25: Extending Human Life: From Science Fiction to Science Fact

and extend healthy life. You know, no big deal. She's a board member of Radish Medical Solutions and founder of Biotrope Investments and Media. She's actively involved international educational media via the International Loungectivity Alliance, of which she is a board member on which she serves as secretary. Thank you so much for talking to me today, Liz, Oh, thanks for having me. I'm always excited to talk to people.

I am excited to talk to you. I really enjoy talking to people who are ambitious and have great, big visions of universes that are possible that don't currently exist. And you know, like I'm just saying, you know what you're committed to. What Bioviva is committed to is a very you know, what some may think is like science fiction, right, or they may think it's some sort of goal that just seems wholly not possible. But you would beg to differ, right,

I would. So a lot of people think that age reversal and living more youthfully longer, many more years is science fiction and actually science fact. So we're doing these technologies already in animals and in cell culture human cell culture, so we're really excited to actually move these into human bodies and see if we can mitigate the diseases of aging and also reverse engineer what's happening at the childhood

level of disease. So there are accelerated aging symptoms that children have in some disease states, and then there's also monogenic diseases and congenital diseases in general. So if this actually has a big implication for the whole world and the whole disease state in general, and disease is a very big thing to take on, and a lot of people wonder how we could be so savvy is to

take on disease in general. But a lot of the diseases that we get in our lifetime are actually diseases of biological aging, and so this is one of our big targets. So if we actually go after biological aging as a disease, rather than going after cancer independently, heart disease independently, Alzheimer's and atherosclerosis, things like sarcopenia, we go

after the aging of the cell. We actually find that we might have be able to knock out these symptoms in one fell swoop, and one fell swoop may be multiple therapies, but we're looking at the cell in a very different way than we used to. Liz, let's tack up a little bit a second, because you didn't you know, you weren't born with this interest, you know, as a child, were you Were you a very inquisitive, curious child, Like, Yeah, I think I was. I think it was really interesting

about me as a child. Now, bioviva works with all human gene sets, so I should just tell you that. But as a child, I kind of saw the limitations of the human body, and I thought we were more than our parts, and I thought, well, what was really holding us back and from being being able to jump like a horse or run long distances like a dog or are things like that. And I always kind of hoped, without thinking on the the realm of superpowers, that I

could do those kind of things. And I thought that people inherently should be a bit different from one another than they are now. And I think in the future that sounds really projected, and this is more projected. I think in the future, well probably will choose for independent traits more so than we think that we could do now. Now,

that's really outside of what we do right now. What we do right now is very level headed, it's very pragmatic, and it's very possible these things will be possible in the future, but we don't have the technology to do that at this time. So right now, where are we at. You can replace a single gene, correct, Yeah, that's right. So we actually don't replace a gene right now. We add a gene and so some of the things I

just talked about we can actually test on or touch on. Sorry, we have a myostatin inhibitor and it can make you more muscular. So certainly you're going to jump a bit higher, you're going to run a bit faster, you're going to be a bit stronger. We have things like this that we have working already, but in the future, you know, we're definitely going to have probably even more switches in phenotype, I would think. So if I see you in the Olympics,

you know, next Olympics, so I know what's going on there. Yeah. If I look twenty and I'm winning the I see with Pirates on TV, I'm like, with Pirates. Yeah, yeah, I think that what We've probably gone entirely off topic now, haven't we. But but yeah, I think that we will have the opportunity and the pleasure to actually bring people back to more youthful states and make them hopefully stronger, smarter,

more visually accurate than they ever were before. And so that's kind of that's a real improvement to the situation. We want to improve the human body so that we don't actually just go down the same route of aging and cellular degeneration. So why did you when? First of all, when did you form this company? And when did you get into this specific area of interest? So let's see, I think that I've been always interested. I think that I've always been interested in biology and sci fi all

of my life. And it's funny how many people come through that route. It's really the people with the big imaginations who imagine something before it can happen that sparks everyone's desire to do better. This company was actually formed just January twenty fifteen. It was a couple of years in the making, so it didn't just come out of thin air. It had a lot of time and thought

and effort in collaborating a team behind it. I was thrust into this most recently about three years ago, when a child I cared very much about became sick and I ended up in children's hospital. And actually it wasn't the first child I knew to become sick. I actually have a few friends who had kids with immunological diseases and various other problems. But this time I ended up in Children's Children's hospital with this child, and I looked around and I thought, you know, I know, we've come

farther than this. I started asking around at the hospital what they were doing with stem cell work and genetics, and I was surprised to find out that it's such a big hospital, one that's known for being on the cutting edge, that they weren't doing any of those things, not for this disease type. And I felt like it really was. It was a command in my mind that

we couldn't we couldn't proceed this way any longer. That these kids that were around me were dying and they had no option, and they weren't going to see any of their firsts, and I felt like we should be pioneering much more quickly. I knew at that point that a lot of stem cell work was going on at Harvard and Stanford, but a vast majority of it was doing being done offshores. And I questioned that, you know, why are we seeing such good results but we don't

have any options for these kids right now? Why is it okay that they're dying. Why is it okay that we're letting them go? Why are we calling you know, certain forms of medicine experimental medicine when everything that's come through the FDA, we're dying while we're taking it's felling these kids. I think that we could do better than that.

So that put me into a catalyst of traveling to genetic conferences, and I ended up at a SENS conference at Cambridge in the UK, and it was a genetics conference, and I thought, I think this is where the cure for these diseases is going to lie. And it was a longevity conference, and I thought, well, well, this is actually pretty shallow. I thought, you know, why are people trying to live longer when we're actually losing our kids. But I decided to keep an open mind and to

sit through it. And I don't know, day one or day two, with the jet leg on top of me, it just really hit me that this was going to be it, that we were going to take on aging as a disease, that we were losing over one hundred thousand people a day to aging diseases. Each one of these persons has the potential to step up for a therapy that may in fact save their life, and that we could use these technologies to save these kids. And I just you know, I started, I hit the ground

running and refused to stop. Well, I mean, you've been called some people call you the fire starter, right, yeah, And I think that that really comes from my my ability to just look at the situation in a really different way. You know, I think that regulation is important, safety is important, but at the same time regulation and safety is killing people. Certainly, if you look at the history of gene therapy, you know, there was one real visible case of one person who died of gene therapy

and it really shut the industry down. This was a person who was really too sick to take the gene therapy and shouldn't have taken it to begin with. And it was a viral vector that gave an immune response, which was a double whammy, and it killed the kid. But every year, you know, upwards of over one hundred thousand people die of adverse drug effects, and these are from prescription medicine that's taken as prescribed. And you know, we this is completely covered up. You know, it's covered

up under ade drug effect. No company is held liable not to mention. Like I said, you know, if you have athroscleoridic plaques then you take statins, you're very likely to die of heart disease regardless of those statins, and they have a myriad of side effects. We believe that we can actually solve this at the genomic level, that we have genes that we can upregulate. We're looking for we're looking at one right now that we already have

working in humans, and we have some antecdotal data. It's only a couple people, but it appears to reverse athroscleroidic plaques, and it has a myriad of health benefits. On top of that, it treats circopenia, which is the muscle loss over years, and so you know, cycopenia causes frailty, you lose muscle mass, you fall down, you break your hip. That's seven percent of the population. Atherosclerosis, if we're right, is heart disease that kills over a third of the population.

What we're saying is that the data is out there. We're going to create more data. And if we're sitting on cures, it's time to stop doing business as usual, it's time to cure people health. Actually, I don't believe that health should come at a cost. Right now, these therapies are massively expensive. People have to pay top dollar to get them from us. Probably the most expensive therapy

that we would ever come out with. Most of that would go into building the gene therapy, and I could tell you which one that is, but not all of them are that expensive. But at the same time, I can't really advertise prices because we work outside of the US and so you know, but the thing is that you can't get the costs down to that We're trying to target every cell in your body. For some of the gene therapies, you can just target a much lower

amount and have the full benefit. So the difference between gene therapies, I don't know if your listeners would be interesting, but some proteins that genes make, So genes make proteins, and proteins make you. And that's the most simplistic way to think of it. Proteins are shared outside the cell, okay, And when they're shared outside the cell, your body doesn't need to make as many of them because it's shared for your whole system. There are other proteins that are

not shared outside the cell. As a matter of fact, they degrade if they go outside of the cell immediately. So we have to target nearly every cell in your body. And that's really only one gene therapy that we're looking at. Right Can every cell have a copy? Do they have a copy of the gene? Yeah? So the two gene therapies that we're working with right now that we're pushing forward first are genes that your cell has a copy of. One of them is turned off, it's repressed, and the

other one down regulates as you get older. So this is just blowing my mind that this is the word having this conversation and this is really happening. I know. Yeah, a lot of people go, oh my gosh, wow, So who you know, when is somebody going to do this? And and and then I say, you know, our doctor actually did it five years ago, right. I remember I heard you you talk about that and you said, he's

at least a year ago. You said, he's doing really well. Oh, he's doing he's doing He's you know, he's recently had his ct angiogram. He has zero plaques in his arteries. Get out of here. Wow, he's in fantastic shape. He you know, he's uh, he's able to just get up and do what he needs to do. You know, he can go and run, he can go and jog, he can go and hike. And you know, he's in his forties now, which is not too old most of us

can still do those things. But you know he can do them with a certain eloquence that the rest of us who don't have the advantage. Yeah, for sure. So you know where I come from this is, you know,

understanding the genetics foundation of motivation and behavior cognition. Yes, and so I you know, there's there's fascinating research, you know, you looking at twins separate a birth, try to quantify the distinction between how many how much is our differences in a certain trait influenced by nature versus or genes versus the environment. So he came out recently looking at

academic motivation. So let's just take academic motivation for instance, and you see that it's entirely that there's a very very strong genetic basis to the desire to learn academic material.

And the only thing that is non genetic is unique, the unique variants to each individual person, not the shared variance by the two twins, meaning that like in an educational classroom, it seems like academic motivation is strong influenced by a combination of the genes that are shared by the two twins and the unique interaction of the genes with the teacher. And that knowledge is very interesting to

think about. And what if we like found owned what those You know, there's going to be a lot there's gonna be a lot of genes interacting with each other, and there's going to be up genetics a play etctera, et cetera. But we discovered what all those genes are I mean, is it? Is it not? Is it foreseeable at all in the future that that gene therapy could act on things like academic motivation? Oh? Absolutely, I think that it will. I think that there is a lot

that we have to learn. So one of the genes that we're looking at now is obviously the clotho vs, which is associated with higher IQ. What's interesting is what they found with that gene is that if you have one, you have a tendency to live longer. They think that it might have to do with something with the reasoning system of the brain, but there's research. Sorry to interrupt you a second, there is research showing that IQ is

correlated with longevity. Yes, but this is interesting. Other people have said that if you have two of the copies of that same gene, you're more prone to depression. So it would be interesting. Some of the most famous existential philosophers of all time could have told you that, Yeah, I think. Actually, I work with a lot of people who are like that. They're you know, they're pretty motivated people, but they have an underlying Yeah underlying is this really it?

And I think it's because they're so smart and their brains work so fast. Luckily, I'm not one of those people, so I think that we will be able to manipulate the brain. Our company, before bio Viva was formed, we formed out of a company called neural Gene and that that company expressly was developing gene therapies to treat neurodegenerative diseases. And that's our first patent actually for Bioviva came over from the doctor who worked for neural Gene and he

brought the patent for the for H factor. It's essentially something that he found with using stem cells in patients with ALS and Parkinson's. So he's expressly worked with patients with ALS for I think about six or eight months, and he was treating them with stem cells to the brain and they were showing recovery within twenty four forty eight hours. They were showing the ability to have cognition that they hadn't, to have physical abilities that they hadn't had.

People who hadn't spoken for eight months called him up within a week to say thank you. People who hadn't been able to stand up were standing up. Now these were small feats, but they were big jumps, and he realized that there was no way possible that anything in the brain could be recovering and that quick of a time that something else was happening, and he went deep to the research and created the first patent for what turns out by a VIVA and that was the release

of this H factor from stem cells. So when you take stem cells and you tear them out of one spot in the body and you throw them in another, one thing that they are doing is they're signaling, and they're signaling like crazy. Their job is to signal and say there's damage, there's damage, recover, recover. They suddenly get cells signaling that have gone dormant or they have gone dormant for two reasons, maybe biological aging and maybe because

of the disease itself. Things start signaling and you start to see this massive improvement. But all of those stem cells, almost all of them, if you track them, go leave the area. And it's true that within a matter of weeks to months these patients regress back into their disease state. What's fantastic about this therapy is that it has the ability to maybe tackle als and parkin and we actually don't know there may be uses outside of that. So the brain is a very important zone for us and

something we'd definitely like to look at. We'd like to work with things like depression and various other things. I think that what we'll need. Right now, we have gene therapy so we can insert sorry, So right now we have gene therapy so we can insert a gene. In the future, we'll have genetic engineering, where you know, we're using kind of crisper type methods to cut things out and put good copies in credible And then in the very a little bit farther off future, hopefully closer than

we think, we'll have genomic engineering. And I think that's really what you're thinking of, is when you're thinking of, you know, all of the chromosomes working in harmony, Will we have to switch a chromozoon out? Will we cut you know, half of one off and replace it with

something good and half of the other. When we look at all the genes and how they're they're essentially making music together, we find all the bad players and witch them out, that will be genomic engineering, And that is when our future will be much more bright than it is now. But right now it's looking pretty good. Maybe the look of a movie I saw recently, you probably

know exactly what I'm talking about. That where there's this like beauty company there they say that they will make you look much younger, and what they actually did is they just replaced all the genes and the person was not the same, and you know, and the son was like, where'd my mom go? Where'd my mom go? And it raised lots of I don't know, did you see this movie? I wish I could remember the name of it. No, I didn't. You know. The thing is, I rarely ever

watch a movie. My friends will say, oh, something, going to watch one movie this year, so we have to choose what that movie is, and so I see very few movies and I don't watch TV. And I think that it's it's cute because I often, you know, people will say, oh, what you do reminds me of this movie, and I always look at them and I say, now, I want you to be the movie you want to see, like go out there and do something great. Because but but I do appreciate moves. I mean I do enjoy

it whenever I do sit down to one. I just don't do it very often. So I wish I knew what that was. That's totally fair. I can't say I really enjoyed this movie that much, but it did get me thinking. You know, if we ever got to the point where we could kind of genetically engineer like like copy like entire like the entire genome, you know, how

similar would would we would I be? It is a good question, and you know it has to do with phenotype, and so we know we can increase your muscle mass, right, but we don't know that we can change what your nose looks like. Those are really big, big, intricate problems that we don't have time to look into now. Of course, we would love to have time to look into that in the future. That would be a lot of fun.

And that's why we're trying to knock aging off and pass that on to free cures for the world, and then we can work on the more fun aspects of the genome. I will never be done. It's just far too big to ever be done. But I do wonder about that myself. You know, what can we change? We can probably change pigment and things like that. Now, so with gene therapy that you know, the great thing about it right now is we can add a gene and

that sounds in comparison to genomic engineering so weak. But the great thing about it is we don't risk your body not identifying those other cells, and so there's the possibility of changing out massive parts of your genome. But if you think about it, we don't really have the technology right now to not only do that, but to keep your body from rejecting that. So if I, you know, shove my blood into your system, your blood, your body's

going to try to eradicate that. In the same way, if we were eloquently able to change a bunch of your genome and didn't change all of it, you know, one part of your body would be attacking the other body, much like an organ transplantation, right right you mentioned maybe think of that Russian man who had agreed to have his head or something put on another person's body. Did you see that, Yeah, I did see that. I was really I'm really proud of him for being a pioneer.

I think that we have to come into our pioneering spirit. I think that we have to realize that there may be something to lose to make a better future. Now, gene therapy is a lot less threatening than a head transplant. As a matter of fact, there are hundreds of people going through clinical trials of gene therapy right now, and no one's dying. People don't die from the gene therapy anymore. As we work into new gene therapies, there may in fact be a likelihood that some of them will be

unknown what exactly will happen with them. But this is done so carefully that I don't think we'll have that. But I'm really proud of him being a pioneer for that. And I think that somebody said something that made sense to me. I saw it in an email stream. They said they shouldn't be calling this a head transplant, they should be calling it a body transplant or something like that, because actually, grossly, he's achieving a brand new body onto

his head. The outcome this will be a fascinating process to watch. I can totally understand why he wants to do this. I'm really surprised that about people who cling so tightly to life that they can't see how someone who can think clearly but can't use the rest of their body would want to just go on in that state, a state that will inevitably kill them. Do you sell

you have immense compassion? Oh? Yeah, that I have. You know that people often ask me, because this is a longevity company, They're like, so, are you afraid to die? I'm not afraid to die. I'm not afraid of death for anyone. I am immensely shattered by suffering. Yeah, I get that. It comes through so clear, and also that you want to increase the quality of living. And you say something, how we die has everything to do with how we live, right, Yeah, it does. It has everything

to do with how we live. And the more humanity that the world has injected into its veins makes a better world. We've seen that over and over again. If you look at the industrialized country, how they treat their animals is changing, how they treat each other, how they feed the rest of the world. We inherently get better the better our lives get. And I think that humanity would get a big boost up from eradicating a lot of these us suffered a lot of the suffrage from

these diseases. They do not create a humane world. And you can see that gentleness leave someone as they become diseased and as they become more and more in pain, and that just you know, there are so many sayings that I think need to be knocked down because they're really ideas of the lowest common denominator. I mean, they're I think that we reach so low today in society that you know, we comfort ourselves with sayings like, oh,

you only get what you can handle. You know, talk to a family that has a kid who's sick or a kid who's dying. They can't handle it. There's just nothing else they can do. But go on. You know, you don't drop dead because you're handed something you can't handle. You know, people say things like, well, on your deathbed, you'll wish you would have worked less. You know, that's not true. That just means that you did something that

you didn't actually have a passion for. We should work more, We should try to achieve everything we can in this world, and we should incorporate the people that we love into that. If we really loved what we were doing, then they would be incorporated into our lives. We must work, we must achieve, we must get things done. We should not be sitting around and and you know, working on this low standard of achievement that you know a lot of

the world is starting to have. Yeah, I don't want to sound like sickophant here, But that sounded very politic. What did it sound like? Poetic? It was very esthetic, Like everything you just said was very aesthetically pleasing to me. Well, I'm glad. I mean, you're a doer, and I think that it's not inherently a person's fault if they're not. But what we need to nurture for each other, for our communities is passion. And passion and being able to

pay the bills should go hand in hand. And so I think that that's you know, I often, you know, people do they give me names like fire starter and things like that, because there's a lot wrong with society and we sort of need to burn and raise a lot of ideas to the ground so that we can start over, so that we can start over with For instance, this is one big pet peep that I have is safety and efficacy equals you know, a billion and a

half dollars in the US. So to get through the FDA, you need to raise about a billion and a half dollars now, and I hear that that's increasing all the time. But actually money and safety and efficacy shouldn't have anything to do with each other. They're actually two different things. And it's and it's a it's a problem that people have separating those things. I've had people say no, no, no, you know you have to you have to go through the system, and why should it cost so much? Why

should saving a life cost so much? Uh. Some of the therapies that we work with are very hard to patent. Okay, so you can't patent a gene and the viral vectors have been patented. And people will say, well, you can't make a company, you can't treat people with unpatentable therapies because you know where do you make your money. Well, actually, you can make money by treating people. You can do the right thing by treating people. You can those those

two things just don't go together. We have to stop this mentality of patent, patent, patent, shut the other guy out when it comes to cures. That is not where we should be. That's a nutraceutical thing. That's a pharmaceutical thing. But pharmaceutical is a neutral suiticles sit to the left. Okay, there's nutriceuticals. They were very powerful for their time. They still work. There's vitamins and minerals and various things there.

Then there's pharmaceuticals and they're like a bumped up nutraceutical that basically has a bunch of side effects, and some of the side effects help us with disease states, and a lot of them don't. A lot of them make us feel terrible. But those are all on the left. Those are all marketing products, okay. On the right should be the cures, and everyone should have access to those cures.

Those cures should be free for the world, and there should be no debate as to whether a company is doing the right thing or whether a company can make money doing that. Of course, a company can make money doing that. As a matter of fact, if you will hold the cure for athrosclerosis, just check out what you know how much money statins make every year. And if it's not even a patentable idea, it's just a therapeutic

that you're giving, you could as well. We try to drive the costs as low as possible, get them as close to what it costs to actually have a therapeutic made for the human body, so that we profit very little, so that we can move the data forward. But of course we want these to be free, which is a lot cheaper than that. In the future, we have to come up with a new idea, and the new idea

is just a completely different way of thinking. And there's always going to be a market for pharmaceuticals, and there's always going to be a market for nutraceuticals. As a matter of fact, when everyone's beefed up on gene therapies and living youthfully to one hundred and twenty or whatever it is, whatever their target goal is in living just how they want to look and just how they want to feel. I guarantee they're still going to take nutraceuticals.

They're going to want to make sure they're maximizing everything. They're going to continue to take aspirin and their pharmaceuticals. There's enough room for everyone here. You said as well, I mean, there's so many things unpacked there. But hold on, how long are we talking here that we could actually people could live like I mean, we could actually decide

like we want to with three hundred years. Well we you know what our company does is we say we look at a human and we say, potentially you can live to one hundred and twenty years. We're saying that that might be a human potential. We want you to live youthfully, well, strong, visually accurate, just right to the end of one hundred and twenty years. We are post with a question and a question that we'd rather have you answer than us, and that is, if you're healthy,

what do you die of? Right? That's exactly the question, right, what are you dying? What are you dying of? I mean, like other than like in hit, run over by a car or yeah, what are you dying of? So what if I mean, isn't it technically possible that this would make Like if you like took yourself and like locked yourself in a shack for five hundred years, could you actually live that long? Well, we know that the human

body actually likes to be worked. So if you put a car away like that, you might actually preserve the car as long as you didn't put gasoline and oil into it. But human bodies like to be worked. We don't know how long people could live. We would definitely like to find out. Would We would be thrilled to find out, and I hope that it's a very long time.

Some of the charts that I show during one of my presentations shows the normal way to die, and so this is something that we had talked about before, but we didn't elaborate on. So what's normal? Okay, the normal way for humans to die is before the age of thirty, of infectious disease. This is this was normal all the way up to the advent of antibiotics and immunizations. Have I read ninety of people died from infectious disease? Oh?

Absolutely so. The one graph that I have the plague was actually rampant that week that we took that data from. But if you look one hundred, two hundred years before or after that graph, still about ninety percent of the population is dying of infectious disease. So that is actually what we normally die of. So when people say, well, dying of aging is normal, I call it a situational opinion. It's only normal in your lifetime. You know, in your grandparents' lifetime.

That actually wasn't normal. In your great grandparents' lifetime, that certainly wasn't normal, right. I think that what the graph is going to look like in the future. So right now, so infectious disease used to kill about ninety percent of the population. Now it kills three percent in the US, in an industrialized country. I think that the rest of the graph is you know, heart disease, nephropathies, cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes type two, things like that, frailty and accidents. So

that takes up the rest of the chart. I have a feeling that in the future, and this sounds very grim, but if you think about it by the numbers, it's very different. I think in the future, the graph is going to go look to look like the old graph. It's going to go back to look like the graph from sixteen sixty five, or ninety percent of the population

or dieing of infectious disease. The difference will be that those people will be I don't know how old, three digits maybe even four digits old, whereas the people in the sixteen sixty five graph are obviously thirty and under more digits. You say someone can live to one thousand years of age. We really don't know. But what we do know is that if we reset cellular division, if we reset epigenetic expression to youthful states, and then if we upregulate the proteins, that will help the body clear

etherteroscleroidic plaques, clear misfolded proteins. If we get the system to the point where it's behaving better than it ever did. Okay. A lot of people think when I talk about aging as a disease that I'm picking on people over thirty or I'm picking on people over fifty. It's usually like ten years older than however old they are, because they

don't want to associate. But actually, you're born with aging as a disease, and so it's that accumulation of damage that's going on that leads to your end stage disease. And now more and more they're finding that you can actually look at the human body, of the twenty year old human body, and you can see symptoms, signs and symptoms of probably what will kill them in the future. I know that they're finding Alzheimer's as early as the twenties.

Athroscloridic plaques can start building up as young as ten. Cancer is something we see in human bodies from about the age five and up. It's just at about sixty five years of age, your risk of mortality from cancer goes up about eighty five percent. We think that has everything to do with the immune system. The immune system just isn't catching it anymore, okay, but all of these things are accumulating over time, you're developing cancer's cells, but

the immune system clears it out. So it's just a matter of time to when your immune system isn't as strong and doesn't clear them anymore. But we're seeing this accumulation of damage and misfolded proteins. What we have to do is we have to create almost a better human. So we can do this with human genes. We don't think that we have to look outside the human genome, although some people are really excited about doing that, do you right, like robots? Do we want What do you

mean like like robots? Like, yeah, I mean with actually genes from other creatures. Okay, I don't know if we were going there for a second. Yeah, some people want to be like, you know, cats half cat or something

like this. You know, we don't know what the advantages would be, but we wouldn't touch that right now because one thing we would not want to do is open up the human genome to any sort of diseases, right right, So we wouldn't want to create We wouldn't want to make humans into vectors that might make other people sick. We just want to use human genes. We've got enough of them and see what we can do now in a safe way. To get people healthy, and then that's

that's the whole point. So if you're healthy, if you're honestly healthy, I'm not talking about when you're eighty five and you go in for an exam and then you come out. People tell me all the time they're like, well, I was told I was healthy at my last exam. I'm eighty five and my doctor said I was healthy. Well, he wasn't comparing you to me, and he was certainly wasn't comparing you to a seventy year old. He was

comparing you to another person who's eighty. Okay, so you know, we so if you're truly healthy, not just what your doctor might tell you today, what do you die of? We don't know. Gosh, it's so fascinating because you know, you showed this one chart that was so interesting showing that between the ages of I guess you know, fifteen and thirty, our chances of dying from diseases about zero percent. Yeah, it really is. And if we can reset, can you reset every like thirty years, can we reset you back

to that point? So that's we're talking about that now. So what we're talking about is whether some of these gene therapies should be transient gene therapies, meaning that we insert the gene, it only lasts for a limited amount of time, or it only if you want to think about it, is it only codes for that protein for a certain amount of time and it leaves yourself. Or if they should be upregulated permanently. Our company is kind

of masters of the permanent upregulation. We're a bit of survivalists. We like that idea, but transient gene therapies definitely have their value. And so with a transient gene therapy, that would be something where you would come in, you know, maybe every ten years and you would get a gene boosting therapy. The reason, one of the reasons we don't like that right now is because we don't want you

to have an immune response later down the road. So right to the genes themselves, you won't have a response, but to the vectors that we use, you might. And so if we did something every ten years or so, you know, you would probably have to take an immune suppressant in order to take it, because your body would get tipped off to some of the viral vectors that we're using, and we wouldn't want that response. That response might also knock genes out that we inserted, so that's hypothetical.

But so one time gene therapy I think is the optimal, right at least for now. Yeah, is it painful to inject a gene into what I would it feel like? Oh? No, no, no, it's not painful. I mean it's painful in the sense of an intramuscular injection is not comfortable. So the difference would be Okay, if you don't have any indications that would make you need a diabetic type needle, then it

might be hard to explain that to you. But for people who take human growth hormone who for people who are type two or type one diabetics, they use a really small needle and it's just a subcutaneous needle and it doesn't really have much pain at all associated with it. An intramuscular shot like we give is more like it's like an immunization. So yeah, you're going to have some

soreness in that area. But you know, it's like I've said before, if we're right about the the myostat and inhibitor that may reverse athroscleoridic plaques, Yeah, that would be five shots in each of your legs, So that's ten shots total. But then you won't get open heart surgery. You know, you would be protected against those things. You would be protected against broken hips, you would be I think that the amount of discomfort would be completely acceptable,

I would say so certainly. Seems so like get you said you hope to have evidence of age reversal by twenty sixteen. Is that still Are you still on course for that? Do you think we are still on course for that? And we are very hopeful and I would I would love you to check back in in the next few months. So we are on course for that. We're a little bit afraid now it may slip to

spring of twenty sixteen, but we're definitely still have two thousand. Well, if I win the lottery like tomorrow, like fifty billion dollars, I'll be checking back in with you on that. Well absolutely, yeah, I want you to definitely, you know, come in funding the company. We'll make you know, ten times your money back in the next five years. We'd be happy. We we actually don't need very much actually to get going comparatively to companies who are trying to How much you

do need? Like, tell me what would be helpful if someone was listening to this podcast that's independently wealthy. Oh how wealthy are they? Let's see now, So actually we need about two point five million dollars would would get us to profit. They would be very happy with that profit. The whole is to build labs, and there's two ideas. It's two point five million dollars. We can build labs to get the cost down on the therapies, and we can start treating people. I feel like that that much.

I was expecting you to say a lot more, but really the full monty deal and is not much more. Is four point five million total, because we'd like to bring in an extra two million to run two offshore clinical trials at FDA standards with an IRB, so that we can run our therapies directly with ten patients. You know, that would be our cohort that are absolutely diagnosed, with one group with athrosclerosis and the other group with Alzheimer's, And that is where the big push would be. It's

to get that money. So it's to get the whole four point five million so we can run the two clinical trials. We can prove what we've got, and that would be a beauty, full, beautiful start. So I'm just thinking, like in the future, what if you prove this stuff is and it gets FDA approved, and you know, why wouldn't we have universal health care for this stuff? You know,

like I, as a taxpayer, I certainly wouldn't mind. I don't think taxpayers would mind if they would be able to personally also be able to experience this right well, as a matter of fact, taxpayers should save a lot of money. The government would save a lot of money. Everyone would save a lot of money. A no brainer to me. Yeah, So right now we've hit the Silver tsunami in the United States and as a matter of fact, for the whole world. So now you have to picture this.

You got to put your mind around the whole world. And we're talking about first world countries, we're talking about we're talking about the most populated places on Earth. The whole world, by twenty twenty crosses the Silver Tsunami. And what that means there's more people over sixty five on the whole planet than there are under five. The under

five group really important group because they're the workforce. They are the force that is going to come up paying for the health care costs of all these aging people, and there are so few of them compared to the sixty fives and over that they cannot afford it. So if you have people living to one hundred and twenty, but they're retiring at sixty five half of their life, they're not working, they're not productive, and it gets worse

from there. They're going to accumulate massive debt and the government is going to have to pay for massive amount of health care. So just over one presidential term, one four year term, the government could save something like fifty no five trillion dollars on healthcare if we eradicated the

diseases of aging. Hell at that point, you know, I know a friend of mine, Bill Andrews, wrote a book, and in his book he said that the government could afford to pay you midway through life, pay ten year sabbatical where you could retrain, travel the world, do all the things you needed to do preparing for your second half of life. What job you would have for the second half of your life with the money, say a book that's stuff? Can you did I hear someonere that

like right now? You could for one point three million dollars you could save your eyesight so that there is a there is a genetic cure coming out for eyesight, and it does run around one point three million dollars. So uh, that is for macular degeneration. And you know this is something that you know Biobiva could do for a fraction of that cost, maybe a fifth of that cost. It's okay. I have a couple of questions, and you know I am very respectful of your time, So just

a couple more minutes. Are you personally thinking of trying and if that's too personal question, you know, I apologize, but you thought about trying any of this yourself. I would actually like our company based on built on with all the people working in it, based on people who were Okay, let me let me formulate that again, because I this is so crazy. I would like it if

everyone who ran this company had taken these therapies. I would never make anyone take them, but I would like to see the people working with Bioviva to be that committed to them that we wouldn't give anything to you that we wouldn't take ourselves. Right, And so that basically answered my question, like that includes you, I would absolutely for them. Yeah, Well, so who else is in this space right now? So are you Are you a leader

in this, in this revolution, so to speak? I think that we are so everywhere that I look around, no one seems to be equipped to make this move. Now. We did see this in offshore companies and medical tourism with stem cells. I guess that's one of the businesses that's most closely aligned. Although genetic cures are so much

more powerful. I think that that stem cells are wonderful, and there will be areas that we will use stem cells, but actually, uh, you know, creating a more substantial protected genome should be the fixative cure. Uh, there are not a lot of people in this zone. I don't know anyone else. I know a lot of people who talk about it, say that they're gonna do it, say that they would like to do it. I don't know anyone else doing it. Incredible, absolutely incredible. So how far off

are we from genomic engineering? I know you said that's the future genomic engineering. You should talk to our chief scientific officer about that. So his name is Abby Roy and he's at Oxford, and he would know more about how close we are to that. That's a ways off, and right now we focus on what we can do right now with keeping our researchers' minds open to that sort of technology. But our researchers are all expanding into like Chrisper type technology now and then more uses of

gene therapy that we have available. We're very much are right now. What can we do right now? How can we intervene right now? How could we get people healthy right now who are dying right you know, But you're simultaneously also a visionary. Oh, absolutely absolutely. That's why I brought it up because we will continue to expand we will as our company grows and as we have more money, we will want to bring on the best talent in the world, and actually not just the best talent, but

the most innovative people. That's a team that's that's worth so much. We're you know, the team that we have are people who think outside the box. They're not worried about things like reputation because they know that they're doing the right thing. You know, there are a lot of people that will say, well, you can't do things this way because that's not how business is done. And we think that it's time to change business to make a better world, right And yeah, it's just really nice to

hear someone doing what you're doing. It doesn't seem like you're you're motivated by the profit margin or by any sort of you know, because when you see these kinds of science fiction movies, people doing what you're doing are often paying as the bad guys. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I know. That's why I don't watch movies. You know, that's a good point. When I talk about investors, investors will be really happy with what we've got it.

But when I talk about why we do it, the people who came together in this company, not one of us did it to come to live high on the line. Nobody came for a Mercedes or a mansion or anything else. We came to get the job done. And we're taking the big risk to get a job done, to make a better world, because actually, I think that life would be a waste if you didn't do that. I don't have to live high on the line. I don't have to have big cars and big houses. That has nothing

to do with my internal desire. Well, well, the investors want that, they probably will. That's not our goal at all. That's wonderful. Well, I wish you all the best and yeah, it'd be great to stay in touch. Well. Thank you so much. Thank you thanks for listening to The Psychology Podcast with Doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as an informative and thought provoking as

I did. If you'd like to read the show notes for this episode or here past episodes, you can go to the Psychology Podcast dot com