The Biohacks Big Pharma Doesn’t Want You to Know: Plasmapheresis, Muse Cells & Peptides

Mark Hyman, MD

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Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode of The Doctor Hyman Show.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Most of the molecules that signal the root causes of aging live in our plasma, from inflammation to toxin buildup to senescent cells. All of that is

Dr. Mark Hyman
Damaged proteins. We started to degrade and our resilience decreases and we age faster biologically. Now before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone by my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real time lab insights.

And if you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, the Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your health journey, visit my website at DrHyman.com for my website store for a summary of my favorite and thoroughly tested products. I want to start with plasmapheresis I think it's a really important innovative therapy. It's been around in medicine for decades for treating various kinds of diseases that are autoimmune diseases or neurologic diseases and it's very effective for those conditions. It's only done in academic centers, it's only done for very rare cases, it's not part of traditional medicine, it's not reimbursed for general health, and yet there's incredible research on it around Alzheimer's, around long COVID, around longevity itself.

So first, why don't you explain what was the origin of the science that kind of began to let us think about this particular medical procedure as a potential treatment for aging itself.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Absolutely. So let's take the story way back to just even the ancient Romans. Were using a technology that they called bloodletting, right? Because they believed a lot of the bad stuff that causes some disease lives in the blood and bloodletting, removing some of this blood, would minimize some of the symptoms of disease. And as we all know, this didn't really work or pan out because there's other things in blood that you really,

Dr. Mark Hyman
really

Dr. Darshan Shah
That leeches.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Although leeches have had a comeback medicine for wound healing. Because you put them on wounds that don't heal and it impregnates through blood vessels.

Dr. Darshan Shah
It does. We use leeches a lot in surgery actually. It's venous congestion and things. I'm very familiar with leeches. But we're not talking leeches.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But you're doing trephination. You're not drilling holes in people's brains to let out the bad No.

Dr. Darshan Shah
So fast forward, apheresis was a technology that was developed to treat a disease called Waldenstrom's disease, where you have immune complexes that make the blood too thick. And that thickening of the blood causes blockages in your blood vessels, people would die from this traditionally. And then some very smart scientists in IBM, I think, figured out how to actually separate the plasma from the blood cells.

Dr. Mark Hyman
What is plasma?

Dr. Darshan Shah
So plasma is the fluid portion of your blood. It's 45% of your blood. And if you've ever seen someone do PRP, which is take some blood in a test tube and they put in a centrifuge and they spin it down, the blood will separate to a white layer in the top of the test tube and a red layer in the bottom. The red layer is your red blood cells and the white layer is your plasma on top. There's like a little

Dr. Mark Hyman
But the red it's also your white cells, all your cells.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So basically you separate it's the soup in which all of your cells and your blood flow So it's like the red cells, the white cells, the You take those out and you separate that from the soup. And this soup what's in this soup?

Dr. Darshan Shah
So the soup is where all of the

Dr. Mark Hyman
In other words, what's in the plasma?

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, exactly. What's in the plasma, right? So this is where all your cells are living, and this is what they're exposed to on a day to day basis. It's the growth factors, it is cell signaling molecules, it's nutrients, It's your lot of the factors of your immune system live in this soup. So it's basically where all the signaling in your body kind of lives inside of this plasma.

And what's good about it is that it carries these signals throughout your entire body. So if you have something going on in your gut, your brain can hear about it. If you have something going on in your heart, your gut hears about it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's

Dr. Darshan Shah
the communication superhighway. Exactly. One of the functions it has is being a communication superhighway for your entire body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So there are all these molecules in there that are regulating all these things. Exactly. So why do we then want to kind of take out that plasma, throw it in the garbage and put in a replacement fluid called albumin? What's bad in there? Because what you just said sounds good.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, right, right, exactly. So let's take it back a little bit more also to the convoys with the parabiosis experiment. Think that's interesting to talk about where they hook up a young mouse to an old mouse and they found that the old mouse got younger and the young mouse got older. And so for a decade, people were looking for like, what is the substance in the young mouse that makes the old mouse younger? And so they did all these studies and substances like GDF11, TNF, and nothing really panned out.

And then ten years later, there's a story. I think it's a true story, but I hear it all because I hear it all the time. Someone at a conference went up to ask a question to the scientists doing all the research on this and they kind of knocked on the microphone and they said, You know, I think you guys are looking at the wrong mouse. It's not what's in the old mouse. It's not what's in the young mouse making the old mouse younger.

It's the opposite. It's what you're taking out of the old mouse. So it turns out inner plasma is also where all the cytokines and all the signaling molecules that lead to inflammation accumulate, right? It turns out that's where all of the toxins that we're exposed to also accumulate. It turns out where senescent cells, the SASP, the negative products that senescent cells secrete also live in

Dr. Mark Hyman
our body The zombie Which are part of the hallmarks of aging, which are essentially these phenomena that happen, these cells that don't die, they just become zombie cells and then secrete all these inflammatory molecules that make us age faster.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. So if you look at all the root causes of aging, most of the molecules that signal the root causes of aging live in our plasma, from inflammation to toxin buildup to senescent cells, all of that is

Dr. Mark Hyman
inside the plasma. Proteins. Proteins, And so all these damaged proteins just float around and they create more problems, more inflammation, more dysfunction and we sort of degrade and our resilience decreases and we age faster biologically.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly, exactly. So it goes to reason from there that if this is all living in your plasma and your body is unable to eliminate this with its own elimination mechanisms, what if we just remove the plasma? And so some very smart people started doing experiments using a technology that's been in hospitals for literally five or six decades. It's FDA approved. We've been using it, like you said, for

Dr. Mark Hyman
I've been a doctor for forty one years, so like, I know I'm old, but I remember it even back then.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, right. We use it a lot. And like, even for like drug overdoses, because you know, that lives in your plasma too. And it works as FDA approved. It's super safe.

We've been using it forever. And it just highlights, there's so much incredible technology locked up in the sick care system that if we just bring it back thirty, forty years, like you can eliminate chronic disease. This is one of those technologies. So the treatment like you've experienced, it is super comfortable. You just basically sit there with an IV in your arm and your blood is removed like about 200 cc's at a time.

So it's a small volume put through this giant centrifuge. The plasma is separated from the red blood cells, red blood cells go back into you through the same IV or a different IV, and then you get a big bag of plasma that's basically thrown away. And inside of that we've basically eliminated one entire plasma volume of all of these negative factors that have been built up over time.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you then throw the stuff out. And has anybody actually studied what's in there? People are. When you get the stuff, it's like when you get an oil change, your car, you throw out the old oil. What's in that?

Dr. Darshan Shah
It's the same things that you measure when you do a blood test. Like with the Function Health blood test, get a lot of Biomarkers. Biomarkers and blood results basically back And you're basically measuring those whenever you do a blood test. It's the same stuff, but you're just totally removing it and you're throwing it away. So I think people haven't really looked exactly at the discarded plasma.

People are looking at it right now.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It would be fascinating to do. What are the toxins in there? What are the immune cells, cytokines? What are the senescent cells in there? What's going on that we're taking out?

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, and basically it's all being removed. Exactly. And so we've actually done a lot of patients now and we've measured their total toxicity levels in their urine. All the toxins. We measure things like mycotoxins, we measure exposure to heavy metals, we're measuring exposure to even like microplastics and all these toxins, and we've seen significant reductions in before and after treatment toxin levels.

So we know toxins are in the plasma, and when you remove them, your body gets a chance to catch up, right? Now it's able to say, phew, I mean, I've lost a lot of the stuff I'm working overtime to remove. And it gets a chance to clean up. And like you said, it's like an oil change for the body. Like, you know, For all of us that have had cars forever, we know that if you don't do an oil change every three to 5,000 miles, your car is not going to run as well.

Well, your body's the exact same way.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's interesting. I read a study recently that came out of Germany where they used plasmapheresis for long COVID. Absolutely. And what was interesting was they looked at a lot of people who have long COVID have auto antibodies against their autonomic nervous system, which is your you know, regulates all the things that are sort of automatic in your body, you know, all the parasympathetic sympathetic nervous system.

And it basically affects your blood vessels in many ways and your blood pressure regulation. And a lot of people have with long COVID they have what they call POTS which is, you know, they get postural hypotension, they stand up, they get dizzy, they have all these other cognitive symptoms, there's all these other cytokine markers and antibodies and they were able to actually measure them before and after the plasmapheresis and it showed significant reduction or elimination of these and improvement clinically in these patients with long Covid. And the stats are always variable about how many people have long Covid but it's probably five to ten percent of people had I think it might be more. Mean how many if you think how many hundreds of millions of Americans had Covid, you take ten percent of that, it's still twenty million people.

Dr. Darshan Shah
A lot of people don't even know they have it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And it's like little brain fog, not feeling as good, just not as good as they were before COVID. And what's even more frightening is I was talking to Jeremy Nicholson who's been on the podcast who's a phenomic researcher from Australia who's doing deep phenomics which means looking at all these, not just the regular blood tests, but metabolomics and cytokines and thousands and thousands of proteins and molecules. And he says everybody who's had COVID has something going on. Like they're all a little out of whack in terms of their immune system, inflammatory Like my wife says, I never used to get sick. Now I get sick more because I have COVID.

So, you know, I think plasmapheresis is fascinating treatment for that and I think has a lot of promise.

Dr. Adeel Khan
Stem cells have two functions. You want this to self renew and the other is to differentiate and turn into all types of tissue. So the analogy I like is kinda 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 and then open up other doors that way. 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 when and versus when we put them in the body, they became friendly.

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

Dr. Mark Hyman
So stem cells are one of the big categories of regenerative medicine. That's that's one of the right. And so so keep keep going around that. I'm just sort of contextualize it because there's a lot of other compounds that are used besides There's

Dr. Adeel Khan
so and and even but even in stem cells, I mean, you can just do a whole podcast just literally about that because stem cells are such a in-depth concept. But at a very high level, what people need to understand is just when you take when you take something from your own body, like, for example, if you go to The US 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. And so a better term for it that Arnold Kaplan, who's a guy who coined the term mesenchymal stem cells in 1992, he's a he's a guy who coined it. He he wrote a paper about this. But, basically, he said that they you know, these things should be called committed progenitor cells, which is a fancy word for just saying that they can't turn into new tissue, but they can reduce inflammation, which is still 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 because whenever 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 your 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.

And so that's 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, these the reason we use mesenchymal stem cells is because they're the easiest to source, because they're in the fat, they're in the bone marrow, they're from umbilical cord 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. Of course, that's always been a concern with, like, embryonic stem cells, which if you're taking them from a gordon genesis, 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 kinda got categorized into this unethical thing. But that's not how we're sourcing our stem cells. We're we're sourcing them, you know, obviously, we're not hurt we're not harming any babies, and they're being sourced from c section births after, know and and some things are being thrown away.

They're donated. It was a very simple collection process, 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 fat and bone marrow and claiming their stem cells 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. So then they can actually have some sort of dose that can be a therapeutic and potentially regenerate tissue in theory. But then 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 and when you do them intravenously, most of them get trapped in the lungs and die. And that's why the results have been very inconsistent, and that's why stem cells haven't taken off the way you thought they would, you know, ten, fifteen years ago, and that's why the clinical trials have been so mixed. And so, unfortunately, there's still a lot of clinics claiming that, you know, we can regenerate tissue in your yeah. 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 can benefit, and and that's and that's and that's the old generation technology.

But now we can isolate we can isolate the best stem cell population and use that one. So it turns out that when we take a stem cell, a mesenchymal stem cell, there's actually 17 subtypes, which is kinda 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. 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 of them felt like. That's what we were doing up until a year ago. 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, in which we can talk about those stem cells. But there's another professor, professor Mary Tizawa, who discovered something called new cells, which stands for multilineage differentiating stress enduring cell. So it's a mouthful.

All you need to remember, or people, is that these are The muse. The muse. Exactly. The muse. The muse is the cool stuff.

They're they're able to they're pluripotent, which means they can differentiate into all 200, you know, and 20 cell types in their body or over 200 cell types, and and they are stress enduring, which means they can survive harsh environments. So that's really the key. 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 type of stem cells. And so that's now what we've moved on to.

And, of course, we talked earlier about your back, and that's what we use for you. 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, you know, I'm I'm in the process of doing some clinical work with professor Guzawa as well, and we we want to investigate these new cells for a lot of different conditions. But in Japan, they've already published trials for ALS, heart attacks, for stroke, and these are not easy to treat conditions. And and with intravenous new cells, you 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 difference.

And that's just because these cells are actually surviving and doing what they are meant to do, which is reduce inflammation, repair cellular function, oxidase, We know one of the biggest mechanisms by which they work is through mitochondrial DNA transfer and mitophagy, which is repairing damaged mitochondria. And I think everyone now knows the mitochondria are so important, not just for energy, but for regulating cellular metabolism and aging. So that's why there's so much interest in this space for longevity and not just for orthopedic conditions. And so those are mesenchymal stem cells, then there's also induced pluripotent stem cells, iPSC, and that's the Galvanagka stem cells where you can take any old cell and you can make it young again. So, of course, when you think about that, you're like, holy.

Wow. That's great. So 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 tumorigenicity, And so we don't actually use them clinically yet.

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 in the body, so they they have a lot more clinical translation than they have a stem cell.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So these are basically, there's different kinds of stem cells, and and and the most of the kind in the first generation seems like they were getting, you know, an anti inflammatory effect, but they might not be doing the full effect we had thought they might and why there was variable results. And they get trapped in the lungs. The immune cells seem to be stress resistant, so they hang out more. They have time to do their job more, and they they have the ability to actually work in different way because they're they're not sort of chewed up so fast. And these don't get also trapped in the lungs.

They they are are resistant to that?

Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah. They so about 10 to 15 times more are able to go into circulation. So there is still some that could trap their lungs, but professor Jazawa has shown work showing that it's, you know, it's not like two times more pocketing an order of magnitude, like, 10 times more are able to go into circulation. So it is still a big difference compared to standard MSC. And and, you know,

Dr. Mark Hyman
there's there's two kind of uses, as you mentioned. The one is injecting it into a joint or a back or some damaged traumatic tissue or injecting them intravenously for systemic effects around really things like ALS or stroke. Those are really, like you said, almost impossible to treat problems. And what kinds of results are they seeing when they do these systemic treatments? What are the kinds of conditions where it might be applicable for?

Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah. Look. I just had an ALS patient I treated a couple 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 rarely. She couldn't she's barely able to speak before. And that was just one IV, and it was pretty incredible to see. Obviously, that's anecdotal, but the clinical trial that was done also showed, you know, some slowing of progression.

And we all know how devastating ALS is, and if if you can something that could forward down again, 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. And then for stroke, we can be much more much more kind of certain that they are gonna positively resolve. Because in stroke, for example, she showed that thirty percent 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. And so imagine

Dr. Mark Hyman
So are you saying if someone's in a wheelchair and can move to the side of

Dr. Adeel Khan
their arm or leg and then they Exactly. Start walking? Exactly. And they go back to full time work. So now thirty percent of people and the other seventy percent had still had significant clinical benefits and were able to get, you know, work they weren't necessarily able to work any work.

A lot of them were able to get back, like, no puncturing of ADLs and IVLs and stuff like that, which is their Activities

Dr. Mark Hyman
of daily living.

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 time. No.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing. They all that's wild. So so what other kinds of conditions might this be out for? Heart immune diseases, longevity?

Dr. Adeel Khan
What what it I it sounds you almost sound like a, you know, a used car salesman or something when you're like, this can treat everything. You know? But it 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. So I'm not gonna 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 acid acid, And and, you know, there's loss of protein, like, or there's there's so many protein misfolding.

There's so many other ones. And so, basically, these 12 let's call them the 12 hallmarks. They they actually underlie not just aging, which is, you know, arguably the most complex chronic disease. They underlie all chronic diseases from from heart disease to asthma to dementia to cancer even and components of that that are overlying. And a lot of them are metabolic in nature.

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 metallurgy. And then, of course, the mitochondria are the ones that help to regulate metabolism. Right? 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. That's why metabolic disease is really the root cause of so many different problems, and that's why they call dementia type three 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 the only coeliac diseases, and that's number one. 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. And if if there's one cell that you need to understand, it's your macrophages. Probably, they're my favorite cell in the body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
They're like little Pac Man. They, go and chew up all the stuff that shouldn't be there. Right?

Dr. Adeel Khan
Exactly. So they're like your little they're like your little Pac Man controlling and surveilling and making sure the bad guys don't get in. They eat the bad guys when they're around. They they take them away, and they'll they'll dispose of them. But what happens to a lot of Pacman or police officers that, like, colonists, they get fat and tired at whiskey.

And and then they start eating too many donuts, and they can't do their job anymore. And this is actually called lipid associated macrophages or LAMTs. And so they accumulate fat and lipid perioxidation inside of the macrophage, and then they can't do their job anymore, and which and the job is so important, and then they start releasing the wrong signals. They start saying so the macrophages start releasing pro inflammatory signals, and then that causes the cycle of chronic inflammation, 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 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 insolventory 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's it's incredible. Yeah. So for autoimmune disease and for chronic inflammatory age related diseases, for just rejuvenation and longevity itself, these can seem to be helpful. We one of the things that I'd you to explain is, you know, how does stem cells work? Because you kind of alluded to the fact that they don't actually work as we thought they did, which is you inject them, and then they go if you have a liver problem, they become a liver cell, or if you have a kidney problem, become a kidney cell.

They just they just have certain compounds inside of them that go out and

Dr. Adeel Khan
kind of Yeah. I mean,

Dr. Mark Hyman
care removal things.

Dr. Adeel Khan
So mesenchymal stem cells primarily work your

Dr. Mark Hyman
Let me just before you kind of go into that, mesem for everybody listening, that's a big word. It means just your body's tissue. What the other kind of stem cells come from umbilical cords or from embryos. So we're not doing embryos at all. We're talking mostly about umbilical cord blood blood that actually has basically baby stem cells as opposed to mine, which are, like, almost 65.

Right? So they're and they're not as antigenic. In other words, they don't tend to cause this foreign reaction. Like, if you were to take I was taking your stem cells, I'd have a rejection of those stem cells as part of my biology because we don't like foreign stuff. But with these kind of umbilical cord cells, it's not like that.

So you

Dr. Adeel Khan
can use these umbilical cord use stem cells to actually kind of bypass that thing, but actually have the the benefit of these younger stem cells. Right? 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 they can actually have markers of senescence and other even cancer markers as you get older. So you don't wanna take your own stem cells and put them in your body, especially if you're over age 40. But but, anyway, yeah, back to, yeah, back to the point about, you know, what these stem cells are doing inside of your body. The mesenchymal stem cells are primarily reducing inflammation via this what's called the secretome. So the secretome is kind of the soup that the stem cells grow in or release, and they're signals.

So there there's microRNAs. 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 type of secretome the stem cells are releasing dictates their ability to change the microenvironment and help with these different cellular processes. So for example, the secretome of a stem cell from your own body isn't gonna 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. This my cells are old. They've gone through x amount of cell damage versus umbilical cord tissue, which doesn't. And that's why exosomes are such a hot topic because if the 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 exosome doc

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. So hold hold there. Hold there for a sec. The the there's stuff that the stem cells secrete. Right?

That's why it's called the secretome or secretome, which is hey, brother. Right? There's stuff that it squirts out basically in its environment that goes out and does all these good things. And what you're saying is that these inside of the stem cells, there are these little vesicles, these little packets of healing factors called exosomes. And they're maybe where most of the benefit comes from from the stem cells.

So you could actually take the exosomes out of the stem cells. You grow the stem cells in a lab. You remove the exosomes. You can concentrate them. They don't have any DNA material.

They're they're much safer. They're less expensive. And then you can use them also. So so now explain to us what are exosomes? Because that's another part of this whole field of regenerative medicine.

We kind of sort of basically skirted the surface of stem cells. I'll be Yeah. Kinda a good sense of that, but I wanna get into the few other things. So exosomes are the next topic, and and let's kind of explore what are exosomes, how do we use them, and why do they work.

Dr. Adeel Khan
Yeah. I mean, you 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. 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. So exosomes are also becoming a hot topic in diagnostics because it turns out the exosome profile of your cells as it become cancerous or as it become chronic diseases, you can detect certain exosome products because we didn't have this technology, right, like five years ago.

And now now we do. And now we can figure out, hey. The signals your cells are sending are changing. This means that you might be developing this problem. So that's so that's why exosomes are becoming a hard topic in diagnostics too.

And then, of course, in intervention or therapeutics, then it makes sense because, like we said, it's all about the signals that they're that are being sent by the stem cell that dictate their ability to modulate or change the cells in a favorable way. And now the exosomes can be isolated in a lot of different ways. The the previously, it can only be done through, you know, ultracentrifugation 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 cell. So meaning, even if they're not replicating, you you can you can basically homoge it's called homogenization, which is basically like, you know, you're blending you know how you, you know, blend, like, fruit to get, like, the pulp out and the the juice?

It's like taking the juice, basically, and the of tissue, and that's the exosome. So you can do that now with any tissue. 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. There's 290 or 281 patents, something like that, on exosomes in the last, like, couple years.

So There's different kinds of exosomes. The scale.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. There's different kinds of exosomes.

Dr. Adeel Khan
Oh, yeah. So that tells you the scale, though. Two over 200 patents on just exosomes alone in the last couple years. So that tells you the scale and the magnitude of research that's happening right now.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's quite amazing that we've kind of, you know, gone this long in medicine without really taking a hard look at peptides in a conventional way. Now there are things that people know of as peptides that you don't even know are peptides, right? Like insulin is a peptide. Exactly. Ozempic is now the blockbuster drug of the day.

Dr. Edwin Lee
It's peptide, yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's a peptide.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Glutathione is a We would have filed the peptide.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, so there's a lot of compounds that we use in medicine that are peptides. It's probably over 7,000 produced by the body, right? Actually, technically 300,000. Three hundred thousand? Yeah.

Okay, was off by a few thousand.

Dr. Edwin Lee
But we only understand fraction of it. And outside in nature, there's, I think I estimate about 6,000,000 peptides out there.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's incredible.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Six I mean, a lot from venoms, from animals and in

Dr. Mark Hyman
my And you in human peptides, but other

Dr. Edwin Lee
Oh yeah, dairy and there's really amazing spiders and just interesting creatures. Nature has a lot of wealth of.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Now as a functional medicine doctor and in regenerative medicine, you know, interested in general medicine, I really love the idea of using bio identical molecules to support the body to do what it's supposed to do.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Oh, definitely.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So there's the drug is essentially a new to nature molecule that interferes or interrupts or blocks some pathway in the body. And there's usually downstream side effects. Okay. Peptides also can have side effects when used at pharmacological doses like we're seeing with Ozempic.

But these are biomolecules that have we've evolved over millennia that regulate everything that's happening in our body. So they're getting a lot of of play in the longevity space to optimize cognitive health, to rejuvenate your skin, to help with tissue repair, to improve sexuality, vitality, longevity. Kind of take us from the top down, what are peptides? How do they work in the body and how can they be used to treat disease, optimize this health and rejuvenate our biology?

Dr. Edwin Lee
You did a great explanation of peptides, but the way I explain to my patients, Mark, is that peptides are signaling molecules. They're miniature proteins, small little proteins that are made of amino acids. And unfortunately the FDA has this arbitrary just made a clarification that under 40 amino acids is considered a peptide, over 40 is a biologic, and then over 100 amino acids traditionally has been considered a protein. So it's the length of basically how many amino acids are put together. And like I said, body makes 300,000 peptides.

We only have seen a fraction of it. And anyway, it's really fun to read the research that's out there. And I I explained that peptides to my patient is a sibling molecule. It's short acting and it's like a doorbell ringing, someone ringing your doorbell, that's a peptide, and a reaction is going to happen. Either your dog's going to bark or someone's going to answer the door.

So if you give a peptide to basically help your immune system, like thymosin alpha-one, that's going to stimulate your immune system work better. So that's a natural peptide produced by your thymus gland. As you know, Mark, it's thyroid and thymus. Patients always get confused, but it sits like in your chest and between your lungs or in front of your heart. I have some

Dr. Mark Hyman
Sweet breads, if you like V. L. Sweet breads. It's when you go to a restaurant and change your restaurant and they create sweet breads, that's what it is, is your thymus gland. I didn't know that.

You didn't know that. But I know, interesting.

Dr. Edwin Lee
I should order some sweet bread.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I wonder if eating it is actually good. I mean, you

Dr. Edwin Lee
get any TA1 or peptides from eating it after it's cooked, I don't know. Well, did a study, you probably read, that basically they gave human growth hormone and metformin DHEA and the improved. It was only in men so they're going to do another trial. I'm curious if it's women but anyway if the thymus gets healthier, your immune system gets healthier. So that's one key component.

Yeah. Have a healthy immune system.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So how do they actually work? Are they like binding to receptors and activating gene expression and regulating various kind of machine networks in the body?

Dr. Edwin Lee
Some peptides are so small like epithalent it can actually slip through and go through the nucleus and interact with the DNA through the histone binding sites. Some of these peptides were discovered by Doctor. Kavisson who is from St. Petersburg, Russia. He has probably forty years of research on these wonderful peptides and unfortunately he just passed away a couple weeks ago so I'm really sad about that.

I have so many questions to ask.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you didn't get to

Dr. Adeel Khan
ask him.

Dr. Edwin Lee
And I did have the privilege to talk to him once. But anyway, to me, he's like one of the top scientists and he should have got the Nobel Prize in medicine. Yeah, it's quite amazing. But it also acts in certain receptors. So there's a group of receptors called the G protein coupled receptor and most peptides interact with that receptor and basically cause a cascade event.

And then basically it's like doorbell ringing and then you get a cascade event.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, like insulin. Insulin binds to a receptor's and then kind of opens the gate for the glucose to go in the cell and VLP1 agonists do a similar thing like Ozempic.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Yes, there is a receptor, yes, exactly. So it's a general class called the G protein coupled receptor. It won the Nobel Prize in medicine, the G protein coupled receptor.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, yeah, incredible. So there about 150 peptides now out of the 300,000 that are being researched for medical applications. And there's over 80 peptides that are already approved by the FDA for medical use. What are the kinds of things that people should be aware of that peptides work well for, or maybe even better than traditional therapies?

Dr. Edwin Lee
Well, in my neighborhood, all my neighbors ring my doorbell and they have some type of injury so they just point to where they need a peptide injected so they point to their shoulder or to elbow their foot their ankle so I have every day someone's ringing my doorbell to get a peptide shot but I usually give BPC157 which is one of my favorite peptides it comes from her stomach, stomach fluid and actually the history is kind of interesting about that peptide it's I really anyway, I can go into that but it was really Saint Disco in the 1990s in Croatia. Yeah. And anyway, I actually published the first human clinical trial in peptides. A lot of research in animals, but I'm conducting two more human clinical trials, which is really exciting.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing. So BP 157, for example, is a peptide that the body produces. I'm assuming it's made synthetically in the lab by pulling together the sequence of the Why don't they know the sequence of it? They sequence the amino acids and they put together that string of amino acids. It's synthetically made, but a bio identical Exactly.

Right? So it's like making testosterone in the lab or making various molecules. Exactly. And then BV157, let's just sort of unpack that because that's a very popular one. I personally used it.

I've had a bicep tendonitis. I was doing some strength training and kind of got irritated. And I'm like, well, I'm just going to shoot some BP 157 in there. I did a couple of shots and it went away. Fantastic.

And it was impressive. And I've used it for other things as well and found them really very effective for immune function. When I had COVID, I, for example, used TA1 as

Dr. Edwin Lee
a peptide.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I use it in my patients. Maybe 157. Let's sort of just unpack that for a minute. How does that work in the body when you inject it, for example, systemically in your subcutaneous fat or abdomen, or if you have an issue with a particular muscle Tendon tear. When you have tendon tear, you inject it into that.

What's actually happening?

Dr. Edwin Lee
For tendon tear, muscle tear, or even like I inject in a patient's joints and they have a tear. What's interesting is that the one classic study that was done is they had these rats and they cut the Achilles.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That sounds fun.

Dr. Edwin Lee
So poor rat and basically one group basically got PPC injection in their stomach and the other group just got placebo. The group that got injected into their stomach and a month later they were walking again. And you don't see that in nature. When you have an Achilles repair,

Dr. Mark Hyman
it doesn't kill by itself. It's be thrown together.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Exactly. This was the first thing that was shown, and that was like, wow. Wow.

Dr. Adeel Khan
So

Dr. Mark Hyman
for my son, basically he was in high school,

Dr. Edwin Lee
he was on a cross country team. He had a six pack. He was just born to run. He's developed basically an ITB injury, illiterate a band and he couldn't even

Dr. Mark Hyman
walk Your ITB, I recall it, right?

Dr. Edwin Lee
Yeah. So he just could not even get in and out of the car. And I told him, he was in ninth grade, I said, Son, I can inject BPC into your leg. And he said, You aren't effing doing that. So I had to show him some slides and I showed him the rat.

I had to show him hard data. And he goes, Okay, you can inject. And then literally, you know, he was, I don't know, 15 at that time. He quickly recovered and like a week later he

Dr. Mark Hyman
was running again. That's amazing.

Dr. Edwin Lee
It's amazing. And so, it actually helps. There's multiple theories on how it could help but number one it reduces inflammation it recruits your immune system to basically heal but the one part is there's a receptor called the phacoemc receptor that activates your growth hormone receptor. So, it's a pathway to help growth hormone receptors to be activated so that whatever growth hormone you have, you can actually heal faster.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So, growth hormone is really involved in healing and repair.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Exactly, it's an anabolic hormone, but you need the receptors and that's

Dr. Mark Hyman
what BPC157 does. There was a study that once they stopped it three days later,

Dr. Edwin Lee
they still had high expression of growth hormone So if you use growth hormone peptides with basically VPC and TB4, you will heal much faster. So I have people, I have so many patients who've had all these massive things.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like the tesamorelin, somoralin peptides, mean, for adding a

Dr. Edwin Lee
series Yeah, CGC1295, tesamorelin, yes, they can all help heal faster too.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing. So it works by helping, for example, growth hormone. There may be mechanisms actually we don't really understand yet.

Dr. Edwin Lee
What

Dr. Mark Hyman
you said in the rat was interesting because they just injected into the abdominal fat.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Right. It's a signaling molecule. So it basically tells the body

Dr. Mark Hyman
to But they didn't have to inject into Achilles'

Dr. Edwin Lee
They did not inject even near the top. Does it work better if you

Dr. Mark Hyman
inject it near the site at

Dr. Edwin Lee
the Yes, it always does. It works better. But that study was truly mind blowing in the belly of the rat and the Achilles'

Dr. Mark Hyman
film. That's quite amazing. In some ways, peptides are used to treat injury or illness, right? Like, for example, BP one hundred fifty seven or insulin Ozempic, could say would be something that would be a semaglutide peptide that would be used to treat obesity or diabetes or to help with various things that it helps with. But, but many of the peptides are not really treating disease so much as, as bio regulators that, regulate our bodily functions to optimize them.

Right.

Dr. Edwin Lee
And my favorite one in regards to bio regulators is Epitalin. And that was discovered by Doctor. Kaverson.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So what's for example? Four acids. Amino acids, it seems like what would it do?

Dr. Edwin Lee
It comes naturally from our pineal gland. And as we get older, like our thymus gland, it will calcify and will shrivel up and you lose melatonin and you lose epipthalen from the pineal gland. And when you lose epipthalen, what happens is your cells that are supposed to self replicate get stuck in G2. So there's self replications. So if you want a new skin cell, your body basically can get rid of those skin cells and then you generate new skin cells.

Inside our body we can generate new heart cells, new myocytes, new liver cells, new pancreas. But our

Dr. Mark Hyman
ability to get less.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Exactly, we're losing epithaline. And epithaline basically turns on cell cycle. It's the peptide to make you younger. And I have patients who have pre diabetes or type two diabetes. Some of them have reduction of their medication or even get off their insulin.

I have patients who basically their macular degeneration is improving, their vision is getting better. So it's actually making you younger. But you can't self replicate forever because then you have discovered immortality, which I haven't discovered yet. Far from it. I don't think I'll ever do it, but I'll ever find it.

But anyway, I have patients. Say, hurry up, Doctor. Lee. Have not much time. But EpiPalent is just amazing.

I just love it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Is this something you take every day? Is this something you take on a cycle? No, no. Kevocin wants you to cycle it. And so I

Dr. Edwin Lee
have made my patients, which is sad because the FDA has this on the chopping blocks there too, in terms of banning peptides. You can get EpiPalant spray, which is actually

Dr. Mark Hyman
Nasal spray?

Dr. Edwin Lee
No, under the tongue. Under the tongue. Normally you have to inject the tongue The problem is that there's so many on the internet, but if you can get from Russia the original one, Kavusin, I'm

Dr. Mark Hyman
sure there's not a lot of commerce going back and forth with Russia. To China. To China. I'm sorry. You're the black market for peptides.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Well, this one's a spray and this one I trust Doctor. Kavison.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So these are I

Dr. Edwin Lee
don't trust the other ones. It's Kavison's brand.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you mentioned, for example, sort of Epi Thalen as a bi regulator that controls our ability to self replication, healing, repair. And so they're not like treating a disease.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Exactly. So you get it. So what happens is

Dr. Mark Hyman
insulin can treat type one diabetes, and that's great. But not all peptides are doing that. In fact, most of them are not. Actually simply just enhancing function. PT-one hundred forty one, for example.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Both of are the same peptide, same type. Yeah, for better libido, better sex drive.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's actually approved for women sexual Yes, Yeah, so oxytocin is the blood molecule. It's suppressed when you're after sex or when you breastfeeding.

Dr. Edwin Lee
There's a lot of other benefits. And my nurse practitioner, Becky Murray, is going to do a webinar, I host a monthly webinar. Not as popular as yours. You probably have thousands. I have only 30 people following.

But anyway, one day I'll be as popular as you, Mark. Well, let's see. There's no way. I mean, you're like New York Times is a seller. That's all right.

Someone bought my books.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I bought your books. Actually, you know what? I went on Kindle and it was free because I think it's part of Kindle Unlimited. Really? Yeah.

Dr. Edwin Lee
I'm going to take it off. I

Dr. Mark Hyman
going to buy it. I was like, Wow, Kindle Unlimited. Is great.

Dr. Edwin Lee
I even know.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I maybe $0.10

Dr. Edwin Lee
a year from Amazon. So

Dr. Mark Hyman
let's kind of dive in a little deeper around some of the use cases and where you're finding the top value for peptides in clinical practice and for patients? What are the ones you like to use? What are they used for?

Dr. Edwin Lee
Okay, number one that I just truly love is if you want skin GHK copper. Doctor. Pickard discovered GHK and it's a natural byproduct. So when you have collagen and basically breaks down, part of it is GHK. So GHK can turn on your fibroblast to make more collagen and hyaluronic acid and make your skin look better.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You don't have to inject it in your face, can just put it in your abdomen?

Dr. Edwin Lee
Well, have GHK copper topical.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Topical?

Dr. Edwin Lee
Yeah. So I'm not that smart, not that good looking, not a great athlete, but I have good skin even though I live in Florida and I don't even use sunscreen, but I use tons of GHK Copper.

Dr. Mark Hyman
On your face?

Dr. Edwin Lee
Oh yeah, topical. I love it. Yeah. And I tell all my patients Now,

Dr. Mark Hyman
it's things like hell when you inject it.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Well, no, no, I'm talking about topical. But you can inject. And for my father who passed away recently with very aggressive cancer, T cell lymphoma, with a small bowel, he had a great life. And he basically was told, we really have like thirty days to live. Chemoradiation won't work.

And I said, all right, dad, you're basically in a walker. Let me give you some peptides. And so for cancer, there's several different peptides that have a lot of clinical studies. So thymosin alpha-one could help.

Dr. Mark Hyman
To help your immune system fight cancer?

Dr. Edwin Lee
Oh, yeah, yeah, as an adjuvant.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Not a cure. We're not saying it's a cure. What you're saying is

Dr. Edwin Lee
Oh, yeah, yeah. All the studies in stage four, most of them shows basically improvement of, basically, longevity than a reduction of mortality. So thymosin alpha-one has been used. You can use basically met enkephalin, which I was using. GHK copper turns off also cancer genes.

Epithaline can also do that. So I told my dad, You're going to get some peptides. And I already drew it up. And my dad goes, I don't want them. He's like, kind stoic.

He goes, I don't want them. And I said, it's too late, dad. Mom is going to inject you anyway. You can say whatever you want. And we got eight great months with that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing.

Dr. Edwin Lee
So he went from literally from a walker to walking two miles a day, regained his weight, That's incredible. Yeah, all three peptides and better nutrition too.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, amazing. Kind of going down and get into the sort of the rabbit hole of like, what are the best use cases? What are the top peptides in your toolkit? For example, I know like my best supplements are magnesium, vitamin D, fish oil. Like those are my go to, right?

Probiotic. What are the in your

Dr. Edwin Lee
I would say number one is I love BPC-one hundred fifty seven. You can take it orally. People with reflux, it tightens the LES junction. I have some people get off their reflux medicine.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's the bottom of your esophagus where the reflux happens. It's come back up from the stomach.

Dr. Edwin Lee
And there's so many things that tighten LES junction.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, that's the lower esophageal sphincter, like a sphincter at the bottom of your esophagus. That's loose and you get less That's what comes

Dr. Edwin Lee
up, you get reflux curve and all that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's impressive.

Dr. Edwin Lee
But BPC has, FYI, I have people taking it and I inject peptides in their elbow and a month later they reinjure their elbow, but they go, Suddenly taking that VPC, my shoulder, I can sleep much better. So it could improve your entire body. So I call it the Wolverine Peptide, so you'll get younger.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So you can grow back

Dr. Edwin Lee
to So you can say Wolverine Peptide. That's right. People 107,

Dr. Mark Hyman
that's the topic of this. So we talked a bit about that. And it's great for injuries, for trauma, for tissue repair. Exactly. And I think one of the ones that I tend to rely on because I think it really personally, it's helped me, and I think it helps a lot of patients.

What other peptides are

Dr. Edwin Lee
I love thymus and alpha-one because as we get older, our thymus gland shrivels up, we're trying to basically help the thymus gland, I mean your immune system get healthier. And as you know Mark, know you got to have a healthy immune system because once it goes down it goes to two ways. It goes to cancer

Dr. Mark Hyman
or to infection. Yeah we get immunosenescence which means the aging of our immune system, which is why when you're older, you get more infections, you can't fight them as well, you die of pneumonia, you don't respond as well to vaccines. And get, looking at COVID, the people who are elderly had the higher risk of death. I think you're talking about a very important phenomenon that we don't really have a good treatment for with traditional medicine.

Dr. Edwin Lee
So generally I tell my patients to use like two fifty micrograms of thymus alpha-one like once or twice a week just as just

Dr. Mark Hyman
Not daily?

Dr. Edwin Lee
You can use daily if you're sick, like higher doses, like if I If it's COVID

Dr. Mark Hyman
or flu.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Yeah, wife, one day, she goes when she gets sick, it's like it's a nightmare because I don't know when to drop the kids off. Do I

Dr. Mark Hyman
give them lunch money? Do I where do I pick them up? You don't have a playbook for

Dr. Edwin Lee
You don't just This is the Uber driver. Yeah. Mean, so when my kids were younger, my wife goes, I took everything, the C, the D, the zinc, you know, silver. I'm coming down with something. I said, she goes, You have something else?

And I go, Yeah, yeah, in the fridge I have the thymosin alpha-one. So I gave her, I remember this clearly way before COVID, probably in 2016 or something like that. So I gave her about one milligram of thymosin alpha-one. The next morning, she was perfect. It's like, thank God.

If she was sick, I wouldn't know how to handle the case.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We don't have the cure for the common cold. If you take this, if you start to feel sick, when you get that feeling, I think I'm getting sick, and you pick it, it can be profoundly effective. Exactly. What else besides the T1 and BP157?

Dr. Edwin Lee
I love Epitalin. In general, we do five milligrams daily for like ten days. If you skip a day or like the weekend you forget, that's okay. Just make sure you finish the vial. So one vial will have fifty milligrams of Epitalin twice a year.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You just do it twice a year?

Dr. Edwin Lee
Yeah, twice year.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So like ten days, twice a year. It's kind of a reset for your longevity. And

Dr. Edwin Lee
I have people like for me, when I was doing it, it's amazing. My sleep, I was on melatonin every year, higher and higher, higher doses. And

Dr. Mark Hyman
do

Dr. Edwin Lee
you know Epithalin turns on three genes of your pineal gland to make melatonin? And my wife goes, How come you're not taking melatonin anymore? And she's like, I don't need it. I could sleep without it. So, it can reset your pineal gland and help you sleep better.

So I love EpiConnell because as we get older

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you mentioned the Russian version via the nasal spray, but you

Dr. Edwin Lee
can also take it Not nasal, it's under the tongue.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Under the tongue, but you can also do it through

Dr. Edwin Lee
Injection through 503A compound pharmacy, a prescription. Yeah, amazing. And the problem is that most people, when they hear this, they're going to get addicted to Epiphthalene. Do not use it every day for the rest of your life because you're going to stop the magic in terms of self replication. It will eventually, like the Hayflick theory, it's going to stop in terms of it's no longer going to work.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Just because a little bit's good doesn't mean a lot's better.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Exactly. So, yeah, just be patient and don't take it every day of the year because it's going to eventually stop working.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Now, other thing that sort of happens as we get older is we end up with hormonal changes lower testosterone. We have lower growth hormone, we tend to lose muscle, we sort of age as a result of changes in our hormonal environment. And what was interesting, a lot of these peptides can be involved in regulating hormone function.

Dr. Edwin Lee
Well, yes, are, in regards to women that are done with, they're in post menopause or finish their menstrual cycle, sometimes I tell them, like, you may start your period coming back. And if you get pregnant, please mention me because I want to be famous, I'm not sure, and choir because I can't be famous like you, I have to go the other route. So anyway, yeah, it's amazing. They go, my period was gone five years ago and I was coming back. So I don't know how long it's gonna keep on going, but they've, in the animal studies

Dr. Mark Hyman
Using which peptide? Epithalin. Epithalin.

Dr. Edwin Lee
So ovarian function gets better.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So it works not just on the pineal gland, but also Other organs. Maybe the hypothalamus. To help the heart. Because

Dr. Edwin Lee
it turns on gene expression, which is interesting. There's certain approaches that get kicked off and things work. So epithalines like to me.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's a good one.

Dr. Edwin Lee
I love it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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