The Future of Anti-Aging Is Stem Cells | Dr. Christian Drapeau

When I give people umbilical cord derived stem cells, which I do think is more potent and actually safer than a person's own. And when I give people those stem cells and then adding stem regen, that's a way of bringing more stem cells out of the bone marrow.

More stem cells in circulation means more stem cells are available to participate to the process of tissue repair. So that means the repair of any tissue because every tissue is constantly going through a process of turnover. So as you lose cells, cells are what will replace. The cells are being lost.

Hello, everybody. Welcome Back to the Dr. Joy Kong podcast where I introduce some of the most amazing scientists and doctors and. And pioneers in the health field to bring to you their discoveries and their knowledge and wisdom. And so today I have a very special guest, Dr. Christian Tropo, who is a stem cell scientist who have something really special that he can educate us on. So, Dr. Tropo, thank you so much for coming on here.

My pleasure.

Yes. I hope I said your name correctly.

You did.

Okay, wonderful. Yeah. I'm definitely not proficient in French. And you're Canadian, right?

That's right.

I'll just call you Christian.

Very good.

I'm going to introduce you a little bit. You are a stem cell scientist and also author and creator of the first stem cell supplement. So Christian holds a graduate degree in neurophysiology and has been involved in medical research for over 30 years. In the last 20 years specifically dedicated to stem cell research. He's the author of five books, including the bestselling Cracking the stem cell Code. And he has published dozens of scientific papers and a biological process he coined endogenous stem cell mobilization. He has been lecturing in 50 countries on stem cell research and is known by scientists, physicians, and biohackers as an expert and pioneer of his field. He's a scientific adviser to many companies and is currently the CEO and founder of Hyan. Yeah. Where he developed the most potent stem cell mobilizer, stem regen. So I met Christian actually at a biohacking conference where I was astounded by his level of knowledge, his professionalism, and just a great, great person overall. And I was very interested in the product. And I realized that I could bring this product even to my clinic, kind of dovetail what the supplement can offer and what I'm offering patients. So we're going to delve deep into the science and the story and what, you know, what are the books about? What have you discovered? Right. So let's bring the audience in. Maybe tell us a little bit about your journey. How did you even get interested in stem cells? And, and where did the stem cell supplement come from?

Okay. I mean like probably anybody in today, the field of stem cell research. We didn' background in stem cell research in stem cells. It's just too recent. So for me, it started when I was hired in 1995 to study the, the mechanism of action of a plant that was distributed at the time, you may have heard of it, blue green algae from Klamath Lake. It was a dietary supplement. The DSHEA had just been passed in America. And the company that was selling this product needed to have science to support the claims that they were making about this product. So the main claims were on inflammation, on IMM and on the mind. I would say half of the consumer would report an enhancement of mental clarity, mental energy, mood elevation, to the point of almost being antidepressant. So we very quickly identified phycocyanin, which is a COX2 inhibitor, the polysaccharide with supporting various aspects of immunity. And it was a unique source of phenylethylamine, which is a well known compound made by the brain in chemistry they called it the molecule of love or the molecule of joy. And so we, we, there you go, it goes with your name. And so we, we very quickly identified that. But, but the things that start to appear or to show up in, in the course of doing all this research is that I came across people who reported not only benefits that were quite impressive, but the benefits were touching various aspects of human health benefits. Touching the heart, the lung, the pancreas, the liver, the brain, joints. I came across people who like reversed multiple sclerosis or had significant improvement, liver failure, those kinds of things. Emphysema. Who has emphysema over years and suddenly three months later, it's gone. You know, it's stories that I'd never heard. So I started to look at some of these cases. Some of these were very compelling. Although, you know, they're just stories from a scientific standpoint, they have no value. But they became altogether all of them being compelled. They became compelling to me, like there was something to this product. So we did a number of studies, we got good data, but nothing that really provided a deep understanding. Until one day, so I'm a neuroscientist, brain research. I really know nothing about or knew nothing about stem cells. And I come across an article that the title was Turning blood into brain. The first article to my knowledge, documenting how stem cells came, went from the bone marrow to the brain and became A brain cell. So in neuroscience, there's one thing we would. We were all told, the brain does not regenerate. And we were all told in med class, stem cells only become blood cells. And here's a study showing that a stem cell became not only something more than the blood cell, but of all things, a brain cell. So I found that, like, absolutely so amazing that I went into the literature and tried to see what else can I find. And I found another study documenting the same phenomenon in the liver and in the heart. So go back 20 some years ago out of just general knowledge of physiology. If a stem cell can become brain cell, heart cells and liver cell, how can it not become also pancreatic cells, lung cells, skin cells and the rest of the. What would be the mechanism of action that makes it become those three and not the rest? Makes no sense. So if stem cells can become those three, they can become the rest. And if they can become everything, that means that the repair system of the body, how could it not be? So? It was a lot of stretching, if you want, of the data, but to me, the data was there. We published an article in the journal Medical Hypotheses suggesting with the data available at the time, that stem said this is 2001, that stem cells actually are the repair system of the body. And in the back of my mind was just like, we have plants, like medicinal mushroom echinacea, that supports the immune system. If we have a repair system, there has to be plants that support that repair system. What if that blue green algae was working by supporting the role of stem cell? So we acquired a flow cytometer. It was, I mean, it was very daring. You know, it's a lot of expense. It's going into a direction that was at the, at first absolutely inexistent in terms of a field of research. But we acquired a flow cytometer and we started to count on ourselves our stem cells. We took blue green algae and then we counted stem cells an hour, two hours, three hours later, and then the whole phenomenon was revealed. This plant was acting as a stem cell mobilizer. So I shifted everything I was doing into that field, because at that time I just thought, you know what we're. The world of medicine is changing. If we can really show that we can repair anything, by stimulating our repair system, we're putting an end to disease. That was my naive thought in 2001.

This is the blue green algae.

Correct. But that's how it started. That's the blue green algae. That was the first one that we documented.

So you had a person take it and then you counted the number of stem cells in their blood. Okay.

Correct. Yeah, so we did that on ourselves. We were maybe, I don't know, four or five in the lab. And then, and then we just started to take our own blood samples and before and after, and then, and it became very clear. So the next, the next year was to, to really refine the protocol so that we can then do that as a double blind crossover placebo controlled studies with participants documenting the mechanism of action through animal models. You know, everything that needs to be done to really show that it's a real phenomenon. And that's what we did, you know, for the next few years.

Okay, yeah. So you were focusing on blue, blue green algae or did you start to search for other possibility possible supplements?

The first few years were really invested into proving that this was real. And you know, in science if you, if you observe something to prove that it's real, you need to show the mechanism of action, the active compounds, the proof of concept. So that's what we did for number of years when all of this was really wrapped up and it was, it was real. Then what, what I started to think is that we evolved in symbiosis with the environment. So just like we have many plants supporting the immune system, there has to be many plants to support the repair system. So how do you go and find this? So we asked the same question. AFA had been this blue green algae had been seen to bring a broad variety of benefits. So what else is known to be associated with a broad variety of health benefits? Immediately mind comes medicinal mushroom, goji berries for longevity. All, all the adaptogens, so called adaptogens, you know, things that we don't really know how they work, but they do a lot of good things in the body. So hey now we just discovered we have a repair system. And if you stimulate your repair system, well, you repair. So that means there could be many benefits. So we started to test medicinal mushroom, goji berries, fo tea from, from traditional Chinese medicine. And we found that they all have an effect on stem cells. But as I went along into this quest, I also started to go into remote areas of the world. My thought process was when you talk about goji berry, medicinal mushroom, these are part of, let's say the global economy. But they don't have access to this in Africa, in Madagascar, in South America, they have their own plants. They don't actually need those plants coming from elsewhere. So what are they using in South America, in Papua New guinea in Madagascar and that quest. Then we came across the two plants right now that are the most potent to release stem cells. Aloe macroclata from Madagascar and Seabockthornberry from the Tibetan Plateau. So these are so. So stem region is a blend of the top five plants that we have investigated over the years.

I see. So what was the mechanism of action that you guys discovered? Are they. Do they all have different mechanisms of action, all these different plants?

They do. There's three main mechanism of action to release stem cells that all have an impact on one aspects of stem cell function. And it's called the Cxcr4 Sdf1 axis, meaning that Sdf1 stromal derived factor 1 is the compound that an injured tissue releases locally to trigger the migration of stem cells into that tissue through the expression of adhesion molecule. It is the exact same phenomenon that the bone marrow utilizes to maintain stem cells in the bone marrow and recapture them from the peripheral blood. So stem cells are naturally designed to home to the bone marrow and stay there. And when you disrupt that signal in the bone marrow, it makes them be released. So you can do that in various ways. The natural way that the body does is that your injured tissue will release granulocyte colony stimulating factor as one of the main mechanism for stem cell mobilization. When that compound reaches the bone marrow, it triggers the secretion of an enzyme that digests SDF1. So in the absence of SDF1, the bone marrow loses its ability to keep stem cells on the bone marrow, so they get entrained into the blood flow. So that is your natural method of mobilizing stem cells. You have drugs that have been developed like AMD3100 for example, that are blockers of Cxcr4, which is the receptor for SDF1 on stem cells. You block the receptor, then you. The stem cell then no Longer responds to FDF1 SDF1, so they get into the circulation. So other mechanism of action is that some plants will trigger fool your body if you want to start to produce granulocyte colony stimulating factor or stem cell factor, which is also immobilizer. So in the mechanism that we discovered with AFA is that I need to go a little bit deeper in this. The receptor for SDF1 is not always on the membrane. It's a preformed receptor that is right under the membrane surface. And when the stem cells is activated to listen for SDF1, then it pops out of the membrane. So that mechanism of popping out takes place by the activation of an adhesion molecule called L selectin. So what we thought is that the response that we had with AFA was much weaker than what we know of gcsf, for example. So we thought maybe that could be a mechanism of action, meaning we block L selectin. So all the cxcr4 existing on stem cells are there, but we can no longer upregulate them. So all the stem cells that have fewer of these receptors then starts to shed them and they get sensitive if you want to mobilization if you block L selectin. So we fished for an L sel selectin blocker in AFA and we found that we have one. So what we did is we basically took recombinant L selectin that we embedded into very, very small microscopic magnets. And then we incubated AFA extract, water extract of AFA with these magnetic beads. So we fished out any kind of L selectin ligand. And then after that you put a magnet on the side of the test tube, you wash everything and after that you detach whatever was attached to these to the Al selectin. And we ran that through gel electrophoresis and we got like very, very clear band. There is one very specific molecule which is suspected to be a glycoprotein that acts basically as a, as an L selectin blocker. So that's what we have in afa, the blue green algae. Other compounds have other benefits or the mechanism of action. Panax Noto Jensen, for example, will do two things. To me, it's phenomenal that nature has this kind of effect in the body. It will trigger the release of stem cell factor, but will also reduce SDF1 in the bone marrow and increase it in the bloodstream. So you change the concentration gradient for the molecule that attracts stem cells. So stem cells suddenly get attracted to the bloodstream. So there are different mechanism of action, but they all act through this sort of single mechanism that is called the CXCR. CXCR4 is the F1 axis.

Yeah, that's very interesting. Yeah. I hope everyone is following, but you can see the depth of the, you know, the, the science that you're going into. So the, the supplements is quite interesting. So you literally traveled around the world, right? You went to talk with the indigenous health, I, I guess medicine people from different locations in different continents and brought back, you probably brought back lots of different herbs and tested.

I have lots of things. Yeah. I, I'm very, I mean I'm a scientist, but I've always been puzzled by the scientific approach that says a thousand of Thousand years history of using a plant can suddenly be denied or confirmed by a double blind study done on 20 people. That's how we look at modern science. The double blind becomes the gold standards and defines everything. To me it's not. If something has been used for a thousand years with results and my study doesn't show, doesn't prove it, then I've got to go deeper and find what was wrong with my study. I cannot have a thousand years of history of use with people reporting the benefit and there's not something there. So my starting point is always going into sort of folk medicine, historical data, what has been used. Let's take for example the sea buckthornberry. Sea buckthorn berry looks benign as a product, but if you dive into traditional Chinese medicine, Tibetan medicine, Mongolian medicine, for at least 2000 years it has been used and in the literature what it has been used for is like lung cancer, lung disease, heart disease, cardiovascular problem, diabetes, liver regeneration, digestive system, and to help the skin repair from burn to the skin, injury to the skin or bone fractures. Now look at, look at the spread of the benefits. The heart, the lung, the cardiovascular system, the pancreas, actual repair, which is, which is a sort of a hallmark of all these plants. They're all involved somewhere in repair of injury. So we went and, and if you look at Seabockton berry, it's available everywhere in the world, but it comes from the Himalayan region, super high altitud in that region of the Tibetan plateau, the Himalayas and Alexander the Great. So you see, 2500 years ago, brought it back to, to the Mediterranean and from there and spread everywhere. So it's everywhere. But in, on the Tibetan plateau, in that high altitude, it grows to like no more than 2 meters. The berries are very small, very bitter. It's a very different type of biochemistry. And that's where it has been documented to have these benefits. So we went on the Tibetan plateau design up an extract of sea buckthornberry. We tested it and we saw a very, very good response on stem cell mobilization. So it's an example of how the research process led us to work. And look at some of these plants. The Aloe macroclada from Madagascar is another one. I was asking a, a pharmacist that I, that I, that I met by sort of randomly. My, my. Well, you've met Stephanie, she's an actress. And so we were at a Hollywood meeting in, in la. And then, and then, you know, as a scientist, it's not really my crowd, so I'm Kind of sitting in the corner, I'm not really talking to a lot of people. And then somebody comes and says, hey, YouTube, you can talk together. It was a pharmacist and her passion was to travel the world and look for plants for Alzheimer's in Parkinson. She went to Papua New Guinea, Madagascar, South America, Congo, hiking for weeks and questioning and meeting healers and shamans and asking about all kinds of plants. I mean, it's an amazing. This woman has an amazing life. So I told her benign question, did you come across a plant that the healer will tell you this is good for everything? She says, nothing is good for everything. So I start to explain to her, I'm not looking for something that is good for everything. I'm looking for something that is good for one thing, stem cell mobilization. But that means people will talk about it in the lens of many different kinds of benefits. So she said, very interesting question. She said, when I went to Madagascar on her last trip, on the drive back to the airport, their guide and translator said, why don't you study that? And he stopped in a small market and scoop a full bag of these black beads. And he says, study that. They're on the way to the airport. She took the bag, flew back home. But she didn't like tell a scientist study that you study it for what? So she put it in her freezer and had been there for five years. So she sent me these little beads. We consumed them ourselves, didn't really know what they were. And then we saw the strongest response that we had ever seen. And so starting to ask more question. It's of all the species of aloe in Madagascar, 60 something species, one of them is used to make that compound, that medicine, that medicine, local medicine called vahona. And it's Aloe macroclada. It grows in Antananarivo in the region in the high mountains. So we developed since then a whole system of collection and processing. And now we're making that ingredient, which is Aloe microclada. It's the main ingredient that we have documented so far. So that's how all these ingredients have been sort of discovered.

Wow. So five gems from around the world. That's right, yes. And then how long ago did you come up with the formula?

The first formula of stem regen I developed in 2016. And the main reason is that. So the first product, which was the AFA extract we marketed in 2005. So we got really good results, good penetration in the market. But as a simple dietary supplement, it was never seen for what I thought it could be really be or seen which is a genuine stem cell type treatment. It's a stem cell technology but, but as a dietary supplement it's really seen as a second class, as a sort of a, not really a stem cell technology. So for me I needed to make a really strong formulation that I can market in and provide to the medical professionals and that's how it was developed in 2016. So I worked for about two, three years through a few doctors friend to use it with their patients and then we refined the formula and the formula that we have today was pretty much completed early 2019. And then we've had this product as it is right now for, for a few years. So we officially launched here in the US in 2021.

Okay. I know you work with a lot of health healthcare providers and so you probably have collected a lot of cases and, and maybe you can share some of the results that you've seen. Just what, what did people notice after taking these five incredible herbs that you've discovered?

So if you let me answer it in two different ways. If you just look at the mechanism of action, we just put more stem cells in circulation. Now if you dig in the scientific literature, that's essentially the whole topic of my book Cracking the stem cell code is what is the many stem cells in circulation in the body's ability to repair and the rel. The relationship is direct. More stem cells in circulation means more stem cells are available to participate to the process of tissue repair. So that means the repair of any tissue because every tissue is constantly going through a process of turnover. So as you lose cells, stem cells are what will replace the cells are being lost. So since the day we're born, stem cells is what has repaired us. All the injuries that 5, 10, 12 years old, you don't, you don't remember them, they're repaired completely. But past a certain age this number of stem cells decline and we don't repair as well. So you put more stem cells in circulation, everything can repair. So if I'm looking at specific example, working with the various clinicians that we've worked with, there is a, a little bit of a disappointment in the sense that we get great stories but most clinicians, and I don't fault them for that most clinicians do not document their patient in a way that can go through to double blind placebo controlled, not double blind but, but peer review process. It's not made for peer review, it's made to improve my patient. So if I give him this and this and that and I do something else to boost the three. Well, then how can I say what did what. So as a. In terms of publication, most of these cases are clear, but they cannot go through peer review process. So we're now working with a number of clinicians to try to narrow the actual way in which patients are treated so that we can start to publish that kind of data. So if I address those, we have one study right now that is ongoing, but we've got two rounds of data. And it's enough right now that I'm starting to work on a short publication on it and short communication, but basically tapping into congestive heart failure. So we're tapping into types of health conditions or systems in the body for which we know that putting more stem cells in circulation can really bring significant benefits. And we know this through the scientific literature and everything that has been published so far in the past history of using herbal stem cell mobilizers. So on congestive heart failure, this is done with Dr. Garber. So he's working in clinics in both Madrid and in Florida. And we're using people with stable chronic congestive heart failure. So ejection fraction that is less than, I believe, 43% with more than two years of having that condition. They're given everything that medicine can do to support them. And we put them into three groups. One group is stem regen, one group is stem cell injection, adipose stem cell injection, and the other group is adipose stem cell injection and stem region. And the reason is that the empirical reports from doctors doing stem cell injection is that when they add stem regen, they tend to, but it's empirical, they tend to report better results. So we wanted to document that and we wanted to also to compare stem regen with injection of stem cells to get a sense of what is the magnitude of the benefits that we're really, that we're really getting in right now, these first rounds of patients. So that short communication, it's ongoing. So we will be able to report everything once the study is done. But right so far, what we see is about a 20% improvement in ejection fraction just with stem regen, which is more or less meaning that people who start with stable chronic congestive heart failure end up six months later with being considered like a normal, let's say 70, 70 years old, because the patients are all between 65 so far. 65. And let's say 75, when we compare with adipose stem cell injection, they get about a 30% improvement so far in the Study that group randomly has started with a lesser ejection fraction. So things can change statistically as we move forward with 30% improvement and 40% improvement when we use both together. So that study is kind of really revealing pretty much what we knew ahead of time through just observation. Meaning stem regen is really good to put more stem cells in circulation. It's the punch is not as strong as a stem cell injection, but for somebody who cannot afford it, it's actually pretty good. But if you combine both, this is really where you get the most out of it.

It that's kind of a vindicating study in the rationale why I'm incorporating it into my clinic because I give people umbilical cord derived stem cells, which I do think is more potent and actually safer than a person's own. So, you know, I've, I've cited a lot of studies showing that, you know why I believe that. And when I give people those stem cells and then adding stem regen, that's a way of bringing more stem cells out of the bone marrow. Right. So you had explained to me that when we give people more stem cells, introducing it into the blood, there's a tendency for these cells to go back to the bone marrow. Maybe you can explain a little bit, why would these cells want to do that? What happens when a person gets a stem cell injection?

Well, stem cells go back to the bone marrow, and that is very well documented. The best example to answer that question is just to talk about what happens when somebody gets a BO transplant. So let's say you have leukemia or someone has leukemia. The treatment is myeloablation through radiation or chemotherapy. You kill all the stem cells, and then we inject you stem cells, bone marrow stem cells from a compatible donor. But we don't inject them in the bone marrow, we just put them in the blood. They will go in the bone marrow on their own. They're attracted to the bone marrow, they will go to an injury, and in lieu of finding an injury, they will go back in the bone marrow. Because the bone marrow release is a signal like an injury, but all the time. So that's how you repopulate the bone marrow and you give it just a few weeks and the entire bone marrow is reconstituted. So stem cells that are injected in the bloodstream will go to the bone marrow. There's no question about that. So the advantage of umbilical cord stem cells in terms of injection is that we know that younger stem cells are much better than older stem cells. Adipose Stem cells have a little caveat in the sense that they're not as old if you want as bone marrow stem cells, but the youngest are definitely umbilical cord stem cells. So you take an injection. That means you recede your stems, your bone marrow with young stem cells. So you are 50, 60 years old and now you carry in your bone marrow. And by carry, it's not the right word, it's more than carry. You have now a, a source of stem cells, pockets of stem cells that have just restarted their life cycle in you, in your bone marrow. But they're young stem cells, so they're more powerful to repair. By more powerful, what I mean is that studies were done where if you take, let's say a middle aged mouse and you trigger an injury and then you inject in that mouse stem cells isolated from a one day old mouse or a 12 month mouse, which is an old mouse, and the younger stem cells are much more effective at supporting repair. So that's what I mean by using younger stem cells, where the two combined with stem regen is that I believe, and this is at this point it is just a hypothesis. We see the result, we know that combining them gives better results. So why. So we would have to go into a lot of studies to really document all of that. But if we step back and we look at the physiology of stem cells, which I described somewhat earlier with this connection with Cxcr4 and Ldf1, when stem cells circulate in your blood vasculature, the only place where they can migrate is in a very, very small area of your blood vasculature. That is called the post capillary venule. It's when a capillary ends and start the vein or the venule. The main difference is that your capillary have muscles around them to control pressure. And your venules, your small veins do not have that. So that means at that junction there's a sudden shut decrease in blood pressure. So like water going from a river to a lake, a calm lake, what is happening right there at the entrance at that junction, you get a lot of turbulence. The turbulence at that junction is the mechanical signal for L selectin to mechanically be affected and trigger the expression of the CxCr4 receptor that now makes the stem cells listen to do I have SDF1 released in that area? So that means the tissue needs repair. So if so, there's connection adhesion molecule, the stem cell grab the capillary migrate in that tissue. That area is a fraction of your Entire blood circulation. So the opportunity that stem cells have to go in that area and that can become quickly saturated when you inject, let's say, 100 million stem cells. So that means the vast majority will just be pulled back in the bone marrow. So now if you Inject, let's say 100 million stem cells, you have about. At our age, we have about maybe, maybe I'm aging you, when I say our age, a little bit older, but we probably have, let's say, 100 million stem cells in our bone marrow. So you inject 100 million. If they, let's suspect here, the majority go back to the bone marrow. You've now doubled your population of stem cells in your red marrow. So now your red marrow that supports the life of 100 million stem cells, supports the life of 200 million stem cells. The estimated survival of stem cells just through an injection, not a lot of studies have been done on it, but the estimated, the estimation is maybe like 15 to 20% survival. And I think that that's why they get a lot of them just do not have the nutrition, the oxygenation, all the support to stay alive. Now add on this stem region that does one simple, very simple thing. It triggers the release of stem cells from the bone marrow. So you take these stem cells and you put them back in circulation, where now they get another opportunity to migrate in tissues and repair. Now do this, let's say, twice a day in the month or two following the injection, and you just magnify what was offered through the injection. I believe that this is the mechanism of action of combining the two, the two techniques together, stem cell injection and stem regen. So we're starting to do some studies to, to document this phenomenon. But we're a dietary supplement company. You know, studies are expensive, but, but that's what I believe is happening.

So these cells, when they all go back to the bone marrow and the bone marrow, has trouble sustaining all these cells. So somehow there's just not enough nutrients or.

I'm suspecting here that when you have a niche in the body that is supporting any kind of cells anywhere in your body, if you suddenly do double the number of cells in that area, it needs, in order to, to be strong and healthy, you need to have better blood circulation, better blood supply, better nutrient supply, oxygen supply, I mean, it comes with it. You don't get that within a few hours of a stem cell injection. So, so I'm just thinking you start to stress the tissue. And over time, it's probably one of the mechanism for the Low survival rate of injected stem cells. I believe that that's how it works. Now, one thing to add into the whole story that I told you when I say younger stem cells are better, that statement, which is true, I think, has been misconstrued in the general message that I hear a lot on YouTube and many places, which is therefore past 40 years old, your stem cells are worthless. And it's important to mention that the study that I just described on congestive heart failure, all of these patients were between 65 and 75 years old. And just on stem regen, they got quite a bit of recovery. So at any age, at any time in your life, in any age, if you can put more of your stem cells, whatever they are, whatever are effective, they are, your body will utilize them for tissue repair. Now, if you can include to that younger stem cells, then you just boost the whole process and that's what you're doing.

Yeah. So when you get them out of the bone marrow and back into the circulation, you think they will have a lot better chance of getting the proper nutrients and actually survive better?

Well, they get back in a place that is well oxygenated, which is your, you know, your arterial blood, where there's nutrients and where they have another opportunity at migrating in the tissue. Because at the end of the day, what you monitor and what anybody monitors is the quality of life of the patient. As you recirculate a lot of these stem cell, then you basically slowly give more opportunity for that tissue to absorb some of them and then just repair and, and be better.

Yeah. Amazing. So. So the congestive heart failure is one of the studies that you're actually able to, to do with clinicians. Are there other studies that you have been involved in?

Yeah, we're starting one. Actually. All these studies were, were ready to start early 2020 and something happened. I don't know if you've heard about it, but early 20th there was something called Covid, and in a lot of these countries here as well, but in Madrid it was pretty intense. Everything turned out to be essential services. And a study is obviously not an essential service. So everything stopped. So we restarting a lot of these studies. The congestive heart failure was one of them. We had one on Parkinson's, so that one is starting as we speak right now. One on Parkinson, we have one that is ready to start on diabetes, on colitis, they have not started. So this will be a little bit down the road. And we also have different labs working on animal models because it's one thing to show that you have a benefit, let's say, on Parkinson s or any of these type conditions. But you don't know in these individuals is it really because of the stem cell migration in the tissue? So you need to go on a mechanistic standpoint. You need to go into animal models. So we have a number of studies in preparation in animal models where it's a very typical simple protocol. You irradiate mice, whichever is the animal model, and then you inject fluorescent stem cells that have green fluorescent protein, the gene for green fluorescent protein. So any population of cells derived from one stem cell from the bone marrow, they will all be green. So you trigger, let's say heart attack. You trigger. Right now we have heart attack, we have spinal cord lesion, Parkinson. These are the kind of models that we're working with. So you monitor the improvement. But then you can easily see in the new tissue that has developed how many of these cells are, are fluorescent. And if you feed the animal Brdu Bri Bromo duridine, which is a, A, an amine base that go, a nucleotide that goes into the DNA, you can measure or identify the new cells. So that gives us an ability to show of all the repair that took place in a tissue. And all these new cells that have all included this bromodiuridine, which one of them is green. So it tells us how much of the repair is by stem cells or stimulated by stem cells. Because many tissues like the heart and the brain, what stem cells do to a large extent is that they migrate in that tissue and then they start to release paracrine. So growth factors that stimulates the intrinsic repair of neural derived stem cells or cardiac stem cells, they activate them. So to be able to kind of document all of that from a mechanistic standpoint. So these are, this is another set of studies that we're developing with all.

These studies and including animal studies. Are you guys going on the drug approval route? Is that something that's in the horizon?

I, I am not looking for this for a number of reasons, man. This has been on our, haven't seen our mind, but it's been something that has been there forever. And I guess what stops me of going in that direction, there's a number of reasons. Number one, if you go the drug route, then you need to have a really clear characterization of the ingredients. If I take a sea buckthorn extract, there's like, there's tons of polyphenols in there. Which one is the one that is the active, which blend which mix of those is really active? I really don't know the amount of research that needs to be done to do this and the amount of historical data that we have on other plants that when you use the plant extract, you get the effect, but any one of them does not give you any one of them. Components isolated never give you the full effect. So many pharmaceutical companies have sunk millions in that kind of research to at the end basically say the plant extract work, but the active compounds separated, none of them is really the active compound. So we need to characterize now five of these ingredients. It's just, it's not a simple task. That's number one. Number two, if we work with the concept here, the reality that the pharmaceutical world today as it is set up is designed to work with symptoms or a disease. I don't have a product here that has anything to do with a disease. It just supports a very normal function of the body, which is stem cell mobilization. These stem cells can go into the heart, into the lung, into the brain. It can help your body. But we have no, we don't do anything to disease. We just support your natural repair system system. So let's say we invest to go and document that it works for the heart. So now it starts to be prescribed for the heart. So I indirectly take it away from the people who take it for their pancreas, their lung or their brain or anything else. So of course there's off label, but once something has been really labeled for one condition, you kind of slowly take it off for the others. So I'm seeing what it does to people's life and like, why would I do one and not the others? And if I do all of them, you know, it's expensive, you know. But I would say probably the most important one is that both you and I are health advocate biohackers. The idea is like don't wait to have a problem, a disease, to start to do something. So the moment I describe something that is for one condition, then it's no longer something that is available to just somebody who's healthy and just want to stay healthy, healthy. The moment we document the role of stem cells, and we can dive into this if you want, but the role of stem cells not just in repair, but in aging with health. Then suddenly we've got probably the poster child of biohacking product or healthy aging product, or health optimization product, which does not belong to pharmaceutical. So I'm looking at all of this and I'm thinking by doing this, as I'm preaching That people must be responsible for their own health. And I take, I'm taking the product that is sort of the product for that kind of vision, and I take it out and I position it pharmaceutical. It seems so contradictory that I don't think we'll ever take that path.

Yeah, this is fascinating because when you're describing the obstacles to the drug, you know, going on the drug route is so similar to the whole biologics industry. You know, the trying to, the fda, trying to regulate the stem cells, the, or the exosomes, the entire, you know, the natural transplantation, you know, agents, that it's hard, it's almost impossible to separate out exactly what the cell's doing, what's the component. And how do you even standardize. Just like how are you standardizing, you know, each crop of the, the, the, the seeds or the, the herbs may be slightly different from the next crop. How to perfectly standardize. There's a lot of nature involved and the, the, the stem cells, you know, the DNA, what exactly is it secreting? And yeah, it's just, it gets so complex. It's a holistic soup that we're giving people. Right. So exactly. Herbal extract or from a cellular, you know, something that, you know, the universe made. How do you control that to the degree that the FDA wants? That's, you know, it's monumental task. Maybe it should not be regulated as a drug because this is not a drug. Maybe we're moving into a whole other way of healing the body. So instead of looking at something that's so simple with one molecule hitting a receptor or going around the body in a specific manner, that we're having, you know, 500 different molecules all working together all at once. And we've got to reach a system approach instead of the, the single linear approach. So that's something I think is a challenge for the, the health care industry. But yeah, so hopefully, you know, we have a whole new way of, of looking at this and whole new way of regulating it.

I hope so. You know, there is, you just described it very well. You know, the, the, the, the way that the current pharma approach and regulations for FD and all of that. It's not a criticism, it's really just an observation. It was designed in a way that absolutely cannot work for what was, what is slowly emerging, which is the depth here of, of sort of natural medicine, if you want. And I think behind all of this there is a, an assumption that we're not really conscious of, but it's a reality. It's the Assumption, I find it kind of a little bit ridiculous. But look back here, 20 years ago we discovered a bunch of things that were not known. Five years before that, 15 years ago, we discovered a bunch of things that we didn't know 20 years ago. And every five years we can look at a lot of things that we have discovered. And we don't draw the lesson that today, the decision that we make by thinking we know it all right now. So we're okay to make a decision today, today not realizing that in five years from now what we're deciding today is going to become, I wouldn't say obsolete, but will be changed. So let's take some wisdom out of that, let's take some distance. And I go back to what I was saying before. If something has worked for a thousand years, we're talking about the repair system. Twenty years ago, this whole understanding on stem cells did not exist. It's a whole new world in the body that has been sort of revealed. So if, if something has worked for a thousand years, I don't think that poking at it with a few assays here and there, with a very, very linear thought of going into one direction, looking at one molecule, gives justice really to what these natural products are, can bring to the body all the new science on epigenetics. God knows, you know, maybe some of these plants are acting somewhere that we have not even started to look at. All I know is that for thousand years they were, they have been utilized and people were very happy about the result that they got because they've continued to use them. To me, it's my guiding principle and how some of these sort of modern way of being analytically looking at plants, I think is limiting us.

Yeah, I so appreciate what you said about respecting thousand year old traditions that I've seen been, been lacking. And my first shock was when I was in UCLA Medical School meeting a MD, PhD student and I mentioned some, something about arc acupuncture and he said, you know, there's still no evidence that actually works. I was like, are you sure? Have you ever looked at evidence? Have you seen the reams and reams of studies even just, just showing the fact it works? Never mention, you know, never mind a thousand years or 2,000 years of tradition. But you know, I think there's such hubris in the medical field, you know, in what we think the modern science can do, as if that can wipe off, you know, the, the, you know, the tremendous amount of evidence that humans have accumulated, you know, over millennia. So the, the, I appreciate Your kind of humility that you're actually giving credits to, to how much humans have put in, you know, the efforts and the observation, you know, the fact that it has helped people so much and using that as, you know, some kind of a guiding, you know, guiding principle or, or some kind of just at the back of your mind showing respect for what that has, has proven. Yeah. So maybe we can talk a little bit about the anti aging benefits because you know, that comes back to what stem cells are, what they do, and why mobilizing them is going to help. You know, I'm in the anti aging field and a lot of people do come to me just for anti aging benefits. You know, a lot of the new, the biohackers, we all want to live long and live, you know, beautifully. So what, what, what have you seen and what are your thoughts on the anti aging benefit benefits of all these? The herbal concoction, to me it's probably.

The most, the most important of everything that we're looking into the whole world of stem cells. I think it's the greatest discovery and probably the one that is talked about the least. Because when you need repair, you don't need repair. Most of your life, you don't need repair, you need repair. Sometimes in your life, most of your life, you're just going on and, and, and have, and you know, living your life. And what we don't know is that when we, as we, we're simply living, stem cells are a crucial part of our, of our health and our survival. You cannot live more than a few minutes without oxygen. You cannot live, let's say more than two, three weeks without water. I'm talking about like survival. You cannot live more than maybe eight weeks without food. You cannot live more than three months without stem cells. It is that crucial to our survival because we lose cells every day and we need to replace them. And it's, that's the role of stem cells. And all of this emerged from observation. So go back to what I was talking about before you do a study. You, you use fluorescent stem cells, you trigger an injury and you look the repair process and the tissue that is repaired now is all fluorescent with green, let's say tissue cells, muscle, heart, whatever the organ. And what scientists have observed is that at the end of the study you are left with some animals in the study that you did not need for your study, but they received the whole treatment and the whole process. But you keep them as pets. It's very common in labs. So let's say you have, you do this on a 3 month old mouse and you keep that mouse until, I don't know, 12, 14 months, that's an old mouse. And now the question is, let's go back and see, what do we see then in the body? And what is revealed is that every single organs and tissues contain cells that are green, meaning stem cells went to repair, but in the background they went everywhere in the body. And depending on the tissue, some of them are all green, others partially green. So what is emerging is that the entire body is constantly in a process of turnover. So the question is, is this also real in humans? So, and there's one set of circumstances where you can go and test that in human and it's women who have leukemia and they received a bone marrow radiation, so bone marrow ablation and then a bone marrow transplant from a male compatible donor. So now their bone marrow is made with stem cells that have the Y chromosome. We can track the Y chromosome. So they went back into banks of biopsy of tissue taken after an autopsy on women who passed away a year, 5, 10, 15, 20 years after stem cell injection, stem cell transplant, bone marrow transplant, and then the whole image emerged. Every single organ and tissue, even in human, is constantly in this process of turnover. Only the heart was specifically studied, for which we have actual data. You have half of a new heart about every 25 years. But every organ is in this process. A new liver every two, three years, a new lung every four to six years, everything is in turnover. So now you look at this data, that means that when you're 50 years old, you don't have a 50 year old liver, 50 year old pancreas, 50 year old lung, you don't have a lot of cells actually that you're born with, with. Everything is in turnover. Now keep that in mind because there's another phenomenon that is absolutely fundamental to our aging and is the fact that we're born with red marrow that makes stem cells and it transforms into yellow marrow very, very rapidly in our lives. It's a very well known phenomenon. It turns into fatty marrow. And by age 30, you're left with about 10% of your original red marrow marrow. So that means that you're born at around, let's say 130 something stem cells per microliter of blood. And by age 30 you're about 6. And by age 50 it's probably about 1 to 2. So your ability to be able to replace the cells that are being lost, there's a point in your 30s where you lose that balance and that's when you start to accumulate a deficit everywhere in your body, body. And that's when you realize you're no longer Wonder Woman or Superman. You realize you're not repairing like you used to, and the little problems start to accumulate. It will reach diagnostic level in 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the road. But it has started on that day. So if you can put more stem cells in circulation every day, you're just boosting your body's ability to just do this normal process of stem cell replacement if you want, in your tissues. And to me, that is why being able to put more stem cells in circulation is probably one. I wouldn't say one of the most potent, but it's like a core anti aging strategy.

But mobilizing more stem cells into the blood actually reduce your reservoir in the bone marrow.

It doesn't. And I know that it's not something that is easy kind of wrap our minds around it. But I think the best analogy will be like a well, you know, a well you have like the water vein, and the more water you take, take the more water you have. Like you won't have. Your, your well is not going to go down. If anything, your well will provide more. I'm not saying your bone marrow will provide more, but what I'm saying here is that while your red marrow shrinks, the red marrow that you have at any point in life just produces stem cells endlessly. It's a, it's an endless reservoir of cells. Stem cells in the bone marrow have telomerase, so telomeres do not shorten. So these are immortal cells. So when you release them, they multiply like the amount of stem cells. Let me put it this way. They did a study to ask the question, when we inject stem cells after a cancer treatment, they normally inject 200,000 stem cells per, per kilogram of body weight. So, but the question is, when you extract these stem cells from a donor to inject in a recipient, you don't know of these cells, how many are really stem cells, because you cannot use antibodies those cells. So, so you try to do your best to extract stem cells. You don't know how many. So the question was, what if I inject only one if I'm sure that it's a stem cells, but I inject only one. And the study showed that if you do myo ablation, inject one stem cells, in six weeks, you've reconstituted the bone marrow in the blood, the whole blood system. So if you have 100 million in your bone marrow and you release 10 million, the 90 million that are left won't have a problem to maintain your bone marrow. So when you release more, you don't have fewer stem cells in circulation.

Well, that's very comforting to know. Yeah. So there's almost like the body has a homeostasis. So the new homo homeostasis, no matter even if it's a small amount of reservoir, it will maintain that reservoir.

Correct.

But it is a smaller amount. So you're going to release less. Less. So you.

Correct.

Allow it to.

Exactly.

Okay. I wonder if that stimulates the cells, you know, by allowing them to release more.

It could. This is all the kind of like basic research that I would love to do. So as we get more and more funds to do research, these are all the things to, to look at and other things to look at that we cannot say a whole lot about, because there's no research, because there's no drug known to do it. Therefore there's nobody has really invested in that research. It's stem cell migration. When you put them in the bloodstream, they're not doing anything in your bloodstream. They need to migrate in your tissue. That process of migration is really not well documented. So we focus on mobilization. But I believe that migration is also a very important phenomenon. And I'm saying this because as I'm looking at all these plants, when I studied medicinal mushrooms, mushroom, goji berry, and a lot of those polysaccharide type active compounds, after about 30 minutes after consumption, what we saw is a sudden drop in the number of stem cells in circulation. Our first conclusion is that that's it. Our machine is broken. Something is wrong. So let's clean the machine, change all of our chemical agents, clean up everything, redo it. And we got the same data. And after a few months, we realized that looks like it's real. And as we did a little bit more research, we found that the receptor CXL4 receptor that is responding to FDF1 released by injured tissues, that receptor increases, the number of them on the membrane, increases significantly after taking these polysaccharides. So that means each stem cell has a greater probability, more chance to respond to a SOS signal from tissue. So as they migrate, then they disappear from the blood. So when I. When we start to document some of those, that, when I start to combine them, because as we mobilize them in the blood circulation, they need to go into the tissue to really be effective. So if I stumble on plants that do that, then I'm including them. But scientifically, there's very little that I can say because it's not very well documented in the scientific literature. You know, when you publish, you need to discuss your data with other data. So in lieu of having that kind of literature, that means I then need to go into more basic research to document the process of migraine. It's a lot of money, but I. But I would love to do it. We will do it one day.

Wonderful. Gosh, thank God for scientists like you who want to go to, you know, get down and dirty and do the nitty gritty, you know, work. So I'm definitely more of a physician, you know, clinician. I want to. To give it to people, see what happens and, you know, get them to do better. But I don't think I have the kind of patience and tenacity to do the kind of research you do. So thank God for people like you.

It's funny because I was going to say I don't have the kind of patience to be a clinician and deal with people.

Oh, my God. Okay. Yeah, that's wonderful. You know, we can all shine in our own lane and then come together and work as a team. Yeah, it's amazing. So I always like sharing, you know, some real stories of people because it just. It gives such a perspective and it's very interesting. So I know you can't make any claims, but even just sharing some anecdotal stories of what you've seen that, you know, you know, after taking a combination of herbal extracts, what. What has it done for people? People maybe, you know, talk about a few difficult cases that. And then you've seen some benefits in.

I have seen so many cases. I guess the. In a general way, let me just say, anytime something repairs in the body, it's not part of the medical language that stem cells are part of that process. But we've got. We have to just let it sink in. In any time there is repair of something, it's the stem cells that have repaired. We never talk about it. You know, you break a bone, the doctor puts you in a cast and says, come back in six weeks. Doesn't say, go back home and let your stem cells do the repair. So do A, B and C to support the stem cells in their reverb process. No, come back in six weeks and we'll remove the cast. Stem cells did the job during that time. They repair, but it's not part of our language. And the reason why I'm saying this is that. That anything that is repair requires stem cells. If you put More stem cells in circulation. Anything that is better because of a repair process can be supported. We have cases touching just so many aspects of human health, touching the lung, the heart, the brain, I mean just about everything. But let me, let me speak about one because right now we're focusing on that one. Because one thing that I have learned over the years, it took a long time, so call me slow, but you have a product that technically is good for everything. So we say, hey, you release stem cells, anything can get better, while something that is good for everything is not used for anything. So that is something that I've learned over the years. We need to go much more narrow into how we present that sort of repair system in the body and the support of that repair system. So what is the emblem if you want of repair? It's an injury, it's a surgery. A surgery is a controlled wound. So we have started right now to work closely with surgeons and we basically, if you put more stem cells in circulation, it's invariable. What is going to happen is that instead of having local fibroblast in the tissue, in the skin, in the tissue under the skin, down to the muscle, connective tissue, all of that, if you, instead of having fibroblast kicking in to repair and creating scar tissue, you're going to have stem cells from the blood migrating in that tissue and becoming cells of that tissue in the skin. It's keratinocytes, air follicles, sebaceous, everything that you've got in the skin. So we have had cases of surgery or injury like a gash by a round saw, for example, accident, a round saw tearing the tissue, the skin, the muscle. And within about two weeks we get a very, very fine scar. The, the tissue has just repaired very well on its own, simply because when you put more stem cells in circulation, it repairs better. So now have a surgeon start to include a product that will put more stem cells in circulation. He is bound to have patient coming back and having showing a much more accelerated, like on the schedule, like 10 days later, they will be the patient that have recovered the fastest. And that's what we see. So this is one that is almost like across the board. So we're putting a lot of emphasis in that direction right now.

Yeah, that's wonderful. It reminds me of what I've done, which is giving people stem cell treatments right before or right after surgery. And that has become a really powerful testament to just how much the cells can help. Propel repair can shorten the recovery time, probably by you Know, make it two to three times faster, and then the healing is so complete. There's one time I injected some stem cells into a lady who just had gum surgery. And I injected right after she had the surgery and when she was still a little numb and healed so beautifully, like what you were talking about, the fibroblast. Because commonly there will be a scar that's, you know, that's visible, but with a stem cell injection right afterwards, it's complete, flawless. You would never, you know, there's no evidence that the gum was ever cut. It was just beautiful.

Yeah, we have a. We have a study like this in. I forgot about it in Turkey. So it's, It's. It's been done and the paper has been submitted, so I will be. I don't have access to it, so when it's published, I will have access to it. But it's a orthodontist surgeons that basically asked the question is about like two, two years ago. If, if we use a product that put more stem cells in circulation, can we help the bone repair faster? Because in terms of quality of life, there's so many. There's so many aspects of dental surgery that when you do it, you put. You put an implant in the bone. If that can repair faster, it has a lot of implication on secondary problems that can show up the time that the patient needs to go back for treatments. So they basically did that study, and I believe the animal model that they use is rat. I believe. But that's what they saw. By putting more stem cells in circulation, they got a faster recovery of the bone during that process.

Yeah. Well, Christian, this has been such a great, fascinating conversation. I really, really enjoyed it. Great nuggets that I think can inspire a lot of people. So you have a book, the stem cell Code. So I assume that's a cracking the stem cell code and that's on Amazon. I assume correct, yeah. And where can people follow you and just learning more from you?

Well, our website, Stemregen Co or on social media. Somebody convinced me about a year ago to start to do TikTok videos about STEM cells. So you go to stem cell, Christian? Some of them Instagram. But I do a lot of it on. On Tick Tock.

That's fantastic. That's definitely out of your comfort zone, right?

It is totally.

Tick Tock yet, probably for that reason, but bravo.

Well, I was told. I know nothing of social media, but I was told right now that's the time Tick Tock is. Is growing really fast. And in order to really build a wide database. And you know, Instagram is, is sort of, I'm repeating what I was told because I know nothing. But it's community based whereas TikTok is more interest based. So if you want to grow your reach in people interested into STEM sales, you will go faster through tick tock. So that's how I started to, to do a lot of, of these posting. But I'm, I'm good. I mean I'm probably like what, 200, 000 followers right now, so.

Wow.

It's going well.

Good job. Yeah. So I'm gonna put in the show note a, a coupon code for the, the STEM region product. So it gives people, you know, a little bit extra saving for, you know, for listening, learning from you and, and trying out this, this powerful product which I take every day. So I was like, I'm not missing out on this stem cell mobilization. Yeah. So thank you again and I look forward to seeing you at biohacking conferences and learn more from you. And so this concludes our podcast today and thank you so much, Christian.

Thank you so much, Joy.