Stem Cell Magic Lift for Facial Aging

Doctor Mok, I'd like to talk about the stem cells that you've got for facial aging. A patient has a history of having Botox and fillers, and they're interested in the stem cell magic lift.

So we've kind of, over the years, have transitioned from fat transfers to the face. Well, first off, we use fillers for the face, which really is the gold standard. It's reversible, very predictable. We can modify the fillers to do certain things. But there's a point where some people want to use their own body's tissues to get fillers. About 2006 or so, we started doing a special type of fat transfer to the face. We'd extract fat through liposuction and thread it into the muscles and the tissues of the face to re volumize the face. So as we age, we have loss of fat in our face. We might gain fat in our bellies or our legs or thighs or arms. We typically lose it in our fat mostly because of solar exposure or sun exposure. So the sun, when it goes through your skin, it penetrates through your epidermis and the dermis and gets to the subcutaneous fat. And what happens with sun exposure, particularly chronic sun exposure, is that the fat cells that are turning over, they Only live about 5 to 7 years in your body, in your face. And then as a fat cell dies, it goes through a process called apoptosis or apoptosis. It gets replaced by a pre adipocyte or a stem cell to make a new fat cell. That's why typically, your number of fat cells stays about the same. In the case of facial aging, we see a decline in the population of fat cells over time from sun exposure. And then we get deflation, hollow temples, hollow mid face. The face kind of falls. And this is something we might have traditionally used, you know, fat transfer for. But the fat transfers have some unpredictability, but they certainly work, and it's a viable thing to do. It's more like a surgical procedure. You have some downtime with it. This has led the way to doing fat stem cell transfers. We use something called nano fat, where we take the fat, we alter the properties of the fat. So the fat cells have been broken, they're ruptured, they're no longer viable, and the stem cells are left behind. We get actually threaded into the tissue in the same fashion. This gives a much more robust rejuvenation of the tissue. It gives off growth factors, stimulate blood vessel growth, give some degree of volume, which doesn't maybe last Quite as long. And it prepares the skin to be ready to do other things to improve the skin. Now since that time, we've jumped a step forward in the last four to five years. We're using a blood product. It's not a stem cell, it's actually a platelet product or a plasma product to revolumize the face. Let's talk about that. So we do some. We have when you draw your blood, you might have seen when the blood gets spun, there's a little red on the bottom and then kind of the yellow on the top or the yellow on the top is serum or plasma, depending on what kind of tube is used. We use plasma. Plasma means the platelets are still active in that area. There's clotting has not occurred. We spin in such a way that we have something called platelet poor plasma at the very top, which is a pretty much a translucent or you can see through it, which is a plasma, which is the juice that holds your blood together. So you have the blood juice and then you have your red blood cells and white blood cells and platelets. So we have the top, which is the plasma. It's got some various growth factors and various, even some toxins in some case in it that we might want to. I'm going to eliminate the toxin statement. You can keep filming, right? You could edit that out.

Yes. Okay.

So the, the top of the plasma has got various. It basically carries things to your different organs. So it might carry, you know, things your kidneys and your liver and your muscles and your lymphatics and your brain. Things that you need, you might want to be getting rid of over time. Underneath that is the platelet rich plasma, which has a lot of platelets in it. Platelets are cell like structures that are designed for growth and rejuvenation and repair. And underneath that is the red blood cells that in this case we don't really, really want for this purpose. So we take out the platelet poor plasma and we basically heat it or cook it for about 15 minutes at a certain temperature and it turns into a solid gel, like a biological filler. We move from that into a little cooling device. Then we take the platelet rich fibrin, or PRP, might be what some people refer to it, and we keep that cooled down so it doesn't clot up. We mix these two back together. We've got a biological filler that can be injected with a syringe into the tissues. And not only is it restore volume, but it has three different key growth factors. One's called vegf, vascular endothelial growth factor, which stimulates growth of blood vessels. One is called platelet derived growth factor that actually causes migration of stem cells in different cells into the area. And one's called transformative growth factor, which causes stem cells to turn into more mature cells. And this gives us kind of a short term and a longer term improvement. Now, the downside to the we call BioPRF or PRF filler is that it doesn't last that long.