Dr. Joy Kong explains why umbilical cord-derived MUSE cells are younger than a newborn's own stem cells. They have longer telomeres, stronger anti-inflammatory effects, and sit at a unique biological sweet spot between embryonic and newborn cells, making them therapeutically powerful at what she calls their "day zero."
10 years ago, I knew there was going to be this shift. These cells have longer telomeres, they have more generations left, they can differentiate into more types of cells, they are more anti-inflammatory, more neuroprotective. So it's day zero from birth, but embryologically speaking, day zero of you is at fertilization. When you were a fertilized egg, that was still you. You were, you were full of potential, right? Just incredible potential to produce any kind of cells in the body. These cells in the umbilical cord, when you look at the age of the cells, is actually in between the fertilized egg and the baby's stem cells. So they— baby stem cells, whatever that's floating through the baby's blood and whatever that's in baby's tissue. However, the stem cells from the umbilical cord are younger than the baby stem cell. They're in between the embryonic stem cells and then later on the baby stem cells. So they're actually sitting at this biological advantage point.
