[Music] so what are mitochondria they are tiny little organel inside each of our cells they do all the energy generation for the cell so you typically have about a 100 mitochondria in your cell they're they that they kind of move around and they they they combust the glucose and the oxygen and they make ATP and that's what the cell uses to do everything it does and they have their own tiny little mitochondrial DNA which are rings and the nuclear DNA is three billion base pairs the mitochondrial DNA is only 16,000 base pairs so that's a good example of just how small they are and they're very similar in a lot of ways to um they're very similar in a lot of ways to what you see in bacteria because that's originally where mitochondria came from originally the theory is that they were bacteria floating around found a billion years ago and they joined in with the DNA and made us a billion years later of mitochondrial and and nuclear DNA Evolution has produced us right so what doctors know this and this has been studied for many years mitochondrial decline as we age is one of the underlying reasons for many many many diseases uh and and it's really very simple your your cells run on energy and when you're 20 of course you're that's your Peak that's when you're uh your your your full size your mitochondria in perfect condition the mitochondrial DNA are all in perfect condition but that declines as we get older and we're learning a lot about how that decline works and it causes all these diseases because there's just not enough energy for the cells to do their job properly okay it's really just that simple you might have other reasons for getting diseases you might be predisposed towards cardiovascular disease or or or Alzheimer's or uh any of these other things diabetes uh arthritis but the mitochondrial energy decline is what kind of triggers it so why do mitochondria Decline and this is something that we've actually been studying as part of our work uh I just want to show you a mitochondrial DNA a scan and this actually is my mother okay who is now 94 who was kind enough to let me analyze her mitochondria and what you're seeing here is actually the DNA structure of her mitochondria we got from a urine sample each Gray Line you can kind of see these these gray lines across each of those is one strand of mitochondrial DNA we got about 500 of them and we sequence them and we lay them in a plot this is a very common way of doing it and what you see here in this plot of course the genes mitochondrial DNA encodes about 10 or 12 genes um but what you see are all these little dots and lines these are all errors okay these are Dam what we call damage sectors it's like sectors on a hard disk as you get older your mitochondrial DNA is replic ating constantly and every replication there's a chance of a little bit of an error creeping in so my mom actually has a damage score of 25% and then this is mine and by the way mitochondria are passed down from the mother to the child with absolutely no modification there's about 500,000 mitochondrial DNA in each egg cell the nuclear DNA comes from the father and the mother the mitochondrial DNA just comes from the mother and so I have exactly the same as my mother so in theory it should look the same but you can see the difference I only have an 11% damage score okay this is my nephew who also has exactly the same mitochondri because he's descended through my sister he has a 7% damage score and so what we can do is we can look at the damage in the mitochondrial DNA and we actually can and see with with a lot of massaging we were able to get a line here that shows the decline over time and it's actually at the point where you can almost predict at what point someone if they if they manage to dodge all the other diseases of Aging there's a certain point when you hit it hit the point where your mitochondria just can't do the job anymore and that's when people start to they just fade away and that's when they pass away of old age okay so of course there's a lot of other pieces of Aging there's a lot of other things in aging but the condal component is its own aging curve which is very very important the other thing is that that can that can accelerate if you drink a lot if you smoke if you have other kinds of diseases like people who have multiple sclerosis for example if you have a disease for 30 years that you're fighting a chronic disease then your body's constantly battling and what happens is your mitochondria get burned out faster and so you age quicker and that's why you see people will die 20 or 30 years younger um of course there's many other reasons for that you might get cancer or you might get an get an injury but that's again this question of how long are your mitochondria going to last you if you if you were starting with perfect ones when you're young so what's the purpose of a mitochondrial Biore reactor basically our idea is hey let's go in every every 10 years or every five years or whatever it turns out to be and let's give you a boost of new mitochondria if by 75 years old you've lost we think you've lost as many as 50% of your Healthy mitochondria either they've been disposed of they they've gotten damaged if we give you a boost of another 20% of young healthy mitochondria that we've grown externally then in theory we could prevent you from developing these agent diseases or even reverse them okay and you can see the chart goes out here into the into the hundreds that's my hopeful my hopeful side says gee maybe this will give us longer lifespans but we don't we're not counting on that but you know we're focused on the healing component primarily but lifespan is a possibility so of course everybody says well wait a minute how do you transplant mitochondria right that's we can transplant livers we can transplant Hearts how do we transplant mitochondria and this is something that has come out in the last eight years or so and it turns out that it is actually quite doable um the way it would look to you is it would look like a blood transfusion okay and uh of course in the in the behind the scenes it's much more complicated than that it turns out that mitochondrial transplantation mitochondrial uh transfer is happening in your body constantly as you sit here right now there are billions and billions of mitochondria being shifted around in your via your bloodstream and also in your brain and in your cardiac tissue mitochondrial transplantation is as we say pervasive and evolutionarily conserved it happens everywhere in the body and this is completely new science you're not going to see any of this in the traditional High School textbooks most people think that mondre just sit there in the cell they're constantly in motion and we've proven this over and over again and and there's actually people doing this in human patients now uh it's being used to treat diseases it's being used to treat uh people for instance in who get heart surgery so the technique that we're using that we're leveraging to do our uh technology is something called we call mitel lets it turns out that if your blood is full of platelets which are usually used to create plots and the platelets are created by the bone marrow you create a 100 million platelets every day and then a 100 million are disposed of after about s to 10 days they they get thrown away they're the most numerous blood cell in your uh in your blood and they contain a whole bunch of mitochondria five per platelet and so we found that after those platelets are activated they spit those mitochondria out in little vesicles which we call mitel Lets and those vesicles are absorbed by other white blood cells or platelets so they're like little battery packs that the white blood cells and the platelets can exchange and they're being recycled because mitochondria are extremely valuable and you don't want to um you don't want to lose any of them okay the body is evolved to preserve mitochondria whenever possible because they're very valuable and your your survival as a species if you're running away to escape a leopard your mitochondri are what get you the energy to to escape so they are pure survival and your body conserves them all the time here's an example of Some Testing we did where we showed or another team did where they found that the mitochondrial these mitel lets decline as you get older right and so we think that the decline of these mitochondria and the decline of the quality is fundamental cause of Aging you just don't have as many of them supplying new mitochondria to your cells and this mitochondrian and your cells tend to burn out they burn out after 10 to 15 years mitochondrial DNA aren't any good anymore and so your body is supplying new ones to supplement them so if we're going to cure diseases how do we do that the way there is no supplies of mitochondria I mean we could we're not going to go out and squeeze mitochondria out of teenagers that wouldn't be popular at all so uh we have to figure out some way to grow them and that's fundamental to any kind of adult adult disease treatment and so we are developing bioreactors which are basically stem cell bioreactors that are specialized for growing and harvesting a mitochondria we have a technology for encasing them in a specialized coating a protein coating so that they're protected and then you just Infuse them uh that also that protein coating has receptors in it so we can Target the mitochondria to go to um specific organs okay so they could go to your heart your liver your whole body it's whatever we uh choose and of course you can also inject them in different places so uh I'll show you some of that some of those tests so a so if you were going to get a bioreactor treatment let's say you know 5 10 years from now it would be very much uh similar to a lot of the kind of um genetic treatments that they're already doing you go in you give some blood they take your mitochondria from your blood we grow them in massive quantities we coat them and then we put them back into your body okay alternatively we might Mass produce them with some sort of common format turns out there's not very many types of mitochondria there's there's 26 major groups that kind of spread across the world uh depending on the migration of the human species different different ethnic groups have different mitochondrial types so it may be that we could create a storehouse of a couple different couple dozen variations and and we could use those instead of creating them from scratch so we've been around for three years we've been doing a whole bunch of testing of this concept A lot of other people in other universities are doing the similar things here's one that I like we took mice at University of Kentucky we injected them with um with sepsis so we basically gave them sepsis which would normally be fatal in 24 hours that's a a bacterial infection these were older mice 13 months old and then we gave them massive injection of these mitel lets that we collected from the platelet trans uh platelet donations that we got from Young mice we got hundreds of young these very young mice and got platelet donations from them and extracted the mitel lets and we injected them into these older mice and when they get these melet injections they survive that's the blue line here okay so it's this amazing thing that you could effectively we're giving them the same immune system that they had when they were younger were're reversing the age of the immune system people say well is that really reversing the age I don't know it's hard to say what is age right is age Just Energy in some cases maybe it is I'll be talking more about that uh later at the end of the session I'll talk about longevity we also did a thing where we just injected mice with a whole bunch of these melet to see what would happen and we got much they got they got stronger they started running on their wheels like crazy they grow back their their brain tissue and that's something that Ben will be talking about in about half an hour um so it's really a way of of making them basically become younger again and by the way we've also extended this work now just started in dogs uh we did a test where we injected a bunch of mitochondria into the eye into the retina of some mice these red this red strip down here is What's called the RP layer and those are red fluorescent mitochondria and this blue tissue is the retina and you can see we injected them in one part of the retina and they spread all the way across they actually end up going down into the optic nerve they'll go up into the cornea mitochondria just kind of spread in the whole eyeball basically the goal is to make the eyeball younger okay so anyway that's our that's our our work that's what we're working on and the goal here is to get this into uh the immune system test retina skin muscle these there's a whole bunch of this different what we call indications there that that can be uh tested on and could be potentially cured okay I always tell people to remember this is already in use in human beings people always will say oh how long till it's in human beings there are doctors using mitochondrial transplants right now in heart surgery they have used them in some rare childhood diseases it's very very new it's very rare we're trying to move it into the bigger World by growing them in bioreactors and obviously we would like to have a worldwide network of these bioreactors providing supplemental mitochondria for everybody the way that we look at longevity is and and people say oh there's Health span and there's lifespan and don't really I don't make a big differential between them I think that if we want to improve People's Health at 70 years old this is the way to do it because everybody knows you hit about 70 75 80 years old and and and it doesn't matter what you've done doesn't matter how much you how hard you work you just start to lose ground and then by the time you hit 90 boom you're really losing ground fast I mean my dad was skiing when he was 90 and then he finally had to quit he said I just don't have the leg muscles anymore your your leg muscles actually decline 1% a year after you're 30 years old so we think that mitochondrial um transplants are going to be absolutely critical for any kind of longevity treatment whether it's whether it's for 80y olds or for giving people longer lifespan because if you have 50% of the mitochondria you need in your body at the age of 80 you're not going to be able to regain any ground if we want to reverse the aging process or even slow it down we've got to restore those mitochondria and I was tell people again it's like look thinking of a re if you think about refurbishing a laptop here's another battery analogy you know you always replace the battery in a laptop when you rebuild it so anybody's ever bought one of those refurbished laptops from online they always put a new battery in because if you don't have power you can't do anything else yes we're going to clean it we're going to clean the keyboard we're going to op install new operating system maybe we'll put more RAM in there but you're always going to put in a new battery that's that's the starting point and so that's my argument for longevity is that mitochondrial transplant will be a foundational component of all longevity treatments and also a foundational component of a whole bunch of just plain Medical Treatments we think you'll be hearing a lot more about this we I I think that there's an enormous number of of medical conditions that um are unsolvable and incurable because we haven't addressed the loss of energy and if we address that then we will get a handle on them and people are talking about Alzheimer's Alzheimer's is a very big Target for mitochondrial work um we're talking about eye disease AMD glaucoma those are all big tar for mitochondria [Music]