Are Expanded Cells Better? | Dr. Joy Kong, Stem Cell Specialist

Foreign. This is Dr. Joy Kong. Today I would like to review one of the videos I was sent by one of my patients. The video was put out by this clinic in Mexico called Dream Body Clinic. And it was a gentleman named Josh that was giving his input on why cultured stem cells are better than native cells. So this is an interesting topic because that's the rhetoric from clinics overseas, and there's a lot of confusion around the subject. Should I go overseas to get cells of huge amount, or should I stay in the US and get cells that have not been manipulated? A lot of people, first of all, don't know that you can receive these cells in the US Legally. And it's absolutely legal. It's considered tissue transplant. It's a very popular treatment. I've treated many, many people with great success. So what's better? Because the bottom line is I want patients to get the best. So whatever that works best is what we should be giving people. So Josh from this clinic. So I just want to show you just, you know, this is the video and the cultured cells. What he said was, first of all, it's interesting that he named the culture medium as the Garden of Eden. So I thought that was very romanticized idea of a culture medium. It's really an artificial environment with ingredients of nutrients we put in. We're trying to guess what, what would replicate the body. So you can never produce an environment as perfect as the body where the cells belong. So to call a Garden of Eden is quite idealized and unrealistic. The problem is that these environments are not ideal. They're not the Garden of Eden. It's actually stressful for the cells to be in a culture medium because they are not familiar what's with what's going on there. So, yes, they were taken out of the tissue that he said, oh, cells are traumatized. Well, you put in an environment that they don't recognize with edges of the dishes, and they're trying to figure out how to survive. So in the process of adapting to this new environment, they're actually trying to gain function so they can adapt. And. And if you're trying to gain function as a cell, you produce surface markers and proteins and secrete different signals. So they end up expressing different genetic manifestations. So they may have proteins that usually are not secreted in the human body, and then they end up secreting their genetic directions are also going to be modified. And, and often the cells will secrete inflammatory type of signals. So these cells putting back in the human body often have an inflammatory Effect So they are stressed, so they differentiate. If they differentiate, the tendency is that they will express surface markers that's identical to the donor. And that means if you're the recipient of an umbilical cord derived stem cells and the cells start to express surface markers of the donor, the donor probably is not a perfect match to you. Actually, it's going to be very hard for two humans to have a perfect identical match. Even if they match perfectly for bone marrow transplant. There's no two humans that are identical. So there's a potential for rejection, which is what we've seen in these overseas clinics that people are getting these cytokine storm response. They're normalizing it as if that you're supposed to get cytokine storm. And we don't get those using native stem cells because the cells are not going to respond to these new surface markers. When the baby's born, the cells in the umbilical cord is very primitive. They're in between embryonic stem cells and, and the baby's stem cells. So they are really young and they lack those surface markers that will cause any kind of confusion for the recipient. But if you start to grow them in culture, then they can start to express who they are because they're stressed. So it's not correct when he said that this is a perfect environment. The cells are not stressed, they're well fed, they're all happy. That's just not the case. If you look at studies, it has shown that genetic changes are occurring and degradation is occurring. He did mention that the more you replicate the cells, then the more degraded the cells are, which is correct. But unfortunately, I don't think he understands the process of cell culturing just the terminology or the science of stem cells very well because he was talking about how the different rounds of replication and it's actually called passages. So when he mentioned round nine to 16, I mean, that's very strange way of describing how stem cells replicate. In the lab. They use passages. So one passage passage one, when it's moved to the second passage is when the plate is completely full with one passage. Then they have to divide the cells into different plates and then that's the second. Within each passage, the cells could be dividing and dividing. And when he said it was exponential growth, and his math unfortunately was not even scientific. When he was doing these multiplications, the cells don't divide the way that he was talking about. The cells divide by doubling itself. So it's 2 become 4, 4 becomes 8 and 8 becomes 16. So it's doubling when you have a lot of population doubling at some point, then the plate is full and that will be the first passage and that's moved on to second passage. So we know by passage four, there could be a lot of genetic changes, that cells start to not have the same properties. And the issue is I'm not against expanding the cells, you know, to a very small limited numbers, and I'm not against it. The problem is that most of the clinic that I have seen and I know have expanded the cells way beyond the third passage. Just the fact that Josh was saying how they only need to make new cells every six months from one umbilical cord, that is incredible astronomical. How many patients are you treating with this one cord? When he said one cord treats one patient? And that's not correct either. If you're using cord blood and you're using it for hemoreconstitution purposes, yes, you may take the entire cord, you know, the blood from the cord. So that is true. But if we're talking about ultral cord tissue and mics, by the way, cord blood have very, very tiny amount of MSCs. Extremely small number, less than 1%. I think it's like a 0.1 to 0.01%. So a very tiny fraction of MSCs, but the core tissue is full of MSCs, so you can extract cells from the core tissue and we actually use a fraction of the total, harvest the total number from a cord to treat a particular patient. So we can treat multiple patients from one. But for him to be able, or his clinic to be able to use this one cord and expand to this massive number so that you can treat many patients for six months, that means it was just divided way too many times and there's going to be self degradation. And I just saw a clinic today. And so in my clinic, this patient, who's a 911 responder, who went to Mexico to get stem cell treatment and, and got two months of extreme fatigue. Not only him, but everybody he met at the clinic and kept in touch with about 20 people. They all had extreme fatigue. So this is a real thing. I don't see that in my clinic. The same patient came to my clinic and got stem cells, absolutely no fatigue. And by third day he had sharp increase in energy, incredible response, and the heating response happened very fast. In three or four days, he started to notice significant improvement. Whereas when he was getting the treatment from Mexico using expanded cells, it took him two and a half months to notice improvements in his lung symptoms. So there's a huge difference and then when the clinics overseas tell people, oh, it's normal, there's cytokine response, of course you can get fever. So Josh in this video was saying, yes, people can have a mild fever because you're getting giving a lot of cells. Your immune system is just checking it out. That is very unscientific if you don't have surface markers that is marking you as foreign and your immune system just not going to react to it. I've never seen mild fever or any fever from our stem cell treatment. So because we're not using cells that have been expanded in a culture medium of where they can have various changes on the cells that will lead to your body reacting. So what else? So one thing I do, a couple things I agree with him is the post thaw viability because a lot of people in this country getting misinformed by other sectors of the stem cell field. So there are people who are doing more of a lot autologous type of cells such as using bone marrow, because that's the oldest way of getting stem cells from a person's own bone marrow. And they do not like the umbilical cord stem cell sector because we don't just take the cells and give it to the person on the same day. Right. So that's not the way it works in these type of situations. We get a cord, we extract the cells and we carefully cryopreserve them. That's by lowering the temperature by 1 degree per minute. Very methodical, all done by machine. And the cells will gradually decrease the rate of metabolism. So gradually lower their activity to the point of frozen animation. I guess they've just, they're frozen and then there's no more metabolic activity. By the time you're ready to use it, you thaw them out. If you did everything correctly, if you are good at your craft, then by the time you thaw them out, they will be alive. As seen by third party testing from our products, as seen by, you know, many other people's products. A lot of people with umbilical cord derived stem cells have good viability. So the whole myth about all the cells are all dead, it's just pure lie anyhow. So he was correct. He said, yeah, post thought definitely there's viability, the cells are alive. And then he also mentioned something that I thought was, you know, right on the dot is about exosomes. So I've always said exosomes are the offsprings of not even offspring are the secretion products of stem cells. Stem cells are the mothers of These exosomes, because what the MSCs do, mesenchymal stem cells do, is that they go into an environment and they sense what's needed for them to exert an action. And once they know, then they can produce certain growth factors and cytokines, and then the cell will package them into a little exosome, which is full of growth factors. And when he said that there's one cytokine per exosome, that's really crazy. So there are a lot of growth factors and it's full of important and useful signals for the cells to communicate with other cells and with environment. So these exosomes that the cells secrete according to the body's need will have a specific action. And of course, the cells can travel, they can get to places where they're needed. The exosome doesn't know where to go. The cells have intelligence. Cells are smart. They can sense what's needed, where the inflammation is, and then they will travel to that place and then give you the exosomes that you need. So in that sense, he was correct. The exosome doesn't have the intelligence to get to where you need them to be. But the stem cells will have intelligence. This is why stem cells are always the foundation of our treatment. Here in Upper level Longevity center. We only. There are many times we only give stem cells without exosomes, but there are times that exosomes are very helpful. So there are a couple situations. I do give people exosomes, but always with stem cells, once in a great while. I haven't seen that yet. There could be patients who are allergic to surface markers on the cell. Again, I haven't seen that happen yet, but theoretically it's possible. So if you use exosomes, then you're avoiding any problems with the cell membrane, you know, whatever marker that may be on the membrane. So. But again, I haven't seen those people. When you use exosomes, the situation that will make exosomes reasonable as an addition is when somebody has serious inflammation, you know, raging inflammation throughout the body. Exosomes can work really fast by calming the inflammation because you're giving a lot of signals all at once. It's going to take the cells some time to produce all those signals, so you can have a more rapid response. And also the exosomes are nanoparticles. They can cross your blood brain barrier and get to your brain and start working right away. So I recommend that for people with significant brain conditions, so we can get the signals there right away. But that said, if you gave MSCs enough time. These cells can secrete exosomes and that could also cross the blood brain barrier and get to your brain. Not to mention, MSCs have been known to be able to cross the blood brain barrier. So some people believe that stem cells cannot, but actually MSCs can. And especially when people have brain pathologies, their blood brain barrier is often compromised. So then it's even easier for these cells to get there. So, so another thing is, I think he was confused between MSCs and stem cells in general because he mentioned that in Spanish cellula matre is msc. He said that's msc. No, that means stem cells. MSC is only one type of stem cells. There are numerous, numerous type of stem cells from the first fertilized egg, that is the first stem cell, to all the way to tissue specific stem cells. They're all stem cells. There could be a thousand gradations, the gradient of how the cells evolve. So mscs is one type of stem cells coming from the mesoderm layer. When the baby's forming, there's the ectoderm, endoderm and mesoderm. So in this germ layer, these cells came to be. So traditionally they can differentiate into fat, muscles, ligaments and cartilage. But they have also been shown to differentiate even into beta cells, you know, that secrete insulin or liver cells, even neurons. So it's not like that's not possible. Biology can be quite mysterious. It doesn't always fall into the category a scientist is putting them into. So they can do some amazing things. So what else do I want to talk about? Yeah, so he mentioned differentiation and the parasite is correct that MSCs can end up hovering the blood vessels again, which is where they are in our human body. So in ume, in our body, we all have a ton of MSCs. They decline in number as we age, but they're everywhere. Everywhere you have blood vessels, there are these msc. So I don't know if you know, it's a pretty interesting statistic. When we were born, every 1 in 10,000 cells is an MSC. But when we reach our teenage years, becomes 1 in every 100,000 cells. So that's tenfold less. And when we reach our 40s, it becomes 1 in 400,000, when we reach our 80s, becomes 1 in 2 million. So people are running out of stem cells. And these MSCs, mesenchymal stem cells, provide this signal capabilities, coordinating this regeneration capabilities of the body. So it really is crucial in how the body know what to do to repair itself. So these MSCs along the blood vessels are able to sense what's going on in the blood and, and what's going on in the neighborhood. And that's the paracrine effect that Josh is talking about. And really the majority of how these cells work is through the paracrine effect, not through their capabilities of differentiating to replenish your tissue. They can leave that job to your local tissue specific stem cells because those cells are geared toward replenishing the tissue. They're ready. They're just one stage, kind of one step ahead. They're in the stem cell category, but they can only differentiate into that tissue specific stem cell. And the MSCs are able to tell those cells, hey, it's time for you to wake up. It's, you know, like, start working, start replenish. The tissue is sick, is damaged, and it's time to regenerate. So I think that's the most information I want to share. I just, you know, want to make sure people actually have the correct understanding of these stem cells. And, you know, it sounds great to give people a lot of stem cells. It sounds amazing, but only if it actually is better for patients. Right? But we're seeing the opposite. The patient I was talking about going to Mexico was getting 150 million stem cells. And when we were giving him a fraction of what he got, not only we have drastically improved response, but practically, well, no side effects really, no negative side effect. He said the side effects is improved energy. So there is a difference between what we're doing in the US and what's done overseas. There are studies showing that when you increase the number of cells by expanding them in a culture, they actually decrease in efficacy. There's one study that was presented at a conference showed just that. They showed that by increasing the number of MSE by 10 times, so from 10,000 to 100,000, these are native cells, you get more of a response. But when you increase that by another 10 times, which will mean 1 million cells, but these are expanded cells, you actually get a decrease effect. So by increasing the number by 10 times, you're decreasing the effect quite significantly. So then as a doctor, I need to look at whether or not I'm giving people the best treatment. If I'm giving you more cells, which sounds good, but it's actually decreasing the benefit I can give you, then it's my responsibility to give you the native cells so that you can maximize your benefit. So the fda, you know, it's not like they don't allow companies to use these stem cells. You can Use the stem cells that are expanded if you want to do that. But you have to register with the FDA as a clinical study under an investigational new drug category. So that is an expensive and, you know, time consuming process, which is why these companies would rather just go overseas so they don't have to deal with that. But, but there's a reason the FDA wanted to regulate these as a drug because during the process of culturing, you're changing these cells. So it's not unreasonable for the government agency to tell the company who want to expand the cells to show their process, to validate and to actually demonstrate that these are safe and effective. So anyhow, that's my input and I hope you find it helpful. And it's my goal to dispel myths that's going around partially because I'm in my clinic treating patients and I hear about these myths quite a bit and people are confused. I train other doctors as well and other doctors are confused. So this is one reason I founded American Academy of Integrative Cell Therapy. You can look, look it up online aict.org so, so that's where I do training for other doctors. There are also a lot of case studies if anyone is interested. You can take a look at various disease categories and what patients have experienced when they got stem cell treatment. So it's actually pretty interesting to read through. And then you can also find me if you're interested in coming to my clinic, it's at Uplift Longevity Center. Uplift with a y. So upliftcenter.com and if you're interested in everything I'm doing, including education and providing the best stem cell product that I've personally formulated, you can go on the site joyconmd.com and if you like the video, please like it and subscribe to the channel where I will keep posting useful information to help people navigate this, you know, fascinating new territory. So thank you so much for your attention and I look forward to seeing you next time.