Young Blood Transfers For Anti-Aging, Alzheimers, Parkinson's & More: The Future Of One Of The Most Cutting-Edge Medical Protocols That Exists.

And he gets this chart and he says, this is the problem. He says, one thing cures everything. And I said, well, why is that a problem? He says, oh, because all the money's in each one of these little boxes.

And to be able to see and observe what I have even observed already is just overwhelming to me. I mean, I feel like God has put me in a wonderful position where I'm at right now.

The whole concept of exchanging blood is not new. What's new is the potential application to new indications.

I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet. From Sealfit, Kokoro, Spartan Agoji, and the world's toughest mutter to 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding, and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science. Search the globe for the world's top experts in performance, fat loss recovery, hormones, brain beauty, and brawn to deliver deliver you this podcast, everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

Howdy. Howdy ho.

I am sitting in a giant dining room in an airbnb in Kona, Hawaii, sipping a black cup of 100% ton of coffee. Actually, the cup is green, the coffee is black. And that might be why my introduction sounds a little funky compared to my normal audio. Because frankly, I'm sitting at a dining room table in a giant, expansive dining room where dining room tables usually are.

It gets a little echoey.

I'm breaking all the rules of podcasting.

When I used to do this, and I used to do it the right.

Way, and I wasn't as lazy, I'd.

Crawl into a closet.

But my kids and my wife are sleeping right now in both the bedrooms. We're on a hunting and fishing trip in Hawaii. We're hunting wild pig and goat and sheep and not hunting for fish. We're fishing for freshwater, spearfishing for prawn, and hunting out in the ocean. Fishing out in the ocean for. To get those words correct for tuna, marlin. My friend and amazing hunting guy down here, Justin Lee. Just having a wonderful time. But I want to bring you today a very, very good podcast episode. I had two people from the Young Blood Institute depend upon my house. No, they descended, descend upon my house. And today's episode is quite, quite interesting. It's all about young Blood transfers. And I was on the edge of my se for this one as I listen to these folks talk about all the near miracles they seem to be achieving with this.

Are we on?

Oh, yeah, sorry, I forgot to tell you. Yeah, we're on. So we're sitting here at my kitchen table, and I have this fellow named Mark Erdog. Did you pronounce your name? Erdahl or Erdol? Erdahl or Erdahl. We just finished crushing the obstacle course and the cold pool. How do you feel, man?

Awesome, baby. That was killer. Sweet.

So I'll give you a mighty fine introduction here in just a second, Mark, but also seated beside you is the wonderful Gloria. What would you actually call Gloria? Your lead nurse. Your head nurse?

Nursing supervisor.

Nursing supervisor.

She manages a team of nurses that we've got across the country.

Okay, gotcha, gotcha. And Mark and Gloria reached out to me. This must have been like four or five months ago, huh?

Yeah.

And Mark emailed me an intriguing message about some very cool breakthrough protocols that he and his team are using for conditions such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, and filling me in on stuff that I'd never before heard of or seen. Although I was slightly familiar with you, Mark, because I'd heard about you from, actually someone who's in our studio audience right now, Dr. Matt Cook, former podcast guest, who's also sitting here at the kitchen table. And you can wave a virtual hello if you want.

Matt.

He's waving. For those of you listening, and Matt told me about this concept of something called plasmapheresis, which you may be familiar with as the transfer of. Of young blood into adult humans, which is probably a very bastardized explanation. And I'm sure Mark will be able to clear up the yard exactly what plasmapheresis is. But when Matt and I were talking about plasmapheresis, Matt talked about the Young Blood Institute that many of you may have heard of as a Silicon Valley institute that is doing some of these young blood exchanges. And it turns out that Mark is the chairman and the CEO of the Young Blood Institute. And Mark's gonna drive me crazy flossing his teeth as we're podcasting. So at some point you gotta, you gotta, you gotta put down the tooth flossing. You're gonna drive everybody nuts. We ate steak last night and bacon bratwurst this morning. So anyways, now that we've got our teeth all cleaned, the Young Blood Institute, it's a non profit corporation. They do clinical trials in the use of therapeutic plasma exchange. And usually where I'VE seen them is the sexy news articles that talk about young blood transfers for anti aging. But it turns out that there's a lot going on right now behind the scenes stuff that's honestly never before been talked about on podcasts. I think this is going to be some of the first or one of the first times you all have been able to hear this information on a podcast, particularly with management of health conditions that go beyond just longevity. But Mark doesn't come from a background in straight up health per se. He actually began his career with IBM Biomedical Systems, where he invented the world's first automated blood cell separator.

Well, I didn't invent it.

You were on a team that invented it.

Yeah, it was invented probably 20 years before my time by an IBM engineer named George Dutson in actually 1965. His son had leukemia and at the time they fractionated or separated blood manually. It was a very laborious process and he needed to. He was basically trying to figure out how to perform leukapheresis or white cell exchange for his son. And so he teamed up with the doctor and IBM was. IBM's been a great benefactor of things like they helped invent the first heart lung machine and all sorts of stuff that people don't know about. But they got a grant from the National Cancer Institute and basically invented this blood cell separator, the world's first blood cell separator, in 1965. So that was, you know, that was decades before I came along.

Okay, so what you invented was that the automated blood cell, like when you were working with IBM, you guys were working on blood cell separators.

So I got hired into IBM Biomedical Systems kind of by accident. I'd gone down for an interview with the computer group and I got there and they said, well, we don't have any jobs, there's a hiring freeze. But there's this little business unit that, you know, we know about, that you might be interested in. I'm like, I'm looking for a job, you know, it's like, I'll talk to anybody.

Yeah.

And so they hired me, flew me out to Princeton where the headquarters were of this little business unit and, you know, handed me Tabor's Medical Encyclopedia. And I started, you know, making calls and going through training with all sorts of.

They didn't have Udemy and the Khan Academy back then.

Yeah, yeah, that wasn't, that was encyclopedia paper. It was a. Yes. Big thick book. Tabor's Medical Encyclopedia. You can go, you can Google it. I think I still have a Copy someplace. But no, they had a really good in IBM tradition, great training program. And I was part of a kind of a new team of recruits that got trained and sort of deployed to everything from Red Cross to Cedars Sinai Hospital. I was in LA at the time and it was an amazing experience. I actually, not to digress too much, but we had another product that they used in open heart surgery that used wash packed red cells. And like month two on the job, I sat at the head of the table next to the anesthesiologist Matt and watched open heart surgery, which was pretty incredible. But the blood cell separation and exchange was kind of the, a very profound breakthrough at the time or a few decades before.

But what is blood cell separation in exchange?

Well, basically the machine draws blood out of one arm, it spins it around in a centrifuge that has a special plastic container, if you will, consumable so that you can swap out these, the consumables every time separates the red cells, the white cells, the platelets and the plasma, they all separate by specific gravity. So the heavy stuff goes to the outside.

So similar to what they do when they're doing like a prp, like a.

Platelet rich plasma, it's similar to that, this sort of preceded PRP when it was started. But then the machine can be dialed to extract exactly the component you want. So you want to collect platelets, no problem. You want to collect plasma, red cells, you can do anything. And then you can exchange it by introducing fluid at the same time. So let's say you're doing plasma exchange, you're basically drawing the blood out of one arm. Okay. The machine extracts the old or takes out the plasma, puts the rest of the blood back, you know, the white.

Cells, the platelets, without the old plasma.

In it, without the old plasma in it. And then you drop in the new plasma through an IV concurrently.

And where's the new plasma coming from?

So there are many choices available. At least there's two primary choices. There's actual plasma and there is purify plasma components. So what happens in the, there's a whole plasma, a multi billion dollar plasma donation industry that is supported by lots of kids going to college that get, you know, 50 bucks to show up and donate and they take that plasma, which is 95% water, and distill out the water and then what's remaining primarily are albumin, immunoglobulins and fibrinogen and they purify those, those components, pasteurize them, which is basically heat them up and Wash them, clean them, et cetera. And then package them up as pharmaceutical grade products that are regulated around the world. And then you. It's kind of like frozen lemonade. Add water, got lemonade. Add water, got plasma. So we are. Our current and first protocol uses the purified plasma components. And then you just add an IV bag, you know, with saline water, basically, and electrolytes and to reconstitute the plasma.

And that's what you do at the Young Blood Institute.

That's our first protocol.

Okay. So you wound up leaving IBM Biomedical Systems.

Well, they sold the business unit, okay, to COB Laboratories, which became the dominant, you know, supplier of these machines. And they redeployed us into the computer division. And I went off to do a bunch of tech stuff, you know, fiber optic, you know, channel technologies and workstation technologies. I ended up spinning some technology out of IBM and running a company called Applied Science Fiction that we sold to Kodak, you know, after about five years and did some M and A work, some investments, bought a business unit from a company and spun it out, grew it, you know, 100% a year over. Over a few years. And one day I just kind of woke up and, you know, I was, I realized that all the stuff that I was doing, like my friends and my family, it was like boring them to tears. It wasn't that, you know, it was interesting to tech people, but I just, I thought, you know, I wanted to do something for humanity, something that made a difference in lives of people that I, you know, held dear. And I'd read about this mice research at various.

You talking about the one at Stanford?

Well, Stanford, ucsf, Berkeley, Harvard.

Did some studies, tell people about the mice research.

Well, it's pretty gross, you know, it has this elegant name, heterochronic parabiosis. What it really means is taking a couple of mice and slashing them down the side and stitching them together and sort of co. Mingling systems. They call it the systemic milieu because it's not really blood exchange, it's sort of blood and guts. And then they measure, you know, what's happening.

That's far different than what most people think that the mouse experiments are like. I always envision just like a tiny, elegant little tube going from one mouse to the next. Sounds a lot different.

No, they don't have little micro needles that they can stick in the mice. And you know, they don't have little chairs for them to sit on. And, you know, it's a pretty. And they use this very sophisticated equipment to measure what's happening. But I kind of liken it to watching the Civil War with the Hubble telescope. You know, it's like you've got a very sophisticated instrument to watch, a very gory process. And I went and met with some of the mice research people because I was curious, you know, what they were finding. And one of the guys I met with, you know, he had this interesting chart where he had a bubble called young blood at the bottom and had these vertical bars on the top that were all these age associated disorders. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer, heart disease, et cetera, et cetera. And he gets this chart and he says, this is the problem. And I'm like, what's the problem? He says, one thing cures everything. And I said, well, why is that a problem? He says, oh, because all the money's in each one of these little boxes. And you know, I was a kind of a finance econ major out of school and got into, I, you know, I've been biomedical. And then they transferred the computer division. I became a system engineer and sort of developed a little bit of technical BS meter, I guess, if you will. And the first thing I thought is, okay, wait a minute, is this a scientist or a marketing guy? You know, it just, it just struck me because if, if one thing can cure everything, what the heck. Why, that's fantastic.

You know, that one thing being young blood, this young blood transfer. Yeah. So what you were seeing in this data from the young mice to the old mice was that it was just fixing all the issues that were going on. The old mice.

Yeah, the old mice were getting, you know, smarter, faster and stronger. And the young mice who were absorbing some of the old blood were getting slower, more forgetful and weaker, basically. So because in heterochronic parabiosis, it's your.

Both parties are recipients are getting the old shit too.

That's right. In humans, we would never do that. Right. But the other thing I realized is that a lot of these folks didn't really have, I mean, they're not really medical doctors. They didn't have any experience in medicine.

Or the people doing the mouse research.

Yeah. And I'm thinking, wow, you know, I mean, this is like. And for them this is all like brand new stuff. And from a research perspective, it is new stuff. But in humans, we've been like, we've been doing this since 1965. Decades, 50 years. The whole concept of exchanging blood is, is, is not new. What's, what's new is the potential application to new indications. So apheresis generally and plasmapheresis in particular has been used largely for autoimmune disorders. So autoimmune disorders typically have the presence of autoantibodies, the presence of T cell disorders, and pro inflammatory factors. And it turns out that aging blood, or what we call immunosenescence, or the decline of the immune system, has those same three factors. Interesting. And so what we did, and I should say my principal investigators, Dr. Janko Nikolic and Mitch Harmon, working together, have just sort of connected the dots between autoimmunity and immunosenescence. And with a very simple hypothesis. We're not, you know, we're not, some of the mice research people are, you know, sort of inferring, you know, immortality or age reversal. We started out just saying, boy, if we could just reboot the immune system for everybody over 50, yeah, that'd be fantastic.

So you launched this, you launched the Youngblood Institute as a part of that effort, but you launched as a nonprofit. Why are you operating as a nonprofit?

Well, you know, several reasons. I mean, number one, we're doing humanitarian research. I mean, and we're doing real research, I mean, which we'll get into, you know, a little more. And then secondly, you know, there's really no intellectual property here. I mean, this is, like I said, this technology has been around for 50 years. This isn't like there's some, you know, proprietary, you know, play to take it, build a company around this unique idea and take it public. And more importantly, there's a lot of learning that needs to occur. And one of the things, in hindsight, I can say I didn't know this, I sort of intuited it when I began. But the problem with a for profit entity, especially if you take, you know, any kind of investment, but even if you don't even spend your own money in it, you naturally focus on profit. How do I make how to make a buck? How do I, you know, grow the business? And that can be contradictory to the idea of research and discovery. And because you may discover something that says, oops, I screwed up my business plan, I've got to pivot or change.

Yeah.

And so those things can be. Because once you get committed to a business plan, it's hard to get off that business plan.

It really sucks for Monsanto to say, oops, we figured out glyphosate may not be that hot of a thing after all, or It's a tough thing to.

Admit, I can tell you there's at least a half a dozen anti aging companies in Silicon Valley that I know about, where the fundamental science is flawed. Now, it takes years for that truth to emerge because there's a whole cadre of constituents.

Interesting. Maybe I won't ask you to throw anybody under the bus right now, but.

No, I won't throw anybody under the.

Bus because I actually, what I really want to focus on are some of these really cool trials that you're doing now. Because, you know, what I've grown to know about you just in the past day as we've been hanging out, is that you're very into this idea of trialing something, of researching something. And you built this young blood institute up around this concept of conducting some of these clinical trials on the plasmapheresis. So what exactly are you, are you guys doing from a trial standpoint right now?

So, well, back to the basics. So we started out with this idea of, you know, we can reboot the immune system. So I've got in the way this sort of started when I connected with Mitch Harmon and Janko. We're all kind of test junkies for different reasons. I come out of the computer world where you want to test everything, every corner case, every possibility, because that's how you know you're going to have a good quality product. Janko is probably one of the top immunologists in the world. I mean, he's been studying immunology for 50 years. I mean, he could talk to you for an hour about IL6, you know, which is one marker. And Mitch, he worked at the National Institute of aging for 20 years. He's been. He was at the first sort of billionaire funded anti aging institute called the Kronos Institute in 2000. So these guys are deep in the subject and they know that, you know, to get valid clinical evidence, you've got to have data. And more importantly, we have a hypothesis that this is a prophylactic or preventative treatment therapy. Okay. Or that it's better as a prophylactic or treatment therapy. So how do you prove that you prevented something? Well, you have to have a measurement that says you detected it in the first place because it may not be evident. Right. And so that's the first thing. The second thing is that there's a lot of, let's say, anecdotal data. And Gloria will share some of this later when we get into some of the things that she's seen that suggest that the effects of plasmapheresis extend beyond that they're systemic and that they extend beyond, beyond the specific indication that it's being treated. And so we wanted to cast a net, a broad net, to capture anything and everything that was occurring. In other words, we would look at the whole elephant. There's a lot of people, and this is kind of how medicine works. You know, you come in, you got a. You know, the elephant's got a problem with the trunk. Well, let me fix the trunk. Well, let me fix the tail. Let me fix the toes. And yet we knew that these other phenomena, like, I fixed the. The tail, but guess what? The nose improved while we were at it. But we didn't document that. And so I see we just very simply said, well, what the heck? If we're going to spend all this money and do all this work, let's just try to capture everything that's happening.

So what are you tracking in terms of biomarkers? Like when someone's coming in and getting a young blood transfer, and you're looking at pre post biomarkers. You know, what kind of things are we talking about? I mean, you mentioned interleukins and some of these immune factors, for example.

Yeah. I mean, this would probably take us five podcasts to cover all our biomarkers. So I'll try to summarize it.

You're holding, like, eight pieces of paper.

Yeah, I just brought along to show you. Yeah. So the first set that we have, we've got what we call the standardized patient care physical exams. These are what the local doctor will. Will administer, if you will. And it's. It's kind of the standard stuff that you get from LabCorp or Quest, but everything you could possibly think of but dealing with cardiovascular.

It's like a complete blood count, comprehensive metabolic profile, red blood cells, white blood cells, hormones.

All.

All the stuff you'd get from a. From a big blood test.

All that stuff. Markers of oxidative stress, neurological, cognitive, muscle.

Gloria just mouthed the words more to me. You can talk, too, Gloria, if you want to. I know we're going to be turning the mic over to you shortly, but, I mean, you can talk.

I'll share this with you.

Let me look at this one.

This is. This is kind of what we call the basic stuff that. That we use to screen for inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Oh, wow. So you're doing, like, grip strength, one rep maxes. So you're not just testing biomarkers. You're doing a lot of physical capacity, muscle function, neurological, cognitive, everything we can do. Wow. Muscle biopsies.

Muscle biopsies are optional. Okay, those. Those can be a little Good, because.

I had those things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're. They're that's sort of like, you know, for the, for the brave, if they want to, you know, for the sake of science. Undergo a little pain.

Yeah. Liver oxidative stress, immune system inflammation, metabolic endocrine. Okay, so, so you're testing all this along with physical function testing. And are you testing all this before someone comes in for their young blood transfer?

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Gotta do it.

Okay, so. So on these three pieces of paper, this is everything.

No.

Oh, geez.

Because here's.

There's more.

I don't know, five more, eight more.

Let me see what else we got here.

So here.

And you're doing post tests of all this stuff too?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. So we're using time of flight mass cytometry, which is kind of the number one tool for immunological markers, although people use it for different reasons. Like we, we actually talked to the, the folks at Stanford who, they've got probably more Cytof machines than anybody in the country.

Cytoff, time of flight mass cytometry. That's what Cytoff is.

Yeah. But their markers are targeted for cancer diagnostics. And we're kind of working the opposite end of the problem. We're not, we're not trying to cure cancer. We're trying to prevent cancer from ever happening in the first place. And so we're looking for, and we believe that the root cause of most, if not all age associated disorders is immunosenescence or the decline of the immune system. And so that is, we die of immunosenescence. I mean the immune system collapses and everything caves in. Right. So that's our, let's say that's Ionko's thesis in a nutshell.

What kind of data can you see about a cell from this Cytof test? Just looking at it.

We can get down to the cellular level. It's called single cell prote.

It's, it's, it's talking about like mitochondria.

Well, the, the markers are in the, the. Let me just grab one here. Grab the paper for me.

Oh, wait, I see the Cytoff. Okay.

Yeah. There's 72 bike markers in Cytoff. This like I said this would be.

Okay, so These are like two day conversations, like CD4, CD8.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. We've got a stem cell progenitor panel because we're, we hypothesize that we may activate this treatment. May activate sort of dormant. Yeah. Dormant stem cells.

Mass spectrometry for amyloid and Alzheimer's, digital LISA for antibodies and cytokines. Okay, so you're measuring telomeres as well?

No, we're not measuring telomeres.

Okay, you're freezing samples for possible telomere testing in the future.

Yeah, yeah. The problem with telomeres, just in a nutshell, is that telomere testing is testing whole blood. And when you measure whole blood, you're getting multiple cell population subsets. So you might get T cells, B cells, NK cells, and each one of those cell subsets has different telomere lengths. And so I could draw your blood in the morning and do a telomere test, and I could draw your blood in the afternoon. And based on the blood draw, you might have aged five years or you might have gotten five years younger. There's a lot of hype around telomere testing, and it sounds exciting because it's one of these aging clocks, but it is not a test that we consider valid at this time. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Bill. Bill Andrews said some of the same things when I interviewed him. He said, you know, if you wanted a decent test, companies like Repeat Diagnostics or Life Length could. They seem to be a little bit more accurate than some of these others. But it seems still seems like kind of the wild, wild west when it comes to telomere testing.

So I'm not going to name names, but we've spent time with the largest telomere testing company in the world, and we actually told them that we would spin down the cell population subsets, load them in the well plates, ship them the well plates, and they could test just T cells, for example, and basically they don't want to do it. And this is good. This will go back to my early example of why a nonprofit, because they've got a committed business model that is all around selling these tests. If we come up with a new way of testing that requires them to retool their entire process and disclose why it's a better process, it might affect their revenue stream.

Yeah. But it might affect their process, but it makes sense. So just so people understand, and you alluded to this, you're looking at telomere lengths on these peripheral blood mononuclear cell populations from whole blood. And this means that when you get a telomere test on a Friday and then perhaps repeat that test the following Friday, you could get what you could be 47 biological age on the first Friday and 33 on the second Friday because you're looking at such a vast full blood subtypes. A random draw.

It's a random draw.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. So instead what you guys are doing is you're freezing the samples so that in the future, when more accurate telomere testing becomes available, you'd be able to analyze.

Right. And we could take, we could take those frozen samples, we could, we could spin them down to get the cell population subsets and we could test just T cell, for example.

Right.

And even that, you know, you could.

Say, here's how old your T cells are, here's how old your white blood cells are, whatever.

Right. And even that we don't know. I mean, the, the National Institute of Aging, who we know pretty well, certain investigators there, they've been studying telomeres for 10 years and they're very skeptical.

Yeah, yeah. Now would that fall into the category, and I want to ask about a few of these other biomarkers you're testing. Would that fall into the category of what you call an aging clock, something like a telomere test?

Yeah.

Okay, so a few others of these you're testing DNA methylation, which would just be a clock of genetic aging.

Yeah. Okay, but the key there is we're actually not interested in the clock. Okay. I mean, the last time I checked, our muscles, cells, tissues and organs didn't know anything about the Roman calendar. What they know about is a change in state. So we experienced in our little iron man or obstacle course this morning, change in state. Right. We pushed our muscles, we stretch things, we push things, then we got into the, we tore things, we tore things, scratch things, then we got into the cold plunge. So our bodies, our cells, our tissues, our muscles are all experiencing changes in state and they're responding to those changes in the state. We think positively, of course, that's why we're doing it and rebuilding and repairing and calling on the natural function of the body to do that. So we're interested in, is how do things change? They change. Is it better, is it worse? You know, but you know, trying to derive some artificial man made concept of an age, it's kind of irrelevant. I mean, would you rather be 30 and you could hardly get out of bed or would you rather be 120 and you're doing a thousand push ups?

Right. So what you're saying is if I were going to measure DNA methylation, you wouldn't want to say, oh, you have the DNA profile of a 30 year old or 45. You'd instead want to say, well, you, Ben, here's how your methylation patterns are.

Changing, how they're changing. And importantly, we're getting like 500 what we call CPG subsites or loci that are the data underneath the clock, all the different methylation markers, and we're going to correlate it to all the other data that we're collecting. Because what we're interested in is which markers are changing. Now, we know from the NIA, the NIA believes, National Institute of Aging, that about 20% of the DNA methylation markers matter and the rest are kind of gratuitous. And, and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna see which ones are moving and sort of compare those with the cytop, the 72 cytop markers and the digital lysis stuff and everything else. Because again, we're trying to build this picture of the whole elephant.

Yeah, but this is one of the. I mean, I've been through the whole health nucleus and some of these whole genome sequencings and full body MRIs, but I haven't seen a list of data this complete. Cause you've also got blood viscosity based on blood thickening with age. You've got genetic biomarkers.

I got to show you something here, Ben.

Okay.

Gloria. Gloria's got it on her computer.

You've got digital biomarkers. So you're using all these like self quantification tools to see what's going on. Well, you know what, I want to ask you about those in a second. But what do you want to show me regarding blood viscosity here?

Okay. Yeah, hold on a second, let me. I want to blow that up. No, no, I'm gonna.

That's a pretty pink computer you got over there. Okay, thank you. It's rose tone, jewel encrusted.

Okay.

Gold plated.

So I'm going to show you something that is not often seen. Okay. This is a picture of the output plasma of our first subject.

By the way, can you send me this photo if people want to see this in the show notes?

Let me, let me, let me, let me check with our investigators.

But just before you keep going. By the way, folks, for those of you listening in, show notes are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Youngblood so if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com youngblood anything Mark can share with me, I'll post over there. All right, so what are we looking at here?

You're looking at thick, goopy, gross output.

That looks like a bag of oatmeal.

Yeah, exactly. That's exactly how I quoted it. Also breakfast this morning, it was thick oatmeal. It Was one of the few, I mean, I have seen after 25 years of plasmapheresis, a lot of plasma.

So this is plasma that came out of one. This is first of a young donor. This would have been like a sick person that came in.

Oh, this is our first subject.

This was our first subject in his 70s. In the 70s that we. He was in his 70s. But this was his very first treatment. But I had never quite seen it come out as oatmealish as this.

It's like a bag of pus.

Yeah, yeah, go to the. Go to like the, I don't know, two treatments later or something like that.

Anyways, as we were observing this, this is what I had started. I had asked Mark, are we able to photograph these?

Well, no, no, no, Gloria, let's tell the story truthfully here. I just get this, this photo across the email and it turns out that the subject took the photo. The subject is a friend of mine. You mean the patient? The patient. And he decided to take a picture and. Or Gloria insisted that he take the picture and he sent it to her and she sent it to us, to Jacob.

Okay, so what I'm looking at right now is I got this bag of plasma. This is the old plasma that you took out of this 70 year old guy. It looks horrible because I've had PRP procedures done before. Like plasma doesn't usually look like that.

And then you're seeing the impregnate. See, this is like two or three treatments later. Okay. It's starting to look normal. And I think.

So you keep on drawing the plasma out. Putting the young plasma in. Drawing the plasma out. Putting the young plasma in over multiple procedures.

Yeah. So the challenge with plasma exchange is it's kind of like trying to change the oil in your car without draining the oil pan. We don't have an oil pan. We can't drain it. Yeah, and so you're taking plasma out, you're putting plasma in, maintaining constant volume. But after a while, the old and new start to intermix. And so the best you can get is sort of 2/3, is the rough rule of thumb. And then mathematically there's sort of a formula. But over six treatments, you can get rid of 98% of the old stuff. Okay, but the interesting thing here is the mice research people have been debating for 10 years, is it adding the new stuff or is it getting rid of the old stuff? Well, treatment one, we pretty much figured out that getting rid of the old stuff matters.

What now? Now, next to this bag of old Plasma. There's like a hand holding up a bottle.

Oh, no, that's. This is. The old plasma's up here.

Okay. So that's the old plasma, and this is how the plasma. So it's becoming more clear.

More clear.

Now, would that be a change? Does that mean that this person's plasma is decreasing in viscosity? Yes, and that's pretty profound because viscosity is like one of the primary markers of aging in plasma.

It's a huge. Well, it's really. It's blood viscosity. It's whole blood viscosity. This actually began a discussion of whole blood, of viscosity. Well, actually, go to the second picture real quick because I got to share one more. The one of the blood clot. So the second subject comes along, happens to be the wife of the first subject or patient. We get a blood clot in the machine.

The machine stops from this second patient.

From the second patient. And the. This is a different type of viscosity issue. It's called low shear viscosity, or the stickiness or the clottiness of the blood. So it turns out that as blood ages, it becomes thicker. And that's. That's. There's data on that. On that.

On the sheet I'm holding.

Okay, but. And that's been tracked for 50 years. But what's new, what we're tracking that's relatively new is what's called low shear viscosity or the stickiness or cloddiness of it. And it turns out to be like.

Risk for a stroke.

Right. So now I know both of these subjects are patients, right? And the. I'm talking to the husband, and he reports having the best sleep of his life after the first plasma exchange treatment. I said, well, if you're not pushing all that sludge, must be easier on the engine. But he said, but my wife didn't feel any different the next day or the next week or whatever. And I said, well, how does he feel about not having a stroke?

Yeah, the machine had the stroke instead. If it stopped up your machine, the machine had the stroke of your machine.

Right. But interestingly enough, in her case as well, in all cases, really, what we're seeing is these odd characteristics of the output plasma that vary from individual to individual. But in all cases, after six treatments, they normalize to that golden color, you know, straw, semi transparent, clear stuff that we normally think of as plasma. Wow. Wow.

Okay, so blood viscosity, that's a big one. These pictures are crazy. I don't know if you guys are legally able for us to post these. But if you are, you'd send them over because these are pretty cool.

I'll figure that.

I'll figure that part out first. Yeah, yeah. See what you can do. Okay. So then you're also measuring digital biomarkers. What are digital biomarkers?

So, you know, Apple Watch, Fitbits, you know, all that stuff we're talking about.

Like heart rate variability.

Heart rate variability? Well, everything. Everything. We'll just. We'll just suck up everything we get.

Sleep cycles, Measuring sleep cycles.

Everything we get.

Wow.

Yeah.

Okay. And then big data of the body. What's that?

Well, so we're collecting such a huge amount of data and. And then we're looking at data that has never. No one's ever put this ensemble of data and different data technologies, measurement technologies together in kind of one place. And so we're. There's the data itself and then there's the data about the data or the correlations, which we would call metadata. The bottom line is, on any one single person, we've just got a huge amount of. Of information. Yeah. So we call it big data of the body. And. And we're going to mine that data over time. Of course, we're going to see certain phenomena that may be obvious. You know, like the one you just saw where the viscosity improves.

You guys are going to have a pretty bomb database because I've never seen all these things tested by one organization before.

Oh, we've got.

It's a lot of stuff. We've got more biomarkers, confidential biomarkers. On top of it, though, am I just your guys, whole system. No, no, it's not on a podcast.

No, no worries, no worries. It's on our website. Okay. But no, we've got. We've got more biomarkers than Stanford, John Hopkins and Harvard combined.

Okay, so. So you're doing these studies now? One thing I'm concerned about, and then I want to get back to. To some of the things that Gloria's seen in, like, real patients, because I find. I find that really intriguing, but kind of the elephant in the room here is the FDA cracked down on this stuff a few months ago, didn't they? Like, like for profit? I guess it was for profit, but young plasma infusions. What was it? Ambrosia that got shut down?

Well, I don't know. I don't think they were specific about anybody in particular, but I don't know.

I saw in the news. Ambrosia?

Yeah. I have no idea. The thing I would say is this, we support their action and we've sort of quietly been. And we don't ourselves really. We're just trying to stick to our knitting and do our thing. But there are some valid medical reasons for the FDA warning. Okay. Infusions are additive. So you're taking someone who's got, let's say, three liters of plasma and you're adding two more over the course of, you know, a few hours. So it can cause, potentially cause circulatory overload. Okay. So there's risk there. What we're doing is a transfusion. We're taking stuff out at the same time we're putting stuff in. So the volume is constant. So you're, you're, you've got about 20% of your blood supply is extracorporeal or out of your body. It's in the machine. But your, your blood volume is constant the entire time. So it's very safe. Okay. And of course, we're a non profit and we're, we're doing research. You know, it's, we're not a for profit entity. So as I said earlier, that, that can affect a lot of factors. And, and yeah, I don't want to comment on what other people are doing.

In fusion versus a transfusion.

Yeah.

And then probably one of the other big things is it's non profit versus for profit. And you guys are conducting clinical research studies.

Exactly.

Are you concerned at all the FDA is going to waltz in and just, just pull the rug out from underneath you?

No, we support them. We support them 100%.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, we're, yeah. In fact, we're going to.

Now, what about all this data you're collecting? Are you guys going to share this? Are you going to publish it? What's the status of these studies at this point?

Well, we're in the very beginning, and what we do is we cryofreeze. Most of the viscosity data you got to get right away because you can't freeze whole blood and then unfreeze it and get valid viscosity measurements. So we ship that off, we get that data right away and we get some of the standard physician exams right away. But the CYTOF and the digital Lysa and some of the exotic stuff, we basically cryofreeze the samples and we're gonna unfreeze them in batches and then test all the samples concurrently. Same day, same machine, same operator, so we can get clinical grade consistency. That's, that's kind of the proper way to do it from a Clinical trial standpoint. Okay. But it, it means that there are, you know, we gotta wait.

Yeah.

For the data.

Okay, so. So when you emailed me a few months ago and I decided to have you guys swing in from. Well, Mark, you're in the Bay Area and Gloria, are you down in the Bay Area? Are you in Seattle?

I am actually in Florida.

Okay, so you're in Florida, but we're. I was close.

She was up here at the time.

Okay, so you were in Seattle at the time. Yeah, that's right when you shot me that email.

And I thought, hey, we could pop over. I thought you were.

Yeah, just pop or just drive the five hours right over. A lot of people think that. A lot of people think Spokane's right next to Seattle. I get that all the time. I'll get emails from people. It's like, hey, I'm in the Seattle airport, I got a layover, can I swing over and say hi? I'm like, sure. It's gonna be a few hours anyways, though. So when you emailed me specifically what you. A term that you dropped on the email was you said, ben, I got to tell you about this thing called a neuro protocol that we're doing. And I found this incredibly interesting because you were talking about potential and I don't know if you can say this, but I can, but you're talking about potential curing of Alzheimer's to a certain extent or some pretty impressive management of Alzheimer's.

And.

When you mentioned this neuroprotocol thing, I'd never heard of neuro protocol before. What is that? So.

It'S an extension of our current protocol. So our current protocol is six treatments over a six week period.

Okay.

The. The neuro protocol that we're adopting. Okay. Because this has been studied for 10 years by Griffels, which is a multi billion dollar plasma therapeutics manufacturer starting in Barcelona, Spain, back in like 2007, 08 time frame. And I've talked to folks there, I know some of their people, and they started studying this 10 years ago and they developed a protocol that they launched about four years ago that is similar to ours in the first part one, the six full treatments over six weeks. But then they had, they added a partial monthly treatment once a month for 12 months. So it's kind of like you're getting your oil changed and then you're topping it off with a quart of oil once a month, every month for 12 months. And Gloria worked on that study. In fact, she was the first team lead on the US version of that study in Florida. And when I originally found Gloria and I was interviewing her, I didn't really see. I was looking at the nursing experience. And then she mentioned something about being on the AMBAR study. Alzheimer's management by albumin replacement. That's what AMBAR stands for. And I said, you run the AMBAR study? She goes, oh, yeah, I started the whole thing. And I'm like, where's that on your resume? She goes, oh, it's down in the management section. I'm like, gloria put that up there in the nursing section because the health implication is so much more important than the management part. And. And I already knew about that study, and I already talked to the one, at least one of the investigators at Griffels, and I had a pretty good idea of its significance. But when I met Gloria, she started sharing actual stories of actual people that she treated, and it just blew my mind.

In this study.

In the study. I mean, and. And. And then I.

With. And. And the study was involving this. The transfusion or not the transfusion? The transfusions, yeah, the trans.

Plasma.

I was thinking not infusion, but transfusion.

Transfusion. Okay. Yeah. Plasma exchange. Transfusion.

Exactly what we've been talking about.

Exactly what we're doing.

Okay.

Yeah. In fact, to be honest, we kind of set up our base protocol to be able to augment it with the extended protocol, because we knew this day would come when we would launch this neuroprotocol. The difference simply is that we believe that there are more indications in addition to Alzheimer's, that can be treated with this, including Parkinson's and possibly als. Now, there's not good data on Parkinson's, als, and the data on the Alzheimer's study hasn't really been published. It's been announced in Barcelona last fall, they announced a 61% success rate in stopping the progression of Alzheimer's at the, I think, the World Congress on Alzheimer's Disease or something. Something like that. I can get you the exact conference. So they announced kind of the headline result, which I called one of the guys at Griffel's. I said, I think you're sandbagging this. He says, what do you mean? I said, well, I happen to have a team of nurses that worked on this actual study, and they were bedside and saw this stuff. And you just claimed that you stopped the progression? He says, yeah. And I said, well, I'm pretty confident that there were people who actually recovered their memories and were at least semi cured. And he says, well, we want to be conservative in our Statements. I said, well, that's fair. I understand that.

Still, like that's pretty huge. I mean, well, I should ask you this. And then I want to hear from Gloria some of these stories. What about Dale Bredesen, that book the End of Alzheimer's, where he has like this whole multimodal approach where they're using light therapy and high dose fish oil and a ketogenic diet, and he's published some case studies where he claims to have reversed to a certain extent, the progression. Are you familiar with any of his work at all, Dale Bredesen?

Yeah, yeah, very familiar with it. And what I would say is this, our approach to clinical studies is that the investigators, our investigators look at only de identified data. They don't actually see subjects. They don't get paid by those subjects. They're not like their patients. Okay. Kind of a separation of church and state, if you will. So we think the right way to do clinical trials is to have top notch investigators who've been studying a subject for a long time that are looking at de identified data and have no research bias. So that's okay. Now we're also going to add diet and exercise nutrition to our, our studies.

But in, but in, in this anbar study, it was pretty much just the transfusions. They weren't doing a lot of diet modifications, exercise, any of the treatments.

That's right.

Okay.

Yeah. Wow.

I'd be interested in how people would respond if they just changed everything and did the transfusion on top of that.

Well, if you think about it, there's an oddity here that some of those patients could have been eating junk food and Twinkies every day. And other, those patients could have been on a plant based diet and they actually didn't track that data. So we don't know if you know, what effects vis a vis transfusion, diet and exercise may or may not have had. From our standpoint, we'd like to get in our neuro protocol. We're going to put everybody on a common tracking platform and a common diet and exercise protocol so we can minimize variability in clinical outcome. We want to, we want to see if everybody's kind of on the good path, you know, health wise or headed there.

Are you going to choose a diet that's already been kind of studied for its effects on Alzheimer's? Like a, like a ketogenic protocol or something like that?

Something in that, in that genre. Right. And, and, but, but even if people follow the wagon and don't follow it, we're going to track it right you know, I mean, we're gonna, we're at least gonna get capture the information about, you know, how different people that maybe on different diets respond. Yeah. Or different exercise regimens respond so that we can, you know, compare it and we'll probably have a separate arm of the study which is just diet and exercise.

Yeah. So I think that's smart.

What, what's the, what's the role of.

A nurse like Gloria here in this whole plasma exchange procedure?

So the thing about plasma exchange is that it's largely a nurse's procedure. Right. I mean, their bedside with the patient for like two hours at a shot or an hour and a half, they're seeing everything. And if things go wrong, you know, you want a nurse that has experience. So all of our nurses with males and females, but they've all got decades of experience, they're either nurse practitioners or nurse practitioner equivalents. And some of them even teach, they teach plasma exchange, they teach apheresis. Right. So from our standpoint, having experience is a huge, huge factor that we sort of take no chances and we want to have the best. The second thing that's kind of interesting is, and I mentioned when I, when I first started talking to Gloria and learning about these things, I said to her, I asked her, I said, well, is anything you're telling me, has it ever been. Did you write this down in your a freesis procedure log? Did you capture this? Did it go into the study records? She said, no, they don't care what we think, you know, And I'm like, oh my God. Oh my God. I said, gloria, go down to the Apple Store, get yourself an iPad, pick anything you want. And we're going to put your apheresis procedure record on the iPad.

That's why you have such a pimped out computer. I know why you built a cool looking one.

And I said, anything you observe, we want to know about. And then here's a special box because the local physician in charge, they're going to have observations. We want to capture their observations as well. But they're busy, so do it for them. Just give them something to sign, something to talk into, something to type, and make it easy so we can capture whatever phenomena is occurring. And oh, by the way, feel free to actually talk to the patients, interact with them, because the patients will tell you stuff.

Yeah.

Right. Now, the things that she's going to share, which I'd like to have her start explaining a little bit here we're more purely observational. Is that the way you'd Say it, Gloria. I mean, you weren't sort of encouraged or allowed to interact with some of these patients. You were just sort of doing the procedure. You were in the room.

Right, right. We basically just documented and did the procedure. All they were interested in was just. Basically just the actual procedure notes. I mean, of course, we had to follow certain protoc, you know, certain blood pressures at certain times, but they were not truly interested in what we had observed. Just to head back just a little bit, what Mark was saying about our team, our team with YBI, let's just say just with our first six nurses have over 230 years experience in nursing. I'm proud to say I've been a nurse for 47 years, and I have been doing apheresis for over 25 of those years.

I'm proud to say I'm proud of Gloria and the team that she's built.

And it was real inspiration when I found out that Mark is interested in following up with what I had observed with the Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is something very close to my heart because my grandfather and my favorite uncle both had Alzheimer's. And I watched it destroy my mother and part of our family dynamics because, as you know, with Alzheimer's, the patient can be very happy, very, you know, going on with life, but they don't remember anything. And that seems to destroy the family more than it does the actual patient. Now following through, too, with our Parkinson's and possibly with als those diseases, unfortunately, do cause more dynamic with the actual patient. And to be able to see and observe what I have even observed already with just two of our Parkinson's patients, how they have improved with the saferesis is just overwhelming to me. I mean, I feel like I have been put. God has put me in a wonderful position where I'm at right now. I'm glad it's a nonprofit. I came out of retirement for this. I will.

Well, she's about to retire. And I said, no, you're not.

I truly feel that I have observed apheresis in a lot of different studies. I mean, we've done studies for rheumatoid arthritis. We've done studies for lupus. We've done studies for our myosinogravis patients. I mean, it's phenomenal. You will see them on ventilators, in feeding tubes, non breathing on their own. And after so many apheresis treatments come back, they're out of the ICU and they are actually eating on their own, talking just. It's phenomenal. So I have seen how Phoresis can do a lot with a lot of the patients.

And just so people know, for. When you say pheresis, it's the same as transfusion. We can use those terms synonymously.

You can?

Okay.

Yes, yes. It's just. It's a plasma exchange. It's probably the easiest way to say it. It's exchange, not just an infusion of plasma. It's a removal and then replacement.

Right.

Okay. But what I saw with the Alzheimer's patients, I wish we would have been able to document quite a bit. Of course, when we were dealing with the Griffel study, there was a certain part of the protocol that they called a sham. Okay. That's like your placebo, and it was a true sham. I won't even get into any descriptions of how we did that procedure, but it was a real sham. But I can remember going to the Cleveland Clinic when we were first asked to join this at the neuroscience center in Vegas, and a couple of the physicians had come up to me and they said, well, after we've observed this, are you able to put on such a poker face? Are you a good actor? I'm like, well, I'm a professional. But of course, with the sham procedure, they wanted to know the psychological effects. These patients actually felt that they were receiving. Receiving a true procedure. So there was.

They rigged up the machine with fake cow's blood and stuck needles in people's arms so they thought. They perceived that they might be getting the real treatment.

Yes.

Okay. So. So the machine is there, and it looks like it's working. It looks like I'm taking blood out and stuff is happening, but in reality, nothing's happening.

Wow.

So it was a shame.

Yeah, it's. It's a placebo. It's also. Sham is actually a technical.

Technical term.

And it's sham, like where they did the knee surgeries, and they showed that people who thought they had a knee surgery had just as much relief from knee pain, but they literally went in and did, like, a fake incision and didn't do the ACL replacement. Or. I forget if it was a meniscus repair or what it was. But. But you. So. So you had one arm with this sham and then one arm that was getting the real for.

Well, we had. Yes, we did. Actually, there was three different arms, but irregardless with certain protocols that they were following. But the patients that actually. Of course, that did receive the sham treatments, it was. Yes, I did have to put on a poker face because in the type of study that as a Nurse, you want the best for all of them. I mean that is one of the things that first questions that I had asked Mr. Yeardal here. Are we going to be having that type of procedures? No, everyone receives the best. We do have a different neuro protocol, but every patient receives.

Well, yeah, and what we're doing, and credit to Mitch and Yonko for thinking about this is we're using different.

You mentioned Yonko are your scientists.

Yeah, my scientist, Dr. Harmon and Dr. Nikolic. We're, we're using comparative control arms. So we will have different protocols that we will compare and contrast in all cases in the hope that this is the best. In fact, in our neuro protocol, we think we've made some improvements over the Griffels protocol. Just for example, the diet and exercise. Just tracking that alone is an improvement, for example. So. Yeah, but we don't think that the mind is going to fool the cytokines or the cells in this case. But we do think that we can compare, legitimately compare different protocols and we can have what we call internal controls in our study in a given arm of a protocol to compare different replacement fluids.

It's a very ethical way to go about things. I mean, if somebody is, is getting into one of these studies or doing these protocols, the last thing you'd want is someone with Alzheimer's or Parkinson's who's, who's looking for every last shred of hope to be giving cow's blood. So, so you're doing a good.

They're not giving cow's blood, but the cow's blood is running through the machine. Right. So they think they're getting, they're getting a good protocol. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay. All right, that makes sense. So, so what kind of stuff were you noticing, Gloria? What kind of things are you finding?

Okay, well, there was quite a few patients. I mean, I'm just going to go touch on a light base. There was approximately over 400 subjects that they had over a four year span with the Alzheimer's study. We had probably about 180. There was only three of us on my team and so I actually overseeing observed all of those 180some patients. There were a couple that I have to say I definitely had to put on a very acting phase. There was a young chemical engineer. He was actually younger than I was, so he was in his early 60s. Brilliant man, brilliant man. His wife was telling me how he could recite poetry. I mean this gentleman would sit here even at the very beginning. Now you've got to understand, just to Qualify for the AMBAR study, the patients already had to have what they call moderate Alzheimer's.

Oh, this is an important thing. Yeah.

Yes. So they already had, you know, definitely Alzheimer's diagnosis. And we were able to tell this because we could actually tell how much of the amyloid beta was in. They had to go through lumbar punctures, and we could tell exactly how much of the amyloid beta was there. So this gentleman, even with moderate Alzheimer's, he was quoting, I mean, Shakespeare. I mean, he would sit there for the two hours and just rattle off from his brain and memory all of this poetry. And unfortunately, though, he really deteriorated.

Well, hold on. Because he was on the sham.

He was a sham. I cried almost for days when I found out where he had fell in. Because we do meet the patients prior to treatments, we are able to at least, you know, communicate with them for a few minutes. And then finding out that that was the number he drew, I mean, it was just so disheartening. It's disheartening with anyone.

And this was in the Anbar study.

But this was in the AMBAR study. And this gentleman, though, being so brilliant and me knowing after I've observed my uncle and my grandfather myself, and I know, just as a nurse what happens with Alzheimer's, where he was going to go. Of course, all of these patients had to already be on Aricept, which is like the only medication they've had out in the last 10 years. Yeah, it does kind of slow the regression maybe for a year, but it doesn't really do anything for them.

So, sorry, that's just another little difference. In our study, we can accept people who, because we're introducing what we think are potentially predictive biomarkers for Alzheimer's. And so what we would like to do is test those biomarkers and incorporate them into the study design, such that we can predictably detect higher levels of amyloid beta, for example, for Alzheimer's. And even if they're not showing evidence of a clinical diagnosis, we might be able to detect the potential for Alzheimer's and also prove that we were able to prevent it. We don't know if we will or not, but we have a strong working hypothesis that we can. So in this case, they all had to. In other words, we can take people who aren't on these drugs that really have 5 or 10% efficacy at best anyway, and people who may be apparently healthy, but detect what we call the underlying pathology, which may be deteriorating at a rate faster than apparent health, and then prevent the onset of these kinds of diseases, that's our ultimate goal, is detect and prevent. Tell them about some of the good stories, Gloria.

Well, there was a lot of good stories, A lot of them that received the actual, what I call the true treatment, the best treatment. I had a gentleman. He was an orchard farmer. Okay. He was in his 80s. His wife stated that he had become very frustrated, of course, very depressed once the diagnosis for Alzheimer's, because he was definitely getting very forgetful. Wasn't able to go out and work in the orchard much anymore. He was so confused. I mean, the gentleman would bring in fruits. He didn't know the difference between a mango, a lime, a lemon. I mean, he couldn't even if I would ask him, oh, the mangoes looked really good today. He'd look at them like, okay, which one's a mango? He wasn't even sure, I will tell you that after a year and observing him on a basis, that he kept coming in. He had improved so much. I mean, he would bring the fruit in, and he was telling me, look at my mangoes today. Look at my limes today. I have brought you guys some of the best lemons. He was telling me ways to fertilize if I was ever going to do my own orchard, how to cultivate.

So a guy like that, how many plasma exchanges is he getting?

I can tell them what the Ambar protocol was.

Well, so, yeah, we already sort of covered that with its six plus 12.

This was, I'd say, eight months into.

Our treatment, but it varied by individual.

So over the course of eight months, how many transfusions are we talking?

Six plus eight? Eighteen. Okay, yeah, but. But I think the key point is two key points. One is that it, 61% success rate means that 39%, you know, didn't receive a benefit. Right, but the other point is, is that different patients have different. They recover at different places and times. So there's not like a known known here.

Yeah. And there wasn't another particular one. Young lady. She was definitely another one younger than me. She had just turned 60. Daughter had said, mom was always the life of the party. She loved to dance. Okay. She was to the point this was a person that was. Besides being, of course, very forgetful, couldn't remember even her own daughter's name. Rarely smiled, didn't even laugh. Didn't really communicate much. Maybe just a couple word sentences. When I had first done the treatments with her, we were only into, like, our second month. Okay. She comes in and the daughter goes, I don't Know what you're giving my mom. But I want it. She wants to go to dances. She wants me take her to Spanish dances every Friday night. She is out doing things. By the time we were done with about three more months treatment, I will tell you, this young lady got her groove back. She was flirting like crazy with, with the physician. I mean it was just so wonderful to see. And another great observation with her, of course, besides the memory, she was looking much younger. I mean she looked like she was not even in her 50s. Well, start of that, I have to.

Say a couple like skin wrinkles.

Skin. Her hands, her skin. I mean she looked so much younger. And with that observation, a couple of us nurses were trying to figure out how we could get this apheresis because I wanted to look 10 years younger. It was just amazing to me just to be able to observe what was happening with her.

First question, every nurse in our study asks, can I get in the study?

Actually that's something I wanted to ask you. Like are you right now having just, let's say like healthy people who are already healthy come in and do this as just like an anti aging preservation type of protocol?

Well, let me just qualify what you said with apparent health, right? So we think there's a curve of apparent health over time that may look pretty good and then people kind of fall off the cliff and suddenly they've got three diseases and that there is an underlying pathology that could be declining. That is. Hasn't been, we haven't. Medicine hasn't been able to measure it predictably yet. And so part of what we're doing is trying to develop these predictive functional biomarkers to get headlights on potential issues. So if we use the word apparently healthy, the answer is yes. Okay. But what we may discover in our study is you apparently look healthy or seem healthy, but in reality, you know, you've got some problems with the immune system.

Or have you had anybody like, let's say like, you know, whatever, like some 20 some year old person who's a, who's a fit athlete or something like that come in and just do a transfusion?

No, no, no. The low end of our study right now is age 30 and we started out with 50. And then I was actually meeting with the folks at the Stanford Human Immune Monitoring center and just sort of bantering about what we're doing and investigating the possibility of using their CYTOF machines, which we ended up using another source at University of Arizona, but they had asked about the lower age limit and I said it was 50. And they said, well, you, you think about lowering that. And I said, why? They said, because it all starts much earlier. It all starts in people's 30s and 40s. And if you've got this level of sophistication of measurement, you want to capture that, that demographic. And I just sort of like hit myself in my head. I'm like, why didn't I think of that? You know, of course, you know, you know, you don't just suddenly get Alzheimer's. You don't suddenly have a, you know, a depressed immune system. You don't suddenly get a lot of stuff. It sort of bioaccumulates over time. And so we just progressively lowered our age down to age 30 as a kind of a reasonable starting point. And there are people in their 30s who have manifestations of age associated disorders or they seem to prematurely age. And it's not really. It may not be age. It may be these underlying.

Identify a lot of this with more of these comprehensive of biomarker evaluations we.

Were talking about earlier, we hope to discover. Yeah. The kind of the 80, 20 rule on these predictive measurements. Right. Right now we're just casting the net for anything and everything we can, we can possibly test.

Yeah. Gloria, were there any other interesting, interesting patients?

Oh, there was. There was a lot. But I'll just describe just a couple more. There was another gentleman, of course, one of the main things with him, his wife had said that he had gotten quite angry lately and his course being depressed. Well, he was so forgetful, he kind of forgotten how to drive. And that was one of the things he used to always like. So she had taken the keys away from him. He was not permitted to drive anymore to his treatments. Yeah, very wise decision. And when he spoke, he would basically just use maybe two word sentences. I mean, he really was not very communicative of all. And his favorite answer was always, ask my wife. So if he couldn't remember something, he didn't want people, of course, to know that I can't remember. He would just say, ask my wife. I mean, I'd ask him simple things like, what are your allergies? How did you sleep last night? I can remember simple things like what is your favorite food? Ask my wife.

In his defense, I use that phrase myself quite a bit. Got anything going on Friday night? Ask my wife. What are the kids up to? Ask my wife. What's for dinner? Ask my wife.

And relatively so to a point saying that, but I mean, I got that response for months from him. And then as time kind of Went on with him. He was dorothily talking a little bit more. Well, he came in one day and he's carrying the car keys and he's waving in front of me and he goes, my wife let me drive today. He was so excited because he got to drive to the treatment. It was just so great to see that from him. And then toward the very end, I mean, he was telling me detailed stories about his grandchildren. He remembered their names. He was describing all these wonderful things about his children.

In other words, he regained his memory.

His memory was coming back.

And this is where I sort of.

It's not like you stopped progression, memory loss. He was actually getting these memories back. Yeah.

Wow. He was regaining some of them. You know, either that or I can't say for sure. But obviously, if he could have remembered, I mean, when you ask how many grandchildren you have, and he's like, I don't know, ask my wife. You would think that he might have forgotten some of those memories. But things like that, as they come back, you wouldn't forget them. So in my opinion and what I have observed, I felt that he was regaining his memory back.

Wow.

There was another incident. This one was quite funny to me. This gentleman came in and he would follow one of my other patients who always loved to watch the Spanish soap operas. I unfortunately do not speak fluent Spanish. Maybe one or two words, but if that's what she wishes to do, of course, you know, it passes the time. I will say, some of the treatments, especially when we got into the monthly ones, because of the amount of IVIG they received, they were in my chair for three and a half to four hours. So, you know, something to watch TV would be great to observe. Well, this gentleman came in and I would always hand him a remote or say, would you be interested in the tv? And he'd turn it on because he could notice the red button. But he never changed the channel. Well, I figured he liked Spanish soap operas. Never pay any attention to it. Well, as the months progressed, one day he turned it on. He goes, can I change the channel? I went, you're welcome to. And he goes, well, I thought you liked to watch these. And I was like, no. And he's like, I hate soap operas. And he turned on some sports channel, and I. Obviously he didn't understand the language himself, but, you know, I guess some of the knowledge came back on how to use the remote. He never asked me, can you change the channel?

It baffles me that this is not yet common knowledge that, that people don't know about this as something that's happening behind the scenes in these studies.

Well, there's a whole publishing cycle, protocol, et cetera. Right. And to be fair, the Griffels people, I mean, it's a well designed study. They do operate with de identified data and they sort of stratify things. And I have to give them a lot of credit for one of the most important studies in the last two decades. Probably I think it will eventually prove out to be the case. But. Yeah, so frankly, when they started this research back in the 2000s, podcasts didn't exist. I mean, you know, and so they're trying to do the right thing and sort of publish things according to conventional procedures, which we have to admire and applaud. But nonetheless, there is an opportunity here to accelerate via, you know, more clinical study, these treatments and to improve on their work. And that's what we're trying to do.

Now. How are you funding this? I mean, you guys are a nonprofit. I mean, how are you, how are you getting the money for all these crazy extensive protocols and the testing and.

The treatments, you know, any way we can is the answer. I mean, I sort of funded a lot of it to start. We get donations. We get people writing us checks, you know, in the mail and PayPal donations. From 25 bucks on up, we get.

And they're writing these checks to the Young Blood Institute.

Yeah, yeah, we get big checks, we get gifts. I mean, I would say we've got a range from, you know, 25 bucks to, you know, in the close to a million bucks, you know, contributions of various sorts. So there, there are many options. There's lots of, you know, family foundations, family offices out there. There are lots of people interested in these topics that want to sort of support the research. And there's, there's definitely an overhead. I mean, you know, we're not doing off label medicine. I mean, these biomarkers alone cost a fortune. I mean, you know, just that part, you know, and then we're, I mean, we're flying machines and shipping equipment.

That's what I wanted to ask you. So when you travel to the Bay Area to get this done, because I know you guys are based out of the Bay Area. I mean, can you get a transfusion like this done anywhere?

Pretty much. Because what happened one of the. We thought in the beginning we're gonna fly everybody to Florida, believe it or not, that that was like, you know, and, and we sort of thought Florida be the case because there's. It, there's a lot of people over the age of 50. And we thought, well, might as well be in Florida because we'll have access to this population down there with all the.

All the pain clinics and the people who drive with their right blinker on.

For three miles, I couldn't say. But I met this guy in Aspen. I was skiing, and we were just on the bus, chit chatting. We got off the bus and the shuttle bus. We were at the same timeshare. He said, well, what do you do? And I kind of explained this. This is before we really started. And he says, well, guess what I do. I said, I have no idea. He says, I develop senior living retirement communities, and I've got the Ritz Carlton retirement communities, and I've got a chief medical officer and, you know, I'm very interested in what you're doing. And so he got that, that doctor, I'll call him, Dr. Joe on the phone. And I sent him our protocol, and we haven't really started the trials yet. And I'm talking to Dr. Joe and we're about 15 minutes into it, and he just sort of stops. He says, mark, you had me at hello. I get this. How do I get involved? Well, I went out and paid Dr. Joe a visit in Raleigh, North Carolina, on the way to see my sister who was in Charlotte. And I just stopped into his office, and he had this beautiful office with, you know, lots of sophisticated, you know, stuff. And. And it just sort of hit me at the moment. I said, well, what if we flew the nurses and the equipment to you? He said, well, that'd be fantastic. And I don't know why it just popped out of my head, but it did because I kept on thinking what a pain in the neck it would be to fly everybody to Florida. And so we went and built a model that allows us to deploy nurses and equipment anywhere in the country by partnering and collaborating with, with the local MD who already has a clinic and a facility. So we just wheel this stuff in. We've got warehouses across the country where we've got kits and equipment. We can deploy it in two days. We put a nurse on a plane or nurse says, and so basically we come to the local clinic and we can scale it up.

So do you have a directory like on your website youngbloodinstitute.org yeah.

Right.

So do you have a directory there where people could be able to communicate with you? You know, let's say somebody has a parent or a grandparent or they themselves and they're interested in looking into this kind of transfusion protocol. Can they just like go find a city or a clinic near them?

Well, they can just call us or email us and they can tell us who is their doctor because that's, that's kind of what ended up happening. We were getting these phone calls and finally I said, you know, I'd just seen Dr. Joe. And so another friend of mine who wanted to get this treatment in San Diego said we were again, he was one of those that we were going to have to fly to Florida. And then after I visited Dr. Joe, I said, well, who's your local doctor? He said, well, it's doctor.

So.

And so I said, we're working on a model where we can come to your doctor. And he's like, well, that'd be fantastic. And so, in fact, Tom Ngogla, who was on.

Yeah, the guy from the NAD injection clinic in San Diego.

Yeah, so he became one of the clinic sites in San Diego. So we've got clinic sites in Southern California, Northern California, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, and we can working on Colorado and basically in Sun Valley. We've got one in Sun Valley now, so. And we're working on kind of the Portland, Seattle area as well, because we've had some. That's what we're up here doing this week. So the beauty is we can engage. And we have a model where the local MD in clinic becomes what we call a sub principal investigator. So our principal investigators are looking at de identified data. They're kind of the, you know, the man behind the green curtain, if you will. But the principal investigator and the nurse, there's a lot of wisdom that those people have. And what we can do is we can. They can make observations, we can collect their wisdom, and then it becomes subject, you know, VOOY x123 and so we're able to incorporate their observations without research bias. Yeah, because they're not actually writing a book about the procedure that they just did. Right. They're a part of a team of investigators that, you know, is really just trying to help patients. They're trying to help their patient, for sure. Okay. So they have that basically kind of.

Crowdsourcing a lot of these people that are doing the treatments anyways, you're collecting data from that. And then you also have these clinical research trials that you're conducting as well with a lot of these more comprehensive biomarkers we were discussing earlier.

We get both. Yeah, so. So really the nurse and the local doctor become human biomarkers. Yeah. Right. Because they may like the things Gloria has just shared with you. That's data that's information. It's, it's meaningful. And even if it is not necessarily repetitive or, or it's hard to codify, it informs potential tests. For example, we've got some skin fibroblasts and some. We're looking for more dermatology tests. But you know, and Gloria's not the only one in the apheresis world who's told me this, by the way. I've heard this from many multiple sources that there's an effect on skin. Well, skin is the largest organ in the body. It's the most proximate to the bloodstream. It responds to inflammatory conditions, you know, and antibodies and such. So you would think that a systemic treatment, therapy that's maybe benefiting one part of the body might also benefit other parts of the body at the same time. So that again, that's why we're trying to cast this net. So these observations could be sort of clinical data or they could inform augmentations or improvements in the study design. Right. As did. Well, if Gloria and the particular patient she was treating hadn't observed that oatmeal bag of plasma and sent us a picture, we wouldn't have thought to go add viscosity to our testing. But we get this picture, I share it with Mitch and Yonko, and we're all just blown away. And first question is, how do we test viscosity? Oh, well, we've been testing it 50 years and we started figuring out what's the best viscosity test we can get.

Yeah, yeah, it's a good model.

We just added it right in. Well, a few things.

First of all, I don't think I'm gonna have oatmeal this week. Lost my appetite.

Oatmeal's a good for you after looking.

At that bag of oatmeal. Second, if people are listening, if you're listening in right now, youngbloodinstitute.org is Mark's website. But then also if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com YoungBlood I'll link to everything that kind of came up during this show today, including the Youngblood Institute website. Anything Mark and Gloria, if you like sending over that they can send over if they have any cool ass photos or interesting things that I was able to see here that you weren't able to see. If they forward that along, I'll put those in the show notes for you guys as well. And if you're interested in getting involved with the institute, whether treatment, whether donations, whatever the case may be, I think it's pretty damn cool what you guys are doing, Mark and Gloria. And so again, go to Ben Green if you're interested in any of that. And I also want to. Want to thank you guys for making the trek out here to share all this stuff with me, with the audience. I know this is one of the first podcasts where this stuff is kind of being discussed publicly. So I feel honored to be able to release this and hopefully do the world a pretty great favor by showing them some of these things that I don't think enough people are talking about. And then finally, Mark, do you want to go out for round two of the obstacle course after this?

I'm there, yeah. But what I have to do is I would like to publicly thank my wife because it is Mother's Day, for.

Letting you come to Mark, for letting me come here.

I have the most beautiful, gracious, loving wife anybody could ever hope for. Thank you, Mark's wife, Jocelyn. And so I'm. I'm grateful to her. You know, you did something, Ben, earlier last night. You said a little prayer and said, think of someone to be grateful or something to be grateful for. And my wife was the first thing I thought about. I love it.

Well, I'm grateful for you guys.

Thanks for coming.

Thanks for having us.

Awesome.

Thanks, Ben.

Well, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield, along with Gloria and Mark from the Youngblood Institute, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps.