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The Neuro Experience
Mitochondria Expert Reveals: Why Your Immune System Starts Failing in Your 40s (And How to Fix It)
00:58:02
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- [00:00]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Wherever they're spraying paraquat, that's where Parkinson is the highest. Guess what paraquat does.
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Louise Nicola
What?
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Dr. Anurag Singh
It's a mitochondrial toxin.
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Louise Nicola
It kills mitochondria.
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Dr. Anurag Singh
It damages them beyond recovery. It's probably making its way in our food through all this, you know, fertilizer or whatever they're spraying. And when mitochondria get damaged, these mitochondria stop talking to each other. The grid just collapses.
- [00:19]
Louise Nicola
And do you think that this may be the reason why we're having a large population of people who are having fertility issues at a young age?
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Dr. Anurag Singh
For sure we can fix all these conditions that we talked about.
- [00:29]
Louise Nicola
Dr. Anurag Singh is an MD, PhD, immunologist who spent 20 years studying mitochondria and screened 4,000 compounds to discover one single molecule. And what he found changed everything.
- [00:41]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Cancer cells are always there. It's only when they see these T cells go low energy deficit, that's when the cancer really starts overtaking the whole system. If you rejuvenated the mitochondria, you get immune system in check, and that allows you to defeat cancer.
- [00:55]
Louise Nicola
What's your take on creatine?
- [00:57]
Dr. Anurag Singh
You're taking creatine at the Sweet is between 500 milligrams to a gram, creating its muscle mass. And that will give you the best muscle quality.
- [01:05]
Louise Nicola
Is that the same with.
- [01:07]
Dr. Anurag Singh
It is better. And it has no smell. When we add one molecule in the mix, you get an even augmented effect.
- [01:14]
Louise Nicola
So I'm Louise Nicola, and this is the Neuro Experience. Anurag, welcome to the show. I want to first start by understanding why you do what you do. You're an MD, PhD. So you've got both clinical expertise, but also the research side. And you're an immunologist. Why do you do what you do?
- [01:36]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Well, thanks for having me on the show first, Louisa. It's an absolute pleasure. So. Well, my journey started as a medical doctor and I was seeing a lot of kids with food allergies. Actually, that's where my training was. And I ran into an amazing mentor professor from Stanford who was also MD, PhD. And he told me, anurag, you like to ask the questions about not how to treat the symptoms, but actually get into the root cause of disease. And so that's how my journey started. About 25 years back, I got more interested in doing medical research and then I was convinced to do a PhD in immunology because just because I felt all my medical training hadn't led me to the path where I could fix the problem, I could fix the problems. Happening in symptomatology that a lot of chronic conditions show up up with. And most of the root causes of all these chronic conditions somehow led me to mitochondria and studying mitochondria and that's the journey for 20 years. Ended up doing a PhD immunology studying the role of mitochondria and immune. Different immune cells. And then one thing led to another. Got hired into a big company in Switzerland, moved there, and somehow all roads led back to mitochondria again and studying how mitochondria affects aging process. So that's, you know, I don't see patients today, but I'm very close to seeing the research I do impact many lives.
- [03:08]
Louise Nicola
So mitochondria, first of all. We'll unpack that. But I want to just go into immunology just a bit just because I, you know, believe it or not, it's an area that really bugs me. And for some reason I feel like I know nothing about it. Like I want to understand why 80% of all autoimmune diseases occur in women. Oh yeah, I want to understand that. You know, in the neurology clinic we see a lot of patients coming in with ms, for example, and a lot of these demyelinating diseases and we can call them autoimmune. But when I'm having to actually break it down, like when patients say why is this happening? Like, is this a genetic risk factor? Is there. Like, is this. No one in my family had Ms. It baffles me when I say it just happens.
- [03:52]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Well, I do know a lot because I did have a close family member who got Ms. And struggled with it. So I do know that disease. And the professor who trained me had discovered anti tnf, which is probably one of the few options we have today to treat a lot of these autoimmune conditions. So let's unpack. I totally believe that immune health and metabolism is very intricately linked. This is a field that we are calling immunometabolism. It's emerging. But I do think it all starts with the energy deficit in the immune cells. And so what I mean by that is so in our body, the two main kind of immune cells we have is one it's called. We call. Immunologists are not very creative. They give like let. So we have T cells and we have B cells. Okay, T cells because they educated in the thymus is a small organ that kind of peaks in young teenagehood. And then involutes and you're left with these immune cells that are like the elite forces, they watch out for infections, viruses, et cetera. As we age, they get fatigued and their mitochondria become poor and poor health. And so.
- [04:58]
Louise Nicola
So there's mitochondria in these T cells?
- [05:00]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Oh, lots of them.
- [05:01]
Louise Nicola
Okay. Just like the mitochondria in all of our cells.
- [05:04]
Dr. Anurag Singh
You got it there. Mitochondria in every cell except red blood cells.
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Louise Nicola
And they originate in the thymus gland. And they're programmed to. When your body feels like it's under attack from a virus, they're programmed to go out there and what, engulf the virus and kill it?
- [05:19]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah, and same for cancer. They also. They're the sentinels. So they're always watching out where the big threat to us as a host is going to come from the outside. And cancer cells are always there. It's only when they see these T cells go a little bit low, exhaustion, sort of low energy deficit, that's when the cancer really starts kind of overtaking the whole system. It's these T cells that control all these, even cancer cells. So it's not just infections, it's the cancer cells. And to a certain extent, autoimmunity can also be based and linked to immunometabolism, too.
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Louise Nicola
Let's hone in on Ms. Right. And let's understand how. What the relationship is then between Ms. And these immune cells and the mitochondria then.
- [06:03]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Right. So there are different kind of T cells. They come in different types. There is what we call cytotoxic T cells. Let's call them the elite forces. They know who to go after, whether it's the virus, cancer, or whatever. They keep us healthy. Then to control them so they don't go overboard and do their job too eagerly. There are these. For every 10 of these cytotoxic T cells, there's one T cell that is called T regulatory cell that actually won the this year, the discovery of T regulatory cells. They keep all the other immune cells in check. And when they go bad, that's when these. The control process of immune regulation goes bad. And that's what autoimmunity happens. Autoimmunity is actually a problem of these regulatory T cells.
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Louise Nicola
So the T regs are like the CEO you.
- [06:52]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah, they are. They are. In terms of the immune system.
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Louise Nicola
In terms of the immune system, yes. And correct me if I'm wrong. What's happening in the microglia then?
- [07:01]
Dr. Anurag Singh
So microglia are like immune cells in the brain. They are a bit different than T cells and B cells, and they're more Closer to something, what we call macrophages and dendritic cells. So what happens is these are the three key players in the immune system. The macrophages or microglia or dendritic cells. They are in all our peripheral organs. They're in the skin, in the gut. In the brain is microglia. They always sampling stuff. Is this foreign, is this infectious, Is this an amyloid deposit in the brain? Or is it just. And then they keep showing that to the T cells. It's almost like a continuous crosstalk.
- [07:38]
Louise Nicola
Oh, they're communicating.
- [07:39]
Dr. Anurag Singh
They're communicating. Right. And I don't know if you've seen videos where once they see a cancer cell, they engulf it, they break it down, they take the pieces and show it to a T cell. And that T cell will recognize this, that as cancer particle or what we call antigen. And then it will go proliferate and then go and kill the cancer cell programs. So this is the programming of what we call, I call it the immune relay. So you have these microglia, dendritic cells with tentacles. They're always sampling stuff. Then they find something that is foreign or dangerous. We can call it the danger signal in immunology. They then tell the T cells, the T cells then go after these. But to keep all this in check, you have this one CEO that you called the T regulatory cell.
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Louise Nicola
And you could say then if we broke it down really simply that a lot of these autoimmune diseases occurs when the T cell becomes dysfunctional. The T reg cell, the T reg
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Dr. Anurag Singh
cells, and to a certain extent also, the whole immune system is short circuited. That's the problem.
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Louise Nicola
But how do we pick up on this? Because it's not like you can go and get a, you know, you, white cell count on a, on a blood workup. It's not going to come up any different. Right.
- [08:52]
Dr. Anurag Singh
So that's the problem today with modern medicine. You know, the doctors will just do a total blood cell count or white blood cell count, maximum. They look at lymphocyte levels, but they won't go and say what in this lymphocyte population is, is different. That's the problem. Autoimmunity is caught because there's a third guy called B cell that makes antibodies. So that's like the last tier of this relay. And so when you detect these auto antibodies and autoimmunity is basically the immune cell recognizing yourself as foreign. And that's what happens here. You know, myelin sheath becomes foreign or things like this.
- [09:32]
Louise Nicola
And that's. Yeah, that's with my, with the myelin sheath, it starts getting attacked. And what we pick up on in the lab or in the clinic is if we do a nerve conduction study.
- [09:40]
Dr. Anurag Singh
You got it?
- [09:41]
Louise Nicola
Yeah. Conduction block or slowing of conduction speed. That's so fascinating because it's, you know, we get so many questions about what causes cancer and it's like, well, if I knew the answer to that, it's. But you're saying that there's a relationship now between our immune system and obviously cancer as well.
- [10:00]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Absolutely. And our metabolic health, which is the third element, which a lot of scientists and doctors have. They're just scraping the, scraping the surface, the surface of this. That there's actually a big role mitochondria have. If rejuvenate the mitochondria, you get your immune cell, immune system in check. You also can get your CEO coordinated to monitor all this happening. And that allows you to defeat cancer.
- [10:26]
Louise Nicola
That was huge. So let me break it down. Are you saying, okay, so we came up with the T reg, so who's the CEO of the other immune cells? But you're saying maybe the CEO has a president that he has to talk to and that's the mitochondria.
- [10:39]
Dr. Anurag Singh
The chairman.
- [10:40]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, the chairman, yeah. Instead of me asking you, well, how do we improve our immune system, which I guess has so many layers, let's talk about the mitochondria then.
- [10:50]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah, I could go on and on. Other than in our med school or even in high school biology, all they tell you is it's the powerhouse of the cell. ATP production, ATP energy currency, and that's all everybody takes. Yeah, but mitochondria are essentially, I believe, one of the. They talk in my field of aging research, the hallmarks of aging, and then there's 12 of them and they're somehow cross linked. I think mitochondria are the mother of all these hallmarks. And when they link to all these processes, you can link epigenetic dysregulation, poor nutrient sensing. We are looking neurodegenerative disease, neurodegeneration, protein misfolding, all this somehow links to bad mitochondrial health.
- [11:30]
Louise Nicola
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- [12:55]
Dr. Anurag Singh
And so what mitochondria are are these key cellular organelles that evolutionary were ancient bacteria. They integrated with, with us in our cells, sort of in a symbiotic relationship over the evolution to sort of get the energy from us, but then give us the ATP as you know, sort of the powerhouse of the cell. So that's what mitochondria are. They are critical. Even when we are thinking getting up from a chair or thinking about, you know, how to write that email. It's your mitochondria that is absolutely key.
- [13:27]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, I mean, look, just getting up off a chair requires a VO2 max of around 20 milliliters. So the mitochond, yes, they produce energy and I believe that per cell there's what thousands are there about 5,000 mitochondria per cell.
- [13:45]
Dr. Anurag Singh
10,000 depends on how metabolic the cell is. So our neurons will have 20, 30,000, our skeletal muscles will have 10, 20,000. Then you get to like the immune cell which will have 100 to a thousand. So it really depends on how metabolic the cell type is. Your cardiac cell will also have lots of them.
- [14:04]
Louise Nicola
Yeah. And they're responsible for every time we eat something and it breaks it down. But the problem that we're having, which what we see in chronic disease is these cells not only are becoming dysfunctional, but they're also dying. I mean the mitochondria is dying, Is that correct?
- [14:21]
Dr. Anurag Singh
They're damaged.
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Louise Nicola
They're damaged.
- [14:23]
Dr. Anurag Singh
So in our bodies, if you look at a mitochondrial life cycle, it's almost like the real estate of a neighborhood that if you live in, you always have good buildings and bad buildings. So in Our bodies or in our cells, you always have good healthy mitochondria. And then you have the damaged ones. And it's like a cycle. The damaged ones get recycled as building blocks for the, for the new, healthier ones. What happens with aging or with neurodegeneration, for example, with Parkinson's disease, is these damaged mitochondria just cannot be recycled very efficiently. And so you get this sort of 50, 50 ratio. You get shift to 20 healthy and 80 bad damaged mitochondria. And that's why you need to get these damaged mitochondria out from your cells.
- [15:06]
Louise Nicola
And how does our mitochondria become damaged?
- [15:10]
Dr. Anurag Singh
So many ways. Diet, probably sugar, excess sugar intake. They just can't keep at it. They need time to renew and regenerate.
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Louise Nicola
So why is that? Is that because the glucose goes into the cell and the mitochondria just can't take glucose?
- [15:29]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah, I mean they, they like to burn fat. You know, they prefer fatty acid oxidation. But they will also do the glucose burnout. And then that's their preferences to use fuel is mostly fat utilization. Excessive glucose kind of impairs them. They, they just excessive, excessive glucose. So they are of course there to metabolize glucose in our muscle cells. If you look, there's thousands of mitochondria and they have these glucose uptake receptors and that's what they do, they kind of metabolize glucose. But it's really the excessive sugar intake and the glucose that we have. Second is the sedentary activity. It's what we call now the bioenergetic hypothesis. We need to use the energy our body is producing, otherwise it kind of just goes away. And these mitochondria feel useless and they degenerate, they become zombie like. And we see that. I've done studies with 75 year olds who run marathons versus 75 year olds who are, are very sedentary. And the top 30 genes, if you do biopsies, are all linked to mitochondria. So it's fascinating. Damaged mitochondria just overtake the good ones.
- [16:39]
Louise Nicola
That's. Yeah, it's. I mean, there's so much to talk about, obviously. Okay, so sedentary behavior. And that means that exercise obviously can induce mitochondrial biogenesis. And not just that, it can also help dysfunctional mitochondria become functional again.
- [16:58]
Dr. Anurag Singh
You got it. So there's many studies, and we are not the only ones who have showed that that exercise is probably the best mitochondrial medicine out there. So if you get older people to just move, come to a Spinning class or do gardening more over six months. If you take their look at their VO2, it'll get better. If you take a look at their biopsies for mitochondrial expression, we have a marker called PGC1 Alpha which tells us if there's more healthier mitochondria coming, you'll see more PGC1 Alpha in the muscle. So just moving helps. That's the biggest stimulator of mitochondria.
- [17:32]
Louise Nicola
Are you a fan of the Low Intensity Zone 2 training?
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Dr. Anurag Singh
I am and actually do that as well. I think any exercise is good for them. So there's obviously different zones in the cardio and the aerobic. But strength training also is important.
- [17:46]
Louise Nicola
So because of the myokine interaction there. Yeah, that's my, that's my wheelhouse. And we had I, I speak with Inigo San Milon, which I'm probably you've heard about. And he's amazing, you know, linking the effects of lactate with cancer. And I love this phenomenon. Right. You know, we, everybody's knows now about mitochondria. We hear, we hear about it so often, it's become very, it's having its moments become very mainstream now. We have heard through the grapevine on Instagram that, you know, doing zone two is a better mover for mitochondrial biogenesis. And that is primarily because you're producing the energy within the cell you got or producing the energy the mitochondria itself. Yeah, I'm fascinated with producing energy outside of that, which the byproduct of that is then lactate.
- [18:36]
Dr. Anurag Singh
That's an interesting concept. This is something we haven't really looked into, into our research. But what is happening inside the cell is just not biogenesis. You can improve the efficiency of your existing pool of mitochondria. And then my research for the last 15 years is that you can actually turbocharged this mitophagy process, which we can talk about. It was just self rejuvenating the bad damaged mitochondria into good ones.
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Louise Nicola
So let's talk about that mitophagy.
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Dr. Anurag Singh
So mitophagy is fascinating. It is essentially autophagy targeted to mitochondria. So autophagy at a cellular level means auto and phago. Right. So self renewal of the damaged cells. These and similarly damaged mitochondria, as they accumulate free radicals and get stressed, they get damaged, they put an eat me signal out. This is something called a protein called parkin. So if you actually look at older adults with Parkinson disease, you'll see Eberin mitophagy. Because there are mitochondria from mitochondria that are getting damaged putting out the signal. But there's a mutation in the parkin protein, in the gene that regulates it, and that what links it to ebarin? Mitophagy. So now in people with Parkinson's disease, they can clear the damaged mitochondria because the signal is improper. So in aging, it's a similar process, but we have found that you can actually. Exercise is a great. It's a mitophagy inducer. But we've actually looked at thousands of natural compounds that can do that, and we've discovered one that is a very, very potent mitophagy activator. So essentially taking the damaged guys out and making them building blocks of healthier and inducing biogenesis.
- [20:27]
Louise Nicola
And is that urolithin A?
- [20:28]
Dr. Anurag Singh
That is urolithin A found in pomegranates sourced from pomegranates not found in pomegranates, not found sourced. Oh, yeah. So when we eat freshly pressed pomegranate juice or a bowl of raspberries or pecans and walnuts, we are taking the precursors of urolithin, which are polyphenolic compounds. Okay, so these are what we call elligitannins. These are very complex phenolic molecules. That.
- [20:58]
Louise Nicola
Is it part of the polyphenol family?
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Dr. Anurag Singh
You got it, yeah. So these are polyphenols. So when you're taking a glass of juice, you're taking a high dose of polyphenols, which are ellagitannins. Now, when you digest them, your gut microbiome will see them and try to digest them. And the gut microbiome will then generate simpler postbiotic molecules out of these complex polyphenols. And one of them is urolithin A. But here's the interesting part. Not all of us have the right gut microbiome. So a lot of us don't make urolithin A naturally.
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Louise Nicola
How do we know if we do? Well, I mean, we'd have to be eating the polyphenols to begin with.
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Dr. Anurag Singh
So. Yeah, so there are two big factors, as you said. One is you need to have the right diet, correct?
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Louise Nicola
Yes.
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Dr. Anurag Singh
I've gone to the US I've gone to Italy, I've gone to Australia, I've gone to India, where I come from. And the prevalence of people naturally making is very different, very low. Okay, well, in France and Italy, where people are eating fresh food and more fermented food, it's higher. It's like 30, 40% in the US is 10% in my country of birth, which is India, because of the high antibiotic usage early on in life, it's almost like 2 to 5%.
- [22:11]
Louise Nicola
Why is that?
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Dr. Anurag Singh
Because they just shoot your healthy gut microbiome early in life by giving you antibiotics for everything under the sun. So if you get common cold doctor trained in India will give you antibiotics and that will take away not only the bad guys, but the good guys too.
- [22:28]
Louise Nicola
I think of skin the same way I think of my brain. It's a barrier system that weakens with stress and inflammation. That's why protecting it is so important. I use Jones Road Beauty, their moisturizer and face wash. A simple clean and focused on supporting the skin barrier instead of stripping it. It's skin care that actually feels calming. If you want to try this and you want clean products that go into your system, go to Jones roadbeauty.com and use code Neuro for a free cool gloss with your first purchase. Okay, so many of us don't have the correct microbiome to actually even make your lithon a to begin with.
- [23:09]
Dr. Anurag Singh
From the diet.
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Louise Nicola
From the diet. So then what exactly is urolithin A doing when we actually ingest it? If we take it in pill form, for example, in a supplement form, what is it actually doing to our mitochondria?
- [23:22]
Dr. Anurag Singh
So it, when you take in pill form, it'll peak about six to eight hours in blood. Yeah, it will go to the target organs, let's say muscle. In, in the case we spend most of the time looking at muscle, it will, the mechanism of action is it will find a target that is on these damaged mitochondria, initiate that target, and then initiate the process of mitophagy. So within a week, two weeks, we see all the damaged mitochondria starting to go out and more PGC1 Alpha, which suggests to us that there's sort of a renewal happening at a, not just a cellular level, but at a tissue level. And then about a month, two months later, we'll see more physiological effects.
- [24:04]
Louise Nicola
How can you know if it's coming from a specific organ itself? So when you measure PGC1 Alpha, for example, is that the only way measuring mitochondrial.
- [24:14]
Dr. Anurag Singh
No, there's different ways. So the ways we have used one obviously is looking at total mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondria have their own DNA that comes from our maternal side. So it's very which is different from our regular DNA. So you can actually have probes that quantify how much mitochondrial DNA you have. That's one second. Yes, you can look at proteins and genes linked to mitochondrial renewal, like parkin protein I was talking about. You can look at PGC1 Alpha, but the best way we have seen is you actually take older adults or healthy adults and you put them in an MRI machine and you make them exercise in a MRI machine and you look at the ATP levels as they exercise, you'll deplete the ATP levels and then you stop exercising. And how fast the ATP comes back is a way. How good your mitochondria are. So that's what we have done in our trials.
- [25:09]
Louise Nicola
And what's that rate? What should it be?
- [25:11]
Dr. Anurag Singh
So between, let's say you're looking at the generation of one ATP molecule and you need this pathway called the phosphocreatine pathway, because that's kind of the pathway you need to make ATP. And so let's say one molecule of ATP, if unhealthy adult or older adult will make it, you'll find it about 60% depleted or 70% depleted in the older adults who are very sedentary. So we are looking for about a 10 to 20% increase in mitochondrial renewal. You're looking for 10 to 20% improvement in ATP production. So that's where we are kind of using as a sort of gold standard. But in clinical world, doctors are so far away from doing that because not everybody has an MRI set up to put people in.
- [25:58]
Louise Nicola
I've never actually seen that. And now I want to. Can I come to Switzerland and actually look at this?
- [26:02]
Dr. Anurag Singh
This is. We did these trials in University of Washington, actually, where the professor, one of the leading professors, it's something called Mrs. Magnetic resonance spectroscopy. So it's like mri, but you're actually looking at specific metabolites. And you can look at nad, you can look at phosphor, creatine, you can
- [26:19]
Louise Nicola
look at adp, who's the lead on
- [26:21]
Dr. Anurag Singh
that now there are at least six or seven labs around the world that are doing it. Yeah, it comes from this lab of Professor Conley, who's unfortunately passed away recently. But he set up these seven Tesla magnets around different top centers around the world. And that's how they measure human performance and mitochondrial performance in athletes and old adults even.
- [26:45]
Louise Nicola
I wonder how this would play in Alzheimer's disease. So, for example, what we see as well with this in women specifically, we've quantified this with PET imaging. Women have a 20 to 30% reduction in brain glucose metabolism, generally due to the loss of estrogen receptors in the brain. I wonder how this urolithin, a compound would have an effect on helping that process of glucose regulation into and out of the neuron in the brain to enhance brain metabolism.
- [27:25]
Dr. Anurag Singh
So as an evidence based person, we don't have the actual clinical data today on, on UA and cognitive function. What we have is almost like 100 publications from different labs on pre clinical models of different neurodegeneration. Yeah, these are models of human neurodegeneration. And so what they have seen is that in Alzheimer's patients or Parkinson patients, mitophagy turns out to be the most impacted biological process. Second is neuroinflammation. These microglia are inflamed like anything that you were talking about. And they have screened about 4,000 repurposed compounds, natural products, to see which can have an effect and across. And this is not coming from us, this is coming from Harvard lab, Buck Institute and another group at National Institute of Aging, where they independently found that urolithin A was the top compound that had an effect on reversing this mitophagy defect. So there are trials now. There are three trials that we are running in partnership somewhere. One is happening at the National Institute of Aging with people who are diabetic. And they're looking at their mitochondrial function in their muscle, their brain and in their immune cells. Because you can actually measure all these three organs and look at their mitochondrial health. And the goal is if you can fix these three organs, you probably can impact a lot of their functionality. So that's one trial. The second trial is funded through a collaborator from the Alzheimer's association. And they're looking at mild cognitive impairment, which is early dementia, kind of, and looking at how urolithinate will have impacts on neuroinflammatory markers, impact on phosphatal, impact on beta amyloid, et cetera. The trial we are doing, and we hope to kick it off, is we are looking at two different populations. One is the aging people, people like me who are kind of in that trajectory in 10, 15 years where we want to see if urolithin A crosses the blood brain barrier. So we're doing spinal taps and then we are doing the imaging modalities like you said, PET scans and Mrs. A group we are working with is fascinating. They're actually looking at REM sleep disorders in 40, 50 year olds and they have found that all these people in 20 years turn into neurodegenerative.
- [29:45]
Louise Nicola
Well, actually, if you're talking also about REM behavior disorder, where you wake up and strangle your bed partner, that can predict, predict Parkinson's disease 20 years before it's.
- [29:57]
Dr. Anurag Singh
That's what I meant. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're actually looking at these folks who are in their early 50s, recently diagnosed with this REM behavior disorder. They know that mitochondria are shot in there because they know their problems with these test modalities. They do sort of fdg, pet and they know their problems in glucose uptake. And so they're trying to see if urolithinic and fix that early on. And. Well, of course, 20 year trials will be long, but. But the goal is to. In aging, I believe you need to intervene early in the 40s and 50s and then you can take the benefit. So this is the kind of research we're doing.
- [30:31]
Louise Nicola
If it didn't cross the blood brain barrier, would that mean you'd have to involve some form of phospholipid?
- [30:38]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Either that, and we do see effects systemically on a lot of these markers that like ceramides or acyl carnitines that cross and they are damaging to the cells. Or what we think possibly could happen is this sort of the gut brain axis where you condition a lot of these immune cells or other factors systemically and then you can impact the behavior of a lot of these cells that are resident in the brain.
- [31:04]
Louise Nicola
So if I took a helicopter view for everybody now, and just say this and correct me if I'm wrong, if we have better performing mitochondria and if we have more mitochondria per cell.
- [31:16]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah.
- [31:16]
Louise Nicola
We have a better ability to fight off autoimmune diseases, cancer, neurodegeneration, mood disorders.
- [31:24]
Dr. Anurag Singh
I think the list is endless.
- [31:25]
Louise Nicola
The list must be endless.
- [31:27]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah, the list is really endless. But those four would be the top four for me too.
- [31:30]
Louise Nicola
What's your take on. I have to ask this because I'm obsessed with creatine.
- [31:35]
Dr. Anurag Singh
I love creatine. So we are such a focused company in postbiotics and mining the gut microbiome. As we evolve, we are obviously looking for molecules that have synergies. And one of the molecules that we find a lot of energy with is creatine, because creatine hits sort of this muscle mass and boosting, you know, if you, if you take muscle cells in the lab and we've done that and you put steroids in them, they get damaged. Right. You can put creatine and you can see their myotubes or myoblasts as we call them, back to their proper shape. When we add urolitin A in the mix, you get an even augmented effect. So going forward, I think the trials we want to do is the combination. So strategy where you can take your URL ton a, you can take creatine at the required dose and you can hit just not the mass, muscle mass, but the energetics and that will give you the best muscle quality. That's kind of where we are.
- [32:29]
Louise Nicola
Yeah. Right now what we're seeing is that, you know, a large body of data has shown that even if you take five grams a day, it saturates the muscle. But now there's like pre clinical data on Alzheimer's disease patients, although it's a pilot study on a very small showing that if you take 20 grams of
- [32:45]
Dr. Anurag Singh
creatine a day, one shot in.
- [32:47]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, just one, it can raise brain creatine levels.
- [32:50]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah.
- [32:50]
Louise Nicola
But the problem is when it does that, what does that do in terms of cognitive performance? Now I'm a huge believer of cognitive reserve because, you know, end of life, if we can get two people, they've, you know, one has a head full of amyloid and doesn't get Alzheimer's disease. Right. Which is insane. And then you've got another person with, you know, mild cognitive impairment, possibly dementia or cause dementia, and they don't have as much amyloid as this person. Like, why did this occur? And I always bring it down to the fact that it's cognitive reserve. So being able to maintain your cognitive reserve throughout your life is inherently the most important thing. So if we can do. What does it take to do that? Well, we need a lot of energy.
- [33:33]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Absolutely.
- [33:33]
Louise Nicola
And I always talk about the dendrites when they connect with one another and we, we, every time we see something new, every time we have a new thought, we create a new connection. But in order to preserve that connection, the brain needs so much energy. Yeah, it's just like having, you know, muscle energy. So how do we do that? Well, we need better functioning mitochondria.
- [33:51]
Dr. Anurag Singh
And it's so amazing what you said because we actually go at a very cellular level. We, we get the biopsies, then we do transmission electron microscopy. So we can actually focus section by section. But it's the muscle or the brain. Brain, you can't get biopsies, but in, in models you can. So you can look at it or your immune cell. And we see as you get older, or if it's a condition like frail person or sarcopenia, these thousands of mitochondria, we say they're actually a network. They are talking to each other in healthy person, in a very functional, if it's a Fit person. In people who are sarcopenic or with neurodegeneration, these mitochondria stop talking to each other. It's almost like you have a grid and the grid just collapses.
- [34:37]
Louise Nicola
So they're still there.
- [34:39]
Dr. Anurag Singh
They're there in a damaged form. And they're almost like grumpy old people who are not talking to each other. And it's like crushed spaghetti. They actually. I wish I had brought these images because.
- [34:50]
Louise Nicola
I wish you did too, because I'm trying to put it into my head.
- [34:54]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Everybody thinks of mitochondria as long, elongated, sort of tubular structures which have these sort of what we call cristae in between. But they don't exist in isolation. They exist in a network. Okay. And in aging, if you look at an aged sedentary person, they're not elongated. They're actually oval and round and fat. And they are far away from each other. And so there's very poor energy transfer happening. If we can fix that circuitry, I believe, by making them in good shape, these elongated shape, and they're back to talking to each other as a network, we can fix all these conditions that we talked about, I believe.
- [35:32]
Louise Nicola
Okay, so it's about the communication between them. You know what the analogy was that I was putting in my head? It was me at school as a five year old where we're all holding hands and it's fun and games because you don't know much. You haven't been that damaged at that when you're five. We all love each other.
- [35:48]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah.
- [35:48]
Louise Nicola
But then you see, as we get older, it's like, okay, well, I've had an argument with this person.
- [35:53]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah.
- [35:53]
Louise Nicola
Things are changing. Then we go through puberty and we get all this damage that occurs to us and none of us are talking. Yeah, it's kind of like that.
- [36:00]
Dr. Anurag Singh
It is, it is. These images are so shocking. And you get them exercising or in, in our studies with, with this postbiotic supplementation, you can fix the grid, you can fix this energy process that's happening at a very deep cellular level.
- [36:17]
Louise Nicola
But just like with creatine, you can't just take a bolus of it and sit down. Right. It's a, it's a stimulant in terms of if you take it, it'll help you lift heavier. It'll give you more energy to go to the gym to actually get the work done. That's going to help you with the mitochondrial biogenesis. And it would probably be the same with urolithin A. Right. You can't just sit down a sedentary person and just take. What's the, what's the dosage?
- [36:40]
Dr. Anurag Singh
So in the trial, so we've done 250 milligram all the way till 2 grams daily. Daily for, for almost four months.
- [36:50]
Louise Nicola
Yeah.
- [36:50]
Dr. Anurag Singh
We find the sweet spot is between 500 milligram to a gram. If you're healthy, if you're doing everything right, if you're taking creatine, if you're excited, 500 milligram keeps your mitochondria happy. They're already happy because you're doing a lot of good things.
- [37:02]
Louise Nicola
Things.
- [37:02]
Dr. Anurag Singh
But 500 milligram keeps the mitophagy at a basal level. That's the dose. If you're healthy, fit person, that's the dose. The gram is my favorite dose because I work with a lot of older adults and people who are struggling with brain fog especially, etc. That's like the quick fix. So if you take a gram for a month, two months, you get the damaged mitochondria out and that's what's needed if the equilibrium has shifted.
- [37:29]
Louise Nicola
So you think it takes around one or two months to see an effect?
- [37:32]
Dr. Anurag Singh
I think it takes a couple of months. It's not a magic pill that you pop in and expect in one week that, as you said, you just can't keep popping in and hope miracle will happen. You need to.
- [37:43]
Louise Nicola
But in biology, we have a cycle approach. Right. You know, what we see is that you have one night of sleep deprivation. And we've seen in this landmark PNAS study, it can raise amyloid beta levels by around 4%. Right. Over time, the more amyloid in the brain, you know, can disrupt the neuronal functioning that allows you to get back into sleep. So it's a cycle. Right? And I would, I would think that it's a cycle with urolithin A as well. You know, you take, let's just say you take a gram a day, but if you're going out that night and sleep, depriving yourself and drinking, then it kind of negates the effects. Or does it maybe. Does it level out?
- [38:21]
Dr. Anurag Singh
So the data saying it does a quick fix with the mitophagy in about a couple of weeks, and then it's all about maintenance. You get a lot of biogenesis and you maintain that. And actually an Australian researcher came to me and said, well, you've shown a lot of data on old people and overweight people and middle aged people. I want to actually test it to the extreme. I want to go after Olympian, middle distance runners. Who are you would assume their mitochondria are at the peak. And she actually ran this trial, we just published it in Sports Medicine. And what she showed was there is no augmented improvement on mitochondria there because these folks are already at VO2 max of 66, 67, believe it or not. They got till 70, 72 with, with Mitopure or urlitinates, its chemical name is. What it helps them with is the recovery process. So the, the sort of. The damaged mitochondria part are helping in the signaling downstream of inflammation. So. So I think depending on different people, they see different effects. Somebody feels less sore after a gym. Somebody.
- [39:29]
Louise Nicola
Yes, that's what I felt.
- [39:30]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Okay.
- [39:31]
Louise Nicola
So I was taking the capsules, the mito pure.
- [39:34]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah.
- [39:34]
Louise Nicola
And I, I felt my doms just not disappear, but I felt it was so much easier for me to go and do another leg day, three days later. Right.
- [39:44]
Dr. Anurag Singh
And the dose you were taking, if you don't mind me, two capsules, 500 dose. Yeah.
- [39:49]
Louise Nicola
So I should take four, possibly.
- [39:50]
Dr. Anurag Singh
If you have a big workout that day, I would definitely take a gram.
- [39:54]
Louise Nicola
Well, I think it's also dependent on what you're optimizing for. And actually this, this leads into my next question. I don't know if you've done any studies on this. I hear that. I keep saying I hear because like I, I read too much and I don't even know what sometimes I'm reading. And. But is it true that the most dense population of mitochondria in a female is in the ovaries?
- [40:16]
Dr. Anurag Singh
That's fairly true and fairly true. Yes. And kidney. Kidney is another place where it's very rich in.
- [40:22]
Louise Nicola
See, that's why I say I hear. Because now you've just introduced a whole new organ to me that I didn't really know that there was a dense amount of population.
- [40:30]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah. And the tubular epithelial cells that line the kidney, you can imagine, because there's so much energy demand there for, you know, clearing out the waste and excretory products, et cetera. So, yes, the reproductive organs, the ovaries, have a high demand of energy. Sperms, if you look at sperm the way they get there, the motor has the densest collection of mitochondria. It's the mitochondria that fuel them to get to, you know, where they need to go. So.
- [40:56]
Louise Nicola
And do you think that this may be the reason why we're having a large population of people who are having fertility issues at a young age?
- [41:03]
Dr. Anurag Singh
For sure. I think if you are into mitochondrial research, and you're not looking at reproductive health. You are missing. What I think will be the next big discovery is how, how fixing the mitochondrial health can fix. Not all, but some of the issues we are seeing in, in the fertility space.
- [41:23]
Louise Nicola
Yeah. Because it's such a wild space. We've brought on a lot of fertility experts on the podcast and it's interesting. We hear people who have got, you know, a very high AMH who can't fall pregnant. But then you've got a woman who's been given an AMH of like 0.01, but falls pregnant naturally and has, has two, three kids. And it's like, why there's nothing in the, you know, you don't get taught this at med school, so why is that? And you know, maybe the hypothesis really comes down to mitochondria.
- [41:53]
Dr. Anurag Singh
There were companies, there are companies that are attempting to transfer healthy mitochondria into the eggs. And then, you know, kind of. So there are a lot of different.
- [42:03]
Louise Nicola
Is that experimental?
- [42:04]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah, very experimental. Or any. But the thought is that fixing mitochondrial function in the USA I can fix the problems with ovarian aging. We'll see how it.
- [42:14]
Louise Nicola
We'll see how that pans out in the next 10 years. Now, let's talk about. Have you done any research or are you bullish on red light therapy?
- [42:23]
Dr. Anurag Singh
I use it and I do think mitochondria like that particular wavelength near infrared, I believe.
- [42:30]
Louise Nicola
And I don't know what the photon length is actually.
- [42:32]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Me neither. I'm not a big expert in that field. But I do know mitochondria prefer red light. They are also very sensitive to temperature fluctuations. So I know one of our advisors has looked at cold versus hot temperatures. They do prefer colder temperatures. So I don't know if, you know, sauna versus taking an ice bath, what the literature is there. But these are areas that need to be explored in the whole biohacking space with mitochondria.
- [43:03]
Louise Nicola
Because we do know that getting into cold water, like doing cold water immersion ice baths can. You can get a rapid release of norepinephrine.
- [43:12]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah.
- [43:12]
Louise Nicola
And we do know that it does induce mitochondrial biogenesis. But I have been doing red light therapy now. I've become really excited about it. I do a red light bed and I do that once a week. And then the clinic, I go to Darshan's next health clinic every week and he just told me that they're getting a whole new bed in there.
- [43:33]
Dr. Anurag Singh
There.
- [43:34]
Louise Nicola
I don't know what, what it means, but I mean, I know when I go in there. I actually feel it. I can feel. Maybe it's just me, but. Or maybe it's placebo, which is a real thing. But I do feel pulsating. I stay in there for about half an hour.
- [43:48]
Dr. Anurag Singh
I'm sure there's some serious science already existing and that can be done. I was listening to Dave Palmrader yesterday at this conference, I was, and he was showing data with different sound and photo modulation that can really impact the amount of amyloid deposits in the brain. And I was, well, it's a new
- [44:06]
Louise Nicola
study that was released.
- [44:07]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah, yeah. So I think that's where we are headed is just not popping more pills. I think it's hitting your mitochondria needs this multi pronged approach, whether it's red light or cold, you know, ice baths or photomodulation, or taking targeted nutrition or drugs even.
- [44:25]
Louise Nicola
So timeline nutrition I've been taking. So you guys have gummies as well?
- [44:30]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah.
- [44:30]
Louise Nicola
Can I push back on that just for a moment and maybe you can educate me. So I saw this report which had nothing to do with your gums. It just had to do with actual creatine gummies where they took like some of the best performing creatine gummies on Amazon and they did a huge study on them and they actually found that the gummies didn't contain any creatine whatsoever. So basically people were just buying these little sugar balls thinking that they're getting creatine in them. And when you actually look into the science, it's because if you, you have to heat up this gummy in order to produce a gummy and in that process you're actually breaking down the creatine. Is that the same with urolithin A?
- [45:12]
Dr. Anurag Singh
No. URL today is a very, it's heat resistant, very stable molecule. It's heat resistant and you can put it across different temperatures. It won't budge and it has no smell. So you already have an advantage over something like omega 3 or creatine or even a lot of these NAD precursors that are a bit unstable. And for omega 3, of course, the smell is a big problem. Problem. So what, what we see and before we launch any product format, I go and run what we call bioeculency studies. So I would take a cohort of 12, 15 people, I would give them the two soft shells that you take, which gives them 500 milligram. And then I will take another cohort of people and I'll give them two gummies that are delivering the same dose. And then I would do every Hour. I would take a little amount of blood and I would look at the levels of where urolithin A is peaking. And when it's an identical match, only then we will launch that product. So the gummies actually give the same exposure to urolutein A that the two pills would give or a powder that we also have a powder will give. So I also made a test. I think I didn't answer that question. How would I know, know if I'm making urolithin A naturally? We don't sell it, but I've developed a test where you can actually measure with your blood from your finger prick, just a few drops, if you're actually a natural producer. And then you can take the gummy or the pill and you can see the increase in the levels of URL
- [46:47]
Louise Nicola
tonight, just with a pin prick test.
- [46:49]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah.
- [46:50]
Louise Nicola
Wow. It's definitely a compound that I want to start including, which I already do, but I think I might up my
- [46:57]
Dr. Anurag Singh
dose, I think a gram. If you're really into training in certain weeks, months, then that's a good dose. And what I see about the gram dose, which is beneficial and augmenting is it has these immense immune benefits. So it's hitting not just the mitochondria and the muscle. It is, because it's a higher dosage, it's hitting the mitochondria universally across in different cells. Yeah.
- [47:21]
Louise Nicola
It's not discriminative, it just, it just goes through. And if you can take a gram a day for a month or two.
- [47:28]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah, I think two months is where most people start seeing benefits. So at least a couple of months.
- [47:32]
Louise Nicola
Yeah. You're also a very big proponent of looking after your gut microbiome. Right. So what if we have dysfunctional gut microbiota? Is that the correct term? And then we take these capsules, what happens then?
- [47:48]
Dr. Anurag Singh
So most people who can make it, like me, I, I have tested myself, myself hundreds of times daily. I can never seem to make it. And I think it's back to my growing up years in, in India, where, as they say, the gut microbiome really seeded in the first thousand days of your life. I mean, you can improve it.
- [48:05]
Louise Nicola
But wait, the gut microbiome is seated in the first 1000 days of your life?
- [48:11]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah. Depending on how you were born, cesarean or not, depending on whether you were breastfed or formula fed, depending on if you got a lot of antibiotics or not, not how many times you went, saw the die.
- [48:23]
Louise Nicola
So that's the natural birth, gives you more.
- [48:26]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah.
- [48:27]
Louise Nicola
High diversity. But that doesn't mean that if you were born by C section.
- [48:31]
Dr. Anurag Singh
No. And that's why they say there's this whole field of probiotics, Right. There's this. You can nourish your microbiome back to what it should have been. But I have sequenced, actually people who make lots of it naturally. I've gone and pulled these people out and said, you are a super producer. I want to know what's the elixir inside you? Because the gut microbiome, personally, I feel, is a polypharmacy. We just found urlithin, but I think there are hundreds of these molecules that are beneficial to us. And when I look at their microbiome versus somebody like me who doesn't make it, my microbiome is just not diverse enough and not rich enough. And it's missing things like Akkermansia versus these people who. I call them blessed people, because they have the right microbiome, they'll have lots of Echomanzia, they'll have a very rich diversity score, etc. So we haven't found that one strain yet that we can probably make a probiotic out of it. But I think the answer lies in. In a healthy gut microbiome.
- [49:30]
Louise Nicola
Yeah, I've started taking.
- [49:31]
Dr. Anurag Singh
I.
- [49:31]
Louise Nicola
It's a field that I don't know anything about. It's so confusing to me.
- [49:35]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah.
- [49:35]
Louise Nicola
Just because I've spent no time. But I do know that there is a real relationship between the gut and the brain. And a lot of people ask me this, they're like, oh, but if you have, you know, poor gut microbiome, does that mean you're going to neurodegenerative diseases? And I said, and it's always, no, but it's, you know, you've got like 15 different modifiable risk factors for Alzheimer's disease and that could be one of them. Indeed.
- [49:59]
Dr. Anurag Singh
And some of these. I was trained by an amazing neurologist in my early days of medical training and he would always make me look at the how to diagnose a Parkinson S patient. And of course, when you see them coming in, you see the tremor, etc. But he's like, just focus anurag on the medical history. History. They all miss. Almost all of them are constipated. They have problems with their GI tract before, and that shows up months, years before they actually get these sort of neuromotor problems. Then comes the problem with smell. So there is some sort of a gut connection with the brain, but most of these people will have problems with their gut before they manifest the neurological problems.
- [50:38]
Louise Nicola
You know, it's interesting, I also interviewed somebody who's like a. A leader in Parkinson's disease. And he mentioned that Parkinson's is a man made aid disease and it's predominantly coming from the chemicals in our water and dry cleaning chemicals. He's so passionate. He. I said to him, you know what I said? I live on top of a dry cleaning. He walked. After the podcast, he walked me home, right. It was like a 30 minute well. He's like, I'm not going to go back. He's a neurologist. Goes, I'm not, I'm coming. I go, I need to see this place. And we went in and he asked them, he said, do you dry clean your product here? And they said, no. He said, okay, you're safe. And I asked him why. And he's in the process of shutting them down because he said that the chemicals are seeping through the vents and going up into everybody's apartment, which is causing people to get Parkinson's disease.
- [51:32]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Wow.
- [51:33]
Louise Nicola
I know.
- [51:34]
Dr. Anurag Singh
I saw data actually very recent at a conference where they were showing where they're using this fertilizer. Parkinson Quat. Wherever they're spraying paraquat, that's what it is.
- [51:43]
Louise Nicola
Paraquat. Yes.
- [51:44]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah. Wherever they're spraying paraquat in different agricultural lands, that's where Parkinson is the highest.
- [51:50]
Louise Nicola
Well, the golf course study.
- [51:51]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah, exactly.
- [51:52]
Louise Nicola
He also said that river in. It's called Goanas in the. In Brooklyn and it's actually heavily in there. Like there's a lot of paraquat there or one of the. The substances there. And that's where you get the most dense population of Parkinson's disease.
- [52:08]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Guess what Barod does?
- [52:09]
Louise Nicola
What?
- [52:10]
Dr. Anurag Singh
It's a mitochondrial toxin.
- [52:11]
Louise Nicola
It kills mitochondria.
- [52:13]
Dr. Anurag Singh
It damages them beyond recovery.
- [52:14]
Louise Nicola
And they're in dry cleaning products, but they're also in other products.
- [52:18]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah, it's probably making sway in our food through all this, you know, the fertilizers or whatever they're spraying.
- [52:23]
Louise Nicola
I now wash my fruit aggressively. I buy this fruit wash. I think you just get it from Whole Foods, like scrubbing it. And that's what Ray Dorsey, the author of this book and the Parkinson's disease expert, told me to do. He's like, no, he goes, scrub it with soap. I said, soap? He said, yeah. He's like. And like, leave it there and scrub it with it. And so now you should see my sink at home. There's like fruit wash and then there's like a scrubbing for the Fruit and the vegetables and like, it's really becoming tiring. I'm thinking of just moving to Greece just because of this, where there's like, I can just farm the fish myself.
- [52:54]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah, certainly there's truth to Mediterranean lifestyle and diet that is so beneficial to us.
- [52:59]
Louise Nicola
I'm sure we're coming to an end. And, and I want to ask, does AI play a role in anything that you're doing now? Because I'm becoming both scared and excited about the role that AI is playing in medicine, specifically for, you know, for what we do in neurosurgery. You know, we're, we're reconstructing skulls and we are doing 3D images of skulls and 3D printing these new skulls. And we're using, you know, all forms, but one of the, the best ones we're using is a titanium mesh and we're giving people their lives back. Right. And we're doing all of this because of AI and technology. And I want to know, is there a role that AI is playing in your field?
- [53:38]
Dr. Anurag Singh
I think it's coming and it's going to hit us with an impact because. So it starts at the discovery phase. So we know, for example, with the discovery of your lithin A, we actually went through 4,000 compounds found in pomegranates to find this one. Magic.
- [53:53]
Louise Nicola
Is it patented?
- [53:54]
Dr. Anurag Singh
So you can patent a natural molecule, but you can patent its effects? Okay, so we have the patents around how it works in mitochondria, how it could be beneficial for muscle regeneration or getting neurodegeneration. You can patent the manufacturing of this. So the urolithin A we make as a supplement is 100% identical to the natural, but we synthesize it through a chemistry process. So that process is patented. And most vitamins today, vitamin C being a prime example, are synthesized. Right, right. So a lot of companies own or used to own the patents, but AI comes in because I think it can fast track that process that took us 15 years by almost, you know, take 10 years off, because it can look at the structure of a beneficial molecule. It can figure out, okay, this is a structure that is beneficial. And pretty much what a medicinal chemist would take many years to figure out. It can then even synthesize new molecules that resemble this natural molecule. And that's kind of of where we are headed. We, we have a spin off of the company which is making these next generation molecules built on your lithin structure that are novel. So you, you kind of own the molecule and then you can go after neurodegeneration and you can go after more pharma like use cases than just the nutrition.
- [55:20]
Louise Nicola
One of the things I was really surprised and fascinated by was your. You guys have broken out into the skincare range. Skincare's. You know, I've only just become extremely excited about my skincare routine. You know, when you're in your 20s, you don't really care about it. As you get in your 30s and older, you're like, you start to notice things. And then I was really fascinated when you guys brought out skincare products and I got some, I got the face cream and then you had, there's this exfoliant which made me think about the fact that our skin cells have mitochondria.
- [55:52]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah.
- [55:53]
Louise Nicola
And we don't think about that.
- [55:54]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Yeah. So I was having this discussion. How did you come to skin from all the muscle research and actually came when we launched after 15 years the oral products. I'm still in contact with the first hundred people who started buying our product in the US And a lot of them would tell me, hey doc, your supplement is having an effect on the skin. And so that got us curious. Is there going to be the similar effect on skin? Skin. And we, so we started looking at 20 year old skin cells versus 40 year old skin cells versus 70 year old skin cells. And I was shocked because it mirrored everything we had looked at muscle. It mirrored everything we are looking at neurons. It's almost like the energy crisis that happens around our 40s in every cell type and then all the pathways get dysregulated. When I say mitochondria or the engine, they actually are involved in collagen synthesis. Synthesis. So we start seeing in, you know, in trials we are doing now, when you apply it topically, you actually can stop the collagen degradation and synthesize collagen and it shows up as, you know, less wrinkles in longer term clinical trials, better skin barrier, etc. So these are, this is what where we headed and actually we have a big partnership with the biggest cosmetic company, l' Oreal Lancome now.
- [57:10]
Louise Nicola
Oh, congratulations. I am so excited for you and the company and Urolithin A.
- [57:16]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Thank you.
- [57:17]
Louise Nicola
Thank you for coming on here and sharing your knowledge.
- [57:20]
Dr. Anurag Singh
Absolute pleasure. Louisa, thanks for having me.
- [57:33]
Louise Nicola
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