← The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
127. Dr. Mink Chawla: Blood Filter Seraph-100 Shows Promise To End Long COVID
01:28:36
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- [00:00]
A
We have certain biologic systems that have enormous redundancy, and inflammation is one of them. Everyone thinks, well, this is such a bad problem, but if you cannot inflame, you die from infection.
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B
Roughly 40% of our DNA is viral, and that lots of pathogens that we catch, the ones we always had, and when our immune system gets run down, they just rear their ugly head.
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A
Your immune system is getting beaten up, and over time, it just degrades. And things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all these things which take out our loved ones begin to emerge. Prior to the age of antibiotics, cancer was rare. So cancer is a disease of success.
- [00:37]
B
Sometimes a difficult concept for people to really realize that all cancer, regardless of its form or origin, was a healthy cell at one time.
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A
If you are a cancer survivor, they don't ever say this, but every morning they wake up and they ask themselves, is today the day my cancer comes back?
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B
If we could filter out and just give the immune system a break.
- [00:57]
A
I was asked to join this Darpa program in 2013. Dar Darpa's singular and enduring mission is to prevent strategic surprise. We want to develop a filter that runs like a dialysis system. We want this device to remove current virus, current fungi, and the future unknown pathogen.
- [01:16]
B
As a physician, scientist, researcher, where do you see this technology five years from today?
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A
What I think is the next most important value proposition scientifically is.
- [01:36]
B
Ultimate human. Hey, guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brea, where we go down the road of everything, anti aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And as you just heard, today's guest. Well, actually, I'm probably more excited than you are about today's guest because I have so many questions for him. I am so intellectually curious about his background, the current work that he is doing, the impact that I believe he's going to have on the aging, the longevity market, just bio optimization in general, helping people live healthier, happier, longer, more fulfilling lives. So you are really in for a treat. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Mink Ch.
- [02:19]
A
Oh, thanks so much, Gary. Delighted to be here.
- [02:21]
B
Yeah, I'm really. I've literally been excited about this for the last six months. We've done some zoom calls together. You're very handsome man. You're the handsome man.
- [02:29]
A
Generous. I appreciate that.
- [02:31]
B
But when I was actually first introduced to you, and I did a little background and research on you, and I'd love for you to talk a little bit about your journey to how you got to where you. Where you are now, because I think that you are about to make a major impactful change that may shift the dynamics and the longevity in the functional medicine world. And we'll talk about that on the podcast. But I read that you had published 170 peer reviewed articles.
- [03:01]
A
Yeah, that's about where it is now.
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B
Yeah, I mean, I know collegiate universities that haven't put out a hundred. So first of all, did you start when you were two and you know, how did you generate that much valid data?
- [03:16]
A
Well, so, you know, my background is I'm an ICU physician, I'm a nephrologist. And that combination is unbelievably uncommon. So people who go into critical care will usually do it with anesthesia or with pulmonary or with surgery. Surgery. Doing it with nephrology is a really uncommon combination. Really uncommon. So I did that. I was at George Washington University Hospital for 20 years and that space sort of blew up in real time in front of us. And it's all about how you can take a very sick patient, take blood out of their body, do things to it that helps improve the patients, put the blood back in. So it's really advanced plumbing, pool filter kind of stuff. Really.
- [03:55]
B
I mean, like dialysis. Ish, right?
- [03:58]
A
Dialysis ish, exactly. And that just led to an enormous amount of research going on. And I also ended up doing some work on a new vasopressor, which is a drug called Angiotensin ii. And that is the drug that led me out of academics. And I spent five years at a company called La Jolla Pharmaceutical Company where I was very privileged to work with an extraordinary team. And we got the first drug approved for septic shock since the Food, Drug and cosmetic act of 1962.
- [04:25]
B
Wow.
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A
So that was a great experience and extraordinary people, extraordinary clinicians and investigators. But the project that sort of led me down to my more dialysis driven days actually started at darpa. So I sort of had this full academic life and then I went on to work on this team to develop this drug and now I'm sort of back into a dialysis.
- [04:50]
B
I want you to talk about that sequence because it began with a contest, for lack of better words, or a request for proposal, whatever DARPA would call it. Yeah. To really get ahead of a pandemic that was coming.
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A
Right.
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B
That wasn't here yet.
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A
Yes.
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B
To actually address this pathogen that was going to be in people's bloodstreams. That wasn't in their bloodstreams now. Correct. And again, I'm paraphrasing, that wasn't in their bloodstreams now and filter it out effectively with basically the fewest amount of side effects.
- [05:21]
A
That's exactly right. And it was a wild, wild thing. So I was asked to join this DARPA program in 2020.
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B
And for people that don't know what DARPA is.
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A
Oh, thank you. So that's a really good point. So DARPA is the Advanced Research Projects Administration. It was developed after Sputnik. So some of your listeners will not know what Sputnik is. You and I are not going to talk about our age, why we know Sputnik. But basically. So the Russians basically launched a satellite. The US didn't see it coming. We were completely surprised by it. DARPA was created in response. DARPA's singular and enduring mission is to prevent strategic surprise. So they get a solid budget, and their job is to imagine and dream up what terribleness can come our way and to do projects and research to be prepared for it. So in 2013, we roll into a room, I'm relieved of my electronics. You go in, and a colonel gets up and says, in the future, there will be a pandemic. We will not be prepared. There will be no vaccine. There'll be no drugs. There'll be nothing. And while we're sorting it out, we want to develop a filter that runs like a dialysis system that removes pathogen. And I am.
- [06:37]
B
But you don't know what the pathogen is, you know?
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A
And so he says, we want this device to remove current virus, current bacteria, current fungi, and the future unknown pathogen.
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B
Wow.
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A
And Doug Silverstein, who's a very good friend of mine who works at fda, still works at fda, was at the meeting with me, and I turned to Doug and I said, this is effing crazy. This will never happen. This is total science fiction. But it's cool. It's cool. And not only were they right about the pandemic, eerily, eerily right.
- [07:14]
B
Kind of makes us want to go down another road.
- [07:16]
A
That could be a whole separate podcast.
- [07:18]
B
That could be a whole.
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A
And we won't do that. And the filter that actually worked to do all that was created. It was emergency use, authorized in 2020, and it worked against Covid, and it worked as advertised, not surprisingly, initially largely deployed at our military facilities. So Walter Reed, BAMSI in San Antonio, Eisenhower, Tripler. I mean, all our big centers, Bethesda, Navel, et cetera. And it worked wonderfully. And we are now learning about all the other things this filter can take out, which is hugely important and valuable. But much of this has been serendipity And I have said for a very long time that great technology teaches science. And so we are letting this tech teach us to be really honest for much of the journey.
- [08:12]
B
I mean, I think it's, it's fascinating for me like this, just this right now, present time in science, in aging, in mortality, in longevity, bio optimization, whatever you want to call it, it's such an exciting time. I see, you know, there are a few big innovations. Artificial intelligence, which manipulates 700 trillion independent variables and creates an actionable result. Early detection. You know, we're now talking about, you know, at stage zero for cancers where we talked about stage one. If you catch it early, this is like pre stage one. And so this, this combination of early detection, artificial intelligence, big data, I, I do feel like the regulatory market is woefully behind and, and is going to have a very difficult time keeping up with the pace of innovation.
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A
I agree.
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B
Right. Because we've, we've built a whole medical system on the backs of randomized clinical trials, which are 5 year, 8 year, 10 year trials. And then, you know, animal studies, then controlled human trials and then launch and you know, usually it's three, four, five, six, seven years before we launch something. And then we go, oh, we made a mistake.
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A
And the failure rate's high.
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B
Yeah, and the failure rate's high. And we're 20 years down the road.
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A
That's right.
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B
That's exactly right. And so the cycle in, in my opinion is just being vastly compressed. Compressed.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But I think it's fascinating, first of all, your background as an intensive care unit physician and also having a nephrology concentration because. Or nephrology expertise, because the kidney is the great filter of the body.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And it can be our best friend or our worst enemy, depending on how healthy. Oh, for sure it is. And, and so this is, you know, getting a window into your brain. You must have automatically been thinking filtration. How do I, how do I filter out the bad and still leave the good?
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A
That's right.
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B
Right. So it can't just be size.
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A
That's right.
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B
Because size alone is going to take a lot of things out of our plasma and our bloodstream. That, yes, could be pathogenic, but by the time you get down to the size of a pathogen, a virus. Well, now you've already eliminated platelets and red blood cells and.
- [10:23]
A
That's right.
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B
And all kinds of immune cells and natural killers. So you can't just, you know, when you think about this kind of filtration, it's, it's gotta Be so multifactorial because it's not as simple as people think about, like, air filtration. Okay. The smaller I make the hole, first I catch, you know, cat hairs, and then I catch dust, and then I catch mites, and then I catch viruses. We can't do that in the blood.
- [10:46]
A
That's exactly right.
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B
And so how did. How did this technology evolve for you? Yeah.
- [10:51]
A
So what's really interesting is that in medicine, since the development of antibiotics, largely we are allopathic physicians. So we go to a lot of training, usually around 10 years on average. You know, post grad, four years medical school residency. We are the most advanced drug pushers in the history of the world. We're very good at it, and we know how to dial in drugs. But 98% of physicians, we add things, we give medication, we give things to you. There's only two specialties that remove surgeons and nephrologists. Right. Because we take things out now surgeons do it with a knife.
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B
Right.
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A
And it makes sense. Like hack out a tumor. Good. We want that. That's fantastic. Take out a certain part of the brain tissue. Totally. So nephrologists, since the advent of dialysis, which was in 1944. 45, we spent a lot of time thinking about, how do I take things out of the body and leave the good stuff? And we have had a very long period of time of working with different materials that upset the blood. Less blood is not meant to interact with plastic.
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B
Right.
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A
It does not like it. And in the early days of dialysis, we would wait to put people on dialysis because the membranes were bio incompatible. So the blood would see the surface and it would hate it. They would get inflamed, complement coagulation. Very bad things would begin to happen. White cells would get activated. They will become inflammatory. So you had a very rough risk benefit equation. So you're benefiting them by taking out their kidney toxins, but you're eating a lot of harm for that patient. And so it wasn't a great place to be. Around the 1980s, 1990s, in the dialysis world, we moved to new materials that were biocompatible, and things began to get a lot better. But all dialysis systems, apheresis systems, they, as you point out quite correctly, use size exclusion to do their job. So an air filter is a good example of size exclusion. A coffee filter. Coffee grounds from coffee.
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B
Right.
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A
Penne from pasta with a colander. These are all size exclusion devices.
- [13:07]
B
Right.
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A
This device, the Serif 100, that was developed in the DARPA program used a very different idea, and they used a concept called surface affinity. So instead of taking blood and saying, okay, big things go through, small things will take out, they use a different concept. So I want you to imagine all of us, you know, adult humans have on five liters of blood in our bodies. That's a gallon jug, plus about 25% more. Right?
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B
Okay.
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A
So you take out someone's blood. We would not do this. This is very uncool. But you take all the blood out of someone's body and you pour it on a kitchen table that's at about 5% incline.
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B
Okay.
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A
And you allow all that blood to roll across that surface, you collect it, put it back into the patient's body. That is conceptually what this procedure is. Now, the surface of this filter is made up of a very special surface. And that surface looks like a wheat field during harvest time. All these little projections sticking up like.
- [14:15]
B
The endothelium, like the glycogen.
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A
Exactly. So this is identical to the inner lining of our blood vessels, the endothelial glucocalyx. And so it's very biocompatible because this is what the blood just came from. It came from an endothelial glycocalyx area, and now it's seeing a glycocalyx so it doesn't get upset. So this surface is very biocompatible. Now, the initial insight was that staph aureus, a very nasty bug that's on all of us, was attracted to this surface. So this surface is made up of heparin. So for the medically literate folks, this is the same heparin that you use to treat someone with a blood clot. But it's not being used in the same way. It's on the surface. So heparin coated devices, the heparin is laid down like latex in this surface. The heparin is projected up so it looks just like our glycocalyx.
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B
Wow.
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A
So our glycocalyx is made of heparan sulfate. H E P E R A N. This is H E P R I N. But structurally, they're identical.
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B
Mild.
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A
So the initial DARPA program was, hey, it tends to attract bugs, pathogens. So let's use it. What we've come to understand is why so many pathogens attach this. So it started with staph and gram negative bugs like Klebsiella and pseudomonas. And then Covid hit. And this device binds the COVID virus.
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B
And I've seen the COVID studies. It's very impressive.
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A
It's very amazing. But importantly, spike protein.
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B
Oh.
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A
Has heparin binding sites, long Covid, and it binds amyloid, which is also linked to long Covid, and it binds circulating tumor cells.
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B
Wow.
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A
And so most people then say, okay, wait a minute, like, how can it do all this? Why is it doing this?
- [16:10]
B
Sounds too good to be true.
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A
It sounds too good to be true. It doesn't take off heavy metals, it doesn't take off glyphosate, so it's not a panacea. But for certain things, it works really well. So the reason why, now this is thesis, but I think it is the Occam's razor explanation is whether you are a Staph Aureus molecule, whether you're pseudomonas, whether you're spike protein, whether you are cancer, you're invading, you're not in a static system. So blood in your body is not in a bucket hanging around. Your cardiac output, as you know, is five liters per minute at rest. Five liters per minute. So your bloodstream is a rushing torrent. All the time, blood's moving, it's moving fast. And you see a movie and someone gets shot and then the artery and blood's spurting out. That's real. That is a legit thing. Like, blood is moving at a really high pressure and pace. So evolution has taught whatever invasion minded particle. The first thing you need to do before you take out your own unique attack machinery is you got to steady yourself like you would getting out of a rushing stream. You got to grab a rock.
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B
Right.
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A
So all of these things have developed suction cups to grab the glycocalyx.
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B
Wow. That's the wall of your vessel.
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A
That's the wall of the vessel, exactly. So they're rushing by. They're like, I need to get out and invade. So they put their suction cup on and they start to do their business. We are the most massive decoy bait and switch device in the history of biology.
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B
Wow.
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A
So all these particles enter the filter and they think they have hit home run. They're like, I'm here, I found it.
- [17:49]
B
Yeah. Because. So there's lots of surface area in this filter.
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A
40 meters square, the size of a football field of surface in a tube, about the size of this thing.
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B
Really?
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A
Yeah.
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B
And as the blood goes through there, there are all these heparin binding sites that it can attach to that they.
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A
All attach to, thinking that they are home free, not realizing that filter's going in the trash.
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B
Right.
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A
And it works Very effectively to do this. And it. So it started with the DARPA program. We got smarter, we saw it working for so many things and I think we need now understand why.
- [18:22]
B
So it is still emergency use authorized for Covid?
- [18:26]
A
Yeah. So in Europe it is fully approved for pathogen reduction and it has been since 2019. The US and this is not a knock against anyone, but we tend to lag behind approvals in other places in the world. It was emergency use authorized just for Covid and it still has that use. And we are currently submitting our full approval to the FDA and we hope to have full approval for Covid and hopefully secondary sepsis in the next six to 12 months.
- [18:54]
B
So would you say that the positive outcomes. And I will actually put a link to that study, it's published because I've read it myself. But for those of folks that are listening that are not really familiar with it, would you say that the benefits were coming from the direct reduction of the viral load? The SARS CoV2 virus?
- [19:13]
A
Yes.
- [19:14]
B
Being reduced. And then there are other ancillary benefits too, like are you removing inflammatory compounds, cytokines, or other things from the blood that are helping the immune system to calm down and stop overreacting.
- [19:27]
A
So it's interesting is that we remove the virus itself, which is a very good thing. And there's lots of reasons why that's a good thing. But we also remove inflammatory mediators. And I'll get a little bit into the weeds here with things called S Flit and other things called damps and pamps and we'll leave links to this for everyone, you know, so they can go read about it. They're really interested. But these are danger and pathogen associated molecular patterns and these are basically things that tell the immune system to be upset. And so I think what people need to understand is we have certain biologic systems that have enormous redundancy and inflammation is one of them. And everyone's heard about inflammation. They're like going on a low inflammation diet. This person's inflamed, they have this lupus, inflammation is killing them. And everyone thinks, well, this is such a bad problem, but if you cannot inflame, you die from infection. So inflammation is part of our defense system against infection. And you remember when we were all cave men and women, we didn't have antibiotics, so you needed inflammation to protect you. So we have lots of redundancy in our inflammatory pathways and this is to protect us. This is evolutionary biology at work. So not only does your bloodstream and blood respond to a Fully intact bacteria, a fully intact virus. It will respond to a particle of it, a piece of it, a piece of bacterial DNA the body can recognize, and it recognizes all these things. In fact, the body can recognize mRNA. So the MRNA vaccine had to be modified because this system called the toll4 like receptor would recognize it and stop it. So they had to change the actual structure of the MRNA to have it get past our defense network to have it work.
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B
Wow.
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A
So all this redundancy is there and the filter removes a lot of these things that get the immune system upset. So it has an anti inflammatory effect, but it's removing the source of the inflammation.
- [21:34]
B
Wow. Hey guys, I'm really excited to announce this. Perfect aminos has gotten a serious upgrade. They've added nucleotides, the building blocks of our nucleic acids, DNA and rna. And this is important. We know essential amino acids are the building blocks of protein and collagen. Having all the essential amino acids in the correct ratio is necessary for complete protein synthesis without the caloric impact. But if we want perfect protein synthesis, we need to look at the process of protein synthesis itself. Because if the process is faulty, we won't get the correctly made protein, collagen, fibrin, or the red blood cells in our bloodstream or our muscles. We can even stop creation of specific proteins which can affect us in so many different ways. Our DNA and our RNA are what, direct protein synthesis, building new proteins. If our DNA or RNA get damaged from toxins, harmful bacteria, or just plain aging, we get faulty protein synthesis so cells, enzymes and hormones are less functional. And we get premature aging. By adding nucleosides and nucleotides, the building blocks of the nucleic acids, DNA and rna, our cells get exactly what they need to help repair faulty DNA and RNA and improve the process of protein synthesis itself. This is next level science, and you need to try these. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. Yeah. Because, you know, I've often said inflammation is the root of all evil. I mean, in fact, there's a. There's a theory and I'm paraphrasing the theory now for a moment. I talked to Peter Diamantes about this on our po. He was, he was on the podcast right. Right before you. He's, by the way, huge fan of yours.
- [23:18]
A
Peter's awesome.
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B
Huge. Speaks very, very highly of you. And I. And I speak very highly of Peter because I just think. Think the world of him.
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A
Me too.
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B
We had many podcasts on Peter Diamantes, right, right before. Right before the Camera started rolling. I just. I love what he's doing in the world, you know, with. With his functional medicine clinics and. And the amount of money he research and some of the challenges that he hosts for innovations and. Oh, yeah, biotechnology. I mean, very interesting. Left brain, right brain guy that's just got a big heart and really, truly wants to, in my opinion, change the face of humanity.
- [23:54]
A
Yeah. I just think what I love about Peter more than anything, aside from how gifted he is, is his intent is so clear.
- [24:01]
B
Yeah.
- [24:01]
A
What he's trying to do.
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B
Yeah.
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A
And then he just give you a good hug, too.
- [24:04]
B
Oh, yeah.
- [24:06]
A
Good guy.
- [24:07]
B
Very strong guy.
- [24:07]
A
Good guy.
- [24:08]
B
Very strong. But. So one of the things that we talked about was sort of this emerging view of aging as an immuno overload.
- [24:20]
A
Yes.
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B
You know, like a slow, progressive decline in the immune system's ability to fight on so many fronts. Right. You take an infant that hasn't been exposed to pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, glyphosates, preservatives, you know, topical hormone disruptors, and all of these other chemical, synthetic pharmaceutical compounds that their immune system wasn't meant to fight. And then you add to that its daily activities, protecting us from all the bugs and the pathogens and, you know, monitoring us for invaders. And I don't think that people really realize how much the immune system does on a daily basis that is not directly fighting the invaders.
- [24:58]
A
That's right.
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B
You know, just cleaning up our own senescent cells.
- [25:01]
A
Surveillance.
- [25:02]
B
Yeah, surveillance.
- [25:03]
A
Surveillance is hard. Surveillance is a lot of work to go around and check everything every day and make sure everything is good, something is bad, to pull it out and get rid of it.
- [25:10]
B
Yeah. And. And so do you subscribe to this. This theory on aging that amongst other things, it is the immune system's inability or progressively weakening ability to defend itself on so many fronts. There's just so many things in our blood that it's got to worry about.
- [25:29]
A
Oh, I. I think that's very right. And I think that a good example of this is prior to the age of antibiotics, cancer was rare. So cancer, not exclusively, but largely is a disease of success. You didn't live long enough to get cancer. Before the age of antibiotics, the average people's lives were like 40, and people would die with cancer, but they didn't die of cancer. So the immune system can get overwhelmed by bacteria. But now with antibiotics, it has all these other responsibilities and clearing senescent cells, getting rid of precancerous cells. But now it is getting inundated with at least in America, a major food problem. This ultra processed food thing is a disaster.
- [26:17]
B
No question.
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A
I am very late to this. Anyone who's watching this who knows me is like mink is. This is the tasty. He would eat tasty cakes and Diet Coke on rounds. He's telling us no in the icu. Anyone who saw on rounds at the GW ICU knew I would go through three or four Diet Cokes on rounds. I would be eating horrible food. These are all bad habits we pick up in our. And I'm not defending any of it, but it's taken me a very long time, too long, frankly, to come around to this insight. But your immune system is getting beaten up, and over time, it just degrades.
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B
Right.
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A
And that degradation is harmed by metabolic diseases, diabetes, you know, all the stuff that comes with obesity. It comes along with not being fit, lack of muscle mass, that harm. So all these things which you are a huge proponent of, oxidative stress, all these things wear against the immune system and the gaps and the defense begin to open up and things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all these things which take out our loved ones begin to emerge.
- [27:28]
B
Yeah.
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A
And so I totally agree with this general thesis, and I think there are concrete things we can do about it.
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B
And I think what's really interesting is the technology that you've developed, this serif filter. You know, again, I'm oversimplifying, but what it does is it removes the. Some of the landscape that the immune system is. Is fighting on. Right. I mean, to move. Because if you can filter out things like viral pathogens and inflammatory compounds, even mold or mycotoxins or circulating tumor cells, which. Which, you know, it's sometimes a difficult concept for people to really realize that, you know, all cancer, regardless of its former origin, was a healthy cell at one time.
- [28:13]
A
That's right.
- [28:14]
B
Right. I mean, it was a healthy liver cell and its metabolism shift to becoming sick, or it was a healthy lung cell and something caused it to shift its metabolism. There's a lot of reasons that cause that. But these were still at one time healthy cells. So these are not really things that are happening to us.
- [28:29]
A
That's right.
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B
They're things that are happening within us. Right.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And so if we could theoretically filter out and just allow the immune system, give the immune system a break and give it some support and some love, it would be able to refocus on.
- [28:46]
A
That's right. So much of the reason why we think that this device helps people is based on something that I had very wrong at the beginning. So there's a very famous Richard Feynman quote that I'm fond of, and it says, religion is a culture of faith and science is a culture of doubt. And I like that. I think that's very true.
- [29:10]
B
It is true.
- [29:11]
A
So in certainly my academic life, we are taught to be very cynical, to be very just. Are you sure? Show it to me again. Show it to me again. And I think that's good. During the DARPA program, I said, listen, every single bug is different. These things are. How are we gonna find one thing to remove all of it? And I said, even if we did, let's by some imagine some miracle ended up happening. I grew up in New Jersey. I was born in Philadelphia. I grew up in New Jersey. So I suffer from what's known as chronic foot and mouth disease. Because I say things very boldly, obnoxiously, then I have to eat my words. My foot ends up in my mouth. So I have chronic foot and mouth disease. So I had a very famous moment with this device. I. This will never work. And I said, here's the reason why I don't think it'll work. If you have pneumonia, which is like klebsiella, which is a very nasty bug, and your blood is filled with klebsiella, and I remove all of it as soon as the procedure is done, it's just going to come right back. It's just going to refill everything. And we had a very powerful case which proved how this works very clearly. So we had a young woman, she's 17 years old, she has a kidney transplant, and she has adenoviral viremia. So adenovirus is a very nasty bug. It tends to pick on people who are immunocompromised, but not exclusively. She had 10 million copies per milliliter in her blood of adenovirus. This is a published case report. You'll put in the.
- [30:38]
B
I'll put them in the notes. I'll put it in the show notes.
- [30:39]
A
And this is associated with a 90 to 95% mortality. She's 17. She should have died. The physicians got very desperate. They put our filter on, and it went from 10 million to 2 million after the first procedure.
- [30:52]
B
Wow.
- [30:53]
A
Then it went from 2 million to 200,000 in the second. And then they stopped treating her with the filter and it all went away. Now they had a kidney biopsy. There's adenovirus in the kidney. Okay. And there's adenovirus in the blood. So we cleaned up the blood, and then it all Got better. So what happened? Well, what happens is the immune system traffics to target areas based on cytokines. So when you're inflamed and these things that make us sick, this is not an accident. This is evolution at work. This is how the cell figures out how to go to the cells that are getting attacked, send out a signal, and the signal is like a scent. And that scent is taken up by the white cells, and they can traffic down that scent to find where they should go. Well, if your bloodstream is filled with pathogen, your immune system is in the bloodstream, and there's all these cytokines, inflammatory meteors everywhere. So when we mop up the bloodstream, the immune system redeploys. That is powerful.
- [32:02]
B
And you have the same number of soldiers, but you're fighting fewer enemies.
- [32:06]
A
That's right. It's the cavalry to the infantry. We now give them enough support so they can go and take care of everything else. So to your point, from the potential, if you look at what are the things that really cause problems? Epstein Barr virus has been linked to ms, hsv, to Alzheimer's. All these viruses are linked and we don't clear them. And as we don't clear them, the body begins to chronically inflame to them, and then terrible things happen to us. So if we can not just move from this inpatient space where this filter has started, we're now moving into the outpatient space. We're starting a long Covid clinical trial right now.
- [32:47]
B
I want to talk to you about that.
- [32:48]
A
And we're seeing extraordinary results from people. We have people with chronic ebv, chronic Lyme, and we have these cases where it's like, wow, this is so if you can take a person. So in the future, we aspire to take people with this tick borne illnesses. They can't clear it through modern medicine. We can now bring something to bear to help the immune system reboot, get back on it.
- [33:13]
B
And even though it may not be getting 100% out, because we know that viruses will retreat to the dorsal root ganglion, Right? And so while there may be a high viral load for a period of time in the blood, and you clean that up, you can resurge, right?
- [33:28]
A
For sure. But the most important thing is just like hiv, we have not cured hiv, aids. I practice in a time where many, many people died in front of me with aids, that I watched highly active retroviral therapy come to bear. Magic Johnson is alive and well, and he's a billionaire and he's killing it. And he still has hiv. So to your point precisely. If the immune system can put that virus back in jail, I don't care.
- [33:58]
B
Right.
- [33:58]
A
He just can't be meandering the streets shooting people. That's the problem is to give it.
- [34:05]
B
Enough of a leg up that it goes dormant. I, I, I think a lot of people don't realize too that roughly 40 of our DNA is viral and that, that yes, you know, lots of pathogens, Epstein Barr, not really pathogens that we catch, the ones we always had. And when our immune system gets run down, they just rear their ugly head. Right. Like come back as EBV or, or, or you know, chickenpox can come back as shingles.
- [34:30]
A
8% of our human DNA is retroviral in origin.
- [34:35]
B
Retroviral?
- [34:36]
A
Yeah. Our genome has retrovirus in it. And when you get very, very sick, those genes start coming out. Now there's probably some evolutionary reasons why we incorporated them in because it has a higher mutation rate. So that helps us evolve a little.
- [34:49]
B
That's really a fascinating point, molecular biology. We have viruses in our strand of DNA and they replicate in silence.
- [34:58]
A
Replicate grandfather to, to son to grant, like on and on it goes. Yes, and they are. And it has given us an advantage. But like every advantage, it can become a weakness, it can become a vulnerability. And so I very much agree with this notion of being able to surveil patients if they have chronic viremias, if they have chronic tick borne illnesses. This I think is going to be a really powerful tool to help.
- [35:24]
B
I think so too. In fact, I'm going down to get my filter this, this month or early next. My wife's doing the same thing. We're gonna, you know, get the hook up to this.
- [35:33]
A
Yeah, you guys being the clinical trial, which I think is great.
- [35:36]
B
Yeah, I'm super excited about that. And I'll let you guys know how it goes and I'll do some pre and post, you know, some biomarker testing. What kind of, for those people that are a little bit more familiar with blood, blood biomarkers. What kind of biomarkers could we look at pre and post filtration? And what could we expect to see after. Yeah, after a filter, let's say some of these healthy. And then I want to talk about long covet because long Covid what I read the other day, 27 million people or so.
- [36:02]
A
Yeah, it is, it is astonishing what those numbers look like. So I think it depends on why folks are getting treated. So people with acute infection or chronic infection, if you happen to have PCR positive viral particles in your blood, then a very easy thing to do is say, hey, did we take that titer down? Do we make it undetectable? And we've done that. We've had cases where people were EBV positive and then they were done. They were EBV undetectable. So that's like an amazing, cool thing.
- [36:33]
B
Yes.
- [36:34]
A
For people with chronic Lyme, we've had some really extraordinary case reports on this. And for them it's, you can't measure Lyme so easily in the blood, but there's these other Lyme surrogates, so I think it's a little personalized in patients with circulating tumor cells. So the first you saw the publication, which is unbelievable.
- [36:55]
B
It really is.
- [36:56]
A
My dear friend Vedran Pruznik, who's in Zagreb, who did the first study with Sonia Ilik. The data are just amazing.
- [37:06]
B
It is incredible. If I had a loved one that.
- [37:09]
A
Had cancer right now to drop CTCs, it's just mind blowing. So we've press released our first experience with five pancreatic cancer patients in Oklahoma. And what was stunning about them is all the patients reported an improvement in appetite, less pain, and their complexion improved. So to get back to your original question, what to measure pre and post depends on why you're getting it done. And I think for long COVID patients, I think looking at their markers of inflammation, simple to easy measure, things like sed rate and your C reactive protein, I think are good starts. I think we want to do more advanced stuff for people who have it available in the clinical trial. But my main interest, and this is something that I'm going to hope to work with you on, is people need to be able to measure spike protein.
- [37:57]
B
Yes.
- [37:58]
A
And it is not easily available.
- [37:59]
B
Yes.
- [38:00]
A
And just the way you've made methylation stuff more available, I really feel like being able to measure if you feel like poo and you think you have long Covid, well, you may not have virus in your blood, but if you have spike protein in your blood, Houston, we have a problem. Yes, and this is an uncomfortable conversation for many, but the spike protein may not just be from a COVID infection. It could be from a persistent vaccine producing spike protein.
- [38:33]
B
I mean, I've said that too. I mean, I've also said that the terms long Covid and vaccine injury could be pseudonymous.
- [38:40]
A
I think in some patients that certainly could be the case. But what's really cool is the MRNA vaccine. Spike protein is you can differentiate it from wild type with a very sophisticated assay. It's not Easily available and I don't want to jump too much into the weeds on it. And what we can talk about, and I hope we will, is the MRNA that you get from a vaccine is synthetic. Is synthetic. And it's slightly different. The sequence is different by two amino acids. And that you can actually detect that is phenomenal because. So I could actually measure spike protein in someone and then I could do a really expensive sophisticated sub analysis and tell you if that came. Not only can I differentiate natural infection or I can differentiate Pfizer from Moderna's. Wow. Which is wild, right?
- [39:35]
B
That is so wild.
- [39:36]
A
Signature is so clean. You can differentiate Wild from Pfizer from Moderna.
- [39:41]
B
Hey guys, I'm beyond excited to introduce something that's going to transform your nutrition game. A new protein bar formulated by me, created in partnership with Body Health. Now, this is the kind of protein bar I would want in my own backpack. In fact, as I head out on the great world race, it's going to be in both my sons and my backpack. It is packed with perfect amino, the same essential amino acids I use every day for up to 99% protein absorption. Clean plant based protein energizing MCT oil and a powerhouse organic fruit and veggie blend that will fuel your body at a cellular level. And guess what? It's naturally sweetened with monk fruit for that minimal caloric and glycemic impact. Whether you're hitting the gym, grinding through a busy day, or you just need that nutrient dense boost, this bar is my go to and your new secret weapon. This is not just any kind of protein bar, guys. If I formulate a protein bar, it's going to be made out of nutrient dense whole foods. And that's what we accomplished here. And if you're part of my rule bracket community, you'll also get an exclusive discount. So snag yours now before they're gone. Your body and your future self will thank you. Links to my protein bar and my rule BRCA VIP community will be down below in the description. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast and just super fast. Not to do a whole lesson on cellular biology, but you know our DNA sends messages into the cell messenger rna, right? Right. So it transcribes these messages and for lack of better words, the vaccine is in some cases is an MRNA vaccine and that vaccine is a synthetic copy of that message.
- [41:14]
A
That's right.
- [41:14]
B
And so it's not a, it's not a natural organic copy that was created by your DNA and then thrown out of the nucleus into the cytoplasm of the cell. This is one that was injected into you synthetically to elicit what they hoped would be the same response.
- [41:27]
A
Right. So let's. I'm going to explain this in a way I think, hopefully is accessible to everyone. So the way to think about this is almost every vaccine prior to this new version, prior to the mRNA, vaccines were made by taking a bunch of vi. Let's just use viruses to keep it clean. And the first thing you have to do is you have to make a lot of virus to make the vaccine. And the way your body works at this is our immune system is so adept. It recognizes specific molecular patterns. Like you and I recognize faces. So you can differentiate two identical twins. Parents can do it. They can look at their face. They can see it. Our immune system is so good. Different parts of different viruses called antigens. So the antigen, which is the foreign product that your immune system responds to, the face on it that it actually sees, is called an epitope.
- [42:23]
B
Okay.
- [42:24]
A
So that's the epitope. The body recognizes the epitope and says, okay, I see that face. That guy's a bad guy. I'm gonna go get him. That is the basis of all vaccines. So what happens is we say, okay, for. Let's say polio or hepatitis B is probably the best example. There's one face. And if I can get the body to make antibodies to that epitope, I can actually make this person immune to this. So what you have to do now is you have to make metric tons of these little faces. That is really expensive, and that takes a lot of time. Now, I'll tell you a funny story. When I entered from academics to industry due to my chronic foot and mouth disease, I was at this big meeting and we were talking about how this one company was having difficulty making some product. Now, at the time, I didn't know that 80% of FDA denials come from not being able to make your product correctly because it's really hard. I didn't know that at the time. Had I known that, I wouldn't have said what I said, which I'm going to tell you what I said. So they're complaining they can't make this thing. And it was a really great drug. And I'm like, how hard could it be? It's yellow and blue. Play DOH makes green. Yeah, but that was the wrong thing.
- [43:43]
B
You didn't make any friends.
- [43:44]
A
Making stuff is really hard. Now, when you say that at a large public meeting and your chief medical Officer of a company that comes back to bite you on the ass forever. Oh, yeah, And I deserved it. And so I get like, play doh, like joke things from these guys. I mean, it's fine. Like, I deserve. Oh, my God, they send me, like, you know, it's so easy. Even a CMO can do it. Like these very funny, you know, joke memes, you know, on plato. But making stuff is really hard. So this is where the MRNA vaccine comes into play. So the idea is it's expensive to set up a factory. It's expensive to take all this virus and make all of it. Instead of having a factory make it, let's have the body make it. That's how the MRNA vaccine works. So the trick and why the technology is really slick is we all our cells make proteins, and there are little factories inside our cells called ribosomes. And they are protein makers. That's what they do for a make. And we need protein. We make muscle, we make antibodies. And these little guys, this is what they do for a living. So they get a set of instructions from the nucleus, the brain of the cell, and that is message. MRNA message. So the message goes from the nucleus to the ribosome. So the blueprint goes from the brain to the factory, the ribosome make this protein. So the idea is, let's hijack that ribosome and have it make this, face this, so that the body will respond to it. So we bypass the factory. The body's the factory. Brilliant. Okay, here's two problems that happen. So the first problem is viruses have been trying to do this to us for a long time too. Even before we came up with this idea, viruses were doing it.
- [45:29]
B
Well, that's what they do. They hijack your cellular biology, right? They're not really living things.
- [45:32]
A
So our in our immune system can detect message RNA and they attack it. So when we tried these original MRNA vaccines, they didn't work because the immune system would see it and take a big billy club and hit it. Okay, so it didn't work. So the MRNA vaccines, in order to trick the immune system, they swapped out the base pair that the immune system could recognize. It's called uridine, and they swapped it out into pseudouridine so the immune system doesn't see it. Ah, doesn't see it. And then it can go into the cell and do its business. The problem that the people who have been really worried about the MRNA vaccine is how does the ribosome factory know to turn off?
- [46:22]
B
Right. Since it's a synthetic message.
- [46:24]
A
So you just sent a blueprint to a factory. Where's the foreman who says, hey, you're making.
- [46:33]
B
We've made enough of this.
- [46:34]
A
And this stuff you're making is bad for you, by the way.
- [46:36]
B
Right.
- [46:37]
A
Spike protein is bad for you. It comes from a virus. It has clearly been demonstrated to cause problems for the heart, for the brain. It's amylogenic. Spike protein is bad for you, period, Full stop. So it's okay if you're making a little bit of it to have an immune response. Well, how do you turn it off? So that's the first problem. So a lot of people who think that the vaccines cause long Covid are of the belief that the vaccine doesn't turn off and continues to make spike protein. How you prove this is probably provable with this advanced assay, but I've not seen good research that demonstrably can say that that's true or not true. It's an open question. Our filter removes spike protein.
- [47:24]
B
Wow.
- [47:25]
A
And so we think for long Covid to the degree that spike protein is a large component of long Covid, we're going to try and see if that can help people.
- [47:32]
B
Right.
- [47:33]
A
So that makes a lot of sense. But the more interesting data that's come out that's a bit unsettling is the pseudouridine doesn't work the way uridine does. So there's a reason why evolution, or the Lord our God, depending on your spiritual preference, uses uridine because it's a really good blueprint. Pseudouridine creates errors. Okay. So I want you to imagine how a ribosome works. So a ribosome makes a protein, and every protein starts looking at like a lighthouse. So you take a bunch of bricks and you put them in circles until you get a big cylinder, until it goes all the way to the top. And then that goes on and can do a bunch of other wrapping and become a much more complex thing. But it starts as a spiral, goes in order. So the order is very important. And you have four different pieces of code. Uridine is one of them. And it puts about 25ish types of amino acids into place. So this pseudouridine causes what's called frameshift proteins. And we'll put a link in this Nature article. This is a very top journal. So the top journals in the world are Science, Nature, Cell, New England Journal, Lancet, jama. This is in Nature. So this is a top group of folks from Cambridge and the uk and they are showing that the MRNA vaccines create frameshifted protein so this is not the spike protein. It's something really similar to a spike protein, but not exactly. The error rate is 8%. Now, I helped work with a team that developed a drug called Angiotensin II. If I went to the FDA and said 8% of our vials will have something else, what do you think they would have thought about that?
- [49:22]
B
No can do.
- [49:24]
A
That leads to what's called a crl, a complete response letter, which is no. They would say, okay, that's nice. Go back and fix it. Okay. To give you an idea of how stringent the FDA is and should be, we gave these things called the International Harmonization Guidelines, called ich. So in a phase one study, I'm going into people for the very first time. If I have an impurity of greater than 0.1%, the agency insists that I characterize it. Really, I don't have to tell you what it does, but I just tell you what it is. Is it a bottle? Is it a cap? Is it a microphone? What is this thing? At 0.1%, this is giving you an 8% error rate, and we don't know what it is. So there's a lot of people who are very upset about this. This is going into people we don't know what these proteins are or aren't. To be fair, there's no obvious data that shows that it's bad for you. I'm not a big fan of. I'm gonna give it to you. I don't know.
- [50:33]
B
Right.
- [50:34]
A
Okay. I was thinking for myself here.
- [50:35]
B
Did you get the vaccine, you and your family?
- [50:38]
A
My wife did, my kids did. And knowing what I know now, for at least mRNA, I wouldn't. Yeah, I don't want frameshifted proteins in me. And they actually looked at real patients, Patients who got a vaccine that doesn't cause. Frameshift proteins have no evidence of antibodies, frameshift proteins. 30% of the folks who got the Pfizer vaccine had evidence that they had frameshifts of proteins in their body. Wow. This is nature. So please look at the paper and double check me. But this is. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if the FDA didn't update the label for them on this.
- [51:11]
B
Wow.
- [51:12]
A
Once they get their hands on this. Because I don't think an 8%, I don't know well with anybody.
- [51:19]
B
That's a big number.
- [51:20]
A
And considering that 0.1 is the standard.
- [51:22]
B
Yeah. And, and, and also that this spike protein in overabundance is now being directly linked to all kinds of, you know, diffuse vasculitis dystonia, vascular. So there's a beautiful myriad of.
- [51:37]
A
It's. It's clots, it's brain fog. But I think the best paper on this is in Circulation, which is a top journal out of the Mass. General, Boston Children's Hospital. So a very reputable institution. And they looked at people with post vaccine myocarditis, and they looked at patients who had gotten the vaccine who didn't have myocarditis. And those who did, all of them had very similar T cell responses and similar antibody responses. The folks with myocarditis all had free spike protein in their blood. The controls had none.
- [52:11]
B
Wow.
- [52:12]
A
So this is not gold level proof or platinum level proof, but it suggests that the spike protein is the culprit. What's more concerning to me is if you have antibodies, why aren't they binding the spike protein? Yeah, like, that's weird, right? If you don't have antibodies. Okay, fine.
- [52:35]
B
Like, is it because. Is it because of the synthetic nature of these, these, these additional amino acids?
- [52:42]
A
It's possible that could be part of the reason. The other reason is that there's a clear concept to your original idea about the immune system getting its butt kicked over the years called T cell exhaustion.
- [52:54]
B
Yeah, T cell exhaustion.
- [52:55]
A
Right. And you're. Peter and I were talking about. Exactly, right. And T cell exhaustion is a very fancy term for saying the immune system is seeing so much of the bad guy, it just stops reacting to it. And I'll give you an example of how the body does this. So imagine you go into a gas station and you smell gasoline, which is normal at a gas station. And for whatever reason, you're stuck at the gas station for 35 minutes, waiting for somebody. You will notice over 30 minutes, the smell of gas will appear less to you.
- [53:24]
B
Right?
- [53:25]
A
But the smell of gas has not changed, just tachyphylaxis. Right. You just start turning off to it. Your immune system does the same thing over time. If it sees a lot of antigen for a long time, it's called T cell exhaustion. It shuts off. So if you're making too much of anything, too much spike protein, right. Your immune system just turns off to it. This is what happens in cancer. There's so much cancer, it's different. Your immune system should be screaming and yelling to get after it. It does it. Now, in the transplantation world, we want this to happen. We want the body to accept the new organ, but we want the immune system to still look for bugs.
- [54:05]
B
Right?
- [54:06]
A
This is a concept called tolerance. So we want the New organ to be tolerated. But that thing that allows tolerance allows you to tolerate things you should not tolerate. And so what we think our filter can do is by removing antigen, is to create intolerance.
- [54:26]
B
Wow. So this could actually help someone tremendously with long Covid. Long Covid suffers whether the long Covid is coming from the vaccine or from the infection. Yeah.
- [54:37]
A
A year from today. I aspire to have very high level data. I want your help in developing a spike protein assay that anyone can access. That's easy because right now it's almost impossible to get it if you're suffering from long Covid. I think one of the big things and you deal with this in your personal practice is randomized controlled trial data is our north star. Right, Right. So in medicine, physiology is our north star. And from a data level it's randomized controlled trial data and it should be. Okay, let's be very clear. I'm not deviating from this position whatsoever. The problem is RCT level data that shows you something you can do to help somebody is not available for many, many patients. If you have chronic Lyme, if you have chronic whatever, the modern medical RCT level data does not offer you very much. And long Covid is in that spot. There's a few RCTs that suggest maybe SSRIs can deal with symptomology, but none of it is dealing with the core problem, whatever it is. So my thesis, this is now hypothesis, is that spike protein and spike protein products or consequences like amyloid are largely responsible for what we call long Covid syndrome. I don't think everyone with long Covid has a spike protein problem.
- [56:08]
B
Right.
- [56:09]
A
But I think many of them do.
- [56:11]
B
I would agree with that. And you can, with this filter, you can trap it and get it out.
- [56:15]
A
I think so. We really think that's a real possibility.
- [56:18]
B
Which is, you know, for the 27 million people out there that some of you are listening, that have long coveted, that's real hope for them because like.
- [56:25]
A
I said, the clinical trial that you're going to be in is set up and we're looking to expand it farther and we think this could really make an impact for folks. Look, we have had people under an irb, so it's under a formal IRB program under compassionate use with long Covid. Get the filter. Now my main disappointment for myself and our team is we don't have the spike protein up and running due to pre post to show that they had it and now they don't have it. But clinically their brain Fog has improved, their fatigue is improved. And so clinically we're seeing real benefit. And so this is a good first sign to really get after it. Yeah. And so, you know, we're a very small company, but we're getting after it.
- [57:11]
B
Yeah. And I love that you're getting after because I don't think there's a lot of answer for people that are suffering from long Covid. We have so many clients that are suffering from long Covid. Whether it's. We'll just refer to it as vaccine injury or whether it's a long Covid from a.
- [57:26]
A
For sure. I refer to these folks as medical pariahs because the modern medical system has nothing for them. And I'm part of that system. And it is discouraging to have someone who's in pain, who's suffering and it's like, we got nothing for you. And I think that when I was in my academic life, and I think this is very. Shows a deep lack of empathy, to be honest, was I didn't think what happens to that person when they leave my office.
- [57:53]
B
Yeah, right.
- [57:53]
A
Because I kind of said, hey, this is my expertise. This is what I told you. But I didn't think, what is this person going to go do now?
- [58:01]
B
Right.
- [58:02]
A
And the answer is they go and seek out answers that they can seek out. Because the modern system says, I don't have randomized controlled trial data for you. I acknowledge your suffering. And then an AI program, you know, denies their care.
- [58:17]
B
Right.
- [58:19]
A
That's what comes to.
- [58:20]
B
Yeah, yeah. And I, and I think that, you know, the. What, what we're starting to see now is that because something is not directly causal, that, you know, very often we say, well, if there's no direct link, if we cannot link the vaccine to the spike protein, to this outcome, then we can't say that it's the spike protein or it's the vaccination. I like the fact that you admitted that you wouldn't have gotten vaccinated nor would you have let your children or.
- [58:52]
A
Your wife, knowing what I know now. And I think that the frameshift protein thing really bothers me. To have that kind of unknown in the equation is something I'm not comfortable with. And I will not take an MRNA based vaccine until this issue gets durably survived.
- [59:09]
B
Never again. Yeah.
- [59:10]
A
No, because the next set of MRNA vaccines are going to be used for cancer and other diseases where you're not going to just take two doses. You're going to get 10, 20, 30, 40. Like you're going to be Taking them forever because they want to keep boosting your immune system to keep responding. Well. If you don't know that this thing is making what you say it makes, every time you put it in, you're getting a random protein generator effect, which doesn't. I'll speak for myself because I don't want to speak for my company on this or anyone else. But from my level of expertise, does not sit well with me.
- [59:41]
B
Right.
- [59:42]
A
Does not sit well.
- [59:42]
B
And I don't think it sits well with anybody else. But the good news is, is that there's immense hope for people with long Covid, because I know there's people listening to this podcast right now that are suffering from long covet, whether they know that it's long Covid or not. Because of this diffuse myriad of symptoms. You know, people just have a mood collapse and it's, it's not enough of a symptom in many cases. In some cases it is, but in, it's not enough of a symptom in a lot of cases to drive someone to the ER or to say, I have to go to urgent care. They just start to tolerate mood numbness and hormone disruption and crushing fatigue and brain fog at a crazy level and a complete lack of libido, and they start to lose those upper tiers of emotional states. They, they don't feel passionate or elated or joyful or aroused or really, really happy anymore. So the enjoyment goes out of life. And I've seen this in, in thousands of times because of our clinic system where people that are suffering from long covet don't. They don't have the exact same symptoms. It's not like they all get myocarditis, pericarditis, trigeminal neuralgia, transverse myelitis, the really hyper specific things. It's sort of this diffuse myriad of muck and they just are not themselves and they know it. And sometimes they'll even describe how they're spatially kind of disoriented. Like, I just, I don't feel like, you know, I'm having this conversation with you, but there's something weird about your distance from me and, and, and how I'm interacting with you. I don't feel very present. I almost feel detached. It's. And I've heard this type of description.
- [61:17]
A
Yeah.
- [61:18]
B
From hundreds and hundreds of people. And it's, it's amazing that there's now hope for them to, to, that maybe detoxify from, from this protein and, and what's really exciting, and I know we have to be Cautious about, you know, making any claims or going down the wrong road. Yeah. And we'll, we'll edit this podcast appropriately. But is that circulating tumor cells eventually become tumors?
- [61:44]
A
Yes.
- [61:44]
B
And circulating tumor cells also distract the immune system from the nodular tumor that you may already have.
- [61:52]
A
Oh, that's right.
- [61:53]
B
And so it seems to me like this is not only a preventative thing, this could eventually find its way into mainstream oncology, where you have patients that have metastatic tumors or they have cancers that. That are nodular or focal and. But you're at least able to remove all of the other.
- [62:15]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [62:16]
B
Things that the immune system is. Is chasing these other circulating tumors.
- [62:21]
A
So let's talk about that. So what's really interesting, and I'm not an oncologist, but I thought when you got cancer and you got metastatic cancer, it was a cloned thing. So you had this thing in your lung. It gets cloned a billion times, and that same thing that was in your lung is now in your liver, and now it's in your toes, and it's in your brain, it's in your bones, and it's awful. And that's not exactly what happens. The original tumor is subdividing and mutating at a very high pace. So the cells that go on to metastasize are colonizers. They're not the same as the original parent. So the great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandson is Cortez. A angry colonizing cell. The cells, because there's an equal number of cells that are indolent and useless, they don't grow up to be big time cancer people.
- [63:15]
B
Right.
- [63:15]
A
They just die.
- [63:16]
B
Right.
- [63:17]
A
So the cells that kill you are not the original. So the really smart oncologists say mink, you have to chase the met. You don't chase the primary, you chase the met.
- [63:31]
B
The metastasis.
- [63:32]
A
That's right.
- [63:32]
B
Yeah. Because the vast majority of cancer deaths come from metastasization.
- [63:38]
A
90% of cancer deaths are from metastatic cancer.
- [63:41]
B
Okay.
- [63:42]
A
And the met looks nothing like the par.
- [63:44]
B
So at some point it's gotta travel in the bloodstream.
- [63:46]
A
That's right. So when you can remove the cells in the bloodstream, which are the ones doing the metastasizing, we slow down the metastasis. So that was the original thesis. Then we found if you remove the cells, patients feel better. Because it turns out removing the cells, when you get a bunch of cells that are dying all over the place. Because only one in a thousand, one in ten thousand of the cells are active mets. But but when they all die, the body's gotta mop that up. That's metabolically and energetically very. It's like a bunch of zombies walking the streets of Miami, getting into traffic, falling into manholes. Someone's gotta go clean that stuff up, right? That's a lot of energy. So one of the things you see in cancer is cachexia. People don't eat because they're metabolically absolutely messed up by the cancer and they're metabolically exhausting.
- [64:36]
B
Exactly what are the top three reasons why I prefer a vertical cold plunge versus a lay down tub? Well, I've used both. When you're in a vertical position, your body naturally regulates your breathing better. So if you're holding on to the sides and you're in a vertical position, you can just focus on your breath work and you can stay calm. A lot of people feel more calm when they're in a vertical position than when they're laying down in the water and think they might slip under the water. So when you're vertical plunging, you're fully immersed faster, you can focus on recovery, inflammation reduction, and you're not struggling to just stay in a lie down position. Your body floats in an awkward way sometimes times. So it's just a more efficient, comfortable experience, in my opinion. It takes up way less space too. It has a smaller footprint. So you can put these on your patio, your garage, your bathroom, your locker room, you can really put it anywhere. I've got one on my balcony, I've got two in my bathroom. So this is why cold life is my favorite cold plunge on the market. So click the link below and you can order yours today. Make sure you get the ultimate human version. Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. So I, I, I, I want to shift gears away from cancer for a moment. I mean, first of all, I mean, I'm fascinated by the implications that this may have. And I want to talk about longevity, you know, aging, because, you know, when the immune system is, is worn down and distracted, right. This whole concept of, you know, the immune system being exhausted, immuno exhaustion is, I think, what Peter Diamantes referred it to. And it made the real light bulb went off for me because, you know, what is the difference between a young person and an older person? I mean, there's been a lot more assaults on the immune system. And we, we, we are bathing our cellular biology in a toxic soup. If we could remove that toxic soup, makes very much sense to me, that our cellular biology could thrive. What are some of the Implications for longevity, for, for anti aging for something like blood filtration so that somebody that doesn't have cancer or, or doesn't suffer from long Covid, but it's really hyper focused on living as long as healthy a life as having as long of a house as possible.
- [66:37]
A
So. So we are very interested in the fact that many things that cause problems are attracted to the inner blood vessel wall, like oxidized ldl, advanced glycolysylation end products. We think, and we're getting into some initial research here that these things are attracted to the blood vessel wall. So if I offer up to These gamish a 40 meter squared surface to go get lodged into, we think we can make a huge impact to remove that. I also think that to the degree that people have chronic antigenemia from whatever, if we, if there's a chronic viremia or something they have, this could impact them in a very positive way. So the most important thing that we kind of believe generically in medicine is what is the risk to the patient before you talk about the benefit. And this device has been in over 2,500 patients now. It's very safe. It's as safe as a dialysis procedure. So when you have a nice safety profile, you can move from the sickest patients in the intensive care unit, which is what we did for Covid. And now we're moving into outpatients who have cancer, who have long Covid, chronic viremia, chronic lyme, et cetera. And we're now going to move exactly to where you're saying is can we help people to treat the disease of aging?
- [68:02]
B
Yes.
- [68:03]
A
Okay. And I know people don't love calling aging a disease and I don't want to sort of get into the nomenclature, but for many people it is a type of disease. And I think that this is biochemically something we can actually start to get a handle on. So for long Covid, it's currently a described syndrome. If we can get spike protein levels in everybody, you can start saying are you a spike protein positive, long Covid or not? And that helps us with diagnosis, diagnosis and with, with treatment decision making. I think for aging, we're getting much better at being able to profile people.
- [68:35]
B
Yes.
- [68:35]
A
So I don't want to be in the position of use, not even just our device. Other devices will come, other medications will come. We want to get more sophisticated. And you have begun to do this, I know, in your practice, which is, well, I'm not going to give everybody everything. What is it that's ailing you. And let's talk about what's potentially causing it. And for a person who's struggling or a person who wants to be optimized, is oxidative stress their big problem? Are they gonna benefit from a hydrogen type kind of therapy? Is it something else? Are they dealing with other issues? Is it endocrine? You want to be able to have the same sophisticated diagnostic processes that we bring to bear for all kinds of diseases like cancer and heart disease and sepsis into this aging piece. And I think you and Peter are actively working on this. I think it's fantastic.
- [69:25]
B
Thank you. You said hydrogen, so I've got to go down that road a little bit because I get a lot of flack for standing behind hydrogen water, so. So staunchly. And I've done tests, you know, where I go right. On social media. And I'll show people how you can reduce the orp. You know, improve the ORP of a fluid by adding hydrogen gas to it. You can use hydrogen tablets if you don't have 250 bucks to buy a hydrogen water bottle. But what was interesting. We talked about this before you came on the podcast. I want to touch on it for a moment. We. We came together mutually through a friend named David Perez. Yes. But it was the interesting. The pathway that you took there, because I guess a friend of yours sent my Joe Rogan podcast. Yeah.
- [70:11]
A
So it was a very funny story. So a friend of mine sends me a podcast and says, there's this guy on Rogan, and he's talking about methylation and hydrogen. Can you take a look at this and see if this is real? And I am a Rogan fan, but I don't, you know, download his stuff every week. I can't keep up.
- [70:30]
B
I mean, most ICU docs and nephrologists don't. I don't think his audience is heavy.
- [70:34]
A
And this is not a criticism, but some of them are, like, three hours long. And so, like, I don't like. It's not like you can skim it.
- [70:39]
B
Like, 18 holes of golf. It's a commitment.
- [70:41]
A
It's a commitment. And so you get half for. Anyway, so my friend sends it to me. I look at it, I see you there, and you're talking about methylation, and you're talking about hydrogen water. And I'm gonna be honest with you. I told you, my initial reaction is, what the f is this dude talking about? I'm like, I have not heard of any of this. Now, because I'm a physician, I suffer from a fair Amount of arrogance. And because I'm an academic physician, it's probably tenfold worse. So I had an initial reaction of if I don't know about this, it must be nonsense. But I looked it up and the methylation stuff is real. I was embarrassed I didn't know about it. I remain embarrassed I didn't know about it. It. And the hydrogen stuff is real. And I was so motivated after I read about. So the hydrogen literature is over now, I think. 1500 PubMed articles, peer reviewed. The first paper about hydrogen is 2007 in Nature. That is not like some nothing journal for people who don't follow the links.
- [71:39]
B
To that several times.
- [71:40]
A
That Nature article is a beautiful paper and. But I came to appreciate that hydrogen is a very powerful substance. But I'm going to try and explain it to folks in my way, if I may, to say this is what I think. So what people need to understand is you hear about alkaline water, you hear about lithium water, you hear about all this water and how it's going to cure you. And I get why that initial concept bothers people, because it sounds hokey, right? So let's not talk about where you get your hydrogen. Let's talk about hydrogen itself. So when we're talking about hydrogen, we're talking about the Hindenburg people. So this is hydrogen gas, okay? The same stuff you put in a hydrogen car to run, the same stuff that was in the Hindenburg. It's hydrogen gas. Now, what people need to understand is that hydrogen as a gas gets dissolved in your blood, whether you drink it or you inhale it. So it goes from a gas to being in fluid, just like carbon dioxide is in salts or water, right? So you look at the water, there's no bubbles in it. You open it, bubbles come out. But there's a lot of gas dissolved in the water. So the hydrogen gets dissolved in your blood water. And that hydrogen, because it's small and uncharged, rapidly diffuses into cells, into the endoplasmic reticulum, into the mitochondria. And when it does that, it reacts with oxidative stress molecules. So when we do a lot of things energetically with glucose, when we fight an infection, when we're inflamed, we as mammals end up with an enormous amount of oxidative stress. And that oxidative stress is linked directly to inflammation. This is a fact. Hydrogen is a very potent antioxidant. It is just that simple. And for those people who have a chemistry background, it is an electron receiver. It is the opposite of an oxidant, which is. Which donates. Right. You lose, you know, it's Leo the lion goes girl for those people. Remember that in high school. So lose electrons is oxidation. Gain electrons is reducing.
- [73:53]
B
Yes.
- [73:53]
A
Oxygen. Hydrogen takes electrons away and neutralizes. It neutralizes superoxide hydrogen peroxide. This is the nature paper and it does it very effectively. And so people who take inhaled nitrogen, sorry, inhaled hydrogen, take it through intravenous saline or through water, are able to very safely dose themselves with a very potent antioxidant. I know that you and David, others use a bath profile. So it's a large surface area to deliver hydrogen. And I would say for those people who don't believe it, I am totally fine with you being cynical because I'm cynical about many things. Please look at PubMed and look at some of the review articles. It's very compelling. The field for which I have many of my publications in a field called acute kidney injury or acute renal failure. It works for that.
- [74:46]
B
Wow.
- [74:46]
A
There is data for ards, there is data for sepsis, there is data in Parkinson's. It's compelling. And one of the things I aspire to do in the next five years is to actually work on in this space. I really think that hydrogen is a powerful tool.
- [75:03]
B
Love to have you in the space. I would love to have your expertise because many of the stories that I have seen, the lives that have been impacted by hydrogen bathing, by hydrogen inhalation and by hydrogen drinking hydrogen water, I do not talk about in the public domain for fear of being so ostracized, you know, charlatan that I literally don't even talk about.
- [75:24]
A
What's funny is I tell my colleagues. I actually started, I was telling. I started a review article on this and I sent around to a bunch of my colleagues and they were just like, what is this? I said, look at the references. This is all in PubMed. So hopefully this will by the time this.
- [75:41]
B
And you send it to what, six and only one is going to take it out.
- [75:44]
A
It's under review right now. It's not set to be. I feel confident it'll get published eventually somewhere and maybe by the time this comes out we'll know and you can put the link but we'll see it.
- [75:54]
B
And is this on bathing or drinking or.
- [75:55]
A
This is just the basic thesis is gases medicine. That's the title of the paper and I think that we use oxygen as a gas for medicine all the time and it's my thesis so people don't get too upset about it. This is still hypothesis. But I think there's very compelling data that hydrogen gas can be used effectively as a medicine. I think there's non trivial OSHA risks around using too much hydrogen. So don't like go to the filling station if you have a hydrant car and like weird I don't let people.
- [76:29]
B
Smoke in my bathroom.
- [76:31]
A
It's, it's like having natural gas around. You got to be thoughtful. But I, I really think that the data are quite compelling and I, I'm continuing to do a lot of work in this space and I aspire to have some published research going on this too.
- [76:43]
B
I'm so excited about that because I, I look at the, you know, like you talked about earlier, the, the downside risk, you know, when we refer to the blood filtration, you know, how, how safe of it is it to engage in this procedure to try to get the desired outcome but always knowing that if it doesn't work, what's my downside?
- [77:04]
A
Right, right.
- [77:05]
B
Which, which I think is you know, a very untenable trade off very often with, with modern medicine. It's like, well this is either going to fix your mood disorder or permanently change the neuroplasticity of your brain and also not work. You know, I mean I feel this way about some of the, some of the extreme psychedelics. Like I'm actually a big believer in psilocybin and microdosing mushrooms, things like that and ketamine and controlled environments. I've seen work, work miracles. I actually have somebody living in my house right now that suffering from absolutely brutal tinnitus.
- [77:40]
A
The data for the psychedelics is actually quite interesting. Yeah. I mean Poland's book on how to change your mind, I read, I think it's a beautiful book that talks about, about some of the basic research behind it and I think that this is not LSD in the 60s.
- [77:54]
B
Exactly. That's what everyone thinks that when they go to shroom trip that I did.
- [77:58]
A
In college and, and these are guided with a therapist, therapeutic interventions and most.
- [78:05]
B
Of the time you don't trip out. Right. You don't, you're not like losing your.
- [78:09]
A
Mind and the dosing is very different like LSD and I mean I wasn't alive in the 60s but, but like LSD in the 60s didn't seem like a very dose controlled environment to me. Right. Like you know, like you just look.
- [78:22]
B
At the artwork that came out and you're like really thought that looked good.
- [78:25]
A
Lick this stamp. Well how much of it?
- [78:29]
B
Half a lick? Just a good like yeah, sure. Corner of it like a black lab, kind of like a cat, you know, like, you know, don't get after it.
- [78:37]
A
I mean, God bless the guys who just went all in on that, you know, I mean, but I saw something on.
- [78:42]
B
On Instagram the other day. It's funny because we have. We have a home in college, Colorado, and. And. And our neighbor's like, a mushroom expert, and he literally cooks the best mushrooms, and it tastes like a delicacy. They. But it was, you know, you got to think at some point, who was like, the first dude that was wandering through the, you know, the. The forest. And it was. It was a funny meme, and it said, you know, well, this one tastes like beef. You know, this one killed Brian immediately. And this one made you walk with Jesus for six hours, right? Like, I don't know who the guy was that ate it and was like, well, that was delicious. And he was fine. And the next dude just keeled over and like. Like, okay, mark that one. Don't. Don't eat the ones with the white with the little polka dots, you know, but, I mean, we. We've advanced so much, and, you know, my. My core interest in my childlike fascination is with extending Hellspan and, you know, maybe not even necessarily lifespan, you know, if people are going to live to 82, but to live 81 and a half. Right. And, you know, when. When I was in the mortality space, it was clear to me that people started dying in their late 50s and early 60s. They might not have left the earth until their late 70s or early 80s, but they started dying in their 60s, and it's just completely unnecessary.
- [79:57]
A
Yeah, I think it's really important to understand that we aspire to be able to have this technology available to everyone soon and right now. And I just want people not get their hopes up. This is only available in a clinical trial for which people are able to qualify and get in. But I just want everyone to know it's under an IRB clinical trial, which is. Is important, but I don't want. I want to be able to get this to everyone as soon as I can, but I don't want people thinking it's instantly available, at least in the US and it's available in a clinical trial, and we are going to expand the indication. We have a lot of work ahead of us, but I'm delighted that people are trying to use this to feel better, and we're learning so much from it as we go, which is what's spectacular.
- [80:38]
B
I am, too. I'm really delighted about It. So I got to ask you this question as a physician, scientist, researcher, what is exciting you and motivating you right now? Like, where do you see this technology five years from today? And I understand that you can't make any medical claims, and I don't want you to make a medical claim or that I believe this is going to cure all cancer. But what's like. Because you're excited, man, you're on fire. You were on fire. When we first started talking, I was like, there's some childlike curiosity that is driving that inside of you. What is that? So that North Star.
- [81:16]
A
What I think is so interesting is when something teaches you beyond your level of education and experience. So I'm 54 now, and I've been doing medicine for a long time. I've been doing research for a long time. You don't get easily impressed. Something has to really be like, wow, same thing.
- [81:35]
B
You get more cynical.
- [81:36]
A
That's right. I think you start cynical and you get more cynical over time. Right. And so I think what is interesting about this is because therapeutically, we think, hey, this is really cool, that we can take these things out. But what I think is the next most important value proposition scientifically is what is it that we're taking out? So here's a very good example. In the cancer space. In the cancer space. So we know that patients with metastatic cancer, those cells are chemo and radiation resistant. They evolve to be really nasty colonizing cells, and they resist therapy. That's why you die. They just outrun everything. Well, as you know, because you've done a lot of work in this space. There's no free lunch in biology. So if you are going to attack, you cannot defend. Now, when you measure things with an antibody, you were using a hook to grab that epitope. And when you do it, you typically kill the thing you grab. What our device allows us to do is to grab virus, bacteria, and cancer cells intact. So next level for us is the interrogation. Now, when you look the way I do and you talk about interrogation, you should be a little bit afraid.
- [82:55]
B
You get to clean them up without leaving all the trash behind in the streets.
- [83:00]
A
That's right. And the idea is now you can elute, like, rinse the filter, take the stuff off, and say, what is this stuff? So in cancer cells, I want to know what makes that cell so chemo resistant? Because if it has to attack, it's gonna have a vulnerability. Maybe we can fight it. Maybe we get an ADC for it or a new kind of therapy. It's already on the shelf that no one knew would work for this. If you have some goofy virus or if I'm taking off spike protein. Well, let's take it off. Did that spike protein interact with the new thing to create a new agent or a new particle, which. Right. Because normally the spike protein is a trimer, meaning there's three of them. Like a clover leaf that's floating around. Well, does it grab onto something else? That's what makes someone give long Covid versus not having long Covid. And can we. So I think that the science for grabbing things intact and learning from them is very powerful. Now, one of the things which you know very well is if you are a cancer survivor, they don't ever say this, but in a quiet moment, they will tell you. Every morning they wake up and they ask themselves, is today the day my cancer comes back? And we all have loved ones who either died from cancer who have cancer, who you're hoping never comes back. Well, what we typically do is we PET scan them. So we're looking to see little shoots of cancer in their body that we can see on a PET scan. Well, what if I can look for the seeds in their blood every six months or every year, Stage zero. Wouldn't that be better? Oh, and by the way, when I do that procedure, I clear all the seeds out.
- [84:40]
B
Yeah. Not just the cancer seeds.
- [84:41]
A
That's right. So we think we might be able. Look, these are early days, and I want to make it clear that no one should be doing this for this reason yet. We've not. But I think this is going to work for that.
- [84:53]
B
I think so too.
- [84:53]
A
And. And I think we can make a smaller filter that's a more diagnostic one and put it with ways that we can do a single needle instead of two needles. To make it really easy. Exactly. To make it minimally invasive for folks. So our focus now is to go to minimally invasive to develop our therapy, prove it out, and get to this diagnostic piece. Because then I hope within, I don't know, three to five years, you could send a patient, they get a procedure, and you'll get a report from what washed off our filter and say, gary, this is what your patient is dealing with. Instead of measuring 85 different things that are up, down, up, down, up, down, these are the things this patient has that are glomming onto their vascular wall. Because we are just a big vascular wall with a huge surface. So whatever is glomming onto us is informative.
- [85:47]
B
Yeah.
- [85:47]
A
Not everything which attaches is necessarily pathologic but almost everything pathologic grabs heparin.
- [85:55]
B
Wow.
- [85:56]
A
So not only now is it a therapeutic decoy device. It's a diagnostic device. That's where I think.
- [86:04]
B
And you know, it's astounding to me, the number of chronic diseases. Multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, not saying all of them, not saying everyone that is diagnosed with those diseases. But how many of these are actually chronic viral.
- [86:24]
A
Yeah.
- [86:24]
B
Or low grade viral.
- [86:25]
A
The HSV data with Alzheimer's is compelling.
- [86:28]
B
It's very compelling. The same is true with, with colon cancer.
- [86:32]
A
Yes.
- [86:32]
B
You know, I mean, it's very compelling. I mean, Dr. Minkoff has been on my podcast a number of times and I've had lots of zooms and, and interaction with him. You know, rarely has colon cancer patients that are not HPV positive. And, and so I think that the, the concept of cleaning the blood, reducing the viral load, reducing the, the cytokines, allowing the immune system to, you know, like, put the windshield wipers on so we can see again. Because our best defense is the defense that God gave us.
- [87:06]
A
Yes.
- [87:07]
B
But it's fighting what man made us.
- [87:09]
A
Yeah, I like that. I think that's exactly right. And I think that subtractive therapy has a real role.
- [87:16]
B
Yeah.
- [87:16]
A
And we really hope to. To really.
- [87:18]
B
The first time that I've ever seen anything so exciting that is, that's subtractive and not additive. Well, first of all, this has been amazing. I'm definitely gonna have you back on the podcast. I wind down all my podcasts by asking all my guests the same question, and there's no right or wrong answer. What does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?
- [87:36]
A
I think for me it's to be able to reach your maximum God given impact. We're all unique. What's wonderful about each individual person is we're the only one of ourselves ever. And to try and achieve the maximum impact for who you were meant to be, and that requires a mindset and it requires trying to be in your best physical and mental health as possible with the right intent. And one of the reasons I love Peter so much, his intent is so solid and he executes his intent. And I just think that he's a good example of someone who's just trying to push at that level.
- [88:17]
B
Pet a lot of love on this podcast today.
- [88:19]
A
Yeah. No, Peter, I'm coming for more stuff for you guys.
- [88:22]
B
Chop this up and just start throwing it out on social media, brother, because you got a lot of love today. Well, Dr. Charla, thank you so much. For coming.
- [88:29]
A
Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
- [88:31]
B
I'm definitely going to have you again. And as always, guys, that's just science.