Dr White (00:00)
A scientist in Japan, was studying MSCs and she made a mistake. And the best and most discoveries in science are made by mistakes where a scientist sees something different and then investigates it.

so that happened with her. She was culture expanding MSCs. She went away after what she thought she was feeding the cells, but actually she put trypsin on them. And trypsin is an enzyme which should kill the cells. It brings them off the plate and should kill them. She went away, and she came back much later. She realized her mistake and instead of throwing the flask away, she took a look. And what she found was there were still some cells alive.

Claudia von Boeselager (00:15)
Mm-hmm.

Dr White (00:38)
which, and they shouldn't have

Claudia von Boeselager (00:40)
if the answer to living longer, healthier lives is found inside the fluid that surrounds us before we are even born? My guest today believes it is, and he has the FDA clinical trials to back it up.

My guest today is Dr. Ian White. Ian is a leading expert in regenerative medicine, stem cell biology, tissue regeneration, and longevity science with more than two decades of experience across academia, industry, research, and clinical translation. He is the CEO and chief science officer of Neobiosis, a perinatal regenerative tissue research and manufacturing company, and serves as chief scientific officer at Ways to Well.

His background includes work at Dartmouth, Harvard, Cornell's Anseri Stem Cell Institute, and the University of Miami's Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute, where his research explored regenerative biology, stem cells, and cardiac repair. He also founded the Space Aging Research Institute, which you're going to dig in today which is competing for the $101 million HealthSpan X Prize, the world's biggest prize in longevity science. What makes

Dr. White's perspective especially valuable is that he sits at the intersection of science, clinical application.

Claudia von Boeselager (01:52)
manufacturing, longevity, and policy. He's not only working on the of regenerative medicine, but has also been involved in helping shape state-level legislation.

Around access to stem cell and regenerative therapies. Today we explore the future of regenerative medicine, including perinatal tissues, muse cells, tissue repair, longevity,

Stem Cell Regulation, Safety, State Laws, and How to Promising Science into Real World Care. Please enjoy.

Claudia von Boeselager (04:31)
Ian, welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast. I'm so excited to have you with us today. It's been a couple of years, I think, in the making, but this is such an exciting topic and your work is really incredible. So I'm beyond delighted to have you with us today.

Dr White (04:42)
Well, it's my pleasure. I do remember us meeting for the first time and it was quite some time ago. We've been planning to do while. So really excited to talk with you today.

Claudia von Boeselager (04:52)
So, so excited. I remember the conference where we first met and it was so funny because I kept asking you questions. I was so fascinated about your work. And you're like, are you sure you really want to know this? Like, are you sure I'm not boring you? I'm like, no, no, I actually genuinely find this really fascinating. And Ian, what I think is also so fascinating is that you've been doing this for 20 years, which is a long time to be dedicating yourself to one field.

And I'm curious, what was the moment that made you think stem cells and regenerative medicine? This is it, this is what I want to spend my life on.

Dr White (05:22)
Well, that's kind of the funny thing is that there wasn't really a conscious decision at the beginning. My career kind of evolved. At the very beginning, I was interested in how parasites interact with the immune system. And so at the of Tropical Medicine, I studied how parasites utilize signaling modalities. And, you know, we didn't know it at the time, but we were really studying exosomes.

But these parasites use exosomes to modulate the immune system so they can survive inside a host. And I just found that fascinating that the immune system could be manipulated like that. And so I sort of pursued that for a while. I ended up coming over to the United States, studying at Dartmouth, and then I got a fellowship at Harvard to study the immune system. And things kind of evolved from there. When you study the immune system, the next... logical

evolutionary step is to study the immune stem cells. So I studied stem cells for quite some time and then the next evolutionary leap is trying to understand how the body is made and how the body fixes itself and then of course why it doesn't fix itself as we get older, what changes. So I went from studying parasites to the immune system.

and from the immune system to studying immune stem cells and then stem cells in general, and then how stem cells contribute to repair and regeneration, and then ultimately what goes wrong to cause the aging process.

Claudia von Boeselager (06:43)
So really, really excited to dig into there. So thank you for following that thread in the last 20 years of your career so that you can share this wisdom with us with the world. And something that I found really profound as a mother is that the amniotic fluid, right? So the fluid that surrounds the baby in the womb that nourishes life at the very beginning is part of the clue to longevity, as you're believing, right? This is what you say. So how did you arrive at amniotic fluid stem cells? And I use that word

lightly because I know there's different definitions and we need to get into that but just to start there for people that mightn't be that familiar. So why do you believe that this is such a powerful implication for longevity?

Dr White (07:20)
Well, it kind of combines two different interests of mine, biology and also physics. But really what it comes down to is I was sitting in a lecture when I was a young scientist during my PhD. And I remember seeing a video of a limb of a salamander that had been resected. So a scientist had cut off the limb of a salamander and then taken photographs of that limb over the course of several weeks.

and stitched those images together into a movie. And so what I was seeing was a movie of a limb regrowing. And that just blew my mind that an animal species not too dissimilar from us could have a whole limb removed and regrow it. And so I became interested in trying to understand why we are different. Why can we not regrow tissue like the salamander? And so I started studying this

ability to regrow tissue. And what I learned was that there are certain signals between the nerves and the blood vessels that coordinate this tissue regrowth. And we just don't have that as adults. But interestingly, we do retain it when we're very, very young. And so my interest for most of my academic career was in cardiac regeneration. So why doesn't the heart regenerate? Why doesn't the heart repair?

And what I learned was if we take a very young heart, in this case, we were using mice as a model and we take it out and we studied in a Petri dish, everything's dying. The tissue's dying. There's nothing we can really study other than necrosis. But if we take those very young signals from birth, that signal between the blood vessels and the nerves, and we supply those back, we supplement the Petri dish with those. I could actually keep the heart alive.

And I could keep it alive for weeks. And not only that, if I injured the heart, and this is the most exciting thing, I still get goose pimples now just thinking about it. When I injure the heart, the heart repairs itself. So it was these very young signals that are present at birth that we lose almost immediately as soon as we're born that were conferring something very, very important. So I started studying these young signals. I got introduced to the idea of heterochronic parabiosis.

Claudia von Boeselager (09:08)
Wow.

Dr White (09:33)
which is this idea where you take a young mouse and an old mouse, you're able to suture them together and then the old mouse gets its sharing something from the young mouse. So we've since learned that these exosomes and growth factors that are present in a young mouse can confer longevity or wellness on an older individual and actually turn back the clock on that individual. So studying these young signals, it sort of made sense to try to understand, well,

if we can harvest them from mice, can we harvest from humans? And I started studying pregnancy and of course what we learned was that pregnancy is a natural form of heterochronic parabiosis. You have a young individual and an old individual sharing a blood supply and the young individual is making all of these exosomes that the mother is sharing. So when we say that a pregnant woman glows,

it's largely in part to these exosomes and growth factors that fetus is producing that is going through her blood supply in order to improve her health to deal with the rigors of pregnancy. So we started studying that and we found that actually you can harvest this amniotic fluid. And in fact, they've been doing this in medicine for over a hundred years. It just hasn't really been very mainstream. But if we harvest the amniotic fluid at full term birth, so a cesarean section, the baby's born, it's unharmed.

we're left with just what we would consider medical waste. We take that amniotic fluid that has all those young signals that I've been studying and we give it to an older individual, we can confer the ability of that young individual to heal the older individual like they would as if they were young.

Claudia von Boeselager (11:08)
Which is super exciting. And obviously, multiple questions are gonna come up. And I'm sure some people listening are like, this is suspicious. Like, how can this be possible? Why is not everybody doing it? how much research is behind it? Let's put it that way. You said they've been doing it over a hundred years. How much clinical research is behind it? Are there any scenarios where it's you know, for the Obviously, there needs to be certain testing of the individual that is transferring also these exosomes So

Can you walk us through that process and also understand the background and the scientific research behind it?

Dr White (11:37)
Yeah, so of course, any of the material that's collected is collected by an FDA registered tissue bank and they go through all the typical processes of testing the material in a clear certified lab. It's not necessary important to understand what clear means right now, but it's a certified laboratory that's allowed or capable of testing material to demonstrate that it doesn't contain any infectious disease, that it's sterile, et cetera, et cetera. So.

And once the tissue is tested, we go through the medical record to make sure there are no issues with or the fetus. And once that checks out with our chief medical officer, then we're able to process the tissue and then turn that into a product. But like I said, yes, it's been studied or used for over a hundred years. The study has really sort of taken off in the last five to 10 years. And in fact, there's about two to 300 clinical trials that are ongoing currently, and you can look them up on.

clinicaltrials.gov. And in fact, we have a clinical trial approved by the FDA currently for our purified amniotic fluid fraction. We call that VIX001. And that's the product we're able to use for post-COVID syndrome symptoms and other indications. We've used it on burns and other indications like diabetic ulcers that just don't heal with any conventional medicine.

If you apply this product topically, we're able to heal the diabetic ulcer, which is quite an amazing feat. So there are a lot of studies we're publishing our observations and our work. The research, like I said, is really taking off, especially in the last five to 10 years. And with all the clinical trials, we're getting real world human data that supports the safety and the efficacy of these products. The problem is these data are being hijacked by a lot of counterfeits.

when you have success, inevitably there are going to be counterfeits out there. And so there are companies popping up now that use our research and the research of others in the industry to sell a product that isn't validated and hasn't been demonstrated through these rigorous protocols. that's sort of really the danger of the industry is these snake oil salesmen coming on board using the legitimate science to sell a product that isn't validated.

Claudia von Boeselager (13:46)
I want to touch on that after so to help people understand what they need to look out for and to make sure that they are you know, if it comes to that using and selecting a practitioner that is using the best in case product. and I also want to touch on the research, people need to understand why it's so costly and so difficult to fund research and it's a very counter intuitive in terms of how big pharma typically functions and what they want. So those are topics that we'll touch on later.

But just to circle back to the amniotic fluid, and maybe you can walk through the landscape of different types of what do you call them? ECVs, what's the right terminology to help people first of all get it because stem cells is not the correct word, but people obviously have framed it like that. But can you walk us through the landscape of the different sources and then why?

In your opinion, the amniotic fluid, as you mentioned before, is the most potent. And I remember seeing a statistic that in one CC of amniotic fluid, it contains four hundred billion exosomes, which is just I think it's more than four times the number of stars in the Milky Way. I mean, that's just to put things into placement. So is that not wild? really, really crazy.

Dr White (14:41)
You

Yeah, that's an interesting

way to put it. i never thought of it that way amniotic fluid ⁓ an amazing material. yes, there are many different components. So often people phrase anything in regenerative medicine as stem cell. But of course, there are no stem cells in these products. We provide a therapy.

Claudia von Boeselager (14:48)
Yeah, so can can you

Dr White (15:03)
that activates and nourishes our own stem cells. So the stem cell therapy term really refers to therapy that our stem cells are receiving in order to activate them, in order to get them to to work and regenerate and repair our tissue. But many clinics perhaps don't fully understand the terminology and they claim to be providing stem cells, which they are not, especially in the case of amniotic fluid. It is Acellular, which means there are no cells in it at all.

However, it is full, as you said, of exosomes. It's also full of growth factors. And those exosomes contain what we call cargo. And it's basically, you can think of it like a FedEx package. So a bowl of lipid, and it's full of signals and information that the cells need. So our healthy cells that are able to repair and regenerate liberate. They send out these messages in these little packages.

to the cells that need help. And those packages are able to find due to inflammation and bind to the cells that need help and then open up and deliver the cargo, the signals into the that needs it. So these exosomes are critical modulators of inflammation and tissue repair. But also we have over 400 bioactive growth factors and cytokines in amniotic fluid as well. Again, remember the baby is making this

amniotic fluid to grow its tissues, to mature its skin and its eyes and its gastrointestinal tract. But also the mother uses it. Her physiology improves with the amniotic fluid going through her blood supply. So those growth factors, which include hyaluronic acid, which you're probably very familiar with. It's something that's added to a lot of different cosmetic products, but it's also FDA approved for osteoarthritis because it's a great analgesic.

It reduces pain. It reduces inflammation. But also, Klotho. I know that you're very familiar with Klotho. Klotho is a big name in regenerative medicine. There are some great books out there about Klotho right now. Joe Cleaver has a very good and comprehensive book if anybody's interested in learning more. But Klotho is a protein that was discovered that associated with longevity. So if we look at mice, for example,

Claudia von Boeselager (16:55)
Can you share about it? Mm-hmm.

Dr White (17:12)
If you were to supply Klotho to a mouse, you can actually increase its longevity, its lifespan by up to 30%. And if you take it away, if you block it, the mice dies almost immediately. It dies very, very quickly. So Klotho seems to be related somehow to the longevity process, keeping us alive longer and healthier longer. Now there are a lot of mechanisms that we know are associated with Klotho, but we don't know all of them. And we don't know necessarily how Klotho contributes to longevity, but

What we found is that Klotho is abundant in our purified amniotic fluid fraction because it's made by the fetal kidneys and the fetal kidneys are what are responsible for making the amniotic fluid. So we've got this huge abundance of Klotho, naturally abundant human Klotho. So not a synthetic version that you might find out there somewhere. This is a natural human version of Klotho and it's abundant in the amniotic fluid. So while we don't fully understand how the amniotic fluid works,

We know it has a lot of exosomes. We know it has a lot of growth factors, hyaluronic acid, but also Klotho. And we think all of these things together are contributing to what we see in the repair, the regeneration, and the extension of longevity.

Claudia von Boeselager (18:22)
It's just such an exciting space and I'm curious your view as a little like side tangent because I want to come back obviously to all these exosomes, but can you define for people regenerative medicine and what comes under that spectrum in regenerative medicine and what you're and what you're excited about?

Dr White (18:38)
Well, so the difference between regenerative medicine and stem cell therapy is that, of course,

when you're talking about stem cell therapy and you're specifically using actual stem cells, for example, MUSE stem cells, which I think we're to talk about a little bit later, that's one thing, but regenerative medicine is actually the full gamut of products that you can use in a therapy setting. So whether it's exosomes, whether it's growth factors, peptides, or even a cellular product, there are non-stem cell cellular products that we use in regenerative medicine. And also non-cellular products

structural products. Wharton's jelly, for example, is a product that can be extracted from the umbilical cord. When it's rendered correctly, we can get a gelatinous product that can be injected into joints, for example, and acts as a very good surrogate for synovial fluid. So the fluid that protects the joints, when that erodes and the cartilage starts rubbing against itself, we can actually inject Wharton's jelly in there to protect those joints and reduce inflammation and

illicit repair. So anything that contributes to repair in the regenerative sense, we could call regenerative medicine. Again, stem cells are a small part of that, but there are many, many products. Amniotic fluid is one of those products. But again, it's not a single product. It's a combination of products that the body naturally makes. Just like if you're building a building, you don't just turn up with bricks. You turn up with cement, bricks, wiring.

woodwork, all of these things that the builders need in order to build a building. same case with amniotic fluid. The fetus is making this in order to make a baby and also improve the health of the mother. So it has pretty much everything the body needs. All those different signaling modalities so they can work together to get a regenerative and a reparative response.

Claudia von Boeselager (20:23)
And I think that's such an important point that these are all the things that are produced by the body be it from peptides, right? People think peptides are there, like, what is this? And it's dangerous, etc. But actually your body's producing them, they just decline with age. So there's again also signaling molecules that are helping with regeneration

Dr White (20:35)
insulin is a peptide.

we make insulin, then when we stop making insulin, we need to take a synthetic peptide insulin.

Claudia von Boeselager (20:40)
Exactly. In instant.

Exactly. And so I think for people to really understand that with regenerative medicine, it's not more chemicals that you're pumping into your body. I think we're so kind of brainwashed from all the commercials on the television about these like synthetic medications, etc. But it's allowing your body to heal like it wants to heal, but as we age and in the different insults that we have from our environment and from ingesting things and the microplastics and the toxins, etc.

Dr White (20:53)
video.

Claudia von Boeselager (21:06)
We get off balance. And so it's allowing us to sort of recalibrate And then using these phenomenal tools that babies use, right? So if it's good for a baby, then it should be good for us as adults and for the mother as well, so should everybody be having these regenerative medicine therapies, would you say, Ian, as we age? what would be if you had a magic wand, what would you say?

Dr White (21:15)
and gives to the

let me first address the point you made a second ago, which is a really good point that the way the pharmaceutical industry has evolved is that as we break down with age, we identify one specific thing that's wrong. And then we use a synthetic chemical to try to over stimulate that pathway. And so that's not particularly good for us because we're not really looking at the body as a whole. We're just trying to.

fix that one thing that we've identified by over expressing a particular protein or a particular synthetic pharmaceutical. And that's not how the body heals. The body heals globally. And so it needs a range of signals. And as you correctly identify it, as we get older, we progressively lose all of those signals. We don't just lose one, we lose multiple different signals. And so if we're going to repair, we need as many of those signals back as possible. And that's where the amniotic fluid comes in.

it has many different components, all made by the fetus to grow its own body, but also to feed and nourish the mother to prepare her for the rigors of pregnancy. So the body has evolved over 7 million years, 300,000 years modern humans, but all of that evolution has identified the signals the body needs to repair itself. So that's all we're doing is listening to nature and we're back and supplementing back what the body needs.

Claudia von Boeselager (22:43)
Yeah. So I hope that for people listening that there's less fear around it or suspicion just because it hasn't been in mainstream media since, you know, the beginning of time. And then it's also thinking, well, who benefits from you having to get sick and forcing pills on you versus regenerating and not actually getting sick And Ian, maybe you can also share some of the most profound scenarios or use cases essentially or cases that you have seen in terms of

regeneration, I guess is the right word, but repair from people who were unwell.

Dr White (23:12)
Yeah. when I first started working in the regenerative medicine space and producing products that people could use, I was introduced to a gentleman called Brigham Bueller, who has appeared multiple times on the Joe Rogan show. And he's testified to the Senate and things about peptides and regenerative medicine.

So on Joe, and if nobody's seen or heard Brigham speak, you should definitely look up the Joe Rogan show with Brigham on it. But it really opened my eyes to how we've been misled with the pharmaceutical industry and modern medicine and that the medicine and the tools that we have access to today have essentially been withheld from us.

the pharmaceutical industry can't make money off of regenerative medicine because there's nothing that you can really patent or there's very little you can patent because the body makes this stuff. You can go and you can get it and you have it. Whereas the pharmaceutical industry will invest billions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars to make billions back protein that they've patented. And so it's very important for them that they protect that. So

We've had a very hard time getting these products into the mainstream, not because they're dangerous or they don't work, but because we've been prevented and the public has had them withheld from them. But now that we're able to get them out there, as you know, certain states are changing their laws and they call them stem cell laws, but it's really a regenerative medicine law. But Florida was one of the first as well as Utah, and there are many others now. And in fact, the federal government is starting to look at different ways to regulate

Claudia von Boeselager (24:35)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Dr White (24:40)
regenerative medicine because it's so effective and so inexpensive compared to some of the other pharmaceutical alternatives. But what we're seeing is our patients that come to clinics that use these products that have no There's nothing else in conventional medicine that's working for them. I'll give you one specific example. There was an individual, she had an autoimmune disease, it's called Red Skin Syndrome, where

Her whole face and chest and arms and legs and red and sore and itchy. And she was like that for five years and nothing was helping her. She tried all the different medications. She was on and off steroids, but it wasn't really helping. And then we gave her purified amniotic fluid Within a relatively short period of time,

she started to heal. And in fact, she had to have a few follow-up doses, but then she went into complete remission. And so we basically changed this individual's life, but not only her life, her entire family, because her kids never really knew her well. She was always sick and there was nothing in the pharmaceutical industry that could help her, nothing at the hospital. Her doctor had no access to anything. She went to a regenerative medicine clinic.

received these products that were developed by nature over millions of years to deal with the immune system, to deal with tissue damage. She was able to utilize those and see repair in a very short period of time.

seeing it all over the place some of the other areas that we've been publishing on this is the use of these products for diabetic ulcers and bed sores. Because traditionally, a lot of diabetic ulcers don't heal. No matter what you throw at them, they just don't heal. They keep getting larger and larger to a point where you have to then reset the limb. You have to cut off the foot or the hand because the...

Claudia von Boeselager (26:00)
And was it a

Dr White (26:20)
ulcer also just keeps getting so big. But when we apply this product topically, what we see very quickly is a reduction in pain. We see a stop in the growth of the lesion, and then we see a reversion. It actually starts to close up, and then eventually you have baby soft skin with no scar. We get revascularization, so the blood system reconnects, and the nerves reconnect, and it looks like there was no injury at all. And this is all naturally evolved through pregnancy.

that we're able to take and utilize in ways that patients had access to before.

Claudia von Boeselager (26:54)
It's so incredible. And were these intravenous or how would they apply to was it a topical spray what is the most impactful?

Dr White (26:58)
Many of them are topical.

Yeah, so you can apply it many different ways. So for example, if you're looking at a knee or a hip, that would have to be an injection to the knee or the hip. I had tennis elbow and I received an injection in my elbow. I also had a frozen shoulder and I was in absolute agony for a long time and the physician was able to hydro dissect. So the tissue was impinging a nerve and they hydro dissected. So they injected the amniotic fluid into the space, which essentially tore it apart.

tore it away from the nerve, but because it's an analgesic and it stops pain, I was in relatively little pain and then the inflammation was reduced and it healed very quickly. So for months and months of pain, after four days, I was down to about 10 % of the pain level. By two weeks, I was completely pain free after months of agony. those need to be injected, but when we're talking about the diabetic ulcer, it was simply applied topically. And we do cosmetic.

applications as well and it's all topical whether

What do you call it? We call it zits in England. So even with severe acne, it can be applied topically and we see a reduction not only immunomodulatory, modulates inflammation, which is part of the issue with acne, but also it's antimicrobial. It's naturally antimicrobial. that flora imbalance in the skin is actually rebalanced.

Claudia von Boeselager (27:59)
acne.

Dr White (28:17)
with the amniotic fluid. we're seeing great results there too. Again, just with topical applications, quite amazing.

Claudia von Boeselager (28:23)
I have a question on that because the skin is our biggest organ and you know, speaking with different experts they say it's a reflection of your gut health. And so, and obviously with skin an acne can be hormonal imbalances. So while it clears topically, is it solving for root cause or do you think also that it could return because of perhaps imbalances in hormones or gut health? Just curious about skin. What do you think?

Dr White (28:43)
that's great

question. So one of the misconceptions in the regenerative medicine or stem cell field is that it's a silver bullet. It is not. it needs to be applied in conjunction with other modalities. So if your diet is very poor, if you're consuming a lot of sugar, you're really not doing yourself any favors at all. Sugar is one of the worst things you can put in your body. And in fact, it will undermine the work that the regenerative medicine is trying to do.

if you're consuming a lot of sugar, it's very inflammatory. It's very bad for us. So yes, you can apply the product topically if you have acne or if you have other issues, but if you're not balancing your hormones, if you're not reducing your sugar, improving your diet, improving your sleep, then really you're throwing a cup of water onto a blazing fire. So you're not really doing what you need to synergize all the different modalities. And that's the beautiful part of regenerative medicine.

It's personalized precision medicine. If we go to Ways to Well, for example, you get a full panel blood work to tell you exactly what's going on with your body, and then they can design a protocol specifically around you. It's not just, okay, you present at a doctor's office, they check the box, and they prescribe you something that a thousand other people would have that day. Personalized precision medicine looks at your entire biology and prescribes for you.

what your body is lacking, what it needs, whether it's hormone rebalance, whether it's a regenerative medicine, whether it's peptides, all of these different modalities synergize, they work together.

Claudia von Boeselager (30:12)
Question on that, are they just looking at the blood panels or are they also looking at DNA, so genetics and RNA

Dr White (30:18)
So I don't know if they're looking at RNA. That's a good question. Definitely genetic profiles. Obviously, we're predisposed to many different things. So getting an idea of that is very important. Same thing with food intolerance. It's a very good idea to get an idea of what we're intolerant for and what could be causing and contributing to inflammation. it's not just a blood panel. They do a full analysis, heavy metal analysis as well, to make sure they understand why you're not feeling

100 % while you're feeling off.

Claudia von Boeselager (30:44)
I also want to look at topic very close to my heart. My mother with passed away last year, dementia. And we know that over fifty-five million people worldwide are suffering with some form of dementia. Maybe the number's even higher that we just don't know yet. When we look at these cognitive decline diseases, essentially, what does regenerative medicine hold as a promise for supporting this as part of an ecosystem? Right. So we know it's not just the silver bullet, but

Where do you see the exciting opportunity potentially for people suffering?

Dr White (31:13)
Well, I'm actually writing a book right now about how regenerative medicine contributes to the anti-aging process. And the premise essentially, revolves around entropy. So I mentioned at the very beginning, I'm interested in not just biology, but the physics of biology. And so I don't want to get too into the weeds with this. but essentially as we get older, we accumulate damage, we accumulate entropy.

And that's one of the reasons why in older age we see neurodegenerative decline. But if we're able to rebalance that by sort of turning back the clock and purified amniotic fluids are these very young signals, again, I don't want to get too into the weeds, but what starting to understand is that they appear to be able to turn back the clock. So you heal like you would when you're younger, but also you're able to process entropy like you did when you were young.

So the older we get, the worse we get at processing entropy. So things accumulate, for lack of a better word, let's just say that things accumulate, junk accumulates. senescent cells, plaques and all kinds of things, because we lose the ability to dump entropy, to process that waste material. And so if we're accumulating plaques and debris in our brains because we lose the ability to clear it, if we can turn back the clock to when we're younger, we might have the ability to clear.

Claudia von Boeselager (32:09)
Mm-hmm.

Senescent cells, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Dr White (32:32)
all of those junk materials like we did when we were children or even babies. And so is that as we utilize and study regenerative medicine, specifically amniotic fluid and young signals more, we're gonna learn that these accumulated or these diseases that are associated with accumulation of damage and waste might actually be able to reverse because we're giving the body back the tools it needs to remove that junk.

Claudia von Boeselager (32:58)
my previous guest that I had on Thursday was Dr. Dale Bredesen. I'm sure you've come across his work in neuroscience. And surely there must be some trials that they've regenerative medicine and using these exosomes.

Have you seen anything? Have you seen some scientific research on that? Or otherwise I feel like you need to speak with Dale as part of his next clinical trial, like, you know, throw the kitchen sink at it. Already he's getting incredible results from his trial, but obviously the cohort is small and funding is obviously an issue 'cause of the cost. But have you seen anything? I'm curious.

Dr White (33:14)
yep.

Right.

an

yes, but what I see most of the time is that scientists, as you just pointed out, need money to do research. And a lot of that money comes from grants. And when you apply for a grant, you need to show precedence. You need to show that what you're proposing may actually work. And you do that by saying, look, all this science behind me, all this other stuff that's been published,

Claudia von Boeselager (33:32)
Yep.

Dr White (33:46)
suggests that my approach may work because they've done something similar. And most of that work revolves around MSCs. Now, MSCs used to be called mesenchymal stem cells, but we in the field argued for many years that they're not stem cells because they don't have the phenotype of a stem cell. They don't behave like a stem cell, but they are in fact mesenchymal signaling cells. But what happened in this industry is that everybody started studying MSCs because of the precedence. Everybody wanted to say, look,

Everybody else has studied MSCs. They show they do something in regenerative medicine. I want to study MSCs. So most of the trials and studies in regenerative medicine use MSCs. But in my experience, MSCs aren't necessarily the best modality to use. And in fact, perhaps purified amniotic fluid, or what we're seeing now with MUES cells, is that these are perhaps the best modalities to use. But very few people have actually been using them.

because everybody's jumped on the MSC bandwagon and everybody's wanting to publish MSC work to get the grant money to fund their own research. So yes, there are a lot of studies around neurodegenerative disease in regenerative medicine, but they're very narrow and they often will focus on MSCs and they're not quite yet looking at the broader scope, which would include purified amniotic fluid exosomes and Muse cells.

Claudia von Boeselager (35:03)
So this is really exciting frontier. And I want to touch on the muse cells because I'm excited to dig in a little bit more, maybe just before then So just to get the landscape clear. So we have the amniotic fluid exosomes. There's from Umblical cord Then there's adipose tissue, which I've seen marketing on different websites saying, ⁓ it's healthier because it's from your own body. You don't need to worry about where it's coming from. Yes, I know. Ian's eyebrows go up.

Walk us through that landscape because obviously, you know, other people, if they're going to go searching, they might land on a website where someone's pitching them to say using your own stem cells, even if you're 55, 65 and have had multiple health issues, is going to be better than anything else. So what are the different types of therapies that are out there and we looked at obviously the amniotic fluid exosomes, but

You know, is there like a hierarchy of effectiveness, or are there certain use cases where the adipose tissue might be better than others? So can you help us better understand that, Ian?

Dr White (35:59)
Yeah.

Well, I'll start with the hierarchy. And in my opinion, the hierarchy goes PRP and bone marrow, then adipose, and then perinatal tissues. I would say perinatal tissues are at the top because you're providing back signals the body cannot make anymore. giving the body back the things that it needs. If you're only using your own adipose or bone marrow, it doesn't fix you anyway, right? It's already not fixing you.

So why do you think that taking it out and shaking it around and putting it is really gonna help? Well, the reason why PRP, and for those that don't know what PRP is, PRP is you take your blood, you spin it down in a centrifuge, and you take the platelets, which are what usually the body uses plug a wound if you cut yourself and repair the tissue. You take those platelets and you put them into an injury. Now,

The way that works is that it elicits an immune response because it's an irritation. There's a lot of pro-inflammatory signals happening there that sort of wake up the immune system and then you get a regenerative response Now, the problem there is that you're at the mercy of your own immune system. As we know, when we age, our immune system declines. That's why COVID is worse in older people and that's why we see the symptoms of aging, because our immune system is not capable.

any longer. So assuming that taking your own immune cells or bone marrow PRP out and expecting your immune system to be robust and rigorous and able to repair and regenerate, it's not always the case. If you're a 20 year old athlete, PRP works great. If you want to charge people more money, then you sell them bone marrow. But bone marrow is basically the same as PRP. It forms an irritation.

Yes, there are stem cells in bone marrow. And I know that a lot of the companies that market bone marrow claim we're the only product with stem cells in it, but they're hematopoietic stem cells, which means that the stem cells that generate the blood lineages, but they're too immature to actually do anything. So if you have an injury and you're the signal from your injury goes to your bone marrow, those cells

Claudia von Boeselager (37:50)
Mm-hmm.

Dr White (37:58)
They migrate from the osteoblastic niche to the endothelial niche. This is just a maturation phase. And then they go into the blood and they circulate around and they go to the injury. All of those signals are required to activate those cells, but they're not present when you just harvest the bone marrow, which is a very painful experience. Harvest the bone marrow and then inject it into an injury. Those stem cells are too naive. They don't have the signals they need. And so really all you're doing is introducing an irritation. So it's just a more expensive version of PRP.

But...

Claudia von Boeselager (38:27)
Is it

a waste of time, Ian, would you say? I mean, would you say people shouldn't even entertain it?

Dr White (38:29)
No, it's not a waste

of time, but there are better modalities. So if you don't want your hip bone drilled into and your bone marrow sucked out, because again, if you're 60 years old and you have your iliac crest bone marrow sucked out, it's probably not gonna grow back. Or if it does, it's not gonna grow back very well, but you need that bone marrow for when you're older. Now that's where your hematopoietic stem cells live. That's where your immune system comes from.

So if you're sucking it out and injecting it somewhere where we'll then get chewed up and spat out, you're sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul. You're taking your bone marrow, you're using it as an irritation to activate your immune system, and then it's gone. I mean, when you're older, the bone marrow doesn't grow back as robustly as it does when we're younger. It's supposed to be in there. It's never supposed to be removed, right? Nowhere in nature does the bone marrow just disappear or go somewhere else.

Only because we intervene and remove it. So it's not a natural process. So it's painful it's costly and in my opinion It doesn't seem any more effective than PRP which you can get from the blood now The next level is adipose or SVF. So the fat that the people sometimes will remove They'll emulsify or they'll remove the cells from that and they'll reintroduce it now the reason I believe that that's more effective than the bone marrow is because

Adipose is a bioactive material in the body. When we injure ourselves, we make adipose. And adipose goes to the site and it starts to contribute energy and it also contributes lipid. So fat is lipid and our cells are made of lipid. And so if you're making new cells, you need a source of lipid. So I'll give you an example. With cardiovascular disease, if somebody died of cardiovascular disease and you opened their chest, you would see a heart.

covered in fat. And physicians used to say, well, no wonder they had cardiovascular disease. Look how fatty their heart is. But actually it's the other way around. The reason their heart is fatty is because it's injured, because it's under the assault of sugars and maybe a viral infection or some other disease. And so the, the epicardial cells, this thin layer of cells that go around the heart, differentiate into adipocytes, fat cells. And those fat cells,

Try to fix the heart that they're chemically active. They have a high energy source and their lipid to make new cells So the body makes adipose in response to injury So if you take your adipose out You can theoretically use it those signals to help repair and regenerate the body when you inject it into a site that it isn't So that's why I think adipose is a little bit better than the bone marrow but then when we talk about This the young signals the body needs that it doesn't have when it's older. You can only

Claudia von Boeselager (40:53)
Yeah.

Dr White (41:10)
get that from the perinatal tissues.

Claudia von Boeselager (41:12)
Let's touch on Muse cells Ian So you've spoken publicly about Muse cells as one of the most exciting developments in regenerative medicine. For listeners hearing this term for the first time, what exactly are muse cells and what makes you so excited about them?

Dr White (41:26)
Yeah, well, so for a long time when we were studying MSCs, you know, I have a book chapter on MSCs for cardiac regeneration. I was in an MSC lab at the University of Miami for many years. We were very excited about MSCs because we would sometimes see really exciting outcomes, but then sometimes we would see nothing. And it was very unclear why that was. And period,

A lot of scientists refer to MSCs as a stem cell because it seemed to do something like stem cells. But when you really dug deep and studied them, you realized actually they cannot differentiate in the body like a stem cell should. They can do it in a Petri dish when you force them, but where it counts in the body, they don't do that. But still there was this nagging sort of something going on that we couldn't quite understand. Why do we sometimes see something profound and most other times we don't? And then

It turns out that a A scientist in Japan, Mari Dezawa was studying MSCs and she made a mistake. And sometimes the best and most profound discoveries in science are made by mistakes where a scientist sees something different and then investigates it. That's what's exciting about science is you plan an experiment, you expect an outcome, you don't get the outcome you expect, and then that triggers you and makes you think, well,

Why didn't I see that? What's going on that I didn't expect? And so that happened with her. She was culture expanding MSCs. She went away after what she thought she was feeding the cells, but actually she put trypsin on them. And trypsin is an enzyme which should kill the cells. It brings them off the plate and should kill them. She went away, and she came back much later. She realized her mistake and instead of throwing the flask away, she took a look. And what she found was there were still some cells alive.

Claudia von Boeselager (42:48)
Mm-hmm.

Dr White (43:11)
which, and they shouldn't have been. So long story short, she started studying these cells and she found that there's a subpopulation inside the MSC population, very, very small population that are stress enduring. So that's what MUSE stands for. So multi-lineage differentiating stress enduring cell. So this stress enduring cell, the stress is the enzyme. the enzyme's trying to kill the cells, but these cells are pushing back, fighting back. That small population of cells was able to expand.

Claudia von Boeselager (43:36)
Mm-hmm.

Dr White (43:39)
And what we found was actually this appears to be the stem cell population within the MSCs. So all of that data that was contradictory seems to suggest that there was a small population in the MSC population that could do what we were hoping the MSCs would be able to do. And that's differentiate into tissue. So if you take that small population, you get rid of the MSCs, what you now have is a true pluripotent stem cell.

but most importantly, it doesn't form teratomas. If embryonic stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells, which is a type of stem cell we can manufacture, these are also pluripotent. But when you put them in a body, they can form a teratoma, which is a tumor made of many different tissues.

So an embryonic stem cell can differentiate into all the different tissues throughout our bodies. Most stem cells are very specific, like a lung stem cell, for example, or an intestinal stem cell. They can only become intestinal cells. But an embryonic stem cell can become any cell in the body. But if you take an embryonic stem cell and you put it into a mouse, or God forbid you put it in a human, it will differentiate into a tumor that is comprised of all these different tissues. So it's very, very dangerous.

But pluripotency is very exciting because it means that if we can take a pluripotent cell and we can put it in any tissue that's injured in the body and it becomes that tissue, that's a very, very useful tool for physicians. But the problem is if it forms a tumor, it's no good. But with these MUSE cells, what we found is that they have this natural anti-tumorgenic ability. So you can activate the pluripotency without activating the tumorgenicity.

Claudia von Boeselager (45:20)
That's just absolutely incredible. I'm just thinking for the application of it, that essentially as a healthy aging journey, we now have a way of potentially for everyone if they can afford it. And hopefully price points will come down. But this should be part of everyone's therapy, would you not say? Because of the potential I mean, is there any side effects? we know that doesn't promote tumor growth, but

Is there anything that needs to still be discovered, or do you think it's safe for everyone, for most people? What would you say?

Dr White (45:47)
Yeah, well, as you said, know, everybody can really benefit from these modalities. And in fact, know, NFL stars and, and famous actors have been using these products for a lot longer than people realize because they've had access to it. And we have an incredible amount of safety data that suggests that these products are incredibly safe. The problem is when these products are made by counterfeiters, they haven't gone through the same rigorous processes that we have. So for example, the Dezawa Muse cells,

have been under research for over a decade. And only now are they making it into the marketplace because all of this rigorous research was performed on safety and efficacy. But these counterfeit cells that are now starting to appear haven't gone through these rigorous tests. They try to sort of copycat the protocols, not quite getting it right. They don't do the validation. So therein lies the danger. The products themselves, over decades of research, have been proven to be very, very safe.

They're non-tumorgenic, they're non-immunogenic for the most part, so they don't elicit an immune response. So they're very, very safe. And we've deployed tens of thousands of units of this product over the years over various different indications. The safety profile is very, very high. In fact, the Pew Report published a publication a few years ago, talking about the safety profile. The title, the heading was,

Look how dangerous regenerative medicine was, but in fact what they ended up proving was that it was incredibly safe. Because over 16 years, they could only find about 300 examples where a patient that had received regenerative medicine had an adverse event. And when you dug down into the causes, we found that it was actually operator error. The physician had contaminated the product or the manufacturer had contaminated the product.

but the products themselves, inherently the amniotic fluid or the cellular products are very, very safe. So yes, I do think that this is something that people should consider including in their regime. It shouldn't be their one and only stop. They should consult with a healthcare provider that's familiar with personalized precision medicine and understand what the body needs. Do you need peptides? Do you need hormones? Could regenerative medicine help you? Especially if you've got an injury, for sure.

you're going to need some signals that can help boost your regenerative response. But if you're just looking for longevity and health span, this could certainly be integrated into a program that encapsulates a whole bunch of other modalities.

Claudia von Boeselager (48:15)
in terms of protocols, if someone is looking to begin a regenerative medicine journey.

What are the steps that you would recommend? And obviously to seek out clinics like Ways to Well, but maybe they are in different countries in the world or elsewhere, or maybe the price point is not accessible for them and they're looking to other places like Costa Rica or Panama, et cetera. What are some of the steps that you would encourage people to do to make sure that they are setting themselves up so that if they are getting treatment, it will be as effective as possible for them?

Dr White (48:44)
Yeah, that's a very important question. And it's actually one of the hardest questions to answer because really it comes down to education. You know, we have great access to the internet and there's a lot of information on the internet, but unfortunately there's as much good information as there is bad information. So it's really hard for the lay person to educate themselves just by going onto the internet. There are some conferences that are available. Some you can stream, some you can

participate in in person. I'll be speaking at A4M in Las Vegas in December as I do every year. And that's a good forum for hearing directly from the scientists and being able to ask questions directly to individuals about the products. Because if you're just trying to learn from a sales rep, they're trained to tell you what you want to hear. And so it's going to be very hard for you to do that. And if you go to some of the counterfeit

products that I've been talking about, have very nice looking websites. have badges on there saying FDA registered, FDA inspected, all of these things that you would want to see when they're not. It's just lines. you know, with our company, you know, I'm the CEO, I'm also the founder, I'm the scientist. We invite people to come to our lab to see our lab, see that it's a physical location and see the rigor that we put into making a safe and effective product.

Not everybody can do that, but the best perhaps alternative is just to ask questions. Where are the products coming from that I'm interested in? Okay, you have a clinic and it says regenerative medicine, or it says stem cell clinic. When you say stem cell clinic, are you giving me stem cells? Because my research tells me that there are generally no stem cells in these products. So when you say, give me $10,000 for a stem cell treatment, what am I actually receiving? Ask that question, ask to see the documentation.

Because what you might find is that it's just exosomes, not just exosomes, that's a great thing to get, but you want to know what you're getting because stem cells do something different than exosomes do. So, you know, ask questions. Who's making your product? What's in the product? Can I see the documentation? Have you seen the lab? Do you know they really have a lab and it's not just being made in somebody's basement? Which really does happen. It really does happen. You know, today you can go out and you can buy stem cell products or exosome products.

or Wharton's Jelly products made in a lab in somebody's basement or somebody's garage. And that's not how this should be done. So the only tip I can really give anybody is ask questions, educate yourself, read what you can. If you go to our website, you'll see that, you know, I'm a PhD, our chief medical officer is an MD, a world renowned MD. Find out who are behind the products. If it's a used car salesman coming into the regenerative medicine space because they see an opportunity to make money,

You know, run to the hills. Yeah.

Claudia von Boeselager (51:23)
Run the other way.

and you at Neobiosis might have also some over the counter products that people could also purchase for certain things. Can you share what they might be? So and we can link things in the show notes

Dr White (51:35)
Yeah, so we also have a brand of cosmetic that we manufacture in neobiosis. That's for topical applications. It's called Lilium, and we have a website called Lilium Pure. It's not available just to purchase by the consumer, but med spas or other providers, aestheticians can access it and then deploy it because it is still considered a biologic and it should be deployed appropriately. So through a med spa or a trained practitioner,

how we like to have these products deployed. So there are many around the country that utilize our products and we can provide a list if anybody reaches out to us. We're happy to do that.

Claudia von Boeselager (52:10)
Okay, perfect. So before we close up today, just one area I find so jaw-dropping is that you founded the Space Aging Research Institute. And I know this is a probably bigger topic, so we'll do a condensed version of it. But you're using outer space as a laboratory for studying human aging. Walk me through the logic of that. And how does space help us understand aging on Earth?

Dr White (52:31)
Yeah, I'm glad you asked that question. Actually, I just submitted a new manuscript for publication to Singer Nature yesterday. I'm talking about this. It's part of my book, my upcoming book as well. But I find space fascinating because now we have access to it like we never did before. It's much cheaper to get into space. So we can do experiments there. And the types of experiments I'm interested in revolve around aging because we age differently in space than we do on Earth.

In fact, our aging is accelerated in space. So what this means is that space is now this brand new tool that we never had access to before to study the aging process. On Earth, we look for tools to study aging. We might look at mice or drosophila, the fruit fly or some other species, because they breed faster. We can try to study the aging process. But fundamentally, mice age differently than humans. In fact, a nature paper just came out this week.

demonstrating that there are different modalities of aging for mice compared to humans. So those studies in mice probably do not overlap to the human aging process anyway. So, but as scientists, we need tools, we need ways to push the boundaries of the biology to see how it pushes back so we can measure it. That's how science works. And what space provides to us is this brand new tool where we can push the boundaries and say, if we do this,

Under these environments, we can see something we never saw on Earth that gives us an idea of how the aging process really works. So what we're hoping to do in the near future to send small experiments into space with a purified amniotic fluid and actually investigate how that amniotic fluid affects the cellular biology in low-earth orbit.

Claudia von Boeselager (54:12)
So you're sending like petri dishes to space or you testing the astronauts? 'Cause I was also gonna say the astronauts probably pretty fit and healthy. So maybe not your average population either, but it's literally the dishes that you're sending up first, is it?

Dr White (54:23)
Well, initially, yes, we've been talking with groups that actually have twins and triplet astronauts. And so what we'd like to do is send one twin to space and have the other twin on Earth. And ideally, if we could do this with triplets, it would be even better. Triplicate is a scientific word. Triplet is three people. send triplets up, then we have a triplicate. One on Earth.

one in space untreated and one in space that we treat with the amniotic fluid, and we can measure their biomarkers to see how their aging has been influenced by first leaving Earth to go to space and then taking a countermeasure like the purified amniotic fluid to see if the third triplet is more like the Earth triplet and hasn't aged like the one in space that hasn't had the treatment.

Claudia von Boeselager (55:09)
Super exciting. I mean you're

Dr White (55:10)
Yeah, it's a brand new tool.

never had access to this before and its going to open up aging biology, I think.

Claudia von Boeselager (55:16)
SpaceX just IPO'd so they're cash flush. if you wanna go knocking on your neighbors' doors, you're just down the road from where the rockets are being launched.

Dr White (55:19)
Yeah, I did shout, they just

took off just a minute ago. I did shout at them. I don't think they heard me,

Claudia von Boeselager (55:27)
we changed

yeah, exactly. In on

Dr White (55:29)
Well, that's what I say in the paper is that if

we're planning on having a base on the moon or if we're planning to travel to Mars, the issues aren't just technological. We need to build a spaceship that can get us there, but also we need to understand the biology because if we're aging exponentially faster in space, if we're sick by the time we get to Mars, then it's useless. We have to understand how to manage entropy in a...

low-earth orbit or at the moon or on the way to Mars if we're ever going to to set a colony out that

Claudia von Boeselager (55:57)
And it's starting with what your work with space So so exciting. Ian, thank you so much for coming on. Where would you like people to follow what you're up to? to learn more about you and we can link everything in the show notes.

Dr White (55:59)
I think we

Yeah, they can take a look at neobiosis.com to understand some of the science. Of course, Lillian Pure for the cosmetic aesthetic applications. But really, if you want to follow what I'm doing, LinkedIn is a great platform for that my upcoming any podcasts they appear on usually end up on LinkedIn. So that's a great platform for following.

Claudia von Boeselager (56:27)
Beautiful. Ian, do you have any parting thoughts or message or piece of advice from my audience today?

Dr White (56:32)
Well, I'd like to say thanks of course, for giving me this opportunity because as a scientist, it's important that we communicate what we're doing. Traditionally, scientists aren't very good at communicating, but with these new platforms and podcasts and people like yourself, we're able to get in front of people and talk about the science rather than them just hearing it from salespeople. You know, I love salespeople, nice people, but sometimes misinformation can be communicated.

Claudia von Boeselager (56:36)
you.

Dr White (56:56)
hearing it directly from the scientists, think is important for people. So, you know, thank you for providing that platform for me and 'other scientists and everything you do for this industry. You're a big name in this space and you're doing a lot of great for the industry. So thank you for that. But as a part and piece of wisdom, I would tell people that it's important to look at your diet. Obesity in the United States isn't necessarily a caloric imbalance.

Claudia von Boeselager (57:10)
so kind, thank you.

Dr White (57:19)
It's not just about eating too much food. It's about the preservatives and the sugar that's in the food. So people are chronically malnourished and so they keep eating more. But that food, that preservative and that sugar is inflammatory and it's the inflammation that's driving the obesity. So if you can just cut out sugar or reduce sugar and preservatives, process food, if you could just cut that out of your diet and improve your sleep, you're going to see huge improvements to your health just by doing that alone.

add into that donating blood. We didn't get into plasmapheresis, the idea of removing the toxins and the buildup of junk in your blood, but just by donating blood, this is another free way to improve your health. reduce sugar, reduce preservatives, improve sleep, maybe donate blood, and you can already very inexpensively improve your lifestyle.

Claudia von Boeselager (58:08)
Great, great advice, Ian. Thank you so much for the work that you're doing, for your knowledge, for taking time to come on today. Such an exciting time. And we'll have to do a round two once your book is out, et cetera, to to dive into that Thank you again so much.

Dr White (58:19)
I'd love to do that. Thanks and hope to see you at A4M maybe.

Claudia von Boeselager (58:22)
Exactly. We'll we'll see there.