Exploring Stem Cell Therapy - Episode 294

Welcome to the Gladden longevity podcast with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, where our passion is helping you to become an AJ hacker. On this show, we want to help you optimize your life energy, longevity, health and human performance with impactful and actionable information by answering four questions. How good can we be? How do we make 100 the new 30? How do we live well beyond 120? And how do we live young for a lifetime? Now, here's today's episode of the Gliden Longevity Podcast.

Everyone, welcome to the Glide and Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey, and as always, we're here answering the big questions in life, like how good can we be? How do we make 100 to new 30? How do we live well beyond 120? How do we live young for a lifetime? And how do we develop a 300-year-old mind? In today's episode, I'm going to be talking with a gentleman, Joshua Kettner, who works at the Dream Body Clinic in Guadalajara. Not in Guadalajara, actually. He's in Mexico, but he's in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and he and his wife have started a clinic down there. Really primarily devot the use of mesenchymal stem cells. It's a fairly short but interesting conversation about their approach, what they're doing, what they're not doing. I think you'll find it quite informative. Hope you enjoy it. Welcome, everybody, to this edition of the Glad Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, and I'm here with Josh Kettner today. Josh, welcome to the to the podcast.

Thanks for having me on.

Yeah. So you're coming to us from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, if I'm not mistaken, and you've been involved with regenerative medicine there in Mexico for some period of time. Do you want to give the audience, myself maybe a little bit of an intro as to how you got interested in this and how you got to be in Mexico?

Yeah. So I take it all back. A little over 20 years ago, my dad had Lou Gehrig's disease, and I just kind of saw firsthand how bad things can be for some of these terminal illnesses. You know, what they will and won't do for you. And know, back then, they didn't have all this, like, right to try stuff. So he had a big aerospace company, and he started doing his own research. And he goes, well, if you got hiv, muscle wasting or, you know, something like that, they're going to throw testosterone and growth hormone at you like you're a bodybuilder. And he asked for it, but up in Seattle they wouldn't give it to him. I mean, not that it would have, probably wouldn't have helped or anything, but we're just looking for anything and it was frustrating. So after that I care give for him until he passed. And then I liked caregiving, I liked helping people. I started working for a Place for mom. They're one of the largest assisted living groups in the United States. And helping people find a place for mom and dad. And read an article one day and it goes, hey man outsources parents to India. That's genius. Great doctors, low cost of care, not over regulated. But no one's going to go visit mom in India.

And.

And I was like, you know, Mexico might work. And we had always vacationed in Mazatlan, Mexico every year. So I started looking into it and I had a friend that had moved here to Puerto Vallarta. I moved down just to kind of see because my job was work from home. Ended up meeting my wife, her sister's a doctor. And you know, just kind of stumbled into this where I found out you can legally seek medical treatment abroad and return home with medication if you do all the paperwork right and everything. So we created a program where we could do that to help people. And then started hearing things about stem cells here in Mexico. But with anything, you got to be careful. I mean there's, there's a lot of over promising and things that just, you know, aren't real in Mexico and other places. So we ended up, yeah, so my wife, she's Mexican, we dug in and we found a guy who did his PhD in cellular biology, University of Guadalajara, and started working with him. But we found pretty quick the quality control here isn't quite what you'd expect in the United States. So we had to go do our own thing. And we got our own biologists, got our own lab set up all of that and you know, had our doctors working with the treatments and we just got this amazing team that does all that. And me and my wife, we just manage everything and you know, help people out.

Nice. So walk us through a little bit about what kind of treatments that you're offering down there, what kind of biologics you're using, that sort of thing.

So the main thing is mesenchymal stem cells. We take ours from umbilical cord tissue, the Wharton jelly from placenta, and we isolate, then cultivate. You know, that's the big difference of what we can do here versus the U.S. you know, in the U.S. they have the minimal manipulation rule, they've got the homologous use rule, which means like, for like these things kind of get in the way of, you know, really doing it the right way like we're able to do here. So it's mainly number one would be joints, knee treatments, lower backs is probably the top thing. Then we do a lot of autoimmune diseases and then a lot of chronic degenerative things like, you know, hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys, that.

Got it. Okay. And so the programs that you're, you're using, you're using mesenchymal stem cells, you're probably using other things in conjunction with that. Can you speak to that a little bit as to what kind of things get combined with that? Sure.

We, we don't combine a lot really. For most of the treatments, it's typically just the mesenchymal stem cells. You know, maybe for like a hip or a shoulder, we might add some prp. But the only other ones we, for brain treatments like stroke recovery will, we might add some like cerebraliacin, which is a great group of peptides that, you know, it's been approved in Europe forever and they just, I think because it's off, they never brought it to market there in the U.S. but yeah, those are the main things.

Okay, and so what does it look like for people to come down there? They come down and spend a week, they spend a day, they spend what, what do they do? They spend a month with you? How does that work for them?

No, it's usually pretty quick because with our culturing process, we've constantly like every day we've got fresh cells coming out, we kind of have to estimate what we're going to have patient load per day, but we take them out of cultivation the night before and administer within 24 hours. So for like an IV treatment, it's a four day trip. Day one, arrive and rest. Day two, blood work. Day three, treatment. Day four, fly home. If they need an MRI, like for a joint, it's five days. So we have our own open MRI machine on site. Same thing. It's just we do the MRI and blood work on the second day, review it with the doctors on the third to make sure it's a good fit or you know, very discerning with what we can and can't help. Very honest with people on that. And then typically day four, we do treatment.

Got it. Okay. All right. Give people an idea of things that you can't help, what would be something that you feel like or some things that you couldn't really be that helpful for sure.

I mean, we. Look, my dad had als. I wish we could fix that, but als, Lang, Lou Gehrig doesn't respond. Parkinson's, we've seen maybe some really minimal reduction in tremors, but it really doesn't help there. And then for joints, it's usually things like they've got a bunch of osteophytes. If they've got like a complete tear of a ligament or tendon, they're not magic. They can't reattach things. They can't get rid of new bone. Those are, those are obstacles.

Right. Okay, what about, what about payment? I assume this is kind of a cash pay scenario. Is that kind of how it's set up? I would think there's. People are not bringing any kind of insurance along with them on this.

No, because like there's, you know, insurance usually is only going to cover things that are like, at least there in the U.S. like FDA approved, all of that. Because of the whole way the system set up. I don't think this will ever get FDA approved. It's a very big barrier to entry there and you can't patent it. So yeah, it's. It's cash. Sometimes if people have like health savings accounts, they can pay with those, but that's about it as far as insurance goes.

Got it. And then what about sources? The sources for these mesengual stem cells you're talking about, what is the actual source? You get in from placental or cord blood or.

Yeah, we. So we take it from Wharton Jelly and the placenta. So we work with a team of gynecologists that only work with first time mothers. You know, we're very careful with who we select from. The age of the donor is very important, their health. So they have to be between the ages of 18 and 25. First time mothers, we need to make sure they're married. We ask how many sexual partners. You know, an MSC isn't going to carry a virus, but if the donor has a retrovirus, there's a less than 5% chance of carryover. So we need to screen the women, then the tissue, then the isolated cells and the cultured cells. Then we send it off to a third party lab for further verification. And we provide all our patients with all the flow cytometry data, cell counter data, and that blood analysis.

Okay. All right. Interesting. Are there other therapies that you're looking at adding to the, to the process down there to the clinic or Pretty much settled into this or. What are your thoughts about that?

Yeah, I mean, we're pretty set into this. There's been some talk about like, muse cells. I don't know if you've heard about those at all. So the, the lady, I forget her name, but she's working with a friend of mine in Guadalajara that they're, you know, she was funded by Mitsubishi. It was for Parkinson's research. And they're, they're starting up a lab there and gonna start doing it. I don't know. I mean, the only study done on that has been for Parkinson's. There's a few places offering it that are, you know, again, saying it's the cure all to everything. I'm not convinced. I've talked with her, I've talked to one of her partners who's this PhD from Argentina, and I'm not sure. Those apparently are going to be pluripotent and that they can turn into other things where mesenchymal stem cells work via the paracrine effect. So, you know, we worked with Dr. Arnold Kaplan in the past. He's who named them and you know, they're not really a stem cell when they're in your body, they, they work via the signaling they do, sending out exosomes and you know, he wished he could have renamed them medicinal signaling cells, but the name stuck. And so we call them stem cells. But there's, there's things they're working on. You know, we've looked into some of the induced pluripotent stem cell things, but you know, genetic editing gets a bit complicated and just maybe in the future, but for now, we're, we're very set with what we're doing with the stem cells.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Cool. And then what about. How do people find you? How do they get a hold of you? What's. How do people go about that?

I mean, most people will find like, you know, videos. We've done interviews, different things. But our website has all the info. They're at Dreambody Clinic and got all the treatments listed. There's links to studies, you know, tons of patient testimonials, things like that. It's all there.

Nice. Okay, great. So Dream Body Doc.

Dream Body Clinic. So it's.

It's Dream Body Clinic. Okay, got it. Any other topics you'd like to cover? I mean, those are.

That's the main thing that we do, the stem cells because we work a lot with like growth hormone for adults, you know, for kids. It's all FDA approved, all of that. But, you know, I've personally been on HGH for 12 years and does great for. They're. They're finally doing some studies on that. If you look at the, the trim and trim X studies they're showing on the DNA methylation test, it is turning the clock back. It's also helping to regenerate the thymus, which is a big deal for your T regulatory cells. So it's getting some cool info there.

Yeah, Trim and trim X are interesting studies. Right. So they're using growth hormone, DHEA and metformin kind of in a cocktail. And they are showing some what I would call minor improvements in epigenetic ages and some rejuvenation of the thymus gland, which is interesting in and of itself because the thymus involutes as we age and then you lose the ability to make more thymus cells or T cells, if you will. So I think that's all very interesting. There's always a balancing act between growth hormone or any kind of andro adrenergic kind of hormone replacement therapy. And the reason is that if you're standing on the gas pedal of MTOR all the time, like bodybuilders or other people, yes, you build more muscle and bone, but you also die sooner and have a higher cancer risk. So there's really a balancing act between cycling into activating MTOR through growth hormone or androgens and then cycling back out of it, where you're activating the opposite side of the equation, the A and PK side, where you're actually rejuvenating telomere lengths and increasing autophagy and things like that. So it's kind of an economy of balance is the way we think about it. It's not about how hard can you push one side or the other. You need both, quite honestly, and you need them to cycle in and out. So yeah, that's how we tend to think about that. We're not fans of pushing anybody into a corner on anything. Whether it's, you know, being keto all the time or being on, you know, MTOR activation all the time or AMPK activation all the time. It's really this sort of symphonic balancing that that makes the difference. So interesting. Cool.

Yeah, no, for sure. I couldn't agree with you more there. I mean, that's the first guy I ever met doing it was actually a us doctor introduced me to it all. And yeah, low dose long term is where he said that's, you know, more of the sweet spot. And we've worked with some of the top bodybuilders in the world. And I mean, you just, you see the acromelgia and other issues that they start forming and it, there's. If you go over six IU a day, you're gonna give yourself type 2 diabetes and they inject insulin with it. That's where it gets super dangerous. I mean, you hear about these bodybuilders, like, it would blow your mind how good their blood work is, even from all the steroids. But the insulin, it's like they don't even check their, their blood glucose. And they're like, oh, I did this dose yesterday, I'll do it again today. And you're like, right.

Well, people don't realize that growth hormone, insulin, things like that, they're really connected. IGF1, right. Insulin, like growth factor comes from growth hormone and then insulin itself. But both of those activate mtor and both of them actually increase cellular senescence. So if you want to have more senescent cells, you know, you stand on that side of the equation. If you want to prune those senescent cells, then you stand on the other side of the equation, right? Where you've got AMPK activation and natural killer cell and CD, CD 8 cells working in your favor. So, yeah, it's, it's complex biology. And if you're listening to this, just realize that it is complex and it's not something to just wade into. You really want to work with somebody that can characterize where you are in the aging process, what you actually need or don't need, how much of it you need and how often you need to be doing it and what you need to be doing to kind of balance it out. I think it's a very sophisticated approach, really to get it right. So just, we have a really healthy respect for it. Sounds like you do too, so.

Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. And I mean, I think that's like what you do with your clinic, right? You're helping people dial that in and put all the pieces together to make sure it fits. Right. So. And like you said that the TRIM study is showing, I think it was like a year and a half. It turned back. Yeah, Methylation, where the stem cells. I mean, we're, we're seeing much greater, like, turn back before and after with like DNA methylation tests from stem cell iv. So when people ask me, for a long time, it was growth hormone was, you know, it had this myth of being like this, this anti aging miracle. We were always very straight with people, like, yeah, you know, celebrities use it, that stuff. But like you just said, it has to be balanced. And, you know, with the stem cells, we're seeing much, much better results.

And yeah, that's right. You can get, you can get bigger results with, with regenerative technologies like mesingable stem cells, other stem cells, exosomes and plasmapheresis actually can give you significant reversal of aging as well. So there's lots of different ways to go about it. I think if you're listening to this, the key thing is to know what you need, how to go about it, how to time it, sequence it, dose it. And if you get that right, you can really, you can really reclaim your youth. If you get it wrong, you can really kind of screw yourself up. It's fire. It can be great, but you can also get burned. So just be. Be very respectful of it. Yeah, Good. Cool. Well, thanks, Josh. I appreciate you updating us on what you're doing there. Sounds like you're doing some good work. So good stuff.

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