Bonus: 'Gene Therapy' featuring Liz Parrish

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. I just made none other than Liz Parrish laugh at me because Liz, who is our guest today, is a very interesting human being. Liz is the founder and CEO of bioviva Sciences, and she's working on hacking healthy lifespans. Liz has been widely recognized as the woman who wants to genetically engineer you, and she's a leading voice for our right and our ability to hack our own DNA, our own genes. And she serves as a motivational speaker, and she's behind bioviva Life Sciences also. And I've actually had a bit of a. I don't. What do you. I don't want to be, like, inappropriately crushed, like, you know, high school crush, but. But normally, say a man crush, but we'll call it a geek crush on you. Because in 2015, I'm like, oh, my God. Liz was the first person in the world to take these dual gene therapies for your own aging. I'm like, I want to do that. I want to do that. And I actually asked my Es, can you reach out and get a hold of her, like, see if I can get this stuff? Like, I want to do it. I want to talk about it. So now, a couple years later, what do you know? We finally connecting, but I still don't have custom made genetic engineering on board. Liz, number one, welcome to the show. Number two, can you hook me up?

Thank you. It's so cool to be here. Yeah, I can hook you up. So bioviva is a bioinformatics company. So basically, we're looking at the performance of how these drugs work now, how gene therapy works in humans, and specifically how regenerative genes work in human bodies. So that's pretty exciting. And how do we do that? Well, we have a partner company called Integrative Health Health Systems, and what they do is they help people get access to these technologies today. Now, you have to do it through a medical doctor because that's the best thing to do when you're doing medicine. And you have to share your data with bioviva so that we can make more, better, innovative drugs through our research that we have going on right now at Rutgers University.

All right, Rutgers. That's a pretty impressive university. Let's talk about how you ended up here. Tell me about your son's type 1 diabetes.

Yeah. So from 2011 to 2013, I was volunteering for the advocacy of the use of stem cells, and I learned about this whole world of regenerative medicine, which was really exciting. And then I heard that there were some of the technology was doing amazingly well in studies in the Harvard and other great universities. But there were also doctors that were doing this work offshore. And there was a lot of debate about how well the technology worked in humans. And so I thought, well, you know, the interesting thing here is what we need to do is bring researchers together with medical doctors. But I wasn't able to do it. The two groups didn't want to combine. So how do you prove that technology is working in humans without actually having research documents and having all of the technology highly documented to figure out what the outcomes and the endpoints were? Well, in 2013, my son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. And I was thrown into the hospital, A World of Sick Children, Children's Hospital in Seattle. And I looked around and I realized basically that these technologies do not translate to humans. They sit in research for decades and these kids didn't have access to this technology. And there were kids there that are dying of diseases that we had cured in animal models for years. Right.

It's so unjust, actually.

It's really unnerving. So I ended up saying to myself, you know, something has to be done about this. We actually, it's not just studying what's happening. It's not just looking at antidotal research. It literally is getting this technology to people in a meaningful way. And we need to mix doctors with researchers. So I went looking for cures for kids. A lot of people don't know that I got into the aging area, the aging arena, by looking for cures for kids. I ended up at a conference. It was a SENS conference, SEN 6 in the UK. I met Professor George Church there. He's now a scientific advisor of our company. And I learned all about aging. And I learned that when you treat biological aging, you're treating the biggest unmet need on the planet.

Yes.

So you have lots of patients and that each one of these treatments will treat a childhood disease. And so how do you expedite cures to the world? You treat the biggest medical unmet need on the planet. And so after two years of a winding road of learning about the technology, I decided to start a company called bioviva to prove in humans which one of these technologies are which technologies. Here there will be many work in humans which ones don't, and try to create the combinatorial therapy that will create an optimal, robust human that stays in homeostasis for the longest period possible.

Tell me about the gene therapy that you did?

Sure. So I did two gene therapies. One was called a telomerase inducer. So it lengthens the ends of the caps of the chromosomes called telomeres. And telomeres are important because with each cellular division, they get shorter and shorter. And they're correlated with all of the diseases of aging. You know, actually, depending on their length, we can see about when you'll be diagnosed. Now, they're not a perfect clock of aging because they can stay short for a long time. But children who have short telomeres tend to suffer from various diseases, the worst one being progeria, which is considered accelerated aging. And then as aging adults, as they get shorter, it leads to things like genomic instability, which is a precipice for cancer.

Yeah.

So that was one of the gene therapies I took. And then the other one is called follistatin. And what it does is blocks myostatin, which is another enzyme in your body. It blocks it from blocking your, essentially your muscle growth. So myostatin blocks muscle development, follistatin blocks it, allowing the body to muscle up. And this is very important for an aging population with sarcopenia, but was originally tested in kids with muscular dystrophy, both Duchenne's and Becker's muscular dystrophy.

Now, when you say you've done gene therapy, you're taking these genes, you're putting them in viruses, and injecting them into the body.

Right. So we used a dento associated virus. It's called aav. And it doesn't essentially do what old gene therapy does. It doesn't give you a big immunological effect, so you don't get sick when you take it, because if you get sick, then you're going to not uptake the genes. So it basically is a really great viral vector that cannot get you sick. The ability to get you sick is taken out.

Yeah.

In that space is put human genes, and then it delivers those genes. And viruses are still the best gene delivery method there is. They get genes into the nucleus. We don't integrate. Integrate these genes. We don't use crispr. With this technology today, we just put what's called an episome. We put the gene into the nucleus. It sits outside of the chromosome, and it just codes for protein or enzymes. And those enzymes and proteins change you.

Now, I'm a huge fan of the Walking Dead.

Okay.

Do you ever worry that one of these harmless things might do something unforeseen, interact with another virus, or basically do something that we didn't think it would do that, could cause it to spread to other people. It's not going to create zombies. Let's be straightforward. But is there any kind of a risk that, that AAV could talk to HHV or become an std? And then I swear, I'm like Milli Vanilli at this point, but you know what I mean? Is there something that could happen?

This is why we use AAV. Actually, 80% of the population have already seen the virus. You've probably, probably already had it. It's one of those benign viruses that goes around and everybody gets it. And then it's only modified to target different cell types. And so you'll see that AAV has a whole slew of different numbers or letters behind it. And that's just how it's been modified to target certain cell types instead of other ones. So, you know, it's about as safe as you can go. We're also using another viral vector in our research at Rutgers University. And it is a bigger viral vector, but it is just as prolific in humans as this one is. So we are, I would say these are about as safe as you can get. And remember, these viruses are modifying you every year. You know, you get viruses and influenzas and things like that. And they do, they all do their little dance. We're just making them do a dance that only upregulates therapeutic genes.

What percentage of human genetic material is viral in origin?

Oh, my gosh, we have to look that up for what just came out yesterday. I mean, literally, there is a lot of it.

It's like 80% or something. It's a giant number.

Even our consciousness now, they think has to do with a virus. Our ability to speak was a virus. The ability to carry more babies long term without having them be attacked by common viruses and abort the fetus is now thought to be because of one virus that we integrated years ago. I mean, it's huge. Viruses are the ultimate gene therapy machines.

We're really scared of viruses because there are some deadly ones. But go for a swim in the ocean, just look at the number of viruses, including some that we've never characterized, just in the least liter of seawater anywhere. And a huge part of our evolution is driven by that. So when we need to add a skill set that we don't have because we're going to die without it. We're pretty much engineered by Mother Nature and so is all other life to be able to work with these viruses, to pick up skills. And it's kind of scary to think of it on one hand. On the other hand, well, maybe we could pick which ones we interact with because there's a whole bunch of viral DNA and everyone listening to the show that we now count as human DNA, but we now have the ability, just thanks the last 20 years of research, to pick through that and go, oh, that came from over there. That came from over there. You know, we're an amalgamation of all sorts of weird lives.

Well, and one of the best fights against viruses might just be integrating pieces of them. So we see that in some of the new immunizations that are starting to come out where they're actually looking. Instead of trying to give you a shot every year against an influenza that may or may not be the active form that year, to actually give you a little bit of the capsid so that you would be immune to any influenza virus that might try to get you in the next 10 years or more. So we know that integrating the viruses actually can protect us against them. So it might be really interesting going forward. Now, the viruses that we use, we don't integrate. You essentially are, you know, we take out their ability to do that. So we're just putting in the therapeutic regenerative gene and then the capsid just. You're going to pee it out.

Got it. So it's pretty darn safe in the overall scheme of things. Probably is. Well, depending on what genes you put in. But the virus itself is probably safer than driving to the grocery store.

It is. So when you deliver a gene therapy, you're delivering two things, at least two things. If you're doing CRISPR Cas9, you're delivering three things. You're delivering two drugs at least. The viral vector. And These, you know, AAV now has been in what, over 400 clinical trials and has not had a problem. It has not had a problem for it. The gene candidate is the second drug. And so the places where we've seen negative outcomes are in cancer therapies, and there are some. But it was likely because those people were amazingly sick to begin with.

So you used these and you got all bulked up. Where did you inject the follistatin?

So we injected the Follistatin into my leg muscles. You can have it injected into any series of muscles, but the legs are good and it has an effect on the entire body. So all of the muscles mass up. And it is a. It's based on titration. How much you do is the output that you get of the therapy. And so more you take the More you're going to. The more you're going to increase in mass.

Now, I may or may not have injected Follistatin into my shoulders.

A lot of people have, and I go all over the place. And a lot of people have injected Follistatin under various methods.

Now, the reason I may or may not have done that is because, well, I don't know if that's medically approved, and certainly I wouldn't do anything that wasn't medically approved because that would make me a bad person. But there's a lot of bodybuilders use a lot of peptides and things like that. I didn't see any difference from it at all.

Did you use a peptide or a gene?

It was a peptide, not a gene.

Okay. The peptide, that's the thing is the peptide is pretty cost prohibitive, and it's only gonna last a matter of hours.

I felt really good for four hours, like I had big shoulders and they went away. Okay. I didn't even do that. It was literally, oh, there goes a few hundred bucks.

Yeah. You would have to do an enormous amount of Follistatin every day. You'd need to do it every few hours. It would be cost prohibitive. The beauty of turning your cells into the drug factory of what would be the peptide? But like the gene. And the downstream effect is much more beneficial. But the gene therapies are pretty cost prohibitive as well.

We talked about one of the two things you did. So now you're walking around. You're like a fitness model underneath your sweater. And what is the other one you did?

So that was the telomerase induction. So that was the one that lengthens the caps at the ends of the chromosomes. So when we treat biological aging, we're looking at the hallmarks of aging. There's about 10 different hallmarks of aging that we're looking to reverse. And we believe that those are the real disease states. So mitochondrial dysfunction, something that you alluded to earlier. We have a gene therapy that massively increases your little powerhouses in your cells.

Okay, how much is that one? It'll all be there tomorrow for that.

Well, that one is a new therapeutic that'll be out later in 2020, and it will start in pretty low doses. We're bringing on a specialist, a PhD who did their thesis in that gene therapy to understand dosing in humans the best. But all of these gene therapies start at lower doses. So they probably will start around the 75,000 layer and go up.

Sign me up. I'm not even kidding.

Oh, it's going to be amazingly cool.

Can I put it on my amex? I want the points.

I don't know, you have to ask them if they take it.

Totally kidding.

So telomerase induction hits mitochondrial function. Actually, it's been shown over and over in cells that yes, you can make the mitochondria healthy and it helps the DNA stability, but if you lengthen the telomeres, it actually helps the mitochondrial function. So this is even a group overseas just recently contacted me with their basic research and said, do you know this? And I said, yes, we know this. We've seen this in research before, but they had just done some cellular research. But the gene that I'm talking about is actually called PGC1 Alpha. And a lot of people who are active in working out and things like that know about that gene because when get active, that's what gets upregulated, one of the genes that gets upregulated. But when you upregulate it specifically, you get more robust mitochondria. They're actually bigger, they're more robust and there's more of them. They're very proliferative. So it's pretty cool.

So guess what my favorite PGC1 alpha stimulator is?

What?

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What?

That was 1 milligram. That was 1 milligram of nicotine.

Really?

Nicotine is a potent PGC1 alpha stimulator.

Really?

And low doses of nicotine will increase mitochondrial function and density, which is why in certain superhuman I explained 1 milligram. If you're over 42 milligrams per day. If you're over 50 and you just add 1 milligram. And since 1988, researcher at Vanderbilt who's been on the show, I call him Dr. Nicotine, has said, look, it reverses Alzheimer's disease. Reverses it. Smoking's bad for you. Tobacco's not good for you. Nicotine as an isolated substance is a PGC1 alpha stimulator. Who would have thought? Wow, that's why people lose weight and get lean and ripped when they're chain smoking all the time. It's because of PGC1 Alpha. Is that cool or what?

Wow. Well, how would you like to come in and just take an injection of it?

I'm in. Like, hook me up. I'm not even kidding. I really want. I also write in superhuman about GW 501516, which people call a SARM, but isn't really a SARM. SARM. Selective androgen receptor modulators. It is something that increases mitochondrial biogenesis. And it's also a PGC1 Alpha stimulator. They call it exercise in a bott. And it was a drug candidate for a while. You can buy it and just take it orally.

It is a real thing. There are papers all over the place. When we did our literature review on it earlier this year, I was like, okay, so anyone on the call, you can actually go to this article, which is written in such an easy way to read, easily understandable, or you can go to this really difficult research paper, which is where all the doctors and the researchers went, um, but it was amazing to know how much information was out there about it, because we just want to upregulate that. We want to make it so, you know, you don't have to remember to take anything. You just have it.

Well, if you can do a. So you're saying the mitochondrial treatment that you're developing that's coming out this and this year, this coming year, 2020, is directly working on increasing PGC1alpha?

Yes.

Oh, my God.

It is PGC1alpha. It's the gene. It's the gene.

I would sell a car to have that. That is the juice of life right there, okay?

That gene, all it's gonna do is code for that protein that's beneficial for you. And in the mouse studies, you know, if you look back to the research that was done in it, the little guys, the little mice that had it compared to their counterparts, they ran so much longer. They spent much more time being activ. Lived longer. They Lived longer than their peers.

I'm going to say this. You're not saying. I'm just putting words in your mouth. So we are replacing exercise with gene therapy. Fantastic.

Well, you know, I'm hoping. Here's what I'm hoping now for those people who don't want to exercise, I think they should be healthy. I think that, you know, it can create a liability to the medical system if you're not healthy. So these gene therapies will vastly help them. But I also think that people who were not active before because their bodies just weren't genetically set up to be sports athletes, might get active.

Oh, come on. That's just marketing. Who wants to exercise five days a week? We don't have time for that crap.

Well, what if you could do it two days a week? So the thing is that I think that most people who get into this technology, get excited about this technology, are going to want to do more.

Of course.

They're going to want to take everything that Bulletproof has. They're going to want to get out there and move their body. Because what we're hoping is people get interested in their biology and actually making it over the top. Going over the top.

Yeah. Well, you're going to develop those superhuman abilities that we all want. And really, it comes down to, number one, having so much energy that you just wanted to go for a hike with the kids.

Yeah, exactly.

Instead of, I'm so tired, I have to go for a hike. So it'll make me a good person because I can see I exercised today. It's a totally different mindset. As someone who had mitochondrial insufficiencies for a long time and has high functioning mitochondria. Now, the difference is it's exponential in what you can do in your life without feeling stressed, too.

Yeah, absolutely. And people talk to us, and often I'll get questions, I think I did at that last conference about is this gene doping? And the truth is that, you know, read the book called the Sports Gene. It's pretty cool. It shows you that people who are professionals at sports generally already have genes that make them. I mean, all of them. They don't generally. They all have genes that make them better than you. I mean, and they're specified to certain sports. So people who play baseball have better vision. It just. It just pays off to have 2010 vision. People who play basketball generally have longer arms than the rest of the population in correlation to the height of their body. People in soccer, or what is called football in most of the world, they have more fast twitch muscle. And so there already are people who are genetically superior to you in those athletic senses. So this is just leveling the playing field, making it accessible for everyone.

It's fascinating. I had an episode where we compared my genetics to an Olympic athlete and I was 2% better at whatever it was genetically than he was. And of course he could kick my ass on all sorts of things, but I could put on muscle pretty well. But this comes at a downside. What you mentioned with basketball players. It turns out that the length, your wingspan, that ratio, if you have a greater wingspan than height, which I do have, you are Almost certainly an HLA Dr. 4 subtype, which means you, you will be more sensitive to toxic mold and you're more likely to have hypermobility, which is why so many basketball players screw up their ankles and knees because their ligaments are stretchy.

So we gotta fix that too.

Exactly.

It's another thing for me to do.

So I wanna be able to tweak collagen formation. You can look at the RCCX phenotype and say, all right, what do we do for that? Because that's oftentimes tied in with that whole thing. So now you have the superpower, I have the long arms, I have the basketball abilities, I have the muscle thing. But the downside that all of these come with, we can hack the downside so that you can sort of dial in. Okay. If you're 4ft tall, you're probably not going to be a high end basketball player and you're probably not gonna be able to change your height once you're an adult. But if you have risks for some things that the flip side of that is a gift for something else. What if we reduce the risk side of that and leave you your gift or amplify your gift or give you a new gift. Yeah, this is, this is the coolest stuff that's possible.

Yeah. This is where it gets really cool. Yeah.

So let's, let's take off your what am I allowed to do? And let's put on your 50 year vision hat, which for you is just a drop in the bucket of how long you're going to live. What are the top abilities that you want to hack using genetic engineering?

Oh, I mean, there are so many things that I want to do personally. I mean, vision is one of the first things that I want to go at. I'd like to have pentachromacy. I'd like to see him billions of colors instead of millions.

Oh yeah, I want that too. So do you think we'll be able to do gene therapy to give people 2010 vision?

Oh, I think that we'll be able to do a lot of things now. Stigmatisms and actually changing, you know, physical attributes. I mean, we can change muscle mass. Can we make people taller? Maybe, but it'd probably be some sort of combination of growth hormone stimulation and various things that we don't understand yet. You know, I just, I want to create that, I guess it's called morphological freedom for humans so that they can live where they want to live and do what they want to do. And I'd also like to move into integrating some of this technology that we have external to our body that's becoming vastly important for our extension of our brain. So, you know, we have all of these technologies that actually make us smarter because we have this phone, we have this computer, you know, we're dialed in. How do we do that biologically? And there's more and more evidence of biological programming of systems that might be able to be more incorporated biologically than we think in the future. But that's a very future.

You mean integrating hard technology, chips and whatnot into the body? Or do you mean building it internally.

But in building it externally? Incorporating it internally, but building it as biology?

That's the right strategy that a few people talk about.

Biology works faster than all of these things. The central nervous system is absolutely amazing. So I don't know how we do that yet. Those are future facing technologies. But right now, I mean, it feels pretty limited when you're thinking in a limitless way that we're really just trying to combat aging and childhood disease still. But this is the technology that gets us to those bigger steps.

I want you to start a gene therapy club, sort of like the Costco of gene therapy. So I could become a member and write a $10,000 check. I'll just take my kids out of school, it's no problem. And then I can get a discount on all the future ones. Right.

We do that in the sense that people can invest in the company, although it doesn't come at that low of amount. I think our lowest investment is, is kind of high, but it gives people the ability. I mean, that's why people want to invest in bioviva. They want to be part of, you know, the technology and get access to it at lower cost. Although the cost of these gene therapies are almost as low as you can go. Here's one incentive. You know, you get 10 people together, it decreases the cost of a Gene therapy significantly. If you're making gene therapies for 10 people, it's less expensive for a new.

Gene therapy, but for these existing ones, because I could get probably 500 people want PGC1 Alpha just from this episode. Like, hey, guys, email me. Let's hook up.

Well, then we could probably get the cost down to about $10,000, $15,000 per person. If you can get that many people.

Here's what I want you to do. If you're listening to this and you're saying, I want this lifelong exercise kind of a thing, hit me up on Instagram. Dave Asprey, just DM me, send me your email and all that stuff. I'll build up a list of people. And when we have enough people, I'm going to hit up Liz and we're going to have a buyer's club. I'm not even kidding. I'm so in on this. So the two things, Clotho and PGC1 Alpha, those are at the top of my list. And if you, if you haven't read Superhuman, just read it. It'll tell you exactly about those two things and why they matter for aging. And then we'll put together a list. And seriously, I. I'm in at those numbers.

Yeah, do it.

Give me two.

Do it.

Okay.

Yeah. So. And that was at 500 people. Now if we have 10, it might be double that. But that still is not bad. If we have a hundred, it might be obviously, you know, one and a half times.

Look at details. There's no promises here. We just made this up, but I'm not joking. Hundreds of thousands of people here. There's a episode and Dave Asprey on Instagram, DM me. I'll have my team just gather all the stuff. I'm going to need your email address.

Yeah. And let's. We'll get you a bunch of kits that you're going to do before and after. And then you're going to have a little bit of protocol. You're going to have to get some blood work before. You might have to get some images, depending on which gene therapy you're doing. You're going to go visit a doctor. You're going to have. You're all going to have a big fun time together getting treated.

Gene therapy parties. Like Tupperware.

Yeah. Gene therapy party. It's. Yeah, we'll pass around some Tupperware. The thing is, once we create homeostasis in a human, right now, what we'd be showing is that we can affect biological aging. We can affect the biomarkers. And we'd make hypothetical guesses off of how healthy, how good your biomarkers are today to how long you'll live. Now, some of those are going to change, though. So when you have a gene therapy, what we're going to look at in populations is if there's some outlying change. You know, let's say look at the people who have the Milano A1 gene. Naturally, they don't get cardiovascular disease. They're a big outlier in the whole human population. But they have high LDL levels, you know, so we have to be prepared to see things and have a different meaning for those things because you now have a different biology in a sense. But if we can get you to 180, yeah, that would be early technology. That would be technology that is just repairing a little bit.

It's at least 180 is the goal.

If we can make repair over damage, you create more repair in your body than you create damage. You know, people who put time limits like a thousand years, that's just. Why would a thousand years be a limit?

Every single new discovery in the history of humanity was impossible until it happened. Every one of them. And when someone says the biological age limit for humans is 38, there's actually someone just came out and said that, yeah, well, the world is changing. And I am so stoked that you're reaching out to the big money people with this. We're going to live a long time. It's going to change economies, it's going to change the way we take care of the environment. It's going to make the world a much better place. On that note, if you haven't read Superhuman, some of the stuff we talked about in this episode is there. PGC1 Alpha is a massive target for my biohacking as well as mitochondrial function, which we talked about. Telomeres are one of the seven pillars of aging that I talk about. And Clotho isn't one of the seven pillars, but it's in there, thanks to having a chance to interview Jim Plant, who's doing some heavy duty work on that as well. So there's just so much knowledge and you can say, I don't know what these are. It's too much. I'm trying to take notes. You don't have to take notes. There's already a transcribe this on my webpage. You can play this back on YouTube, on iTunes. But this is all real. It's happening. So thank you for listening. Thank you for being bulletproof and you're only going to hear more of this in the next episode.

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