Stem Cells and the Future of Healing with Dr. Joy Kong | HFYH # 127

She was trying to get pregnant for four years and she always had miscarriage. Miscarriage. And we did one stem cell infusion and within two months she's pregnant. And now her, her child is like probably almost two years old in the eyes of science. Anecdotal. However, if you keep adding anecdotal, you better look at what's going on.

Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright and this is Hot for your Health. Join us for conversations on the bleeding edge of science, health and culture. Bring you tech innovators, thought leaders and the movers and shakers who are transforming science fiction into your new health reality.

So welcome back to HOT for YOUR Health where we interview fascinating people, scientists, change makers and today is no different because I'm being joined by Dr. Joy Kong who is a pioneering stem cell expert and and aging physician who takes really innovative approaches to regenerative medicine and longevity. She's a physician and leading authority in cellular therapies and really is looking to harness the potential of stem cells to improve health slow aging as particularly relevant to you women in midlife. She is the CEO of the California Stem Cell Therapy center which is an LA I have lots of. So Dr. Kang, I'm so glad to have you here today.

Thank you so much Dr. Bareda. It's wonderful to be here with you.

So how did you get interested in regenerative medicine and biologics?

I think if you go all the way back, really. I mean I went to ucla, right trained traditionally, but I did grow up in China. So part of the fabric of health is preventative. It's looking at the body as a whole. So that is not a new concept. That is just how we live. So when I was here I saw that the medical education was not emphasizing how to prevent people from getting sick in the first place and also forgetting that everybody parties connected to each other somehow. We all are so enthralled with our specialization that we forgot that we are really all these organs affect each other. So I wanted first of all, I wasn't satisfied with my patients results. I actually went into psychiatry. But the head is still connected to the body. But psychiatrists don't seem to think so. They think the head is floating above with a thyroid and little thyroid. That's the only thing that matters for the rest of the body. So you know, go figure. And I just wasn't happy and wasn't intellectually that wasn't enough. But at the same time of, of not feeling that I'm helping my patients enough, also I didn't have enough tools to optimize my own health, right? So I may have a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of mood issue, a little bit of what, what else to have, you know, besides just, I guess, normal aging. But mostly if I'm, you know, feeling, let's say, cravings for food and I'm not, or maybe gut health was not optimal. But I have no tools given to me by my medical school or residency on how I can do better. So then I had to search on my own. And that's what led me to functional medicine. And then quickly, because I was in the realm of this new form of medicine which is more holistic and looking at the cutting edge research. And this group of doctors in this new field are more open to other forms of therapy, including stem cell therapy. So that's how I ran into a doctor who was doing stem cell thera, ironically on an autistic patient. And I was in psychiatry. I had seen plenty of autistic kids and it was not a, not a good experience because I didn't see that we were really helping these kids. We were just trying to shut them up. Basically we're trying to sedate them. And I didn't see that was fundamentally helping these kids to actually function better in their brain. So when I saw this doctor giving a simple infusion of so called cells and somehow this kid have these miraculous improvements in like over, I don't know, 20 areas of, of his behavior in a short amount of time, that's when the light bulb goes off. What could be in these cells that I didn't know anything about, that we weren't capturing in medicine, but, but deserves my attention because I could really drastically improve people's health. So that's what drove me into it. And I, I see that a lot of doctors have that kind of, kind of curiosity, but a lot of doctors don't. Ironically, you've talked to a lot of people, but most people you talk to are pioneers. But you probably have also talked to some colleagues that are just very closed up, right? They don't want to hear about new discoveries, new information. So, but for me, that was a impetus to dig deeper and do research through, I mean, other people's research really, because I, I, I don't really have the patience to conduct research, but I want to learn about what other people have found. So I just read article after article after article and that's how I became really, you know, really deeply involved in the field.

That's interesting. So let's go way back because I think at this point, most people have heard of stem cells, they've heard of platelet rich plasma. It's no longer the way it was in 2000, which is when I started and I did have a lab working with platelet rich plasma. We were working with what we at the time called muscle derived stem cells, which we know now are more satellite cells in the muscle. But I think people have heard the word, but they're not sure exactly what that means. And the different kinds of stem cells take and define for the people listening, what is, what is the potential actually of a stem cell. And then I want to lead that into. There are myriad kinds of stem cells, the kind that your clinic focuses on.

Yeah. So stem cells really should not be a mystery because. But in the same time it is a mystery because we all came from a single stem cell. When your mom and dad decided to make something happen and they actually, you know, the sperm and egg met. Right. Because of what, you know, their actions. And then there's a spark of light, then the cells have a reset process. They, I think they, that a lot of the genetic issues and problems was raised during that spark. And then you have the initial, the first, the first spark of life, which is the first stem cell, the fertilized egg. And that is the, the cell from which wh came from and from that one cell, of course it knows, somehow has intelligence to know where to go and how to divide and what surface markers to, to to manifest and then start to form this very complex organism. And each step along the way, when the cells divide, the cells keep, make, keep gaining more function, but losing potentials. But all the way along their pathway, they are stem cells, they just more or less potent or which means the variety, the range of potential for differentiation. So as they narrow down in their ability to differentiate, they become closer and closer to the end tissue specific cell. And that is the, you know, muscle cell, the liver cell, the neurons. But anywhere before that, they're all stem cells. So when people talk about stem cell therapy, they talk as if there's some kind of miraculous cells called stem cells. But really anywhere before you can get to the ant working cell, they are stem cells. So we can intercept anywhere along the pathway to get a cell knowing the cell has the capacity to become the end tissue cell. Right. And, and to see if we can get them to, to form new tissue, because the goal is to replenish and replace damaged cells, dysfunctional cells, senescent cells, so we can have more functional, healthy tissue. So that's the end goal. However, There are different types of stem cells. One very unique specific type is mesenchymal stem cells. And these are very different. So different that the, the, the discoverer of these cells, Dr. Arnold Kaplan, kept on insisting before he died that absolutely these are not stem cells, even though he named them medicinal signaling mesenchymal stem cells. But he decided to rename them medicinal signaling cells because he said the cells function as a source of signals for regeneration. So, but these are stem cells because they have the capacity in both experimental conditions, petri dishes, or in a real animal's body, they can differentiate into muscle fat and, but also liver cells, neurons. So we've found that they could differentiate, but that's not the main purpose of these cells by the way. We have these mesenchymal stem cells, MSCs for short, throughout our body. So anywhere you have blood vessels, you will have these mesenchymal stem cells always huddling around the blood vessel and they're waiting for signals from the blood or from the neighboring cells and they're, they're, they're coordinating what, what's needed so they can squeeze themselves into the blood vessels and then get out of the blood vessels to get to the place of high inflammation and injury. So they're highly adaptable and highly mobile and they're there to help you regenerate. So these cells, they, their main purpose is to send signals not to become local stem cells. And that's actually the, the reason I mentioned them is because that is the most touted source of cells and most popular cells that we use these days. So when people think about mesenchymal stem cells, this is a very particular category, is very unique. But they're so easy to work with because they are immune friendly. They're, in a sense they don't trigger any immune issues them from one person to another because they're actually immune suppressive and immune privileged. So they don't have the, the tendency to, and they're actually calming for the immune system because they can be used for, for organ transplant to prevent rejection of the, the transplanted organ. So this is a very special category. And because of their signaling properties, you can put in the body and then they can help any organs regenerate because what they do is to give your, give these signals to the stem cells that's in your organs. In all our organs we have tissue specific stem cells and the goal is to wake them up so they can make new cells to replenish the tissue. So that's kind of, yeah, the, the, the cells I don't know if I, I, I might give you a good picture of kind of the lineages of the cells and what kind of cells we're using.

So I'm smiling because I'm, I'm old. I'm much older than I appear. And I was around when Arnie Kaplan started publishing. Oh, really was. And we were, I mean, we were all, because my lab, we had this muscle drive stem cell Lab was in 2000 and under the tutelage of Dr. Johnny Huart. And so we were all colleagues at the same time trying to figure this out. And so for Those listening, what Dr. Kang has just described is what I talk to you about when I talk about the musculoskeletal system, because I often talk about how, just as you did, how muscle and tendon are actually all derived from the mesenchymal stem cells. So they're cousins and they speak the same language. They're not on desert islands not talking to each other. But something that I want to talk about briefly before we go into.

Some.

Really fascinating work with chymal stem cells and, and the difference between X from an XX source or an XY source is safety. Because I think when I always caution my patients that you have to know who's giving them to you, what they are, how many you're getting. Because I don't know about your experience, but in our laboratory when we were experimenting with mesenchymal stem cells and then muscle derived stem cells, I could dump a load of those that have been transcribed to produce almost anything. But let's say we were going to ask them to make muscle. I mean, often in these rat models we would use, sometimes we would make muscle, sometimes we would make bones, sometimes we'd make tumors. So how do we know how many cells to give? Because cancer is a stem cel bad. Let's just say it, right? So how do we ensure the safety?

First of all, I have to ask you, what was the source of these mesenchymal stem cells you, you were using? Were they from the bone marrow? Were they from fat? Were they from umbilical cord?

We got the mesenchymal stem cells from bone marrow and then we would harvest the muscle derived stem cells, the, the more differentiated but still stem cells from muscle. We would harvest muscle and isolate the stem cells by their cell surface markers.

And so there were always the, there's always a difference between what you're doing with a cell in a tissue culture versus what's in a real animal's body.

Yeah, these are animals.

Yeah. So if so you were putting muscle derived stem cells into the animal's body. You were hoping that they would become a cell of a damaged tissue. Is it correct? You were hoping them to repair?

So I'll give you a, I'll give you the experimental design. So let's say we were going to see if these, these, these muscle drive stem cells transduced to be able to produce BMP could fill a bone gap in a skull. So we would make, without damaging the brain of the animal, we would make a little deficit. We would put stem cells in there on a scaffold. Because for those of you listening, stem cells need a scaffold. They need cells, they need growth factor. Well, step to a healing system needs scaffold cells growth factor, right. So we'd put them in the little deficit. You can't see my hands in the little deficit, asking them to heal the bone. And sometimes they did beautifully, sometimes they didn't. And then sometimes. And we were trying to learn and.

Sometimes I think that illustrates, that illustrates two camps of thought. One is that I'm going to give you a cell and I'm going to. My intention is that these cells are going to become the cells I want you to become. A whole different camp of thought is that I'm going to give you some kind of signal. But you are a stem cell. If you're a bone, I know you have bone stem cells, right? Osteoblast. So there are bone stem cells. So all I need to do is to give you the signal so I wake you up because you know what to in the bone so then you can replenish bone. So these are two different camps. So the camp that I'm going with is focusing more on giving the signals to wake up the local tissue. So I don't need to induce them in any direction because in each tissue they already have those cells. Who knows what directions to go to. So all you need to do is to wake them up, give them those signals and then they will repair that tissue. So that's why I'm able to give people simple IV infusion. We're helping people with neuropathy with repair of different organs, including the heart, the lungs and the brain and the muscles. So I don't need to induce them in any specific direction. Can we do that one day with precision? I'm sure we can, but are we there yet? We're not. That's what you saw in your experiment. And also there's a difference between what bone marrow stem cells are doing and what umbilical Cord stem cells, I'm talking even, even they're both mesenchymal stem cells. So remember I was talking about evolutionarily, when you grow, when you become more and more specialized and you lose more and more potential. So the MSCs from the bone marrow are actually very different from the MSCs from the umbilical cord. Even within the umbilical cord, if it's in the cord tissue, which is the word jelly, versus is in the amniotic membrane or versus it's in the core blood, they all have different potentials. Some are more tailored toward bone muscle, you know, the particular mesodermal, you know, differentiation, some are more ectoderm. Right. Muscles and I mean nervous system and skin, etc, so they have different potentials. So if you just grab one from one source, that may have completely different potential as far as what to become comparing to a different source, even though they're all called MSCs. And also when you get cells from an older source, like from the bone marrow of an existing human being, right. You can only get cells from the bone marrow if a human has been formed, usually an adult human, you don't get it from babies. So a fully grown adult human, you get it from the bone marrow or the fat. Those cells actually have lost a lot of the potential to detect cancer and prevent cancer from proliferating. Whereas umbilical cord stem cells, which is much younger than the baby stem cells by the way, even though they come at the same fetus was forming, a lot of the early cells were trapped that there's still embryonic stem cell markers on these umbilical cord stem cells that are completely lost in the baby. So, so these are primitive stem cells and they have much stronger capabilities of recognizing cancer. So direct head to head comparison between fat derived stem cells versus umbilical cord derived stem cells next to a cancer cell have drastic differences. One make cancer grow.

Do you think these cells are just signaling? If you think mesenchymal stem cells are just signaling and not part of the process.

So they're not just signally, but I would say maybe 90% of what, what they do is signaling. But can they become? Well, from research, if you, if your research is almost ad nauseam, like I just taught a course, I presented study after studies, I, I start to repeat myself. Okay, the study shows the, the result of the, the tissue regeneration. When they actually looked at the markers, the tissue regenerated, new cells are formed. Are the new cells from the cells? We just gave no, vast majority of the cells are of the origin of the, of the recipient, not the donor. So it's been repeated over and over. And I was like, you know, like say I, I told my, you know, the doctors I was training, I said I'm repeating myself, right? You see the theme because it's over and over. So in the past 10, 15 years, it's been proven over and over and over again that the vast that's happening through mesenchymal stem cells is through signaling effect. Can some small amount happen by direct differentiation? Yes, it has happened as well, but that is cannot account to the vast majority of the repair.

So my question is, is it the exosomes, not the stem cells? Right.

Exomes is fantastic, but exosomes can never replace stem cells. That's something I wanted, I want to make sure that, you know, people can disagree with me. But, but, but I'll tell you why. First of all, stem cells are what makes the exosomes. And so stem cells will package information into the exosomes in, into these, you know, lipid bilayer enclosed nanoparticles. So it can put nucleic acids, can put different proteins, right? Cytokines, growth factors. So when lipids, when it packages, why does it package things in certain way? It's because it's responding to the environment. So it doesn't give you uniform exosomes. You can't, it's okay. So if you grow cells in a culture and you have produced vast amount of exosomes, what are the cells responding to? So is there a particular reason the cells are packaging certain types of growth factors into those exosomes? No. If you put the cells into a particular region, the package is going to be different. It's not going to the cell just blindly. Cells are intelligent. There's a reason we have the DNA which responds to the environment because, you know, depending on what's going on in the environment, it will activate different types of protein synthesis. Right. So we can activate different functions. So if you just put blindly produced exosomes into the body, which I do as well, it can be very helpful because they have a lot of great signaling molecules. But can it replace cells? No, because the cells can travel to where the problem is, can travel to the site of inflammation, injury, throughout the body. Once it's there, it's going to produce exosomes that are more tailored toward the local defect to give it appropriate exosomes. Not to mention the cells do more than just secreting exosomes. Cells communicate with other cells, not just through exosomes. Exosome is, is like one of the major ways that these stem cells communicate with other cells. But it also just send out growth factors, send out cytokines directly into the extracellular space. Doesn't need to packages. So it does all kinds of things. It sends out mitochondria so it can pinch off a little piece of his membrane and give the mitochondria to another cell or the mitochondria can just walk across microtubules and go into another cell or just go into the extracellular space and float around and find its way somewhere else. And, and these cells do amazing, interesting, strange things that exosomes cannot do. So you can never replace cells, but I think you can utilize these exosomes to maximize treatment results. I utilize them all the time to calm inflammation. I give them through IV route. It's great to calm inflammation throughout the body. You can do it, of course, for skin regeneration. I use it for intranasal injection, not injections, but you don't have to inject because you can just allow it, allow the nasal membrane to absorb the exosomes and that will uptake them directly into the brain. You can. Yeah, the exosomes can be used in just about any place that you can use stem cells, but it can never replace what stem cells can do. So that, that's, that's the way I look at it.

So have you or studies been done? Because I'm assuming if you're using embryonic or even mesenchymal.

We don't use embryonic. Yeah. Umbilical cord.

An umbilical cord. So those cells arrive to you. Are they, are they freeze dried? Are they alive in a, in a ampoule that you pull out, how do they arrive to you? In your clinic or. Yeah, you're not harvesting them there. You have no babies, right?

No, I, I wouldn't want to do that. But there are tissue banks, right? CGMP facilities they will contract with procurement company. So these are companies, their whole goal is to get these tissue, right? They can get any kind of tissue, but including the umbilical cord, the placental tissue. So they will go to hospitals and birthing clinics, find mothers who are willing to donate. If they don't, the mothers don't. If they don't want to save it for their own baby, then they can. They're asked if they want to donate. So most people are willing to, but they have to fit certain criteria. So it's a very, very stringent criteria screening everything from their own health history, their family history, their travel history, work history, toxic exposures, sexual history, so everything that you can think of that encompasses where this human has been and what kind of effect the environment has been on this person. And then of course, we screen out genetic issues. And, and if they fit this strict criteria, then they're screened for any, the infectious agents which are required by the American association of Tissue Banks to screen. So these are same criteria as any organ transplantation that, that's necessary. We screen more, we, we screen Covid, Chagas, Prion disease, et cetera. So once the screening is done, then the cells are, and then the tissue will be accepted? No, actually the tissue will be collected, but the screening will be done. If the screening shows that there's some kind of pathogens that doesn't pass the criteria, then the tissue will be tossed. But the tissue is mechanically processed. There's no enzymes, no chemicals used. So they're almost like a slow maceration process to free the cells up. And once they're freed, then they're in this solution. Right. So there's a particular cryo preservation process that allows you to keep the cells alive, and that's by lowering the temperature by one degree per minute. So you can imagine that's very, very gradual. So, so gradual that the cells, you know, doesn't notice it in a sense. It doesn't, it doesn't affect them adversely. So there's no crystals forming. Also they're, they're putting some cryopreservatives in the solution to prevent crystals from forming. So the cells are just, you know, they're active, active and less, less, less, less active until they're kind of frozen in animation and that's it. And then they can be put in a liquid nitrogen or ultra low freezer and they can stay that way for years until you're ready to use. So what comes to our clinic, actually what we send out to doctors, because I also have a stem cell company, is these cryopreserved vials in ultra low. Yeah.

So you've done the testing. What percentage of those cells persist living? Because often over 90.

Yeah. So our, I can't speak for everybody's product. Our product is definitely over 90. Yeah, 95.

And is this still considered minimally manipulated?

Yes, because no enzymes, no chemicals are used and we're not expanding the cell. So we didn't grow the cells. A huge number. So if the moment you start to grow the cells, the FDA said now it manipulation, now you have to go through drug studies. But what we use is completely what we call native. So it has never been altered.

Got it. So let's Turn this background conversation to thinking about the role of endogenous estrogen on stem cells. Because obviously every woman listening to this knows, either because I've told them, my guests have told them, or because they've experienced that the precipitous decline in estrogen that happens around the perimenopause and menopause has profound effects on every body tissue. And I'm wondering your thoughts on what does it do to the potency or survivability of stem cells?

It's interesting question. I think it's to me it's more the reverse. What does decline in stem cell population do to estrogen progesterone levels? Because we all know estrogen estrogen stem cell population declines precipitously as we age. So just to give you the, the, the what your audience, you probably already know, but your audience a quick number to put in their mind so they understand how fast the, this the number declines is that when we were born, every one out of 10,000 cells is a mesenchymal stem cell. However, when we reach our teenage years is has already gone down to one in a hundred thousand. So it's tenfold less as far as cell to, you know, stem cell to other cell type ratio. And when we reach our 40s it becomes 1 in 400,000. When we reach our 80s is 1 in 2 million. So literally we're running out of the juice to regenerate. And so that can have profound effect on all our organs, including our reproductive organ. So the decline is throughout the body. If you don't have what's, what's needed to keep life at a fresh state, then things are going to start to go downhill. And what's interesting is that if you replenish the stem cells like experiments have done been done on perimenopausal rats. It's very interesting. So I didn't even know that rats menstruate. I've never seen one dragging around with menstruation. But of course I haven't seen that many rats. But what happens is that these rats will have declined estrogen progesterone level and increased LH and fh. So when they gave these rats stem cells, so young rats stem cells and through their tail vein, right. It's basically a form of IV infusion for them. And when they tested their, their estrogen progesterone level, they all went up closer to younger state. And then the FSH and LH went down closer to younger state. And not only that the ovary size increased the number of Follicles increased. And the final important thing is the number of pregnancies increased. So that was a very direct evidence of what the cells can do for reproductive health. And I don't think there's enough human studies. So there's only been anecdotal. I mean, I've treated a patient like one of the doctors in our clinic, actually. She got one stem cell infusion, her AMH doubled. So it drastically increased her chance. Right, right. Of a pregnancy. And another also physician I treated, she was trying to get pregnant for four years and she always had miscarriage, miscarriage. And we did one stem cell infusion and within two months she's pregnant. And now her, her child is like a, probably almost two years old. So it happened. I mean, these are anecdotal, right? So in the eyes of science, as anecdotal. However, if you keep adding anecdotal, you better look at what's going on.

That might be interesting. You probably have enough volume in your clinic. You could just, in, in midlife women that you give these to, you could measure and improve this point. Actually, that's true. That's interesting. Well, I mean, we are almost to the end of the hour. We could go on forever. But I want to get your opinion, since this is what you do every single day. When you look to the future in the next five to 10 years, what do you predict or what are you hopeful for in the role of biologics, stem cells of various kinds for preventing disease? What, what do you think will be the next best, the best thing to look for?

I think the world is in a bit of a precarious place, so it's a little hard to predict where we're going yet as far as government, you know, logistic directions. And there's definitely opposition to this new form of medicine because the existing form of medicine obviously has made a lot of people a lot of money, right. Maybe not as many, but a small group of people a lot of money. So there is a vested interest to keep things the way they were because things were going very, very well for these very powerful people. So if we have a new, whole new form of medicine, all of a sudden, we can prevent people from getting sick or we can get them off all these medications. So that's probably 10, 20, 30, 40 years worth of medication that could be sold. All of a sudden, sales gone, right? So in a sense, what we're doing right now is not welcomed by, you know, certain people. So under these constraints, the fact, just the fact that we cannot advertise for stem cell therapy on Google, Facebook and Instagram because they consider stem cell therapy as unproven therapy. They lump us in the same category as miracle cures. And which is laughable because just take a look at the rigorous studies from around the world and don't tell me that this is some something that it's that experimental. Show me a drug, a medication that has this amount of study backing it. But anyhow, that's a whole other subject. So what I'm trying to say is the progress may not be as fast as I'm hoping. Nonetheless, the end result will be the same. So it may take longer, five to 10 years. I'm still not that optimistic, but 15 to 20, I think it's very possible we can get to the place where stem cell therapy is no longer fancy. That is actually no big deal because we know of course you're going to get some stem cells. Of course you don't want to start to decline in age. Get some stem cells. Oh, you just got a injury, you just got into an accident, you just got infection. Okay, get some stem cells, that's going to help you heal so much faster or you're about to get surgery. Get some stem cells prophylactically. So you're going to heal, you know, three times as fast and you have we less downtime and your, your, your, your tissue, the wound that's created by surgery is going to heal so much more beautifully. So one day it's just going to be like that, like antibiotics. Of course you take some antibiotics per, you know, prophylactically. Of course when antibiotics first came on the, you know, on the scene, it's not embraced as much. But now everybody is of course antibiotics. So it's going to be like that. It would just take, I think would take a little longer unless the world drastically changes.

Well, and you know what, I think you have a point because in the last 20 years, literally maybe 30, all the studies you're talking about have been done. And now the public can talk about this like, oh, they come to my office, oh, I want to talk about stem cells. Or I use, I use several kinds and then I use a lot of platelet rich plasma. But they're saying this vocabulary to me, which 30 years ago when I started practicing, that didn't happen. Right. So I think there's a public awareness, I think there's studies. So you may just be right. In 20 years it will be not a big deal, just go get a pump of it. But well, yeah, I really think this.

Is a grassroot movement. This is driven by patients. This is not like we doctors. We're so forward thinking that we are bringing this to the world. We're teaching everybody. Actually, the patients are the ones that are looking for solutions and seeing the solution actually work for themselves, for their family members. And they are telling all their friends and people are searching for solutions. So of course they're going to ask their doctors. So I have so many doctors who come to me saying, I have five patients lined up. They all want to do stem cells. I don't know how to do it. Please tell me what do I do? So I, I, I see, I see how this is moved is it's because people need healing.

That's right. Well, I appreciate you taking your time. I know you have a busy clinic. Dr. Joy Kong, thanks for joining Hot for your Health.

Oh, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. I really appreciate you.

It's my pleasure.

Thanks for joining us on Hot for YOUR Health, where we bring you conversations from the bleeding edge of science, health and culture. You can find links from today's show and connect with me@drvander wright.com don't forget to subscribe and leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Dr. Vonda Wright.

See you next week.