118 Next Generation DNA testing with Dr. Stephen Fry of Fry Labs

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to another episode of Lyme Voice. With me today is Stephen Fry. Dr. Fry has a BS in microbiology, MS in molecular biology, and his medical degrees were all earned at the University of Arizona. He completed his postgraduate training at Banner Health and St. Joseph's Medical Center in the Phoenix metropolitan area. He has been in general practice in the Scottsdale, Arizona area since 1992 and has a very special interest in chronic fatigue, chronic Lyme syndrome, autoimmune, and vascular disease. He's lectured nationally and has numerous publications, abstracts, and patents. His science interests are in the microbial causation of chronic disease, biofilms, and their treatment. And I had the opportunity to spend several hours with Dr. Frye out in Scottsdale a few weeks ago, and I found it endlessly fascinating, took 6 pages of notes, and here we are. So thank you, Dr. Frye, for being here with us today.

Hey, thanks for the intro, Sarah, and it was really nice meeting you last month, and hopefully this will be informational and maybe we can help some folks out there. Okay.

Yeah, so huge. Testing is such a huge issue, and I feel like you guys are kind of narrowing the gap, right?

And there's some deficits, I think, scientifically in terms of microbiology, but you're right, we're getting closer. Okay, so my real interest came when I had patients in the '90s when I first started my practice who were chronically ill, fibromyalgia. And what really did it for me was I had a patient with fibromyalgia, an older woman, and she gave me a book by Henry Scammell. It was on the bestsellers list called Why Arthritis? And it was about Thomas McPherson Brown, who was the chief of rheumatology at George Washington University. And Dr. Brown, uh, was one of the first champions for using tetracyclines and rheumatoid arthritis and the autoimmune diseases. Actually, when the '90s— out to visit his lab, he died in '89 of prostate cancer, uh, but he left a legacy of a laboratory run by his PhD, Dr. Coker Van. Went out, looked at his lab, and I started using his principles and treating this gamut of patients And the tetracyclines really help these patients. I started initially with minocycline, and so I said these patients really— but, you know, I started with fibro, chronic fatigue, branched out into rheumatoid arthritis and even expanded even further years ago before I even thought about Lyme disease. And I saw this work on them, and these were patients that usually really didn't do well with traditional therapy. Say for RA with Plaquenil or methotrexate or something like that, and they would turn around on minocycline or doxycycline, and it was okay, there's something going on here. And so ethically and morally and as a physician, I did not have a problem prescribing these medicines because I would put teenagers on minocycline for years to control their acne. So I said, you know, you know, physician do no harm. I couldn't really see the harm in it. Yet they got this tremendous benefit. Okay. I actually had, you know, patients who were in wheelchairs, and a year or two later they would be walking and they were able to, you know, move their hands around. And so I saw these changes. So then, and also chronic fatigue, I was very interested in that category of patients. I mean, these are perfectly healthy people where they were stricken by some illness, and then, you know, months later they were in bed all day with headaches, joint pain, and muscle pain. And I had a little different insight because here in Arizona, I had people where I don't even know if we have ticks in Arizona. I know we see them on dogs once in a while, but we almost never find Borrelia in the ticks that we do find. I think they've found some in the mountains, so I sort of had a different viewpoint. But we have plenty of mosquitoes here, so that sort of changed my viewpoint on people But I started asking, have you been bit by a tick or mosquito or anything back in the later '90s? I felt that there was something going on that was vector-borne. And then I was invited to go to the Lyme disease meeting. I think it was in '03, and that was the first meeting I went to. And I had already developed some tests in my laboratory and really the stains we were using. And then I was asked by some of these Lyme physicians to do that. And that's sort of enabled me to incorporate our laboratory. So we started doing simple stains, went to serologies, autoimmune screening, and then in '09 we started doing molecular, and then in 2012, 2013 we started doing sequencing. So, and the sequencing, we were the first commercial lab in the United States, maybe worldwide, offering DNA sequencing for infectious diseases. And we now have 9— we just got 2 more patents in Europe. We've got 9 if you include internationally, probably have about 12 or 13 patents right now. And that's on developing a system to pick up all microorganisms. And we use the, you know, the National Center for Biologic Information database, where there are millions and millions of different types of organisms in that database, and we sort of match it up. So again, my drive was, let's figure out what's wrong with these patients that are chronically ill. It's got to be an infection of some sort, and that's been my, you know, I'm totally convinced of that. The question is, what infection do they have? You know, this knowledge, this capability of determining exactly what's wrong is very powerful in terms of trying to model a therapy for these patients.

Yeah, that's huge. I think it's fascinating that you were putting the pieces of the puzzle together back in the '90s saying, hey, this can't just be ticks.

Yeah, and it's because we just I mean, you know, I certainly would have people coming from other parts of the country or on vacation or something about tick exposure, and I would get positive Lyme tests on these patients. But here in Arizona, we just— it's, first of all, it's too hot. We know the Lyme belt sort of starts to end when you get into West Texas. Those studies have been done. It's just too dang hot for Borrelia in the ticks for carriage. And but we have plenty of mosquitoes here in Arizona. We have— usually we're in the top 3 in the country for West Nile virus. We have encroachment of some of the viruses that are in Latin America, I think. Arizona is a hotbed for West Nile? It was, a couple years it was. So you don't understand, we're a desert, but we have rivers and estuaries and ponds. You know, it's warm here, it's hot, and so it's a good breeding ground. I mean, mosquitoes can breed in a thimbleful of water. And so we have rivers, we have irrigation, We have lakes and ponds in Arizona, okay, especially in, you know, around the Phoenix metropolitan area, also around Tucson. And then my patients actually that came up positive for some of these mosquito-borne viruses, now that I'm checking, they're in a river system up in central Arizona that has known sort of swampy areas, okay, where there are mosquitoes there. So they're out there. Most people don't think about that. So we even have the Anopheles aegypti mosquito south of Mogollon Rim here in Arizona, and that is the carrier for malaria. Okay, global warming, we actually think we have malaria in northern Mexico. So we actually think some of these diseases may start to encroach into southern, southern America, southern Arizona, you know, California, Texas border, that area. We're sort of diverging out a little bit, but, you know, this is informational. So anyway, I just try to keep as a microbiologist an open mind.

Yeah, I think that's huge. So I got to meet you. I got to meet several of your staff members. And one of the things that I was just overly impressed with was literally like how much you guys care, because it is— you said this— it's hard to find a physician who cares about a complicated illness. And it's hard to find anyone because even the fact that you like chronic fatigue syndrome in the sense of like, oh, okay, how do we solve this problem? That's not the mentality of most practitioners of like, how do we solve this problem? It's like, this is a hard problem that's not solvable for most people. And you have a very different perspective.

Well, you know, if you talk to any patient with autoimmune disease, whether it's multiple sclerosis or rheumatoid arthritis, and lupus, they'll have chronic fatigue. So I saw that connection back in the '90s. And so it was really sort of a spectrum or continuum. So you would get a patient who they were exhausted all the time, might have a headache or something like that. And of course, I was in primary care. I would follow these patients for years, if not decades. And eventually a chronic fatigue patient would roll into full-blown autoimmune disease with, you know, a lupus or an MS or an RA diagnosis. So, so it was really sort of an evolution. But again, I was convinced with huge bias as a microbiologist that they had some kind of infection. And again, that was the challenge of starting and initiating, doing, you know, simple tests leading to PCR, leading to sequencing, which I really believe is part of the answer. The other part of the answer is developing new serologic tests.

And, uh—

Why is that part of the answer?

Part of it is we know, for instance, I'm interested in viruses, okay? And we'll take some examples. We know that, say, in West Nile virus, Zika virus, we've heard of before. I like chikungunya 'cause it's been studied extensively. We know a lot about it now on a molecular level. We're isolating it in the synovial cells in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Also, it's related to multiple sclerosis. Is that these viruses attack you, your immune system mounts a response, and usually in the blood, it's called a viremia. After about 6 to 8 weeks, you don't find it in the blood anymore. And of course, this is where we normally would look for it. And, uh, we do know now that in West Nile virus 1 or 20% of patients have had West Nile, you can isolate live virus in their urine 7 years later. That means they still have active virus in their system somewhere. And, and I think there may be other ways to look at tissue and fluids on a molecular level to see if there's something going on. But a quick, simple, easy thing would be to develop some sort of— then we're looking at it some sort of general immunologic test. There's some on the horizon where if you look at their T cells and their T cell response by stimulation, you can see if they've been exposed to a certain virus in the past. The problem is the assays now, as we look at them, are way, way too expensive. So I think there's a better way of doing it. It's just, you know, our lab got diverted by COVID. You know, 6 or 7 months ago. And so we've sort of had to drop everything else and work on that. But the good news about that effort is that we've been involved and now we're partnering with one of the major corporations, biomedical companies in the world, to automate DNA sequencing to make it more accurate and actually more affordable. So, I mean, it's really— the other thing that COVID-19 has taught us The drugs that me and a lot of other Lyme doctors have been using and rheumatologists have been using actually have potent antiviral activity. So my favorite in these autoimmune chronic fatigue patients over the years evolved into ivermectin. Well, ivermectin is horse medicine, right?

Yeah.

And I kind of started— when I first started using it on request by a patient about 13 years ago, They got so ill and had such a terrible reaction to it, I would never go there again. But then some of my other colleagues that I would meet at the Lyme disease meetings were using it and getting good results with it. So I tentatively started using it again and more and more and more. And for some patients, it worked and it worked great, got them on their feet and got them asymptomatic in months. So it doesn't work for everybody. But it turns out that that's probably the best single agent for COVID-19. It's now in use in, you know, government-sponsored and 30 countries around the world. Uh, NIH is now look— doing a, uh, study on it. Uh, I've actually been on the phone with a couple of my colleagues. They're using that plus doxycycline to treat COVID. No one seems to go to the hospital. It's cheap, it's available, and you don't have to use a whole lot of it. So this was discovered kind of around the same time in India and Peru, where people who were being treated for parasitic infections coincidentally developed COVID and that they were getting better. And the doctors noticed this, spread word of this around. And around the same time, the Australians did an in vitro study testing the thousands of drugs available out there and found that ivermectin was one of the best agents in the test tube against COVID-19. So now we have some bench work that says the same thing. Okay, also this, uh, Dr. Raoult out of Marseille, he was using, uh, Plaquenil and azithromycin to treat COVID with excellent results. And this got popularized or depopularized by the president earlier on that the chloroquine or Plaquenil work. Well, Dr. Raoult showed it actually worked very well and it does have antiviral activity. So all of these drugs that we've been— and also doxycycline is another one. All of these drugs probably have some broad-spectrum RNA virus inhibitory activity. And, you know, it's sort of a hint at what we may be dealing with in both autoimmune disease. You know, this is like clinical response to these agents. Maybe that's what we're doing. So it's another, you know, kind of leg of the stool in terms of figuring out what's going on with these folks. And these drugs are reasonably safe. I actually think ivermectin is very safe.

Well, and I took, I took ivermectin both times I went through treatment, and a lot of people do. I mean, it's just a normal, it's a normal part of the Lyme community, really.

Yeah, so it didn't, it did not used to be. This was, uh, probably, I think a lot of us got into it maybe about 8 years ago. And, uh, yeah, and so I give an example. I had one patient He was doing Border Patrol work in Texas, uh, came off the field once along the river, um, the Rio Grande, with 32 ticks. He did test positive for Lyme disease, but it didn't seem to work very well. Eventually, he got better on ivermectin, but once I added doxycycline, he was fine and never came back again. So higher dose ivermectin for him, doxycycline He was fine. Okay, so he picked up something other than Lyme disease, I think, you know, when he got bit by those ticks. And, you know, any study that we look at looking at ticks, they're just full of different microorganisms. I think there was one study out of Maryland, and I think 32% of the ticks, when they— we did a molecular analysis of the ticks, had at least 2 and then it was, uh, oh, 25% had 3. And I think Garth Ehrlich presented some data at a meeting where, uh, there's just a bite, and he's doing sequencing now on a research basis where the ticks are just full of multiple organisms. You know, it's like I was talking about Coxiella burnetii, which we do serology for. Our PCR or our molecular equipment picks it up, and it turns out we weren't really sure where people were getting it. But Garth showed that we— it's in ticks, okay, in the Northeast. So you have to remember there's more than one organism that these ticks carry. And then in the whole subject of viruses, we know they exist, we know they're in research labs, we just don't have tests for them. And that's a real problem.

Yeah, but it feels like you guys are kind of bridging that gap.

I mean, yeah, we're trying, we're trying to.

Yeah, from my perspective, when I do a coaching call or get contacted by someone and they say, where do I go for testing? And it's just, it's, it's this ongoing discussion of, well, where do you live? And do you have someone who can read the results? And right, and will that, will your physician actually accept that test? Or should you just wait, find physician, go with the test that they prescribe and that sort of stuff? One of the things that you mentioned that I feel like is really, really important is that you're saying it is not just a bacterial infection. There's a lot going on with people who have this chronic—

It's not just Lyme disease. Literally millions of other organisms out there. And so with what we call agnostic DNA sequencing, it's not just the panel. We think it picks up just about everything. Okay. So by this process of elimination, and we've done, you know, I probably treated thousands of patients over the last 28 years. Had sequencing since 2013, and then we've probably done thousands of sequencing, you know, tests on patients around the country and the world. It's sort of— some people actually do have bad bacterial infections. Some people really have recognizable, say, valley fever. Some people do have toxoplasmosis. Some people have trypanosomiasis. So sometimes we see it in the microscope. All right. But when we don't really— don't find anything else, it's almost like there's a default to Well, maybe this could be some sort of viral infection. Okay. And then, you know, one interesting area is when you look up these arboviruses, ketoviruses, the alphaviruses, they're like 35 in the Western Hemisphere. They all have the same symptoms: fatigue, myalgia, arthralgia. You know, we know about this. Okay. If you get it, promise there's no test for hardly any of them. Okay. So that's, that's the challenge. All right. And again, this COVID has really taught us a lot. It's horrible. I mean, a lot of people are dying. A lot of people are gravely ill. It's dramatically affected our economy. Hopefully this vaccine will be available in this month, okay, at least one of them. And I think the two messenger RNA vaccines that will be available probably, I think, will probably be safe because they're synthetics. They're not done in cell culture.

What do you mean? Are you saying there's two new—

Yeah, Moderna and Pfizer have mRNA vaccines. Okay. So these are molecular constructs. So to understand, you have to be sort of a molecular person the way we are. If they're not grown in cell culture, it's not proteins that are grown up. These are actually synthetically— think of them as chemicals, those synthetic messenger RNA that are manufactured on a machine. You put all the base pairs in, it constructs it, you know, it builds it, and then they make a lot of it. And that's the vaccine. It's not like a killed organism. It's not grown in a vat with a bunch of cells, HeLa cells or something like that. It's actually a chemical, okay? Think of it that way. So DNA sequencing, we're dealing with the chemical deoxyribonucleic acid. That's a chemical, okay? Think of it. It's just a complex chemical with a complex structure of the 4 bases, uh, ATGC— adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine, okay?

One of the things that you had said when we were in person is you were just talking about how in the human body there's 250,000 miles of blood vessels.

Yes.

And that you really believe that chronic fatigue is this huge, huge life-altering issue that a lot of people deal with because chronic fatigue is just like, okay, get up and deal with it. That's how chronic fatigue is labeled. And I was literally told Oh, you probably have chronic fatigue because you have too many kids. And your viewpoint was so different in the sense of like, okay, we have 250,000 miles of blood vessels and those blood vessels could be filled with bacterial infections, fungal infections, all sorts of other things. And this issue of chronic fatigue, chronic fatigue syndrome is not little. It's really the catalyst for all these other massive issues. Am I remembering that correctly?

Yeah, it's, it's, you know, what causes fatigue? There are a lot of different causes. You know, it could be viral, it could be vascular, could be an infection, you know. So chronic fatigue syndrome, as defined by, say, you know, we have the Fukuda syndrome. You can look at our 2018 article. Is it 2018? Yeah, I think it's a 2018 article about that. Let's backtrack a little to this vascular disease, which is sort of a favorite topic of mine. You know, we're trying to investigate using new spectacles, so to speak, or microscope, and looking at older diseases in a different way. For instance, plaque. So I had this suspicion when I was a pathology resident— when I was doing heart dissections and brain dissections that the vessels were just— the plaque was just this yellow, tough material. And we all assume that it's just calcium deposits and fat and cholesterol. But then I went in 2003 to the International Biofilm hosted by Bill Costerton, bless his heart. And Bill, very impressive character, a real smart guy. And they show these pictures of pipes clogged up with biofilm communities, and it looked just like plaque to me, vascular plaque. So we finally did the study in conjunction with my friend and colleague Richard Heuser, who invents stents, and he's probably one of the world's top interventional cardiologists. So we piggybacked on some of his other studies They got fresh plaque from carotid filters, you know, venous emboli, and then on the side, we actually got coronary plaque, and we did next-generation DNA sequencing on these materials, okay? And the plaque and clots are just full of bacteria, fungi, protozoans. They're alive, okay? They're alive, okay? So we have a real interest in vascular disease, but, you know, that process is an ongoing living process. These organisms are alive.. And our bodies have found a way to deal with it, to keep it under control. And so what we call aging, you know, the number one cause of death are heart attacks. Well, what if it's really just a slow progressive infection that finally plugs up everything and produces a stroke or heart attack? Two, two top causes of death. Anyway, vascular disease. So again, I think I'm a proponent of this viral load concept where we get exposed to viruses throughout our lives. And eventually we don't handle it very well, and it's sort of set up for secondary disease, as I've talked about before. Okay, so again, I have more of a global concept about it, you know, the complexity of these biofilm communities, the interrelationship between the host, your body, our diet. Diet's huge in terms of health for chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease. And then, but we also have some just really nasty bugs out there that really, once you get that, you know, diet and exercise help. But I think, you know, they're just, they're just tough bugs to treat. But again, it's back to let's figure out what they are and come up with a model for treatment. For instance, COVID, we found out what COVID was reasonably fast. They grew up in culture. We were able to sequence it early on. We got the sequence for it. And they were able to grow it in a test tube, and then all the drugs that we know about and all the herbs we know about, and that gave us a lot of ammunition and information on how to treat it. Okay, also enabled us to develop a vaccine and vaccines. And so, you know, it's a coronavirus. Have we ever come up with anything for the common cold? A lot of the common cold viruses are coronaviruses. So maybe this is a step to a universal polio virus vaccine. It's synthetic. It'll be, I think, a safe vaccine. It's messenger RNA. And that's a whole new approach for vaccines. It was the first— I think they're the first messenger RNA vaccines. Okay. And it looks like they work.

One of the other things that I appreciated about your organization, about Frye Labs, is that you guys, in addition to running all the tests, will also do a consultation of explaining what those tests mean.

Yes. So I really, from the community, you know, I retired from clinical practice 3 and a half years ago, and this summer, plus the need for COVID and everything else, I actually got back into it by popular demand, and I do some teleconsulting. I have to limit the hours because we're really engrossed in our R&D and the clinical side of the practice,— but I think we're one of the few labs in this arena that offer that. And again, my resources are limited, but we do offer that. And we have no problem, you know, I have doctors that call me, I just had a doctor call me earlier about, you know, how do I interpret these results. But that's one of the problems with our sequencing in terms of adoption is the physicians still are unfamiliar with the technology. And again, sometimes you'll get a lot of data. If you do a sputum sample, you'll have 15 different bugs in the sputum sample, and they don't know how to sort that out, what's important. We see that frequently. I've been doing this for a long time, I'm a microbiologist. So that's important. So this is another reason why we wanted to do, it's called direct access testing, allow patients to order this to enable them to get the test done themselves. And some of the results may be simple to interpret, the others, They'll have to go to their doctor and hopefully get some interpretation from them. Again, I'm open to talking to physicians nationally and internationally about those results. We're actually trying to engage some infectious disease, but my colleagues in that arena right now are happy to do it. The problem is they're so bogged down on the wards right now taking care of their really sick COVID patients, so they're exhausted, tired, and sort of swamped right now. But I think that'll change in 2021.

Dr. Frye, where do you think— where do you see Lyme disease and these autoimmune issues 30 years from now with our medical system, with our nutritional system, with things that— life as we know it? What do you see unfolding in the next 30 years?

Where are we going to be? Well, I think we have tidbits of evidence now. COVID, we're seeing autoimmune disease with that virus. I think it's not the body's reaction to the virus, I think they actually still HIV virus. And if we follow the— actually, the Brazilian rheumatologists and scientists have been doing some really great work on chikungunya. So chikungunya is a virus from Southeast Asia, Africa, came in at Christmas of 2013 into San Martin in the Caribbean, spread like wildfire through the entire southern, you know, southern hemisphere, Latin America, and Millions of people have been exposed to it, but they found that— and the main complaint is arthritis, okay, fling arthritis in about, uh, you know, half of the patients initially. And then they did a study at 2 years post-chikungunya, 1/3 of patients developed rheumatoid arthritis, okay. And so what they did with newer capabilities, now molecular capabilities, they went into the synovial cells, and the synovial cells actually are chock-full of the virus. So what I think we're going to find is a lot of these autoimmune diseases are caused by primarily RNA viruses. We'll be able to come up with, you know, detection methods that show that's true. The ultimate answer would be a vaccine. And I think now we have an example of a safe mRNA. It's a synthetic vaccine, just a chemical that will be able to make that may address this broad variety of at least 10, if not hundreds of different viruses that we know are out there that could be causing disease. And in terms of chronic Lyme, I think these spirochetes and other microorganisms absolutely play a role. Again, it's not just one hit. You know, our prostate work that's not published yet, we show in prostate cancer this complex community of bacteria and fungi, and then we prove that using fungal stains and the production of ochratoxin, you know, that may be that complex relationship there that's really developing a disease process. It may not just be one organism, it's this combination. So again, we have this new powerful tool to enable us to, you know, analyze it in a different way.. For instance, in our prostate work, we couldn't find anybody who in prostate cancer work had done a full fungal analysis of tumors. It's— we couldn't find a paper in the literature dating back through the NCBI or all the databases. And I was very surprised. If someone knows of one, please send me the articles, okay? That'll help us with support for our paper that we're trying to get published.

So, but you guys are diving into the prostate side of things saying— Yeah, different diseases. But you're also saying like people with prostate cancer are showing up to have high fungal counts?

Yes. Yeah. And that's actually a surprise. I got into that project because in my general clinical practice, I had guys in their 40s who would go on a trip somewhere like up to the Great Lakes or go to South America and they come back not feeling well, flu-like symptoms. And then over, you know, 4 to 6 months, they would get this fatigue thing going on. They recovered from that. Within a year or two, guys in their 40s would come down with prostate cancer, and I probably had 10 guys over my career from '92 to, you know, 2015 who had that, and we finally, you know, did the project. We're now seeking funding to expand that project Wow. To do more cases and dig into it some more and actually look at therapeutic options.

Wow.

One of the things you had said in person is you said that you have found that throughout the country there's these pockets of disease. Yes. Yeah.

Explain what you meant by that. Well, you know, it's like if I can talk about your experience yourself, I think you said you were camping in the mountains in New Mexico. Yeah. And you knew of a lot of other people who had gotten sick in that area. And so I think we know this, the Bitterroot Valley in, you know, the Pacific Northwest, you know, I think that's at Montana. And we know that that's a hotbed of Rocky Mountain spotted fever. And then we know they're like Lyme disease. Lyme, Lyme disease is actually geographic. It really concentrates in the Northeast mostly. But as we get further south and further west, we see less of it. All right, but I think we have pockets of this, and this is well known in microbiology. It's like Ebola. Ebola is harbored probably by bats or monkeys or something in the Congo, and we know there are probably areas where you find it. We don't really find it anywhere else, and it comes out once in a while. I know that one friend of mine went camping in Colorado, just like your experience, and got bit by a lot of bugs, and You know, and they still have problems. We don't know what bug it was, but, you know, they're passing on something that we just don't have tests for. Okay. And for instance, West Nile here in Arizona, we know that it's around where the mosquitoes are. So that's a pocket. Also rabies. And actually, it's Rocky Mountain spotted fever down in a southern county here in Arizona.

So we see pockets of disease all over. Yeah, it's interesting because with so many of the things that you were saying are just like, oh yeah, of course there's pockets of disease throughout the country, throughout the world.

That's what we call it, whether it's bats or animals, or there's a particular ecosystem or something that supports propagation of those organisms.

So, so what's interesting is you're saying it like a simple thing, right? Because you've figured it out over a lot of years, but never once— in seeing tons of practitioners, did anything like that ever come up? Ever?

Anything?

There was no comprehension of like, hey, where could this be coming from when you come to a physician with chronic fatigue?

Right. Well, there's a lake in New England. I won't mention the state. And if you live within 10 miles of that lake, you have one of the highest incidences of ALS in the country. And then I had a patient from Montana. There is one of the largest freshwater lakes west of the Great Lakes there. In his church group, there were 20 MS patients and 10 ALS patients. Okay, so there's something— and we already know in the neurology circles, we know there's a relationship between bodies of water and getting Lou Gehrig's disease. We know that association. Okay, so water— is it the mosquitoes, or is it, say, an algae that's an aquatic algae that we found in these tougher ALS patients? I don't know, but we know of that association between bodies of water and getting disease. Okay, so we have to be, you know, again, again, we're more open-minded about what could be wrong with people. So it's not just really Bidorfi or Abscelli. There are other microorganisms out there.

And that's— I talked to so many people who have done multiple tests and Lyme didn't come up, right? Or whatever they're looking for, this bacterial infection or Bartonella or whatever it is. And I think the thing that I took away from my conversation with you was like, that's okay. Like, they might have something else.

Yes, yes, you have to be open-minded about it. Okay, so really my idea is let's eliminate the possibilities and think of, well, it could be something else we know about, we just don't have a test for it, and use that as ammunition. Now, let's— a little bit— there's a caveat to that. Well, you can have a bacterial infection that really doesn't show up in your blood, but it may be localized somewhere, okay? You always have to remember that. But we can't very well go in and cut everybody up and sample, you know, a liver sample, a kidney sample, a bladder sample on everybody. So really, we inexpensively default to looking at a blood sample, maybe a urine sample, or stool sample. That's sort of an indirect, non-invasive way other than a blood draw to see if there's something going on. So it's sample dependent. And for instance, now in our COVID work, our assay looks like it will detect it. Okay, one, it won't miss it. So it's probably— so COVID, the RNA virus, okay, looks like our new assay that we just applied for approval for, at least from our data, it's probably 3 to 4 times more sensitive than the traditional qPCR that most folks are using. And in terms of specificity, in other words, you know, how often, let's say, if you get it, you know, is it negative? Well, it's negative compared to the comparative assay. We are picked up, say, in 30 samples, we'll pick it up, up another 2, 1 or 2 cases. Where the other assay would miss those. So we know this new type of technology sequencing is very accurate and sensitive. So if the organism is there, we'll probably pick it up.

Wow. But it has to be in the sample. All right. How do people get in touch with you, Dr. Frye?

Where do they go? Well, we have a website, fryelabs.com, and it's— it needs revamping. It's been revamped. We just haven't gone live with it yet. We have a few things to clean it up. We would like to offer it, we think we can, for direct access testing for most people. Can order a kit, they pay for it first, just like on a cart. They get a kit, they have to go get a urine or a blood sample or stool sample somewhere taken. Fortunately, the main labs, it looks like, depending on the state, like LabCorp and Quest, They will almost always require a doctor's order and a diagnostic code, but some other labs don't necessarily require it. Depends on the state you're in. They have phlebotomy services that will do it, and it depends on the phlebotomy service. So, uh, and then there's a group called ArcPoint. They do draw services for people. You don't need a diagnostic code. The only problem for that with patients with no diagnostic code or a doctor's order is reimbursement. Okay, but we've brought our prices down to where they're very reasonable. And, uh, we do provide, uh, procedure codes when we send out our super bill so they can submit it for that. Okay. Um, yeah, so on the old site the prices aren't listed, but basically our Borrelia test, you know, $1.99, you know, or like $199, and any additional serology is another $100. Uh, our stains, $199. Each additional stain is $100. Sequencing $895 for 16S or 18S, but for both, $1,195. That's a deal. Let me just explain the sequencing. Other labs are doing— there are a handful of labs doing DNA sequencing out there. They're doing what's called shotgun sequencing. It has an inherent inaccuracy. We do what's called amplicon sequencing, so it's much more sensitive. So it doesn't get confused by human DNA at all. So it's much more accurate.

We think it's better. Well, and I feel like because of your intentionality and your scientific interest in the chronic fatigue realm, that you are bridging those gaps. I mean, just talking to you, you guys have continued to adapt and modify and you're always creating some, some new option for people to understand what's going on.

Right, right, right. So, so generally clinically, if you don't mind if I get into the clinical thing, I found that this is just advice for your audience. It's hard to do if you don't feel well. It's like grandma said, go outside, get some fresh air, get some sunlight, try to move around. Okay. You know, we know patients with fatigue syndrome and everything, they have vascular issues. And then I've recommended a whole food plant-based diet for for 11 years now. I've seen dramatic improvements and I recommend people read The China Study by Dr. Colin Campbell. Go to John McDougall's website. These guys are, you know, scientists in food science. There's nothing wrong with that kind of diet. It has all the protein you need if you do it appropriately. And I, I have ideas of why people do better on that diet. I'm not exactly sure, but these fresh fruits and vegetables are full of antifungal, antiviral, antibacterial agents. These are the chemicals in fresh fruits and vegetables. And it seems like high fat seems to fuel disease. I actually looked it up the other day. A lot of viruses, their replication require a higher fat content. That's like the craziest thing I ever found, but it's true. And then think of if you've got a microbe growing, like any test tube you're trying to grow. What do we give it in a test tube? We give it sugar, we give it amino acids, and that makes it grow faster. So, and most people know sugar is a no-no. Changing to a diet like that seems to help. And then something new— hyperthermia. It's not new, it's been out for ages. We know it works for people with arthritis, you know, but we've known now that people seem to do better having a sauna or something like that. But it's probably not warming the core body temperature up. But we know, and it's in the literature, but people may be helped by, say, a hot tub, but stay in longer. So I recommend, if possible, 101, 102 degrees for up to an hour every day. Okay. So what it does is it inhibits, say, viruses. It inhibits some organisms. It also, interestingly enough, cranks up your immune system.

Makes it work better. You know, it's funny, I didn't know—

I wrote it down that you recommend— what? Yeah, I'm just talking about simple things that people can do to improve their health that really don't cost a whole lot of money that may make them feel better.

Yeah, I did not know that you recommended a whole food plant-based diet when we started this. I had written it down but I'd forgotten. And it's interesting, I've done it a few times, um, and I'm actually thinking of putting my son on it because he has Lyme. And one of the things, just from my own reading and stuff, is it seems to actually prevent vascular issues.

Oh no, that's actually documented. So the— actually, the best study— yeah, that's Caldwell Esselstyn's— his third study was published in American Family Medicine about 3 or 4 years ago. So his third study was about 200 patients. So he took people who had had just had heart attacks And one group— and that's Esselstyn, E-S-S-E-S-S-E-S-T-Y-N, Caldwell out of Cleveland Clinic. He basically took patients, half of them went on a whole food plant-based diet, the other half— both groups were on Crestor, I think it was 40 milligrams a day. So the number of people who had additional heart attack in 3.8 years in the study was about 70 or 80%. So the number of people who had another heart attack on the whole food plant-based diet group and 3.8— so many— nobody, nobody. Yeah, no one had another heart attack in the whole food plant-based diet group. So we know in large population studies of whole food plant-based diet, Seventh-day Adventists live roughly 15 years longer than the average American. That's huge. So we have this added lifespan of doing that. For multiple sclerosis, we know that this is a 1990 Lancet article by Roy Swank. It wasn't totally a whole food plant-based diet, but it was mostly plant-based. Roy Swank followed MS patients for 32 years who were put on that diet, who stayed on that diet. No one died of MS in 32 years, or the death rate was dramatically lower in patients who modified their diet. You know, so diet's huge.

It is chronic disease. It is huge. And I'm, you know, thinking of my own journey and I've done keto over and over again and have done well on keto.

Yeah.

What are your thoughts on keto? I used to follow my patients on keto. Dr. Campbell calls that the cancer diet. Okay. I call it the heart attack diet. So short term, maybe fine. Long term, not good at all. And also we have the China study, which is a study of the entire population of China. Chow and Lai came down with renal stomach and said, okay, we're gonna find out what factors are. So knowing Dr. Campbell and his expertise in nutrition, he was included in the design of the study. So I had like this 350, 370-word questionnaire, question questionnaire, and the whole population was surveyed. And what they found out, that these poor rural peasants who were mostly eating vegetables all day, very little meat, and actually were healthier than city folks who had money, who were eating meat and dairy and all that other stuff. That's called the China Study. And, and there are multiple studies and populations— for instance, breast cancer. Okay, they're gonna shut us down for this information, but it's in the China Study in the book. There's a straight-line relationship between the amount of dairy consumed and the incidence of breast cancer. So if you take countries like Thailand or these Southeast Asian countries, They do very little dairy. They have virtually no breast cancer. The opposite, the highest dairy consumer country is New Zealand. The United States, Great Britain, we have the highest breast cancer rates in the world. Wow. So it turns out that casein protein and dairy is a tumor promoter, very potent tumor promoter. That's actually Dr. Campbell's work. At that time, he was at the Department of Agriculture when he did that work. Mm-hmm. But then all this information is suppressed because the egg and dairy lobbies are very, very powerful.

There's a lot of information regarding our health that is being suppressed.

Yeah, big business. That's life. Yeah, you just have to be informed. You do. Be an independent thinker and read, and don't believe everything you see on TV. We're all being manipulated by, you know, different powers. So just keep an open mind, as I try to keep an open mind, and try to be diverse in your media sources. Read and Just be somewhat critical in your thinking about things.

Use your common sense. Well, I really appreciate your time. As always, you are a wealth of information, and I think it's so valuable for people to know. Like you said, to be a— it's each episode does not solve someone's specific problem, but in general, each episode contributes to some piece of someone's puzzle, and that's what matters.

And you have a wealth of experience. Right. Hey, thank you very much for this opportunity to reach out to everyone.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, Dr. Frye, uh, what keeps you going? I know, I, I know the amount of hours and intensity and passion you are putting into Frye Labs.

What keeps you going? Well, you know what, as I got back into, you know, just, uh, you know, intellectually getting back into helping patients again, it was the— it's the problem solving. Okay. It's trying to figure out what's going on, trying to help. And then, I guess I have compassion. Physicians get burnout once in a while, I guess. Going into semi-retirement for 3 years, I got into woodworking and more travel and all that stuff, but you can only do that for so long. And, I just had demand from the community to get back into it and I forgot how much I enjoy trying to help people and trying to, you know, that problem-solving what's going on. And then I just have this quest in our laboratory to, you know, push the envelope and develop new tools to help us figure out what's the underlying problem with someone's illness. So, you know, we— I, you know, you take people who are perfectly healthy, you know, look at these people. It was on 60 Minutes last week. And I think it was— was it this Sunday? Last Sunday. And they talk about these post-COVID patients who are perfectly healthy. You know, athletic runners, everything else, then they're stricken by this virus and they can't seem to recover. Okay, so I don't think there's anything wrong with the person genetically that much, though genetically they may have predisposition for that particular infection. But, you know, it's infectious diseases. That, that's, you know, and the thing is, the infectious diseases community in general is looking for these acute problems, and that's what they're very good at. But we sort of push these chronic illnesses into other areas such as neurology and, you know, rheumatology, that sort of thing, you know, and general medicine. But they all could have an ultimate causality. It's just some sort of infection, you know, of microbes that we don't have tests for. For— I'll give an example. For bacteria, we can only culture about 2% of the bacteria that we know about now. Yet medicine still relies primarily on culture technologies to tell someone whether or not they have a bacterial infection. Wow, that's an astounding figure. Yeah, for instance, my daughter came down with myocardial disease, I think it was almost 5 years ago, and she struggled for 6 months. She— they were lining up for pacemaker and ablation. We finally did DNA sequencing on her and she had a well-known microbe that was initially isolated in shower curtains and around bathrooms and water in Europe, and she'd been to Europe, and her arrhythmia definitely reversed in 3 days on Bactrim, the right drug, and in 30 days she was dramatically better, and now she's had complete recovery in 5 years of her muscle, yet she was so bad that her chances of living were about 50/50 at the time. So, and then we have another patient with elevated PSAs, biopsies, everything, He's actually a testimonial on my personal website. His oncologist agreed to put him on an antifungal drug, and in 3 months, his PSAs are normal, and they're still normal after a year and a half. Wow. So, it's like that. So, this is the power of the technology. But again, because in medicine, we have a standard of care, you know, if you have a new bug or a new understanding, getting, you know, mainstream clinicians to step out of the box a little bit and to change what they've been trained to do is very difficult. Plus now, most physicians work for a group or a hospital chain, and they have to go by algorithm and not necessarily use their brains anymore. And I'm not being overly critical, it's just this is our training and this standard of care, and we have, you know, and it's litigation also. We have to stay within our framework now, okay? And so who suffers really? It's the patients who suffer from the rigidity of the system.

Well, I see both sides. I see the practitioners fighting just as hard to treat the patients as the patients are hoping to have the care. Right.

Right. Both fighting the system. Right. So in, in general, I mean, I think our medicine does a pretty good job overall, especially for acute stuff. Very good job. It's just when we get into the chronicity diseases, It's a bigger problem, but I think through molecular diagnostics and molecular tools, we're gonna be able to figure this out. Like you said, in 30 years, you know, 30 years is a long time. I mean, for instance, you know, what was it, 10 years ago, for us to sequence an isolate was $50,000 for one organism. Okay, now the work we're doing right now, we'll be able to sequence an organism, probably reagent cost will probably be less than $20. Okay, so that's the revolution in our field that's going on in both bioinformatics and data processing and the tools we have available and the automation that is coming online and the chemistry that we're working on. Okay, so that's the future. So it opens up a lot of horizons. For instance, I talked about this National Center for Biologic Information with 72,000— 72 million entries. Well, 4 or 5 years ago, we only had like 100,000 or 200,000 entries into that database. Okay. So the field is just exploding. So I think we're going to be able to do a lot. For instance, this response to COVID, unheard of. Here we figured out in just a couple of months what was going on in China. We had a test for it just about widely distributed by February, March. And in roughly 8 or 9 months, we now have not one, but maybe two, maybe three vaccines. The normal process for a vaccine is 8 years. So again, these are molecular techniques and modern things that we have going on in the biomedical industry that are changing things. So 30 years is a long time for a lot of changes. Okay, so I think it's an interesting question. I think we're going to see a lot of changes and a lot of these chronic diseases probably addressed by then.

There's hope.

Okay.

Good to know.

Thank you so much for being with us today.

Okay, take care.

Yeah, thank you.

Disease is contrary to life.

Therefore, wherever disease exists, life must also fight to exist.

Good job fighting, Lyme fighters. Keep it up.

We'll see you next time. LymeVoice contains general information about medical conditions and treatments. The information is not advice and should not be treated as such. Okay, Lincoln? Okay. The medical information on LionVoice is provided as is without any representations, warranties, expressed or implied. Okay? Okay. LionVoice makes no representations or warranties in relation to the medical information on this podcast. You must not rely on the information on this podcast as an alternative to medical advice from your doctor or other professional healthcare provider. If you have any specific questions about your medical matter, you should consult your doctor, or other professional healthcare provider. And for you, you consult your parents, okay? Okay. If you think you may be suffering from, from any medical condition, you should seek immediate medical attention. You should never delay seeking medical advice, disregard medical advice, or discontinue medical treatment because of information on this podcast.

Got it, Lincoln? Got it.