really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat. Remain conscious of the food that I eat and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics. You know, on this podcast I only recommend products and services that I use, that I use not only for myself and my friends and my family that I think are high quality and safe and, and really impact a person's life. So check it out. Levels link. Peter give you two additional months of membership. And it's something that I think everyone should be doing eventually. This stuff is going to be in your body, on your body, part of our future of medicine today. It's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well. I first heard your name two years ago on our Longevity Platinum trip when we were visiting Dean Kamen's Army Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute and he was buzzing about stealing you from Texas to go and join army and you know, we'll talk a little about army because I want people to get what you're doing there.

Right.

And he asked a question. It's interesting. Right. So if you need a heart transplant today, and those numbers were stunning, only 10 a day and a 2700 person waiting list. And that represents only those who can afford it, which means it's a fraction a minute fraction. And so if, if you need a heart today, you're effectively waiting for someone to die and donate it, which is typically someone on a motorcycle without a helmet.

Right. Just to be clear, we tell people to move to states without helmet laws if you need an organ transplant.

I mean, we laugh at that because of how sad it is. But if you need a pediatric heart, where do you go? You can't take an adult sized heart and put it into a newborn. That really hit me hard.

It's true.

And so the work that you're doing is nothing short of extraordinary. Can you just talk one second about what your vision is and what army is? One second. I want people to get a sense of what you and Dean are building there.

Sure. Army Biofab is a Department of Defense funded advanced regenerative manufacturing initiative because the realization it was made pretty abundantly clear that although we've been tissue engineering and laboratories across the US for a number of years, we haven't gotten products to market in this field. That's in part because we haven't had the infrastructure to be able to build something complex. Every time we failed building our hearts, it was because they got contaminated, because we didn't have the right closed infrastructure, automated infrastructure. Somebody sneezed. Dean Said, I can do that. I've built a lot of businesses. And he's put together an amazing infrastructure that allows you. They're incubating companies there now, but more than that, they're bringing together people who can speak process development in a complex way. For those of us who didn't grow up speaking that vocabulary, a number of.

You went with me two years ago on the longevity trip to see Dean's facility. Right. And we're going to go back there this year. When we were there last, he was building longevity, building ligament bone segments. And Dean's genius applied with Doris. Genius is he's a manufacturer, processing engineer and put stem cells, or put skin cells created into induced pluripotent stem cells in one end and get a heart coming out the other end. I remember having a conversation with Elon in which he said that the idea is the easy part. Even the design is the easy part. It's the operationalizing it, making it into something that can be repeated over and over again. That's everything, right?

And we're at the slog through it stage. We're at the slog through it until we're convinced it's, I can do it with your cells and your cells and your cells.

When people come this August and September and we visit you and Dean, what will they see down there?

So what we will show you is places where we are storing cells, how we're growing the cells, and a clean room system. You'll be able to look in our clean room system, see the robot injecting cells into hearts. And the future is building a heart hotel where we have 40 hearts in a hotel behind the robot that live in that ecosystem every day. We're partnering with Advanced Solutions, a great robotics company, to do this. And I've already taught BAB their bioassembly bot, how to inject hearts. We do a fist bump at the end of those. It's pretty fun. But the reality is this is not science fiction anymore and it's not B.S. you know, I had some surgeons come visit and they said, doris, we've heard about this for years, but we couldn't wrap our minds around it until we saw it. And I said, yeah, some surgeons still think this is BS and 20 years away, like we heard with Quantum, and it's not with the right people and the right resources, it's five years away.

That's amazing. Can you imagine having a backup set of organs? We have that for our cars, our planes, our dishwashers. But the idea of having a backup set of Organs. Do you. I mean, people don't realize. And thank you for correcting me. It's five times the number of women in breast cancer. Thank you. I have that in your data point. But people don't realize how vicious heart disease and stroke is. It robs fathers and mothers and sometimes.

Teenagers every 34 seconds.

You said that heart disease and aging is a failure of stem cells. Can you speak to that a second?

Yeah. I believe aging and all the chronic diseases that are associated with aging are a failure of endogenous repair. And that endogenous repair is stem cell based. And that as we age, we've shown data. First of all, we were the first to show data that the stem cells you have, if you're a man or a woman, differ that the composition of your bone marrow.

Which one's better?

Who do you think? Who do you think?

I'm clear.

Do you think I'd bring it up? Come on. No, seriously. Seriously. We were able to show that as you age, as you develop cardiovascular disease. Men develop cardiovascular disease like this. They get it earlier, over time, women develop it later, and they catch up. We were able to measure stem cells in blood and show that they directly paralleled that development of cancer.

We start as a newborn with a huge supply of endogenous stem cells in every compartment of your body. Brain muscle, every place.

Blood, bone marrow.

Yeah. And as you age, that population goes down because the body was never meant to live past age 30. Right.

And because every time we take a hit, we use some of those cells. Right. And that explains why when someone has a trauma, traumatic injury, they age very quickly thereafter. And I just want to say stress is another word for inflammation. And inflammation is basically nature's cue. You fall down, you scrape your knee. This is the example I always use. Fall down, scrape your knee, it turns red. That's inflammation.

Yes.

That's nature's cue to say, hey, help, I've got an injury. Send me cells. If you get the right cells there, you turn off the inflammation. If you're 2 years old, you regenerate that skin. You don't have a scar. If you're 62, you still get the same redness. You still recruit cells, but the cells are fewer in number and less potent. And that was the whole and the whole thought behind exogenous stem cell therapy in the 90s. When we started, it was, if you don't have time or you don't have the number, let's get them there. And what we're finding, as you've heard over and over, Here is that inflammation is basically a biomarker of whether or not that's working. And what I want to say is stress is another word for inflammation. And if you don't believe that I measured, I was privileged. I got to measure stem cells in one of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's monks.

Yes.

And I drew his blood before and after he meditated on compassion for. For 15 minutes.

Wow.

There was a 40% increase in circulating stem cells in that 15 minute time. 40% increase.

Another reason to meditate, everybody.

And if you don't believe inflammation, another word for stress or vice versa. Look at a president after four years.

Yeah. Holy cow. Talk about a job I would not want to have. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the Crisis News Network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week I put out a blog. One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR.VR blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to dmandis.com blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. I want to talk about how much money you've spent and how much you need to implement this five year vision. Have you talked to us about your capitalization? Talk to us about how you've been supported and what you need going forward.

So. So the company has brought in mostly non dilutive funding and grants and my checkbook, this has been me and a few people who have worked with me because they believe in this for no compensation right now. So we've basically existed on non dilutive grants and a little bit of family money from families of individuals with heart disease to get through our clinical trials and have this approved. $300 million. That's not a lot of money.

Well, relative to the size of the business opportunity and the lives saved.

But this is not a 3 year 10x ROI. This is a 10 year thousandx ROI. What we really need is partners. We need people who are going to help us think through this plan, who have a vision, who want to change the world. Because the reality is everyone out there is changing the world every day. The question is whether you're doing it for the better or the worse. And I want to leave the world a better place, and this is the way I've chosen to do it. Join with us. Let's do this. Let's.

Are you here through tomorrow?

I am here through late tonight.

Okay. So if you're interested on this moonshot, please check out Doris at lunch or this afternoon or this evening. I'm going to be bringing Doris back on stage for your questions in just a little bit. Let's give it up for Dr. Doris Taylor.