SciFi Medicine Made Manifest: Stem Cells, Exosomes & Regenerative Medicine 🎙️ with Dr. Jeff Gross by @jeroseland on 3Speak
I delve into SciFi medicine made manifest with Dr. Jeffrey D. Gross, MD, Stem Cell Whisperer and Spine Fellowship Neurosurgeon. He's a regenerative medicine physician with decades of experience spa...
Tags: #ant-aging #podcast #interview
You are living in the future. We have self-driving cars. You have an AI assistant on your phone that you talk to every day, which seems able to answer nearly every question. You can instantaneously beam information around the globe and escape into hyper-realistic worlds whenever you please. As a biohacker, you probably attach tech, wearables to yourself on a daily basis to monitor your biosigns and enhance your body or mind. And wars are increasingly being fought by robots. We're living in a science fiction movie. But is it a utopian or dystopian sci -fi timeline we find ourselves in? I contend that's a question. Only the individual can answer for themselves via their own health decisions. As health remains, the highest leverage point for rewriting your own screenplay. You now have tools for vitality, longevity, and, dare I say, immortality that an Egyptian pharaoh would go to war for if his physicians whispered into his ear the promise of stem cells that can make your bones young again, exosomes that fight cancer. or peptides that restore beauty lost decades ago. I'm Jonathan Roseland with Limitless, and on the other side of the mic from me today is the stem cell whisper, a spine... Fellowship neurosurgeon, that would be Dr. Jeff Gross. He's a regenerative medicine physician with decades of experience spanning neurosurgery, cellular therapy, and advanced longevity science. He's the founder of Recelebrate, a stem cell activation clinic in Las Vegas. Maybe pay them a visit next time you're in Sin City, and you'll leave feeling less sinful, I imagine. Dr. Gross, welcome to Limitless. Thank you so much, my pleasure to be here. Recelebrate is the exclusive sponsor of this episode. Thanks to them, there are no annoying ads interrupting this conversation. Listen until the end, where I explain why this kind of exclusive sponsorship is the highest integrity business model for doing what we do here. Before we get into our questions, I got a call to action for the listener. You probably got someone in your life, friend, family member, colleague, friendly... package delivery guy who has achy knees or joints and is considering or dreading a joint replacement surgery. Send them this episode to listen to via a private message, and that'll be your good karma to do for the day, as what we have to discuss here may save them. a lot of expense and suffering. Dr. Gross, first question, what are some things medically possible today that were pure science fiction when you were in medical school or starting your career? Great question. Thank you for that. And some of these things that were... science fiction back in the 90s when I was in my residency and finishing medical school in the early 90s are still thought to be fictitious by my colleagues who trained with me because even though medicine is progressing, you have to actually go seek it and renew your education all the time. You have to put down the Kool-Aid. But those things include the ability to tap into our regenerative system. Our bodies can heal. Think about it. When you were three years old and you skinned your knee on the sidewalk, you know, that wound would heal in a few days. It would scab quickly and, you know, disappear with hardly a scar within days. Now, when you're in your 70s and you skin yourself somewhere. It takes weeks to heal. It's the same body, the same genes, the same set of instructions. What's different? Well, the difference is that youthful, restorative ability, and that's what regenerative medicine is all about. We can help our bodies heal, restore, renew, and replace, thought to be fiction during my training days. Is this a biological quantity or quality? problem. Is it a thing where we have, we're born with a set amount of stem cells and they just decline as the decades pass, or is it the toxicity of modernity that has a tax on regenerative regulating systems like the PARP system, for example? Right. Well, it's some of both, Jonathan. We do have decline in the number of functioning stem cells and our own functional cells, not just the stem cells. And the same goes for their quality because of, like you said, the toxicity of modernity, right, the accumulation of chronic inflammatory oxidative stress, molecular junk. Some of those cells become so bad. We call them zombie cells, senescent cells. So that's exactly right. We have declining. numbers and declining quality of our ability to repair ourselves. And, okay, we're going to get into all the applications, these kind of mind-blowing applications of stem cell therapies, but could we give the listeners, like, some tips for maintaining the stem cells that they've got? Sure. What is it? What are some things that we do that sabotage our stem cells? Well, unfortunately, especially on the American side of the globe, you know, our food source and our water source are full of things we... probably don't want. A lot of these things might have had a purpose, you know, expand the food source or the length of the shelf life of the food source, but a lot of those things turn out to be problematic, and a lot of those are... not available or banned in other countries. So I think we're starting to think about that and move in the right direction there. So eating clean, organic food sources, now I say that. And recently a study showed that even the organic farms have pesticides in the foods that are found because the winds blow the chemicals from a non-organic farm over into the... organic farms. So despite their best efforts, we still don't really have, you know, a very clean natural food source. So food, water, air, what's in our air, what's in our daily exposures, electromagnetic fields, all of these unwanted cellular stresses cause our ability to function, our cells to function, and our stem cells to help repair, to decline. So if you can... You can restimulate, I think to the second question is how do we preserve to the best of our ability, these things. You can stimulate that by doing Hormesis. Hormesis is a slight stress on the body to build cellular adaptability and resilience. At the end of the day, the better our cells can adapt. the better we can survive. And survive means live longer. And, of course, we want a healthy longer life, not just a longer life. So your cells will be healthier as well. Hormesis would include things like hot sauna, the finish protocol, cold plunges, fasting for periods of time, you know, not just a day, but maybe 72 hours here and there. High intensity exercise. to stimulate things, and maybe situations of brief low oxygen, you know, usually people use, you know, abundance of oxygen, they do hyperbaric oxygen, which has a role, but I also believe in building the resilience through low oxygen tension. So the breathwork, where you do breath holding. And I've used a couple of these breathwork apps, and over time, you build up your lung capacity with them. And, yeah, it can kind of be a good practice, like, early, okay, in the morning is when we want that cortisol to spike. And so you'll do a breathwork practice, and you'll start by holding your breath for, like, 45 seconds, and you do that for like a month, and you'll be up to, like, like, two minutes sometimes. And, yeah, you're, I guess you're stimulating drowning there, but that's, yeah, that's a hell of a horbesis trigger. So, yeah, so, like, cold showers, are there? Okay, I heard... an argument that this is what, when people look at these studies that are still somewhat paradoxical about moderate amounts of alcohol being healthful, or the blue zones, where some people drink like fishes in the blue zones and end up statistically much more likely to be centenarians than the average American? Is that because alcohol is a poison can introduce a hormetic? a balanced hormetic stress to the system? Is that kind of what's going on there? Ooh, that's interesting. I think the benefits of alcohol would be, one, it's a slight blood thinner, so you have less chance of having a heart attack or stroke or vascular occlusion. Two, it's a social lubricant, and we know that the social piece in the blue zones is a huge component of longevity. And I think that... Those are the two main, you know, biologic reasons I can think of. As to Hormesis, there's probably, like anything, Goldilocks Happy Zone, where it may be, if you have too much alcohol, of course, you eventually lose your liver function, and you can hurt your brain cells and things like that. So I suppose there is a potential amount that's helpful, whether or not that's hormetic. I don't think we know that, and it would be a tough study. Okay, there is a company doing pretty aggressive marketing on the internet right now for cocoa flavanols, and cocoa flavinols are apparently do great things for stem cells. Have you tried that supplement? Yeah. Or is there something to those claims? Yeah, there are. Let's, let's. Let's cover phytonutrients in general. So, phytonutriots are the molecules that plants make that we've evolved around that our cells need for cofactors and to function best. And there's a wide, diverse amount of them, and they help not only our stem cells, but our cells in general. I think the, you know, dark chocolate flavonoids. are one of them, and that company is obviously working on what they have, but there are many others, from resvertrol to, to, you know, physitin, to keratin, to glutathione, to B vitamins, vitamin C, all these things are produced by plants in something called a plant derived extracellular vesicle or... for short, a plant exosome, and the way to get them to deliver to your cells where you need them is through these vesicular deliveries or exosome deliveries. If you just buy a bunch of chocolate, dark chocolate, or you buy an off-the -shelf supplement, that's just the molecule, it's not in a vesicle. You're not going to get much into your cells. So there's a wide variety of... of quality of cellular delivery at your vitamin shop. So the best way you can get these is eat the actual plant, because before it's distilled into the molecule. The problem is you'd have to eat quite a bit of chocolate, which could be good, but of course, to tolerate chocolate, it'd have to be a little bit sweeten, then you've got that issue. We don't want, you know, sugar as much as we're getting it in our modern diet. But otherwise, yeah, flavonols, flavonoids, so many other phytonutrients are so crucial for us, and we just don't get enough in the modern world. And what we get, you know, these highly, you know, farmed fruits and vegetables don't have the nutrients of a wild type. Okay, I got a funny story that's kind of sort of tangential to this. Once upon a time, I was in Panama, and I was touring these paradisical Panamanian islands, and there was a chocolate farm on one of the islands. And while we were taking, so I bought some of that, like, pristine dark chocolate, it was pretty amazing stuff. And as we were taking the boat back, I am, like, halfway joking with the boat driver, the pilot, the boat pilot. And I say, oh, I'm thinking about buying a chocolate farm. and, like, immediately his ears perk up. And he's like, oh, if you want to buy a chocolate farm, like, I can introduce you to some people. Yeah, he was ready to, like, wheel and deal and make a chocolate farm transaction happen. But, unfortunately, I was not at all in the market. But you're saying that to actually, you would actually probably need to be, like, the proprietor of a Panamanian chocolate farm to get enough of the raw... constituents to, like, get the same kind of benefit that you could much easier, much more easily get just from a suppulant that's properly formulated to deliver those. Well, you can, you can actually extract these exosomes from the plants. It's laboratory intensive requires ultracentrophagation for quite some time. We've done this with a set of Italian organic fruits in the Blue Zone. and we have them, as far as I know, it's the only such supplement out there for longevity. And the preclinical studies did show all the markers of longevity for a cell were moved in the right direction, like reduced reactive oxygen species, increased or two-and-one gene activity, which is a major anti-aging. gene cascade, reduced DNA marker, DNA damage markers. So this is something that's tremendous, but it's just at the beginning because it's so difficult to extract the exosomes. So can we do that for, you know, cacao? Possibly, we haven't tested it. We're working on a pomegranate one right now. Ah, okay, well, before we get people thinking about sweets. too much. So let's talk about your guys's wheelhouse, which is, which is like joint repair and restoring mobility. And I'm imagining people that have been athletes, I'm imagining martial artists. I was a martial artist for about a... decade. And basically, if you do almost any martial art, with maybe the exception of, like, Tai Chi, you're going to end up with some, you're going to end up with either major injuries or micro, or micro injuries. And if, and then those are going to kind of come back to haunt you, like even, even decades after you were a kid doing Taekwondo. I'm also wondering if the stem cell therapies are, if you see these being used for the injuries that are downstream from our modern sedentary lifestyles. I'm thinking about the disc and hip issues that people get from... spending too much time sitting or the nerd neck that so many of us have because we spend too much time looking down at our phones? That's a great subject area. Let me try to handle it broadly and we can get more granular, if you like. So we are seeing incredible regenerative benefits back to a more youthful state of healing and repair. which takes us back to the beginning of our conversation, in the musculoskeletal realm. I started in regenerative medicine in that area because I'm a neurosurgical spine surgeon by training, always trying not to do surgery for people. That should be the very last option. And when I adopted and went back and retrained into regenerative medicine eight years ago, I meant to do it as a new tool for joint and spine, and now it's everything I do. I call it cell signaling. We're signaling cells to behave in a better way, a more useful way, a more restorative way, whether that stem cells, stem cell derived, secretions or secretome, such as exosomes, peptides, all these things are signaling cells. We use sometimes all of them. We call this stem cell medicine, even though stem cells are very 2010, now we're using what stem cells produce, back to the vesicles, back to these exosomes. So that's what we're using to signal our cells to do the work. At the end of the day, a stem cell treatment that you might have isn't doing the work. It's encouraging and inducing our own cells to behave more youthfully. and do the work. At the end of the day, our cells do the work. We just need to remind them how to do that. Yes, we have really incredible results with joints and spine, people facing potential surgery who want to avoid that. That's my favorite type of person to talk to in this realm. We address hips, knees, ankles, toes, all the upper extremity joints, and some elements of the spine. Not everything. Our results are at least the same or better as to the 15-year follow-up results published in France for knees and now hips. So this is not, you know, shooting from the hip. This has medical evidence backing it. And it's a single injection, and it... we have before and after MRIs in some of the cases showing we're able to achieve cartilage regrowth, not for everybody, and it's only part of the equation. We still have to have a person who is not inflamed, a person who is doing the work, exercising, building muscle, healthy, eating the right amount of good protein. and much more. You have to be part of the solution. We can't just do the injection, hoping it'll work on everybody. We'd treat athletes, and weekend warriors, and people who sit in a chair all day, they degenerate fast, too. Most of our patients are 30s to 80s. Just depends. We see people have had prior surgery, maybe a small endoscopy surgery to clean up a meniscus or something like that. They degenerate faster. We see people have had too many cortisone injections to try and temporarily quell something in a joint. They degenerate faster. We see people with other inflammatory problems that accelerates joint degeneration. They degenerate faster. We take all these people and we try to slow and reverse. in a focal way, their degeneration. Now, that's just the joint and spine. Now, of course, we do other things, and now we're using, like I said, mostly the stem cell derives signaling, the exosomes, the growth factors, the things secreted by the stem cells. We call that the secretome. The secretome. Okay, oh, because they're secreted, not because they're secreted, but because they are secreted. Exactly. Exosomes to, my understanding is they are the intracellular internet communication matrix within the body. And what I was curious about is I have also heard that cells communicate photonically to each other. So is there kind of like two different intracellular communication networks? And boy, this might not even be a... a question that you know about. Is there, when do cells use exosomes versus when do they use photons to talk to each other? Well, let's, listen. I don't think I could address the last part, but it's a great question. We're learning more about that. But we do know that cells do communicate with energy. It can be photonic. It's not, I mean, many cells work in the dark, so we don't know if they're, if it's photonic or what, but we do believe that the mitochondria are the energy receivers and deliverers. Like Egyptian pyramids might have had something to do with energy receipt and delivery, right? Yeah, yeah, man. Those are our pyramids. Those are our pyramids of mitochondria, and we know that pulse electromagnetic fields, ultrasound, sound waves, and light, like red light, near infrared light, all have a role in, at the mitochondrial level similar to, in the plants, the chloroplasts, the chlorophyll and the chloroplasts. So we know that they are molecules in there that can receive light energy and do something with it. bioelectrically or biochemically. So I think you're right about that. So cells can communicate that way, and cells do communicate, and this is very important, that's why we talk about cell signaling. They communicate through the secretion of small proteins and peptides or growth factors, and vesicular, encapsulated cellular information, like microRNAs. other proteins and peptides like heat shock protein and some lipids and a few non-genomic DNA fragments. So really not enough DNA to make a gene, but sometimes these DNA signaling factors can act as promoters to encourage certain genes to be transcribed. So when you have a packet of information going into another cell, you're giving it information. Like, if a cell's under attack by infection, you're warning all the neighbor cells, hey, lock your doors, we're under attack. And it changes what proteins are being made, what pathways are undertaken in that cell, what we call cell metabolism, what's going on in the cell, you know, what's the cell focused on, you know? And our cells, over time, exposed to our not-so-great, not-so-healthy world, and with age in general, accumulate inflammation, and they're busy fighting that. They're constantly trying to patch the inflammation. And that's where the stem cells and the exosomes come in. We're basically signaling to ourselves, hey, take a break from that nonsense. Go back to that youthful, restorative, anti-inflammatory state where you can function normally. And that function is specific. It could be a liver cell, a kidney cell that needs to do their job. It could be a cartilage forming cell. Could be a brain cell. And we go back to that. you know, factory setting. That's what we're looking for…