Dr. Adeel Khan
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And that's why the results have been very inconsistent. And that's why stem cells haven't taken off the way we thought they would, you know, 10, 15 years ago. And that's why the clinical trials have been so mixed. Uh, and so unfortunately there's still a lot of clinics claiming that, you know, we can regenerate tissue. You can do it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And it's just, it's just misleading because, and even I thought this, you know, which is that I thought IV stem cells were great, but it turns out a lot of them just get trapped in the lungs and most of them die. And that even with that, you still get some people who get benefits and that's, and that's, and that's the old generation technology, but now we can isolate.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
We can isolate the best stem cell population and use that one. So it turns out that when you take a stem cell, a mesenchymal stem cell, there's actually 17 subtypes, which is kind of crazy if you think about it. So it's like they, they, there's something called single cell RNA sequencing, which is basically to look at gene expression of individual cell profiles.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So that way you can see how different cells behave. And then you can see that, hey, there's actually these 17 different cliques that they hang out together and they behave differently. And some of them are more useless and some of them are more useful. So we don't necessarily want all 17 subtypes, which is what most stem cell clinics do. And that's what we were doing up until a year ago.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
But as you know, I spent the summer in Japan. And in Japan, they won the Nobel Prize for regenerative medicine, Professor Yamanaka. for cellular reprogramming, and which we can talk about those stem cells. But there was another professor, Professor Mary Dazawa, who discovered something called new cells, which stands for multi lineage, differentiating stress enduring cells. So it's a mouthful.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
All you need to remember for people is that these are cells that are used exactly the muse, the muse is a cool stuff. And they're able to, they're pluripotent, which means they can differentiate into all 220 cell types in our body or over 200 cell types. And they are stress enduring, which means they can survive harsh environments. So that's really the key.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So they don't die when they go in the body. So we can isolate these using cell sorting technology and filter them out so that we're injecting primarily new stem cells instead of just injecting all the different types of stem cells. And so that's now what we've moved on to. And of course, you talked earlier about your back and that's what we use for you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And that's what we're using exclusively just because the results are so much more consistent and the science makes a lot of sense. And I'm in the process of doing some clinical work with Professor DeZawa as well. And we want to investigate these new cells for a lot of different conditions, but In Japan, they've already published files for ALS, for heart attacks, for stroke.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And these are not easy to treat conditions. And with intravenous new cells, you do see benefits. And of course, we're seeing that in the real world, treating patients with all sorts of degenerative conditions and actually seeing a real meaningful difference. And that's just because these cells are actually surviving and doing what they are meant to do, which is reduce inflammation and
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
repair cellular function, reduce oxidative stress. We know one of the biggest mechanisms by which they work is through mitochondrial DNA transfer and mitophagy, which is preparing damaged mitochondria. And I think everyone now knows the mitochondria are so important, not just for energy, but for regulating cellular metabolism and aging.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So that's why there's so much interest in this space for longevity and not just orthopedic conditions. And so those are mesenchymal stem cells. And then there's also induced pluripotent stem cells, iPSCs. And that's the Yamanaka stem cells where you can take any old cell and you can make a young again. So, of course, when you think about that, you're like, holy, that's great.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Shouldn't everyone be doing this? But it turns out when you make that old cell young again, it makes it almost embryonic in nature, which means it can cause cancer or tumors. So IPSCs, as they're called, or Yamanaka stem cells to honor Professor Yamanaka, they're great. But the problem is they have the risk of tumor genicity. And so we don't actually use them clinically yet.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
uh there's a lot of work being done on it but it's still i think a few years away from clinical translation so that's why the new cells because we know they don't cause cancer and we know they're naturally occurring on the body so they have a lot more clinical translation than the yamanaka steps
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, so about 10 to 15 times more are able to go into circulation. So there is still some that get trapped in the lungs, but Professor Dazao has shown work showing that it's, you know, it's not like two times more. We're talking an order of magnitude, like 10 times more are able to go into circulation. So it is still a big difference compared to standard MSCs.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, look, I just had an ALS patient I treated a couple of weeks ago and I was blown away because it was my first ALS patient I treated with new cells and she couldn't swallow because of the bulbar symptoms, you know, and now she can swallow. She can speak clearly. She was barely able to speak before. And that was just one IV. And I mean, it was pretty incredible to see.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Obviously, that's anecdotal, but the clinical trial that was done also showed, you know, some slowing of progression there. And we all know how devastating ALS is. And if there's something that can slow it down even, I think we just don't know the exact dosing for ALS yet. But I think for now, I think we can certainly say it can be helpful and it's not harmful.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And then for stroke, we can be much more kind of certain that they are going to have positive results because in stroke, for example, she showed that 30% of patients in the clinical trial were able to go back to full-time work when they were disabled. Like we're talking patients who are disabled.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And they're able to go back. Yeah, exactly. And they go back to full-time work. So now 30% of people and the other 70% still had significant clinical benefits and were able to get off. You know, we're- They weren't necessarily able to return to work, but a lot of them were able to get back to normal functioning of ADLs and IADLs and stuff like that, which is still a big deal.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And you know what the most interesting part was? 25% of the patients in the clinical trial had reversal of gray hair. And that was just like an accidental finding.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, well, I mean, I know it sounds, you almost sound like a used car salesman or something when you're like, this can treat everything, you know? But once you understand the physiology of chronic disease, as you do, you understand that there's certain hallmarks of aging and there's hallmarks of chronic disease that overlap.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So I'm not going to list all 12 of them because I'll bore people, but there's basically 12 hallmarks of aging. We've listed a few of them, mitochondrial dysfunction, you know, stem cell exhaustion. Yeah. Chronic inflammation, which is related to amino senescence. And, you know, there's lots of protein, like there's so many protein misfolding. There's so many other ones.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so basically these 12, let's call them the 12 hallmarks. They actually underlie not just aging, which is, you know, arguably the most complex chronic disease. They underlie all chronic diseases from stroke, from heart disease to asthma, to dementia, to cancer even, and just components of that that are overlying. And a lot of them are metabolic in nature.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so that's why these stem cells have this ability to restore metabolic health because of that mitochondrial DNA transfer and helping to repair the mitochondria through mitophagy. And then, of course, the mitochondria are the ones that help to regulate metabolism, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
That's where they have, that's where your, when you eat food and your body has to process it, it has to go through your mitochondria to produce energy. And if your mitochondria aren't working properly, which is what happens to everyone with aging and chronic disease, then guess what? Your metabolism is messed up.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And that's why metabolic disease is really the root cause of so many different problems. And that's why they call, you know, dementia type 3 diabetes. And all this other stuff, right? Because a lot of them are metabolic in nature. And if you can restore metabolic health, which stem cells can do, then that's why you can treat so many chronic diseases. And that's number one.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And number two, the other beauty of these stem cells is their ability to regulate your immune system. So this is called immunomodulation. That's the medical term, but that just basically means we're shifting your body from a pro-inflammatory state to an anti-inflammatory state. So this is called immunomodulation, which is reprogramming your immune cells, specifically your macrophages.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And if there's one cell that you need to understand, it's your macrophages. They're my favorite cell in the body.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Exactly. So they're like your little Pac-Man controlling and surveilling and making sure the bad guys don't get in and they eat the bad guys when they're around. They take them away and they'll dispose of them. But what happens to a lot of Pac-Men or police officers, I like to call them, is they get fat and tired. And then they start eating too many donuts and they can't do their job anymore.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And this is actually called lipid associated macrophages or LAMs. And so they accumulate fat and lipid perioxidation inside of the macrophage, and then they can't do their job anymore, and their job is so important. And then they start releasing the wrong signals. So the macrophages start releasing pro-inflammatory signals, and then that causes the cycle of chronic inflammation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And that's really the root, as we know, of so many disease processes. And that's why if you can treat chronic inflammation, you can treat so many different chronic diseases. And that's why these IV mu cells have so much potential. And even with IV,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
let's call it the first generation even with the iv you know first generation stem cells there are clinical trials that are published showing that inflammatory bowel disease can get into remission that rheumatoid arthritis can get into remission it's just the dosing is quite high and people need a lot of frequency of those but with the new cells you can get obviously you can get a lot better results but it's the same principle which is you're just regulating the immune system
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, exactly. Unfortunately, using your own stem cells, there's many reasons not to, but the biggest one is definitely they've gone through a lot of replicative stress because they've gone through their own aging process. And so they can actually have markers of senescence and other even cancer markers as you get older.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So you don't want to take your own stem cells and put them in your body, especially if you're over age 40. But anyway, yeah, back to the point about what these stem cells are doing inside of your body. The mesenchymal stem cells are primarily reducing inflammation via what's called the secretome. So the secretome is kind of the soup that the stem cells grow in or release
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
and there's signals so there's micro rnas there's what are called cytokines which are these proteins that that help to reduce inflammation there's growth factors so this is all what's called the secretome and depending on what type of secretome the stem cells are releasing dictates their ability to change the micro environment and help with these different cellular processes so for example
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
the secretome of a stem cell from your own body isn't going to be as good as a secretome from umbilical cord tissue. And you can probably understand that intuitively because it's like, oh yeah, it makes sense. My cells are old. They've gone through X amount of cell damage versus umbilical cord tissue, which doesn't.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And that's why exosomes are such a hot topic because if most of the benefits of mesenchymal stem cells are due to the signaling process, then why not just isolate those signals and inject those? And that's what the exosomes are.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, I mean, you kind of just said the definition, which is they're a type of extracellular vesicle, which are just packages by which your cell communicates with other cells. So they help with cell to cell communication. And there's different type of extracellular vesicles. So there's something called apoptotic bodies. There's something called MVBs, which are microvesicle bundles.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And then there's exosomes, which are the smallest type of extracellular vesicle. So extracellular vesicle or EVs is kind of the class. And then there's different types of EVs and exosomes are the smallest type of EVs. And they're basically to help facilitate cell to cell communication, which interestingly changes as you age.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So exosomes are also becoming a hot topic in diagnostics because it turns out the exosome profile of your cells as they become cancerous or as they become chronic diseases, you can detect certain exosome products because we did have this technology, right, like five years ago. And now we do. And now we can figure out, hey, the signals your cells are sending are changing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
This means that you might be developing this problem. So that's why exosomes are becoming a hot topic in diagnostics too. And then, of course, in intervention or therapeutics, then it makes sense because, like you said, it's all about the signals that are being sent by the stem cells that dictate their ability to modulate or change the cells in a favorable way. And now...
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
The exosomes can be isolated in a lot of different ways. Previously, it can only be done through, you know, ultra centrifugation of cells that are replicating. So you have to have cells that are replicating, but now that technology is improving so that you can actually get exosomes from terminally differentiated cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So meaning even if they're not replicating, you can, you can basically homogenize, it's called homogenization, which is basically like, you know, you're blending, you know, how you, you know, you blend like fruit to get like the, the pulp out and the juice. It's like taking the juice basically of tissue and that's the exosome. So you can do that now with any tissue.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So for example, there's people working on natural killer exosomes, dendritic cell exosomes, exosomes from liver, from muscle. So there's so many interesting exosome products being worked at. There's 290 or 281 patterns or something like that on exosomes in the last like couple of years. So that can tell you the scale.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Oh yeah. So that tells you the scale though, 200 over 200 patents on just exosomes alone in the last couple of years. So that tells you the scale and the magnitude of research that's happening right now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, a few things. First thing I would say, just because you touched on a little bit, was there's a lot of politics limiting regenerative medicine's ability to really get mainstream in US.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And interestingly, Japan has the opposite politics, which is that because of Professor Yamanaka, they spent $8 billion of taxpayer money on regenerative medicine, and they have lobbyists for regenerative medicine. So it's very different. environment that's actually favorable for regenerative medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And unfortunately, the US has taken a really archaic stance to the point where they regulate exosomes, which is an a cellular product, meaning it doesn't have any cells, like you said, no DNA material, and therefore we know it's very safe. They're just signals that stay in the body for minutes to hours, and then they're more or less they're gone.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
But they help to change the micro environment and help to change the functioning of cells. And so the safety is so high of exosomes, but FDA has decided to regulate it like a drug. And so therefore an FDA has still not approved any drug or any exosome products.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So technically, I mean, obviously there's so many clinics offering it, which is very interesting, but technically none of them are FDA approved. So it's just something to understand the regulatory environment. I don't agree with it, but that's the world we live in. And that's why people have to travel offshore, unfortunately. And I think that's going to be the way it is for the next few years.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
It'll take a while before even someone like us gets FDA approval for the new exosomes. It takes seven years, five to seven years. You have to go through the phase one, the phase two, the phase three, the post-market. You have to go through all that. And even then, you may not get FDA approval. And so they really made it difficult for regenerative medicine, which doesn't make sense.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Oh, yeah, exactly. U.S. is being left behind, basically.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Look, it's always about safety. Safety is always number one. Exosomes are so safe. And even mesenchymal stem cells have so much safety data around them, too. It's always about first do no harm. And this stuff does not have harm. And so why not try it as an alternative to opioids or to surgery for chronic pain, especially, right? Like it doesn't, to me, it baffles my mind, but it's very clear.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Unfortunately, do you know what the most profitable drug now is?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
No, it's actually methotrexate. It made something like $26 billion last year. So it surpassed spattens.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
It's an epidemic of autoimmune conditions, probably related to toxins in an environment, probably COVID, maybe everything else that's going on in the modern world. And so it's just an epidemic. And you and I both know you can treat many of these just through nutrition and lifestyle, but most doctors don't know anything about that. So of course they're just prescribing medications.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And we know these things, wouldn't you rather be on something that's going to regulate your immune system and fix it than just suppress it, which may cause cancer, right? Like it doesn't, the risk benefit, it just makes no sense, you know? And I think you always have to look at what's called number needed to treat versus number needed to harm.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And that's essentially just a fancy, fancy way of just saying benefit versus harm. And if you look at that for a lot of the pharmaceuticals, it's not that great. Um,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, because to me, then you have these interventions that we're seeing that are reducing inflammation, oxidative stress, that are helping with so many different chronic diseases and they don't have harm. So why not have them as a first line as opposed to going straight to a lot of these pharmaceuticals that have risk? And that to me is kind of the logic.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And on your note of Muse exosomes, the reason they're... superior to standard exosomes is simply because they're from that new cell lineage.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So when new cells are replicating and when they're growing, the soup that they're growing in, that's what we're isolating, which has the signaling profile, meaning that secretome, which we talked about earlier, is superior than just a standard mesenchymal stem cell. So it has a better profile, number one.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And number two, because it is from a stressed, enduring lineage too, meaning the exosomes can stick around longer than standard exosomes, which it cleared up pretty quickly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, that was my take. Until I had the mu cells, that was my take more or less. I would only use the stem cells in very specific situations. But now that's changed because the mu stem cells are actually pluripotent, which means they, and they, new stem cells are very interesting because they act kind of like macrophages.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
They actually eat, they gobble up damaged cells and then they turn into the new tissue. So they'll, for example, in the heart, they'll go to the heart, they'll eat the damaged cardiomyocytes, so like damaged heart cells, and then they'll actually regenerate new cardiomyocytes. So they're actually pluripotent, right? And that's the key difference because they're not just reducing inflammation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And that's why new stem cells are, of course, more powerful than these exosomes because they're actually going to regenerate new tissue versus just reducing inflammation
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
which is what the old generation stem cells used to do and that's why when i was using the old generation stem cells i was kind of just using exosomes for the most part because i didn't see the point because i'm like you're just really reducing inflammation but now that we have something that's pluripotent if i'm injecting it for something degenerative and i actually want to regenerate something new then i'm going to use the stem cells so for example with advanced osteoarthritis
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
If we want to actually stimulate cartilage regeneration, using the new stem cells makes a lot more sense. But if you just want to reduce inflammation, then you can just use the exosome.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, and there's studies out there showing that the exosomes can create a favorable microenvironment for stem cell differentiation and for stem cells to do their job, basically. So that's why I tend to just combine them because the exosomes are only there for like minutes to hours, you know, like we said, like they're cleared up pretty quickly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
But then what they do is they go in there, they reduce inflammation, they make it a better microenvironment so that the stem cells can do their job more effectively.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So the results since the new stuff has been honestly incredible. And as a physician, you always want your patients to get better. And now we have much more consistent results. With the older stuff, the results were a bit more inconsistent, meaning some people would get better, some people wouldn't. Whereas this stuff just tends to be reproducible.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And the way we do it is it's still very specialized, right? And this is the problem too. There's so many stem cell clinics that they don't know how to inject properly. You have to have a very high skill level You can't just, yes, there is a certain homing mechanism, but at the end of the day, the treatments are going to work better if you get them to where they need to go.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So for example, if you have a rotator cuff in your shoulder and you don't get the right spot, your results aren't going to be as good as getting it right in the right spot. So, and that takes a skilled, that takes a very skilled, you know, how it's skilled. It'd be very skilled at ultrasound and you have to have a high level of proficiency to be able to do that image guided injection.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah. Yeah, no. Actually, it's funny because I watched your TED Talk when I was in medical school, and I remember you talking about depression and how you have to look at micronutrient deficiencies, the gut health, neuroinflammation. And that whole concept just made so much sense to me. So you were definitely a part of the inspiration for me to pursue this. So thank you for that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so that takes years of training. And then on top of that, you have to know which products to use. So I think people don't realize this is a very specialized field. It's not like anyone can just do it despite a lot of people just offering stem cells. You know what I mean? A lot of people are like, yeah, I do stem cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
It's like, well, you can't, it's not, it's not just like, you can't just like do that. It's like doing, to me, it's like almost doing surgery. It's like, I don't just do surgery just for the sake of it. You know?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah. And so the image guidance is very key to it. And the results for musculoskeletal conditions, chronic pain, even neuropathic pain has been very consistent, meaning the only patients that I find that don't get better usually just need a second treatment or sometimes a third in very rare cases. So it's just a dosing thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
We don't know the perfect dosing for everyone, but we're starting to learn that more and more
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Cause some people respond great to one treatment and some people need two treatments and we don't really know why.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah. So I work with a company called mini circle and mini circle has the world's first reversible plasma gene therapy. So what that means is it's basically a way for us to transmit any gene of interest up to a certain size to your body. So for example,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
If there's a gene like phallostatin, which is a bioidentical peptide hormone in your body, and we want your body to produce more of that, we can put it onto this mini circle vector. We call it mini circle because literally it's like a circular strand of DNA that
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
and you insert that phallostatin gene onto there and then you can inject it and then that will transmit it to your cell and tell your cell hey your cell will now read that instructions and then it'll say hey i need to produce more phallostatin and then phallostatin goes into the blood and you raise your phallostatin levels and that has all these downstream benefits which we can talk about in a second but the vector is what people need to obviously is you know probably being like holy what was what is he talking about right the vector is scary you're like what are you doing like
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, exactly. Are you modifying my DNA?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, exactly. So it's not as advanced as CRISPR, which is kind of the gene editing technology where you're actually cutting out different strands of DNA and kind of putting them back together. This isn't as complicated as that. It's not as powerful as that either, but it is still a form of genetic modification because We are inserting a foreign DNA into your body.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Where does that foreign DNA come from? It comes from E. coli. So we're not injecting bacteria into your body, but we're injecting something called plasmid. The plasmid is kind of think of it like exchanging cards with people. It's how bacteria exchange information. So we're isolating that plasmid from the E. coli, and then we're using that as a vector.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So plasmids have been around in microbiology for two, three decades. They're not new, but the new breakthrough was just getting the plasmid to not shut off. Because normally when you put a plasmid in the human body, your cell does something called transient silencing, which just says, hey, this doesn't belong here. I'm going to shut you off. And then it just shuts it off.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And then but we figured out a way for it to keep remain on specifically to express whatever gene of interest we want, which obviously are longevity genes. We're not going to put something in your body that's not useful. We're going to put something in your body that's going to have some real longevity benefits. And polystatin has been studied again for two decades.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And in terms of, yeah, I read your books. I read, obviously, Jason Bland's functional medicine book, like his textbook.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Polystatin is something your body makes. It's basically a way for your body to put on more muscle because the higher your polystatin, the lower your myostatin. which is basically imagine the brakes on your muscle. And so if you take the brakes off a little bit, it's not like you're going to get jacked like the anabolic steroids, but it will make it a little bit easier to put on muscle.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
But much more importantly, and this is why I like polystatin, it's very anti-catabolic. Because as you get older, especially after age 60, your catabolism increases exponentially.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
There's anabolism and catabolism. Anabolism is building more tissue. Catabolism is what happens with aging, which is loss of tissue. We actually lose, I forgot the exact percentage, but we lose some like, you know, very large percentage of our total tissue mass as we age. And that's loss of mitochondria, that's loss of muscle, that's loss of bone density. So we lose a lot of tissue as we age.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so if you can maintain as much tissue as possible, that's going to be a a net positive thing, and especially muscle tissue, because muscle tissue is the most metabolically active. It has all these protective cytokines that are released called myokines that turn off tumor suppressors that help prevent cancer, help with diabetes. I'm sure most people know about the benefits of muscle.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
and anything we can do to help preserve that, I think it's going to have a net positive effect on your health. There's obviously a lot of people get concerned. They're like, how do you know this is a hundred percent safe? Because it's new. It is new, obviously. And I'm not saying there's not enough long-term data to know, is it going to do something to you 20 years from now?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Jeff Bland, yeah. And, you know, integrative medicine textbooks. Luckily, medical school was fairly easy. So I had lots of extra time and I could read. I had a lot of time to read other things. But the reason I got into it was partly because
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
We can't say that for sure, but what I can say, and the reason I'm a believer in it and the reason I've done it for myself and obviously patients and Many, I've injected hundreds of people with it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And the reason is because, and the reason patients like it too, is because the net positive of having more muscle and having reduced systemic inflammation, which is what false statin does, to me is going to outweigh any theoretical risk that maybe we don't know about. But I think it's unlikely anyway, because we understand how false statin works.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
That's exactly right. And this is one of the drivers, but that's a great, a great summary. Yes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
I mean, what if the gene, what if the product, like some of the risks, for example, in theory could be, what if, what if the vector that we're using migrates? What if it goes somewhere we don't want it to go? But plasmid vectors are very well studied and very well documented.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
kind of documented how they work and they have a very high, you know, they have a high safety profile because they're very inert, meaning they don't stimulate your immune system. They don't cause they don't have any, you know, known serious risks, but there are vectors, for example, so people can understand like what is with the vector.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
I saw patients not always getting better and even my own mom had some medical illnesses and it was kind of frustrating when the doctors were just like, well, there's nothing else you can do. And, and then I started digging deeper and obviously I came across functional medicine and, and, all this kind of root cause work. And then I'm like, wait a minute, there is stuff you can do.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
For example, when they use the COVID vaccine, they use something called the lipid nanoparticle vector LPV. But the LPV, if you read about LPV, the vector that they use, unfortunately, can migrate. And that's why some people get myocarditis or pericarditis. And the vector can also be immunogenic. So that's why it stimulates some people's immune system. And that's why they get autoimmune conditions.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And that's why we know now that the vaccine actually has some harm, more than we probably thought when it first came out. So basically the plasmid vector, though, as compared to like a lipid nanoparticle vector is a lot safer just for comparison.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, so Clotho is a really, really interesting peptide because
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
the the word itself comes from the greek of saying the one who controls the threads of life which is a bit dramatic but basically but basically it's like whoa holy what does this clotho do does it control my life yeah well yeah what they thought what they realized they found this accidentally in some animal research and they found out that animals that had higher levels of clotho lived 30 longer and then they've seen similar data in humans of people who have higher levels of clotho naturally
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
not only live longer but they're protected against dementia even if they have the echo e4 gene which is super interesting and then it can actually help with kidney chronic kidney disease too so the two levels where most of your clotho is produced is your brain and your kidneys and so those are the two main medical indications which culto is being very
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
very like looked at like there's a lot of research going on right now and there's a lot of biotech companies looking at cocoa but our platform i believe has the most applicability just because of the ease of use and obviously being able to just give it same technology through a plasmid vector which is just an injection in your arm or your stomach and then optimizing your Clotho levels.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
But Clotho is definitely more high risk than Phallostatin because you don't want your Clotho levels to go too high either. If Phallostatin levels go too high, it doesn't really have any harm. It just saturates and there's not really much that happens. But Clotho,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
If your colto levels go too high, it can cause your PTH to go down, and it can kind of mess up your hormonal system, and there could actually be other detrimental side effects. So colto is definitely exciting, but I think we're still at least a year, a year and a half away after the clinical trial that we're starting now before we can start offering it to people.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
I'm going to be doing it on myself actually next month, so I'll keep you posted.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
We're just not learning about it. So then it was kind of like, why aren't we learning about it? And then you realize it's just because doctors don't know what they don't know. And that's just how medical school is. You're being taught by specialists who might be the best cardiologists at their in-depth center. And they're amazing. They do amazing work. But they don't know much beyond what they do.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
PTH, parathyroid hormone.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So you have to monitor it. So you have to do blood work for that. Yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So It activates Wnt genes, which are these regenerative pathways. The Wnt gene pathway is kind of well known for being one of the more important ones that a lot of different regenerative molecules work on. And Clotho helps with that too. So it can facilitate regeneration and repair as well. And it can also, in terms of helping with neuronal death.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So there's something called the integrative stress response, which is what your neurons, when they are under stress, they have this stress response called ISR. And Clotho can help to mitigate that so there's less neuronal death. And that's why it can help with various... That's why there's so much interest for so many different neurodegenerative conditions.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah. So the costs will come down and then I believe in the net really like not, we're not talking like 10 years, we're talking within the next five years because we're very close to this kind of automation and of manufacturing. There's a company in, Silicon Valley that actually just started. And they're doing well. They basically figured out how to automate cell manufacturing using robotics.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so using that plus bioreactors, which allow you to grow a lot more cells a lot quicker, will significantly reduce the cost of manufacturing these cells. And obviously, if the cost of manufacturing goes down, then the cost of the consumer goes down.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah. And so that's, so that's, that's the first thing. And then the, the, the second thing is. there's economies of scale, which just means as more people do it and there's more demand, then obviously you can lower the pricing as, as there's going to be more people who are willing to do this type of treatment at a lower price point.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And that's just the limitations of their knowledge. And so oftentimes we're only being given one perspective, which is allopathic medicine. But it turns out there's a lot more than just allopathic medicine out there. And when you look at the totality of the research, you realize there's a lot of stuff out there that can be quite beneficial with less harm.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And that's one of the things, you know, I'm at, I'm very adamant about making this stuff accessible to the average person. And the only way that's going to happen, as you, as you just said, there has to be early adopters, right? You bought a Mac in 1988 and probably not many people had a Mac back then. So it's like, Uh, but there's going to be early adopters for every technology.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Just like, you know, I was an early adopter of Tesla personally. I bought an electric vehicle before anyone else really did. And I was, I was, and, but now it's becoming much more common. And so I think it's going to be the same thing with this, where it's like, okay, there's going to be the early adopters. There's going to be people who are more into this stuff.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And, and it also, I think the way to think about it is if you have the means to do this stuff, you're kind of, you are paving a better way for a future of people because we're at least our company.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
You know, we're investing all of our profits back into R&D and trying to push this field forward and trying to really make a difference in regenerative medicine, you know, as opposed to just trying, you know, as opposed to just kind of using it just for profit for yourself type of thing.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So, and that's why I'm, but the only way to push this bill forward is you have to, at the end of the day, do controlled clinical trials because that's the only way you're going to get insurance companies and regulators to buy into this. And that's the long game.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
But by being able to offer these offshore treatments that people are willing to pay for and people actually get real results for, they're funding our ability to do the research, which ultimately will be used as justification for regulators to approve it, which I think will take probably seven to 10 years, you know, in terms of getting approvals for specific medical conditions.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Like I think osteoarthritis, for example, is not very far away. We're already getting incredible results with the new cells and hydrogel scaffold, which is kind of, you know, like a jello that protects the stem cells and allows them to stay there so they don't migrate. And the results are already incredible.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And, you know, but just before I came on this call with you, I was talking, we're working with a company that's making custom scaffolds using 3D bioprinting. And that can actually resurface an entire joint. And they've already done that in large animal studies. So the human trials are next. And that's what we're going to do. And so this stuff is not that far away.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And that's really what drew me to this field was just because, hey, if I can do less harm for my patient and have the same benefit, why wouldn't I do that first? And that's kind of what got me into regenerative medicine because regenerative medicine is just a playoff of functional medicine, which is, you know, you're trying to restore tissue or restore dysfunction of the cell back to normal.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, I mean, look, in Japan, I keep bringing up Japan because they're just so far ahead of us. But in Japan, they actually cover intraarticular stem cell injections. for knee osteoarthritis and cartilage defects. And so, and those are culture expanded stem cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so, the fact that, and the reason I bring Japan up too, because it's not like Columbia or Mexico or Panama, some random country that doesn't really have any sort of developed economy and like rigorous, like Japan has like rigorous standards. Like they're very meticulous with everything.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so to me, the fact that they're able to approve, not only approve it, but actually have insurance companies reimburse people already just shows you like what's possible. But I think America, there's just so many politics, right? And the politics, unfortunately, affect the ability for us to offer these to patients.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And what I believe is a solution is personally, you know, if our company becomes big enough, I'm going to get some regenerative medicine lobbyists. And you bet you I'm going to get them to start lobbying for us, because I think that's the only way to really get this stuff moving in the U.S.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Well, no, it's not a problem, right? Like I, that company I was just talking about, for example, a 3d bioprinting company, they got, they got a mask national NIH grant.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
know for 18 million dollars they're able to do some uh animal studies and some preliminary phase one stuff but now they're hitting a roadblock because obviously they have to they need more money to do more trials and it's so expensive to do clinical trials in the us that you and they can't get any more money from nih so basically they have to go to dc's venture capital or private equity and try to raise money and they're having they can't get it it's like too hard because they're biotech and it's high risk and
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yada, yada, yada.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so it's really hard for these regenerative medicine companies to fund and find money and to, and honestly, that's, that's actually been my strength is I'm good at finding technology and I have, I have a good networks and I'm able to help like the new cells, for example, Professor Gisela, unfortunately hasn't had the, you know, she, she, she had funding, but then lost her funding because again, politics and,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
But I'm able to, you know, help her with that stuff. And I have and then obviously I have marketing and other resources.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so we can and that's that's kind of my, I guess, vision with this stuff is being able to actually drive this stuff forward by doing the controlled clinical trials of very promising technologies that I believe that, you know, based off the science, I think are going to be a huge part of the future of medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Uh, funny enough, because alternative media is becoming more and more popular. And I think people will demand. that their doctors or people know that, Hey, look, I deserve to have this as an option, you know? And I think that's what it comes down to. Patients have the right to have all their options explored and especially options that are safe and can be just as effective as surgery.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So I think it's, it's, you know, it's unfair to patients to not be able to, or the doctors to not even know anything about this stuff and not be able to have a conversation with their patient about it just because they don't know. Unfortunately, they don't know anything about regenerative medicine. And just because, I mean, you and me didn't learn anything about legitimacy in that school, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And now you can do that using cell therapy, gene therapy, or tissue engineering, or the combination of those three is kind of what we label as regenerative medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So there was no education.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
I'm in Dubai now, but we do have clinics in Los Cabos, Mexico, which is probably closest for most of our us.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
patients and then we have a clinic in europe and then we have a partnership in tokyo as well uh and then maybe uh mark hyman and i maybe maybe we'll have something in abu dhabi soon but uh but uh yeah our what our company is called eterna like eternal without an l and eternal.health but my instagram i have a you know i'm very responsive on there and it's at dr.acon k-h-a-n and
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
I try to be as helpful as possible. I we've helped many patients with chronic diseases and, you know, sometimes we know affordability can be an issue and we do try our best to help those patients with hardship pricing and stuff like that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so it's not, you know, it is expensive, but we are also, we are trying our best to work on that and also starting a foundation to help cover those costs for like, you know, for veterans and for people on disability and stuff like that.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, thanks for having me.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, exactly. Our slogan is empowering the body's natural healing abilities. So that's what we live by. But to your point, it's not just limited to biological substances. You can even use something like bioelectricity or shockwave electrical signals that can manipulate the body at a cellular level to help it to heal.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So essentially, it's anything really signaling wise that can facilitate healing or regeneration in your own body. And that's why even peptides, in my opinion, fall into this category of regenerative medicine, because a lot of them are just sending signals. Especially, obviously, there are some peptides that are more regenerative in nature.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
They're just sending signals to help your body to heal better. And of course, there's biological substances, which we'll go into too. But at a very high level, we're just giving your body the right tools and the right signals so it can heal on itself.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah, and I think that's really the key. The tools that we have now are much better than they were even five years ago. So regenerative medicine is moving at an accelerated rate. And that's to your point, a lot of physicians don't understand that there's so much innovation happening in regenerative medicine.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so they still have this concept that they were taught in medical school, or maybe they learned, you know, or 10 years ago when, you know, stem cells had all this hype and they don't actually end up doing anything. And so in their mind, that's what they still think. And of course,
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Stem cells is the first one I have to talk about just because I think that's the one people always think about with regenerative medicine. Stem cells is a very broad term, number one. What that means is that it's not specific to any type of nomenclature. If you go to a stem cell clinic, they're not specifying. What does that mean?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Does that mean you're getting a stem cell from the fat, the bone marrow? And even if you get the stem cell, is it culture expanded? How is it being engineered? How is it being isolated?
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And there's so many questions that just don't go answered when you ask these clinics that. And that's a problem still to this day with a lot of the offshore clinics, too, is there's all this excitement around stem cells. But at the end of the day, stem cells have two functions. One is to self-renew. and others to differentiate and turn into other types of tissue.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So the analogy I like is kind of think of it like a, you know, like a master key. And that master key can replicate itself and then it can, you know, open up like different doors or it can divide and clone itself and then open up other doors that way.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
uh and so if if that's a function of a stem cell in theory then it should be able to repair tissue and fix things in your body when we put them there but it turns out when we take stem cells in the test tube and then we and versus when we put them in your body they behave differently so it's not as simple as we thought and and there's very and there's a lot of different types of stem cells so those stem cells are one of the big categories of regenerative medicine that's that's one of them right
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
There's so many. But even in stem cells, I mean, you can just do a whole podcast just literally about that because stem cells are such a depth concept. But at a very high level, what people need to understand is just when you take something from your own body, like, for example, if you go to the U.S.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
right now, there's a lot of stem cell clinics, but they're not actually true stem cells because if you're just taking your bone marrow or your fat and then you're just isolating that and injecting it, it doesn't actually have the ability to turn into new tissue, but it does have an ability to reduce inflammation.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so a better term for it that Arnold Kaplan, who's the guy who coined the term mesenchymal stem cells in 1992, he's the guy who coined it. He wrote a paper about this, but basically he said that these things should be called committed progenitor cells, which is
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
a fancy word for just saying that they can't turn into new tissue, that they can reduce inflammation, which can still be useful in some conditions, but it's just misleading because a lot of patients are like, oh yeah, I got stem cell injections. It's like, well, it wasn't really a stem cell per se. It was more just something to reduce inflammation because it's not
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Because remember, the definition of a stem cell is something that can actually regenerate new tissue. And if you're just taking your fat or your bone marrow and injecting it, that's not regenerating new tissue through the mechanism of that stem cell. It may send signals to your own body stem cells to help with some regeneration. But for the most part, it's an anti-inflammatory product.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
And so that's the number one thing to understand about these. And this is, we're talking about the broader category of mesenchymal stem cells, which is just, you know, an embryological term. But essentially what it means is this is from, you know, the reason we use mesenchymal stem cells is because they're the easiest to source.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
because they're in the fat, they're in the bone marrow, they're from the medical core tissue or dental pulp. There's so many different sources now. But that's the reason why MSCs or mesenchymal stem cells are so popular. And the other reason is because mesenchymal stem cells only have a finite ability to differentiate which means they can they won't cause tumors or cancer.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
Of course, that's always been a concern with like embryonic stem cells, which if you're taking them from aborted fetuses, which some clinics still do. And obviously during the Bush era, there was a lot of controversy around that. And that's why stem cells kind of got categorized into this unethical thing. But that's not how we're sourcing our stem cells. We're sourcing them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
You know, obviously we're not we're not harming any babies and they're being sourced from C-section births after, you know, and some instead of being thrown away, they're donated. So it's a very simple collection process.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
But the problem with the mesenchymal stem cells, as we said, is first of all, there's a lot of clinics saying that they're taking your fat and bone marrow and claiming their stem cells, which are not. But let's say, let's say you go offshore somewhere and they can isolate them and then they can do what's called culture expansion, which means they can grow them and they can replicate them.
The Dr. Hyman Show
Stem Cells & Peptides: The Secret to Reversing Chronic Pain and Aging | Dr. Adeel Khan
So then they can actually have some sort of dose that can be a therapeutic and potentially regenerate tissue in theory. But then again, What happened, it turns out, when you take these stem cells, whether from any of these sources, when you put them in the body, most of them don't survive. And when you do them intravenously, most of them get trapped in the lungs or die.