Episode 220: Turn Back the Clock--The Impact of Exosomes on Aging Well w/ Dr Edward Park

Join Dr. Jeff Armstrong in this fascinating episode of the Aging Well Podcast as he dives deep into the science of exosomes and their potential to promote longevity and wellness. Featuring Dr. Edward Park, an expert in the field, the conversation explores how exosomes facilitate cell-to-cell communication and their promising role in anti-aging research. Dr. Park shares his personal journey into this groundbreaking field, the mechanics behind exosomes, and the latest research findings. Learn about natural ways to stimulate exosome production and the challenges in making exosome therapies widely available. Perfect for anyone interested in cutting-edge aging science and holistic well-being.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the Aging World Podcast. I'm Dr. Jeff Armstrong. Today we're exploring an exciting frontier in aging science, the role of exosomes in promoting longevity and wellness. Our guest, Dr. Edward Park, is an expert in the field and will help us to understand how exosomes, tiny extracellular vesicles that facilitate cell to cell communication, may hold the key to slowing down the aging process. Dr. Park, we are thrilled to have you on the podcast. Could you start by just telling us a little bit about yourself and how you became interested in exosomes and aging? About 20 years ago my dad came down with brain cancer. So I thought why do people even get sick? I, this makes sense. So you Google it. And I came up with this idea that A lot of people had that. The telomeres, which are the ends of the chromosomes, they shorten and that causes the stem cells to get errors and die. And I think that's still true. So 17 years ago I started taking a telomerase activator and it's kept me with most of my hair, it's dark. I don't use reading glasses. These are first stigmatism. So for 17 years that's age 40 to 57 Now, I've been taking that every night. And I think it really has helped about six years ago I was working on developing a company with an investor for exosomes treating aging. And then I heard a doctor talk about his experience crashing his motorcycle, breaking his ribs, his ankles, collarbone. Losing a third of his blood. And I thought there's no way this guy's up there on stage telling the story. Six weeks later, there's gotta be something. So I experimented on my knee, my shoulder and my torn meniscus and all three got better. So gradually I opened up the practice to friends, family. And now I've been teaching doctors how to do it. I've written a book on it. And so I think it's really one third of the puzzle of aging well. We got stem cells, which are constantly depleting. So this will sometimes cause stem cells to copy and go back in time. And then the telomerase activator that I've taken is like maintenance. And the third part that we have is telomerase. senescence, right? Senolytics. But the problem is if you kill off all your damaged cells, are you going to have any good ones to replace them? So in the grand scheme, I know you're interested in aging exercise, obviously huge with, keeping your hormones up, your vitality, your clotho levels. But at the end of the day, the big theme seems to be stem cell depletion. And that's really one of the drivers of aging. So is it too late for my head with the exosome therapy? We've seen I'll show you a picture of a guy, his head went, really very dark again. We do get regrowth, pretty, it's not remarkable anymore. There's a lot of people doing it for hair growth. My personal feeling is, I haven't had that much success. The most success I ever had was when I mixed MSC exosomes like I use. on everything with amniotic. So I have a couple coming down from the Bay Area next week to try that. The amniotic they no longer make. Some companies make it. So it's important to realize that there are different kinds of exosomes. The ones that we use are the ones from mesenchymal stem cells. And so for our listeners that might not be as familiar with exosomes, just explain for our viewers and listeners, what are exosomes and why are they such a promising focus in anti aging research? So we've had electron microscopy for 70 years. But so when they looked inside the cells, they knew, the mitochondria, they knew the nucleus, they knew the Golgi apparatus, but they saw these things called multivesicular endosomes, which are balls inside the cell. And they arbitrarily decided that was just trash, which is bizarre. So it's if aliens were looking at us and saw us sending FedEx or letters or emails and they thought, oh, that's just trash. So it turns out 16 years ago, people said, what if it's not trash? Let's analyze them. And they found, Oh my God, these exosomes that are invisible to the optical microscope, only visible with electron, they're filled with MRNA proteins, micro RNA to block MRNA. And they're like, Oh, shoot, we've been calling it trash. But it turns out that every plant and animal, the cells communicate primarily through exosomes. So over the last 16 years, people like, Oh, oopsie. So they're studying all kinds of cancer, disease states. And they find out, Oh, yeah, when things are going this way or things going this way, it's all the communication between the cells, which is the exosomes. So it really is a huge revolution in science, actually. And so what led you to focus on exosomes in relation to aging? It just worked. It worked for my musculoskeletal stuff, and we've seen people with, even things like stroke damage. Something that works is pretty rare. As medicine is largely the practice of mitigating symptoms. And we don't really cure a lot of stuff. If we really think about it, the things that cure us are internal, right? So good thoughts, good actions, good food, it's all internal. So your body has the mechanism to heal and with exosomes you can jumpstart that. So how are these exosomes different than other anti aging interventions like stem cell therapy or other regenerative medicines? Great question. The point is that stem cells work by exosomes. So in the past, you had PRP and that would cause inflammation and bring in stem cells to calm it down and rebuild and they'd secrete exosomes. So now we don't need steps one, two, three, and four. We just need the exosomes. Okay can you share some key findings from recent research studies on exosomes and how their effects have been on aging and cellular health? Sure. Like for example, they do experiments in rats and because human stem cells are in culture, they'll. filter out what they're secreting, and those are the exosomes. So they'll give rats a stroke, a heart attack, they'll tear up one of its knees or both of its knees, and they'll experiment with exosomes. And even if you use human exosomes, because we share 98 percent of our genes, roughly those Treated sites will recover better, which is exciting. But we have about maybe 10 trials going through the FDA now on MSC exosomes and so hopefully one of those will get them approved and we could start using them in an off label way. Okay. And so what role. What roles do exosomes play in cell to cell communication? That's one of its key factors. And why is this communication so important for healthy aging? Like I said until 16 years ago, people thought it was cellular junk, like excrement, but actually that was a big mistake. This is really one of the main ways cells communicate. There are maybe several dozen proteins that make up exosomes. That cells will use to dock, like insulin, things like that, neurotransmitters, but primarily this is the way they talk, and we just didn't know that. So the exosome will go out there, it'll dock with another cell, and it'll inject its mRNA proteins. So this is the main way they communicate. And yeah, that's, I hope that, does that answer your question? This is was a totally unknown area of science, and now. Everyone's oh, oops, it wasn't poop. It was actually the main way they communicate. So this includes you, me, animals, and plants. And right now you have gazillions, I don't know the actual number of exosomes in you. And if you were to develop liver cirrhosis, your exosomes would change somewhat. And if you get cancer, your exosomes will change somewhat. It's literally like the communication. It's like the internet packet of information that people are sending. It's how the cells are communicating. Are there specific ways in which exosomes help to mitigate these age related issues like inflammation and cellular damage? Yeah, now remember, that's a great question. Inflammation is a nonspecific term, so some people even have mixed the term aging and inflammation for inflam aging. But I think it is true at some level that take the knee for example, right? When the knee has arthritis, what happens? There's inflammation in there and it can cause meniscal tears, right? It dries up like beef jerky. Yeah it's like inflammation is an emergent phenomenon of cell aging. So I still maintain at the core of it, the cell copying is what the problem is. So let's take, for example, tennis elbow. So you got tendons and you got stem cells. And when it gets overworked, what does it do? It tries to make more tendon and copy some of those stem cells that make the collagen, right? But any cell can't copy forever. That's called the Hayflick limit. So because the telomeres shorten and only for a short time does the telomerase activate to re lengthen. So what you really have is not tendonitis, if you've been playing tennis at a high level for many years, you have tendinosis. Which means that those little busy cells that we're trying to copy just gave up. So people think it doesn't hurt anymore, it must be fine. No, the next step is rupture, like your tendon is no good. So if you do MRI of people in their 80s over half of them don't even have certain rotator cuff muscles connected. While it's hurting, it's trying to copy, it's inflamed, but in most cases, we're not talking about itis, like tendonitis, we're talking about osis. And tendon osis is a very different thing, if you inject a tired, burnt out tendon with steroids, it can rupture. And the doctor knows that, they'll mention it, but again, you won't get sued for injecting a tenosylpho with steroids, but there is that risk of rupture, because it's not that it's inflamed, in which case steroids would help. It's just that it's burnt out, it's old, it's tired. And so exosome therapies obviously are pretty new. What are some of the current challenges in making these therapies widely available and affordable? That's a good question. Okay. So about seven ish years people have been using this in clinical practice. I just learned from a patient. It's been really big in Japan, but that illustrates one of the challenges. Last year, I think a couple of people died from a bad batch. So the short answer is it's super easy to make an exosome. All you gotta do is have a stem cell and then drain the fluid and filter it. Anybody, you and I could do that in our garage. So the challenge is quality control, testing for potency, knowing what you're doing. You can't let cells just do their thing for more than a couple of months. Otherwise they'll get bad. So it's like anything else. It's making eggs from chickens or milk from cows. It takes a little bit of a quality control skill, a husbandry. So that unfortunately, since there's money in it, a lot of people have been less than ethical in representing the quality, the testing. And the payload, the amount that they have. So anybody who's good looking in a suit will come and tell you, I can give you twice as many exosomes per half the price. And you got to be aware because they may not know what they're doing. And some of these companies have actually closed down for whatever reasons. So it's easy to do. You and I could make wine in our garage, but could we make, screaming Eagle or, Chateau Lafitte, probably not. How expensive is it for exosome therapy, and how does somebody go about finding, a reputable therapist to be able to treat them and give them a good product? Yeah, it's, there's a lot of varying ethics in this field. I have a patient who's a literal billionaire. Like he hoarding Bitcoin in 2010. Even I don't like to ask him for even market price. I usually sell below market price. But the short answer is it could be a few hundred bucks to a few thousand. But there's some less ethical or they may have a big overhead. They charge 10, 000 for what I'm doing. So it could, it just varies. But again, You cannot compare brands, like you can't compare Night Train Wine to Chateau Lafitte Rothschild. So make sure you're comparing the same brand because people will play fast and loose with billions and trillions. The sad thing is, and I've done videos on this, no one can see an exosome because it's below the size that an optical microscope can pick up. So they have to use inference from Brownian motion. So any particle, even in sterile, distilled water in a glass bottle or whatever, if you measure the amount of Brownian motion, you can call it trillions of particles per cc. So people play fast and loose with that a lot. So you make sure you're talking about the same brand when you're pricing, but say for a knee, it could be, if you're my friend or family, I just treated two MDs yesterday at cost wholesale costs. Because there is profit for us, we can do, cases where people are hopeless and desperate, most people go for a two X margin. So people less, I tend to be less, some people do more. So the bottom line, you could be looking at 500 to. Three or four thousand bucks, but again, it's so hard to generalize. It's like asking how much is a glass of wine? What does that even mean? Are you in a restaurant on top of a building? Are at the 7 Eleven with a paper bag? This is what I'm saying. So how do I find somebody to treat me with exosomes? I do it in six states. If you want to ping me, I can refer you to somebody in those states. I only have one experience with one brand and it's one that I found safe. I get asked a lot to try other brands and if I wouldn't feel comfortable based on my conversation with you and your chief science officer putting it in my body, why am I going to put in someone else's body? And people will say I'll come bring my own exomes. You inject me. No thanks. Cause you know. I know that there are risks, but I know what they are and how to mitigate them. But, if you bring me a cloudy vial of exosomes, I don't even know what's in there, so who's making these brands and how do you know who's good and who's bad? I only know the one I've used for over 2600 treatments and I know it's good. It's safe. It's predictable. It's potent. But again, you have to be careful because there are a lot of brands that are freeze drying. And so does that work? Maybe at some percentage there they work, but you add different elements. We like to keep the cold chain. So ours are kept at minus one Oh nine dry ice temperature. So it's one time thoughts like pork. You don't freeze it thought and freeze it. How do you know? If anyone does it, you do diligence. They'll hear the brand names. I don't want to go into that. It's not that I wouldn't use another. Brand. It's just that this one, I'm comfortable injecting in my friends and family, my patients, even intraspinal. Unless and until they give me a reason to doubt them, I'm not going to switch it up. But it's hard. It's the hardest part for a consumer to say I got exosomes, again, if you talk to the scientists and the doctors using this, they couldn't really even give you a very suitable back of the napkin description of what they're doing or how to count them. So there's a lot that people don't know. And they don't like to talk about stuff they don't know. It sounds scary for anybody who's trying to step into this. How do you know What you're getting. If they just, go on the boards, they're going to, there's going to find out there's, 10 to 20 companies that have exosomes. Like I said, it's not hard to make exosomes. What's hard is to bring in a high quality product quarter after quarter, year after year, without contamination, with high potency, with objective standards of measure, like how many grams or micro nanograms of MRNA you have. And there's only one company I know that does that. The rest of them, they are very fast and loose. They'll say more donors to our product means less infection. And, that's like saying the fewer people you've slept with, the less chance of a sexually transmitted disease. But so people just make stuff up and it's scary out there because they don't know how they count them. And so there's a lot that people don't know and are not willing to admit they don't know. And are there any regulatory agencies looking over this that people should be aware of or not? The FDA has been involved in regulating exosome manufacturers warning letters and such. These days, because over the last couple of years, they've been working together to get trials through for various things like long COVID, infertility, Crohn's disease. There's a little less of an adversarial relationship, but because nobody's really an expert in exosomes let alone the FDA, they just feel like it's our right to regulate this, but in actuality the code that they use to cite is for cell tissue products, whereas exosomes really are so small and they're not cellular. They don't have DNA. They don't have mitochondria. They don't copy. So it's more analogous to milk, Mill cast tons of cow exosomes if it's unpasteurized. So again, it's debatable whether the FDA really can regulate this. What's not debatable, you know if you get a paper cut or you sprain your ankle, you're making trillions of exosomes on your own and you're, These are not FDA approved. So we're not talking about some weird single molecule or what have you. We're talking about the way that every human that's ever born, every mouse that's ever born has healed itself. So this is ongoing, whether it's FDA approved or not. What we allege is that if you take it from a newborn pre COVID placenta, donated c section, and you make these millions of stem cells freshly secrete their exosomes, that you'll start healing like a newborn baby. So for people that are interested in slowing the aging process, are there some natural ways to stimulate exosome production in the body, or is therapeutic intervention necessary? No, I'm sure, what you do and advise people to do is stimulating exosomes, the process of breaking down muscle and rebuilding it, that's stimulating exosomes, trauma to muscles is good. Unfortunately, trauma to ligaments and tendons is not always as good. You see someone like Dave Bautista from Guardians of the Galaxy. He's smaller. A lot of these guys that are jacked up on HGH or testosterone, they got the strong muscles, but can their joints, ligaments, and tendons handle it? So they need to downsize a little bit because, These joint surfaces that they're torquing are not getting younger, but the muscle is an interesting tissue. It's one of the only things like the heart never ages either because it's muscle. You can get electrical problems, but in general muscle is fascinating because it's stem cell self regulation is perpetual. We see these old guys with old faces and they look so ripped. So I think it's a unique sort of class. So looking ahead, what advancements in exosome research or technology do you find the most promising? I think that it does help with longevity. My 87 year old mom is still a firecracker. I have a 78 year old guy. He's gotten like 13 injections with a massive dose every month and he's starting to get black hair. He has black hair up and down his body. He loves that. And his erectile function came back after six years. So it's just one piece of the puzzle. The fourth thing that I didn't talk about, we talked about maintenance, the telomerase activator I've been taking for 17 years. We talked about rebirth, which is the exosomes can cause transient de differentiation and multiplication, and senolytics, most of which have, there was a company out of the Northwest that failed. There's something called FOXO4 DRI. And then there's natural senolytics like curcumin and whatnot. But there's lots of hacks, calorie restriction intermittent fasting, obviously resistance training excellent sleep is is a core fundamental. But the fourth thing that we don't talk about is actual banking of your stem cells. If you can bank your stem cells and re introduce, the really the worst part about getting old is the due process. The mutation and loss of your hematopoietic stem cells. So those are the ones that make blood cells. So what does that mean? Means that Jack LaLanne in his mid 90s with a perfect body got killed by the common cold. If you look at 114 year old Dutch lady She had only two types when you should have 10, 000 types of white blood cell producing cells. So this is the thing that allows cancer, it allows sickness, it allows disease and infections. So if we can bank our hematopoietic stem cells and replenish them, that would be the game changer, right? That's a total hack. Like instead of making a copper coin or a gold or silver coin, we could store it or make it and then we'd have wealth in terms of our health if we could actually store and reintroduce more, hematopoietic stem cells. That's just one of the aspects. But in the future, they'll have, neurologic exosomes. So from people who are easily able to regenerate brain tissue, they'll have exosomes that those cells created. You can have that for kidney disease, liver disease. We don't even need to know how the music is played or understood. You can just take those songs. And that's why my book is called Exosome Songs of Healing. If you get a rat that's being healed from liver cirrhosis, and you give it to a rat with liver cirrhosis, poof, magically it gets better. You got a woman with brain breast cancer. You take the exosomes from her blood, give it to Lady Without, she can start to develop breast cancer. It's all about the communication, and something that we're just starting to scratch the surface on. Even though there's tens of thousands of studies looking at it, unfortunately, research science goes slow. Cures to the bench, to the bedside, are very slow. And so these exosomes, are they transferable between individuals, between species? Oh yeah, that's, these whack a doodle billionaires doing the young blood, that's what they're trying to do, because it's been known for decades, if you sew, an old animal to a young animal, parabiosis, the young one will get older and the old one will get younger, because that's, Presumably, the exosomes are being shared. So just there's an old smell, I forget the name of the protein, nano something or other, yeah. Exosomes are all about the communication. So that's what these young blood transfusions purport to do. And are there groups that are doing this, like storing our stem cells or, gathering that stuff up or sharing young blood with people? There are, yeah. One of the gentlemen who endorsed my book, he's a charming guy. He's one of the founders of the American Anti Aging Academy. He's got a site in Jersey and Costa Rica and they can find him out. But what he'll do is he'll give you a cancer chemo drug called GM CSF and if you get that, your body will allegedly secrete Mosaicable stem cells, hematopoietic stem cells, and endothelial cells, and he says that he can reintroduce those in a useful way. These are not technically impossible things to do to get you to secrete hematopoietic stem cells. But then the key is to clonally expand them, which means to make them double. So then you recharge yourself with your own matched identity. The problem that people don't really grasp is that when they go to Europe and they get a sheep stem cell, there's so much mismatch on the genetic identity that your body, if it's healthy, will quickly clear those out within a few days. But during those days, you're secreting exosomes, which is great. But the mismatching is a problem. And people say why don't I just get it for myself? You're already old and depleted. They need to put it in a dish, and take 10 million and make, 200 million, and then reintroduce it. That might be a game changer. But in the past, when people used to freeze cord blood, that was good, but there was really no use case for that. But now people are smarter. They're freezing placentas that placenta for your kid. 60 years from now could be used to regrow kidney, so that's genetically matched. That's probably a good investment, but you can't just put in your home freezer. Cause that's not cool enough to crowd preserve. Gross too, I think, to be storing a placenta in your home freezer, a little bit, yeah. But those temperatures aren't enough to crowd preserve. I know that because when I lived in Hawaii, I had some chicken. I took it out after a year, and it was rancid, even though it was frozen. So you need the temperatures approaching, minus 109. And most people don't have those capacities in their homes. No. But there, you could pay someone to store it for 300 to 500 a year. But yeah, I don't recommend eating it or planting a tree. If you want to help your kid, assuming anyone out there is still having children with all this negative messaging, there are companies that will store it in liquid nitrogen for a long time. For those who are interested in Exosome therapy, what steps or questions should they consider before exploring this option? They should read my book, Exosomes, Songs of Healing. It's an audiobook, ebook, and a regular color book. They can go to my YouTube channel, DRPARK65 on YouTube. There's dozens of videos there. They can go to Wikipedia. This stuff is not esoteric knowledge. It's not like a sleepy backwater. If you want to go to PubMed, P U B, M E D, and Google exosomes, you'll see that there's 30, 40, 000 articles on exosomes. So the exciting thing is we didn't even know this. Again, we thought it was cellular poop until 16 years ago. Because they're hard to work with, hard to isolate it's an emerging science but it's very exciting. So they can read my book. They can watch my videos. They can just learn, but when it comes time and there's a chapter about how to choose a provider, again, I can only speak from my personal experience with one brand. It's not that other companies can't or don't make a good product. I just don't have experience. So I can't comment on that. All right, so we have a question that we ask of all our guests and so it's time for that. What are you doing personally to age well? I, like I took that TA 65 telomerase activator for 17 years. I do the exosomes when I'm injured. I just did another shot six weeks ago nasally for the brain and I think that's really enhanced my speed and my emotional resilience, but also it qualitatively changed my dreaming for the last six days. And this was I took the shots six weeks ago. The dreams are so vivid that it's like I'm in it. I'm thinking, I'm reading people's emotions. I'm having decision making. It's very It's like being awake, but in a dream. I stay away from processed foods. I try to, cause red dye number 50 or whatever is not good for you. Anything that lives on a shelf for months is probably not something your body wants to digest. I should probably cut down on the caffeine and wine at night. But I think mainly just sleep movement. I try to swim every day and walk. Yeah, stay away from the bad foods to just love and healthy. I think people should can check out this book. I wrote for a house. It's called the teal in their miracle. And we talk about the six pistons, breath, breathing, like breath work can help mind how to control your thoughts, sleep, exercise, diet, and supplements. So nothing groundbreaking in here, just like evidence showing that, if you look at people who sleep poorly and there's a deep dive into sleep architecture and people that sleep well surprise, the people that sleep and eat and exercise have longer telomeres, which is a great hack. Anything that makes you more grounded, more human, more stable, happy, joyful, obviously is going to help. But at the end of the day, we can't floor ourselves. We're all becoming that Dutch lady, 114 year old lady. We're losing our stem cells. A lot of these people talk about escape velocity of aging. Literally, if we get better at storing, reproducing our own stem cells, then we can have like serviceable machines for much longer than was intended. So I'm excited about that. Dr. Park, I love to learn and this was an exceptional learning experience. You've alluded to this, but let's just bring it all in, in one spot. Where can our listeners learn more about you? What's the website again? And is there any social media? Yeah. The book is the books are both those books. Are they available on? Yeah. Yeah. So we got for Hay House. I wrote this lifestyle book, how to hack your best health. My original book was A couple things I disagree with, even that I wrote for 15 years ago, Tealmare Timebombs. And this recent one from last year is Exosomes, Songs of Healing. People can go to my website www. rechargebiomedical. com. See if I practice in one of your states. That's New York, California, Hawaii, Texas, Florida, and Utah. And doctors can get trained. I have an online training course, 12 hours. They can learn, take questions, download forms, and I'm doing an ongoing series of videos on YouTube. My social media handle is at D R P A R K 6 5, and I'm trying to interview experts, also, in alternative health, so that'll be great. Yeah, that's how you can connect with me, you can email me, schedule a free Zoom consult, or ask a question. All right, great. Is there anything that we didn't ask that you want to include in today's discussion? Not really, no. I think you have great questions, very open ended. Sorry if I spouted on too long, but No, that's okay. We like long because we get a lot of information in those long interviews. Dr. Park thank you for joining us on the Aging Well podcast. Thank you for the work you are doing and keep aging well. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. Thanks Jeff. You're welcome Thank you for listening. I hope you benefited from today's podcast. Until next time, keep aging well.