Anti Aging Gene Therapy Liz Parish

Here's the problem. It's aging. Aging cells cause Alzheimer's to actually come to fruition. Then we look at the disease that has a multitude of symptoms. And then finally, we look at beta amyloid plaques. And when you're trying to create a drug for that, you're basically just trying to slow a disease. But if you go up the level to aging and you treat aging, you're not only keeping people from getting Alzheimer's, you're keeping them from getting cancer and heart disease. Welcome to the Seamlund Podcast. I'm your host Seamlund, and our guest today is Liz Parrish. Liz is the founder and CEO of BioViva, which is a company committed to extending human lifespan using techniques such as gene and cell technologies. Liz Parrish became the first person worldwide to take dual gene therapies for treating aging. This episode is brought to you by BioOptimizer's Magnesium Breakthrough. Magnesium is one of the most important minerals in your body and it's involved in hundreds of processes, starting with energy production and ending with cognition. Magnesium deficiency increases the risk of incident resistance and cardiovascular disease. What's worse, up to 70 to 80 percent of people are not getting enough magnesium because our food contains about 25 to 35 percent less magnesium than a few decades ago. I think magnesium is one of the few nutrients almost everyone would need more of. That's why I use Magnesium Breakthrough that contains seven of the main magnesium types. It's the most full spectrum magnesium supplement out there. Head over to the show notes of this episode at Seamlund.com forward slash 223 to get a link for a 10 percent discount off Magnesium Breakthrough. That's Seamlund.com forward slash 223. Liz, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's very... I think a lot of people are interested in gene therapy or it's a very cutting-edge thing and not a lot of people are aware of what it is. So maybe let's maybe start like what kind of a gene therapy are you involved with? Right, so just to give people a little bit of background of what gene therapy is. Gene therapy is the removal or addition of a therapeutic gene that makes the organism healthier. And so in our work we look at genes for treating biological aging. So genes that make people younger and those exist. And so this is a really exciting time for people to get involved in the science behind that. So we look at the hallmarks of aging, the things that happen at the cellular level that make people old. And we try to target the hallmarks of aging with therapeutic genes that reverse those hallmarks. So we might work with something like telomerase induction. Telomeres are the ends of the chromosomes and they get shorter as you get older. And we have a technology that can lengthen those. But we also look at gene therapies that kind of blur the lines between physical enhancement and preventative medicine, such as folistatin, which is a gene therapy that will increase your muscle mass. Right, yeah, that's very sci-fi for a lot of people. And in very simplistic terms, it does make sense that you have these genes. And if you have different kinds of genes, then you express or you have different outcomes in terms of health and longevity. Right, so if you look at somebody who is like Hussein Bolt, who can run faster than most people on the planet, or you look at someone like maybe Arnold Schwarzenegger, who can build more muscle mass with less addition of maybe some stimulants to do that than the rest of the population, you're looking at genetic abnormal genetic construction. So, sorry, I just cannot talk this morning. It's still early for me. But the so you're looking at people who are enhanced in comparison to the rest of the population. So what we would like to do is kind of even the playing field, make these sort of genetic abilities available to everyone so that people are in generally better health, but also look at gene therapies that provide benefit for the biggest unmet need on the planet, which is So a lot of people think that gene therapy is like a technology that is very new, maybe hasn't been done in humans. But in fact, there's already five regulated past gene therapies for use in humans. And they're considered a one time treatment for a lifetime cure for some pretty serious, deadly diseases. So we're just basically piggybacking on that ability of technology to be able to actually use it for the biggest unmet need, which is something more complex, such as biological aging. The difference between treating biological aging and the diseases that they're treating now are the diseases that are being treated right now with gene therapy are considered monogenic diseases, meaning it's a single gene mutation, one gene has a faulty character, and you can replace it with a healthy copy of a gene and have a therapeutic benefit. When we're looking at aging, we're looking at what's called a polygenic or multiple gene cascading effect that causes biological aging. And so it's more difficult, it will take us longer, but we have, yes, we have embarked on upon trying. Well, yeah, it's worth to try, for sure. Definitely. And I think that we can do it. I think that vastly, we need to remove our risk aversion to therapeutic treatment to people in the greatest need. And that will, in fact, alleviate much of the problem of translation. So today, we're looking at the biggest embarkment of gene therapy in the world with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines and the vaccine out of Oxford Biomedica. Those are gene therapies. Those are short-acting gene therapies. They use messenger RNA, and that is a downstream effect of gene therapy itself. So we're looking at 4 billion people potentially taking a vaccine within the next year. And that is fantastic news because it will turn people onto the technology of the potential reparative effects. Now, when we're treating something like a disease state, it's not necessarily like a vaccine, but it is very similar. It would be vaccinating you against the processes of aging. But the reason that these technologies could come so fast to market was because they are gene-based technologies. They are gene therapy based technologies, which is an exact science. It's not like the old science where you take a bunch of small molecules and you try to have a net effect on a disease of a symptom of a disease. This is simply creating the protein at the cellular level that upregulates the effect that you're looking for. So the reason that these immunizations for COVID were able to be developed so quickly rather than taking years and years of development was because they're gene-based technologies. I think maybe it would be easier for people to also understand how does the gene therapy work? How can you change your genes? People think that they're born with their genes, so how can you edit them? Yeah. Okay. Let's just go back to the basics. So the cells in your body have a nucleus and the nucleus holds all of your genes. So your whole body, actually every cell that has genes in them, have the same genes. But there's something called epigenetics that tell those genes to behave differently. For instance, that's why your nose looks different than your lips and other parts of your body. Those are epigenetic changes that are telling those cells to only upregulate certain genes. So the genes transcribe proteins and the proteins and enzymes and hormones are what make you. So you being male and me being female, you know, your hair being a different color than mine, our eyes potentially being a different color, mine are green, yours are probably blue. All of that are how the genes transcribe. It's the proteins that the genes make. And so when we're looking at a therapeutic protein, we're looking at a gene that creates that protein that then upregulates some sort of regeneration. So what is aging? It's degeneration over time. We degenerate over time. We become older, our cells break down, our mitochondria don't function, our telomeres get shorter, our muscles waste and become less supple. We're looking at genes that then reverse those processes and make the body more like it was when it was more youthful. And hopefully we'll even do better than that. I mean, the human of the future is not synonymous with a 25-year-old today. The human of the future is more than that. The human of the future regenerates faster than they degenerate. So we become like, we reverse engineer ourselves into like a cell or something. We would be ultimately healthy. So one of the things that is really staggering, people say, well, what does that mean? What does ultimate health mean? And if you look at the World Health Organization's definition of health, it's actually quite startling what they expect health to be. And it is just being in a complete state of health, both physically and mentally. And that's something that most people on the planet are not in today. Mental illness is rampant, as are a variety of diseases. Yeah. So maybe it would be like some examples of these chronic diseases. Like you can maybe edit some of your genes that regulate your risk of cardiovascular disease or regulate your risk of diabetes and those sort of things. Exactly. So the biggest killers being heart disease, cancer, and dementias, you know, followed up by COPD, which are breathing disorders. And obviously accidents in hospitals and car accidents and things like that are up there, but they are not as big of killers as heart disease and cancer and dementia. And so when you're looking at those, historically what we've done in pharmaceuticals is create small molecules that have an effect on the downstream effect of those diseases. So for instance, if you're looking at dementia, often the biggest section of dementia is Alzheimer's. Pharmaceuticals would be designed to try to alleviate beta amyloid plaques. Okay. So there's one example. So those are plaques that start to build up in the brain and cause, they think are a causative effect of, you know, the cognitive decline of dementia and Alzheimer's. So pharmaceuticals got together and they said, well, let's remove the beta amyloid plaques from the brain. Let's see how we can do that. But if you look at the layers of, here's the problem, it's aging. Aging cells cause Alzheimer's to actually come to fruition. Then we look at the disease that has a multitude of symptoms. And then finally we look at beta amyloid plaques. And when you're trying to create a drug for that, you're basically just trying to slow a disease. But if you go up the level to aging and you treat aging, you're not only keeping people from getting Alzheimer's, you're keeping them from getting cancer and heart disease. So now science has really turned its eye on the aging cell. And almost every paper now that comes out about Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or cancer or heart disease talks now about the aging cell and the processes of the aging cell. And those are the processes that we're after. Yeah. That's a big, like a paradigm shift that has happened over the past few years or so that instead of looking at the diseases themselves or the symptoms, you look at the root cause, which is aging, so to say. Because as you get older, then the risk of all the diseases increases, like the risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease and obesity, those things increase as you get older because of this grand phenomenon of aging itself. So if you kind of figure out what is causing the cells to become older and you fix that, then yeah, you can just prevent these diseases from getting initiated in the first place. Yeah, exactly. That's the most simplest way to put it. And that's fantastic. I'm glad that you're relaying that to people because once people understand the simplicity, now curing aging is difficult, but the simplicity of the process of targeting aging rather than a symptom. So Alzheimer's being a symptom of aging and then beta amyloid plaques being a long, way downstream effect of aging, then you realize that in fact, we've been doing it wrong. We really need to target the aging cell. Yeah. So what would be some of the characteristics of aging or the hallmarks that you mentioned? Right. So some of them would be mitochondrial dysfunction, which is greatly helped by a gene therapy called PGC1-alpha. It's also greatly affected by telomerase induction, telomeres, short telomeres. So you have a finite amount of cellular divisions. It's called the Hayflick limit. And now several categories of species have been directly correlated with their telomere length and their lifespan. So a bowhead whale living to 250 years is correlated with the number of cellular divisions that they can get out of a cell from one of those animals. And humans are also limited by a cellular division of about 50. And so what happens is as the cells divide, the telomeres get shorter and shorter. And when they get critically short, cells go into something called senescence, which is another hallmark of aging. And that just means that they're no longer going to divide. Unfortunately, they tend to send off inflammatory cytokines to the cells around them, making them more likely to turn senescent. And senescent cells are something that we're very familiar with seeing. You might look at someone who is very old and they have thin, shiny skin. Those are senescent cells. They are more likely to wrinkle. They don't have the beneficial effect of healthy, robust cells. More of the hallmarks of aging are things like intracellular and extracellular communication that breaks down over time. And then glycation. Glycation is the buildup of intracellular junk and garbage that essentially just gums up the system and makes things more difficult. I can definitely send you one of the charts of the hallmarks of aging. But these are the things that we go after. And you can see, as I discussed, things like lengthening telomeres targets the most hallmarks of aging of any therapy. It affects the telomere attrition. It affects mitochondrial function. And it affects the senescent cell process. But it doesn't target all of them. And so that has been our work at Rutgers University to devise the multi-gene delivery system that will target all of the hallmarks of aging. And that's a work in progress. That'll take us many years to do. Okay. Yeah. So it's a matter of damage versus repair and rejuvenation, so to say. So we get older and the damage accumulates. And the repair mechanisms get weaker and not enough, inadequate, so to say. We're not able to recover from the damage that we experience. Yeah. It's kind of like if you think of it as cleaning your house. When you're young, you might be sloppy about it. But you eventually get really good at understanding that you want to live in a clean environment. But as you get older and older, it is harder and harder to keep up on cleaning a house. And pretty soon, the roof caves in. The walls start to leak. The pipes are bursting. And you need to be able to do all those things. But the cells are becoming older and older and incapable of doing those things. Yeah. But what is the current situation with gene therapy? What kind of edits have been made? Or has it been seen to be effective? And how does it affect actual people? Yeah. So we will have some of our first human results this year based on a study that was done with our exclusive partner company called Integrative Health Systems and dementia patients. And so we're looking forward to having that released. That should be out by March or April. And so far, it appears that the therapies are safe in persons. And that now we're just waiting to see what sort of beneficial results we can get. We're already seeing some benefits there. But I can't talk too much about that until the biostatisticians go through all the work and write the paper. We've got two papers that will come out this year. One of them will be on our research and development with our viral vector delivery method in order to... We're starting to design a multi-gene delivery system. And the second one will be about how patients are doing in the first major study that we've accomplished. Right. And I'm sure a lot of people are afraid of the negative side effects or some potential side effects. Like if you mess things up accidentally or something, then you have like some, I don't know, mutations or something. Yeah. Well, you know, gene therapy has become safer and safer now than it had ever been before in the past. So in the past, they used viral vectors that had issues and they caused off-target effects. But today, just like we're seeing with these new vaccines that are coming through, the technology is very precise. We're just upregulating the protein that we're targeting. And so I believe that we'll see in the next three years that not doing gene therapy is the more risky thing to do as far as aging. Right. Yeah. Because if you have... If you die 100%, if you don't participate in something, I think that we can bust the odds into much better outcomes just with the technology we have today. But then we'll work that into a more robust technology. And of course, the hope is right now, anyone would be happy to stop the process of aging or slow the process of aging. That would be a billion dollar industry, right? But we're really trying to target reversing aging because that would have the biggest impact financially and ethically for the whole world. Yeah. And what would be like some of the initial, let's say, ways of going about it? Would everyone get access to it or is it something only like very select few people get? Well, I believe that everyone would get access to this technology as it would make... Governments would save trillion dollar tax issues by treating biological aging and keeping people healthy and younger longer. Our workforce would be better. It would work longer. We know that from anything from the military to space travel to just an average job here on planet Earth, the longer you work in a trained position saves companies money. So it's not just an ethical thing to do. It's a financial benefit to the whole world. So I believe the technology would be made available to everyone. Yeah. I agree. And yes, it's something like some people, skeptics would be like that these people want to do it just to live longer and be immortal or something. But yeah, like I said, it has an ethics thing and financial thing as well. So we would be more productive and we would just be more resourceful as a species, as a whole, and we would progress ourselves faster. Yeah, sure. And think about how much more we might take care of the planet if people feel more tied to it, that they are going to be here for a very long time. But I mean, people can be skeptical and they could say, oh, people want to live longer. Well, nobody wants to die. I mean, you know, there are just basic like, of course, people want to live longer. Talk to an 85 year old who is in stage four cancer. They would wish that they were healthy and they could live longer. But of course, you know, we have to tie living longer to being more productive and beneficial to this biosphere that we live in. And we see time after time that innovation works towards the good of humans. That's why we live as long as we do today. It's why we're concerned about the planet. It's why we know about global climate change is because we're concerned. And so giving people the lifespan to actually tackle those problems and be tied directly to them, not that they can just use up resources and die and be gone, will expedite a revolution in taking care of this planet. And I mean, we can say that with really feeling of confidence because we've seen that historically, the industrial revolution is based on lifespan. Every country's industrialization and modernization is based on how long people live. So this would hopefully benefit everyone in the world and the planet, which then further benefits everyone in the world. So I really believe that people work towards the betterment all the time with technologies, that technologies can be used negatively and a few people might do that. But the vast majority of technology is used for the betterment of humans and now hopefully for other species on the planet. It's this type of technology that can alleviate some of global climate change by, you know, George Church, one of our scientific advisors, has looked into bringing the permafrost grass back that will actually buffer global climate change. We can now grow meat based on stem cell technology, which is gene and cell technology, to feed people without using, you know, 60 percent of the resources of farmland that, you know, raising cattle does now. All of this sort of genetic engineering is tied to a better, healthier planet and the ability to let the wild come back, to allow, to minimize the use and space of humans so that the wild can come back in its natural way around us again. Yeah, it's so true that you can use technology in a good way and a bad way and it depends on how you use it. And yeah, like there's always been like some pushback against all kinds of technologies, like even like the steam engine and railroads and airplanes, all those things people were initially very skeptical and, you know, trying to fight the changes. But as, you know, after a while, like no one would prefer to live in like a candlelight sort of environment. Yeah, the candlelight environment was really cost prohibitive. You know, people would have to put in a whole day's work to afford a candle that might last for two hours. And now, you know, today we have, you know, illumination all around us that is so inexpensive. And that's how these technologies will roll out. At first it's expensive and then it becomes really inexpensive because the cost value exchange is just so great. The value is just way higher than the cost, then the cost goes down through scale. Right. So what will be like some theoretical timeline for it? Like when would people be expected to have something like that? Well, through our partner, Integrative Health Systems, people have access to these technologies now. But unless there's a study that's funded, and we're always asking for people to come forward and fund studies, which we just did, we did a six person dementia study that was fully funded. And so it was free to patients outside of pre and post testing and travel. The technology is still pretty cost prohibitive. But as long as we're allowed to collect this data, and we keep people going through the system, we will then take the drugs that have the best benefit to trials to clinical trials. Clinical trials take about 15 years. So we're asking governments like the US government to allow us to do testing right here on US soil instead of having to send people to locations where they can get consensual use. So we can do it the most safely right here in the US. And then we are also asking that there is an expedition in drug development, much like we've seen with these COVID vaccines, where within a year, we could potentially get out treatments that might treat heart disease and Alzheimer's. And instead of in 20 years time, when you know, I mean, over 36 million people die a year of aging diseases. So I mean, it's an atrocity beyond some of the horrors that we've seen here on the face of earth, before that we call out as being major travesties. Yeah, sure. But what about the differences? Like, you know, let's say you take this gene therapy, you edit your genes that you know, promote longevity and reduce the risk of diseases. So what about your lifestyle? Like, you know, we just still have to be like living the healthy lifestyle, or you can just do whatever you like, you know, eat bad food and not exercise and that sort of thing. Well, I know you're a big exerciser. And that's fantastic. There are other people who are not as genetically inclined as you are. You are pretty perfectly inclined as a human for your your gene 101 set. So one of some of the things that we look at is gene therapies that can affect people to put them into a greater state of fitness. Let's say if they were massively obese or in terrible shape, or they had atrophy of their muscles due to aging or something like kakaxia having gone through cancer treatment, so we can increase them. So the future human I hope will be active and use their body and I hope that more people will use their body as we can create more of a robust, healthy, active person out of maybe somebody who was actually quite chronically ill and obese before. But I have to say that we definitely suggest lifestyle modifications with gene therapy. Now, we're kind of getting ahead of ourselves. We are at the very beginning of this. So we know we can increase muscle mass, and we can assume that we can decrease obesity. But we're, you know, we don't know if this technology is a curative effect yet, or if more genes need to be involved in making it happen. So let's not talk about it like we've already solved the problem. But for the people who do participate in gene therapy, we suggest that they become rigorous in their exercise on a slow upstream basis so that they don't just hurt themselves to begin with. But if you participate in a gene therapy, we suggest that you get active, that you increase your regimen of exercise to a healthy level. We suggest that you eat right. After gene therapy, you might want to eat more calories than you usually do in order to facilitate the genes to do their job of regeneration. But, you know, the idea is to get people living a healthy, healthier lifestyle along with the therapies themselves. So even if the therapies could do most everything, you're still going to need to move your body to gain muscle mass, you know. And if you move your body, you're still going to get a better effect from the gene therapies. Yeah, so it's more like these are predispositions and kind of inclinations that help you to, you know, lean towards a certain direction, whether that be like increased muscle mass or better insulin sensitivity or something. So because, you know, even if nowadays, even if people have like good genes for like exercise and they're still not going to be building muscle without exercise, they still need to kind of trigger some of the growth. Yeah, I was kind of, I was a little bit shocked because a couple of papers had come out about folistatin and mice and the mice not needing to exercise and still gaining muscle mass. Well, the mice were still moving around. They were still active. They're generally more active on folistatin. So, you know, I just, you know, pause to say to anyone who is interested in that kind of gene therapy, you know, you still should move your body. You still should exercise. I think that is going to be an important part. I think like a biomarker that I would love to see in the future, I would feel like we were very successful if we took somebody who was grossly obese and with some health problems and turn them into a mountain climber, you know, I think that would be, that would be a good clinical outcome that I would love to see happen. And so, you know, but we're still in the very early days, but I would love to find out if people who are genetically predisposed to obesity and a myriad of health defects, if they, in fact, the opportunity would be more active because people like you and I who don't carry as much weight and are more predisposed for those things to be easier for us to do may not have the same appreciation that of the difficulty that it takes those people just to walk across a room. Yeah. One of the muscle growth genes is like myostatin as well that inhibits your body in growing muscles. So if you inhibit myostatin, then you're going to grow more muscle. So there are like these myostatin deficient mice and dogs and cows that are just super muscular and jacked. And that could be maybe too muscular, but that's what polystatin does is it blocks myostatin. It's just in the doses that we give, it doesn't block it entirely because, you know, then you would have unregulated muscle growth. Yeah. And that can also have like a negative side effects in terms of like promoting cancer growth or some other malignancies because you're just growing too much. Well, muscle cells are generally pretty safe from getting cancer. So in all of the animal studies, even the non-human primates, so those are the monkey studies, most simply put, varying doses of polystatin actually did not see any risk in disease. They lived longer and healthier, even the bigger monkeys. And also muscle mass is correlated with living longer. I don't know if you know that. So the more muscle you have, it's kind of like this, it's a very sacred store of energy for the body. So if the body was to get really sick, you know, muscle can be broken down as a nutrient to the body. So as we get older, the ability to get through illness is really important. So some amount of fat stores is important to older people definitely. And so is muscle. Yeah. Like sarcopenia is the age of the muscle loss that you lose muscle mass. And that's where you start to see like this increase in obesity and diabetes because you have like less of the muscle mass that keeps your metabolic rate high and keeps you insulin sensitive. Oh yeah. So, you know, increasing your muscle mass is a really good protection against type two diabetes. The insulin sensitivity definitely goes up with more muscle mass. And so, you know, those are sort of the two areas we look at is metabolic disorder and muscle loss attrition over time, which is sarcopenia, like you said. You know, people die of frailty. My best friend's mom just died last year of falling down. I mean, she just had frailty and she was supposed to use a walker and she fell and she hit her head and ended her life. Yeah, that's that's pretty sad. And yeah, like older, older, older people are like more predisposed to just see fractures and that sort of thing. Oh, and she was very mentally cognitive. You know, she was doing great in every other way, but she just had this frailty and they said, oh, you know, you should use assistance walking. And, you know, I mean, people don't realize it really does kill you to not have muscle. You know, be stronger, smarter, faster. All of it is survival. Yeah, absolutely. But, you know, you mentioned it already a few times that your genes can also affect like your personality or kind of psychological traits, you become more motivated to work out or something. What kind of examples would more of that be? Well, one of the genes that we're looking at is called clotho. And I've taken it and several people have taken it now. And it's for actually three different purposes. Clotho protects your body against chronic kidney disease. And your kidneys, everyone's kidneys will fell over time. So everyone who's past 65 has a level of kidney failure. Right. And it just continues as you grow older. It also protects against heart disease. It is a major contributor to protecting against heart disease. But the third thing and what we're I'm speaking to here is that it is a cognitive enhancer. And so having the ability of clarity to think faster, to have better recall, to have the ability to put ideas together is as vast associated with this cognitive function. And it's the most closely related gene to that. And so that is really exciting. It also seems to protect against the detailer deleterious effects of dementia. So in people upon autopsy after dying, whom they saw had a massive amount of these beta amyloid plaques that we talked about being associated, the gunk in the brain associated with Alzheimer's. People who didn't have the cognitive deleterious effects, people around them didn't know that they had Alzheimer's because they didn't have the cognitive association with the things that happened traditionally with Alzheimer's had upregulation of cloto. So it protected the brain against those cognitive decline. That's nice. Yeah. Can you can you like change maybe like your way to like learn a particular skill, like a language or maybe learn some other like a mental skill in terms of like, is it like very specific or is it just general? If you increase your general cognition and intelligence, then you can just see any better improvement in all of those things. Well, this is what we're hoping to find in these studies. First of all, we will be looking at people who are already in cognitive decline and we're looking to see if we can improve that cognitive decline. And then as we go, I've said this a million times, these gene therapies will be used in younger and younger people. And then we will be able to see if those who get a gene therapy who don't are not treating an already substantial disease will have a better cognitive effect and able to learn tasks faster. Mice definitely can. So they saw an improved cognition of about 20% after the upregulation of the protein. So that's 20% smarter. Think about it that way. And for I know that for me and a lot of other people, we're very interested in that effect. 20% would be fantastic. 100% would be better. But those are technologies that we'll get to or learn how to devise out of the same technologies we have today. Yeah. So what kind of gene therapies have you taken personally? I have taken the telomerase inducer and the myostatin inhibitor. So the fullest statin in the age chart. I took those in 2015 upon launching the company. I did not want to have a company that we were giving out therapeutics or trying to design therapeutics for humans that I hadn't participated in myself. And I've also taken more recently the Clotho and the PGC-1 Alpha. Anything that you're excited to try out in the future or expecting to try? Oh, I will. I definitely want to do higher doses of the Clotho and maybe more of the PGC-1 Alpha. I want to do more age chart, the telomerase inducer and the myostatin inhibitor. I'm pretty interested in FGF21. It is pretty interesting. And George Church has about 20 genes. Well, there's some 40 some, but there's 20 of those that are appealing to me that are associated with aging and slowing or stopping or reversing the aging process. And so I'm pretty flexible and interested in all of the new technology that is around this. But I particularly like the four genes that we chose as candidate drugs for the near future. But what about your baseline genes? Have you taken a DNA test and seen are they good genes, bad genes? Yeah, I have. And I'm going to do more genetic testing. I have had two genetic testings done. And they have said, for instance, they said that I was not predisposed to Alzheimer's. And I was actually pretty surprised. I'd like to have like a real clinical evaluation done because both of my grandmothers had Alzheimer's. And so, you know, so the APOE4 gene is associated with Alzheimer's risk. And having two copies means you have a much higher risk. Now, you could have the APOE4 gene and never get Alzheimer's as well. So, you know, your genes aren't everything written in stone, but they're pretty close to it. They definitely increase your risk significantly. Sometimes I become a little bit skeptical. And so, you know, we're really so on our website, we carry some pretty interesting, really excellent biomarkers of aging. And I have yet to find the perfect company that is not too cost prohibitive for everyone to check their genome to make sure that they're getting at least a 30-time review of the genes of interest and make sure that they're getting accurate data. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's at the moment, it's still relatively new. And it's mostly a matter of getting enough people trying out these things and getting more data and information. Then we can have like a bigger picture. Yeah. So, if I don't have APOE4, you know, did my grandmother's and if not, then what is the great risk that someone might have towards those diseases? I mean, there are important things to know. There are things that you want to know so that you can take all of the steps necessary to circumvent those diseases. Yeah. Like it would be like a pretty big strategy to not know that you have like a certain risk, like a big risk factor for some disease, like cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer's and not do anything about it. So, if you know these things, then you can take precautionary measures and extend your lifespan in so doing and be like healthier. Oh, yeah. Because, you know, sometimes when people in their twenties, they say, oh, well, it doesn't matter to me now. So, I'll worry about that later. But actually, you're already accumulating damage in your twenties. And that, you know, there are a lot of good, strong, powerful beliefs that in science, we'll be able to already diagnose what you'll die of nearly exactly based on the work on the body, the biomarker work on the body in their twenties in the future, because we can already see the accumulation of atherosclerotic plaques and your genes will have a certain predisposition and how your microbiome is set up. It's a sort of a multi-omic view of the system. So, yeah, I think it's really important to know all of your risks and to do the best you can to subvert them. And then in the meantime, you know, we'll work on the gene therapies and hopefully have something available when you need it in a timely manner. So, you know, the game plan for most people at the moment would be to just stay healthy as long as you can, until we get access to these more technologies, then you can, you know, escape this sort of the current longevity. Yeah, the longevity velocity, I think they call it. So, you know, the best thing to do is do a lot of testing, learn about your genes, learn about yourself. And then, you know, when it comes time and you're interested, then companies like ours, you can dump all of that health data on us and then work with partner companies to get access to those type of technologies that might benefit those hallmarks or biomarkers that you're experiencing. And then you can be part of helping us actually find the medical cures of the future. Yeah. Well, that's exciting things. And before I ask my last question, where can people learn more about you and your work? Oh, well, you can go to bioviva-science.com. We have a new website up. It doesn't have all of the information that the old website had up. It's more of a shopping experience for biomarker tests. But you can look at the web. You can look at our website. You can go to integrative-health-systems.com. They're the company that does the consensual use gene therapies. And then, essentially, if you just wait and watch, in the next few months, we should have our first research and development paper come out on regenerative gene therapies. And we will have our first patient data. And we will release all of those on the website as well, on our social media. So you can find us on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. And yeah. Sounds good. We're going to put all the links in the show notes. And my last question is, what's this one piece of advice or habit you wish you adopted sooner? Oh, my gosh. Let's see. I have been an advocate of exercise ever since my 20s, luckily. I had happened into exercise because I really needed it at the time. And so that, I'm glad that I've had. Gosh, my gosh. Sleep is really important. And COVID has been wonderful for my health, as far as that goes. I think that just recently, ironically, with COVID, I've been a vegetarian for decades. I think that that's really good. I think that everything in moderation, a lower red meat diet is probably better for everyone. I haven't done everything right. But what I'm going to get to is that COVID helped me realize that sleeping better was really important. And it helped me actually reconnect with my family. And I think that it's really important because often we're out there running, we're doing, we're trying to achieve something big for the world in a really what is too short period of time. And I'm hoping to extend that. But it's too short period of time of the life of when you actually are most productive. And so I think that, you know, connecting, you know, with families, with humans, with your friends is really important. And this last year reminded me of that I got all caught up with the people that I love. And I spent time with them on the internet, just learning what was up with them. And I think that is really important. And meditation, I do wish that I would have started meditation sooner. I started meditation in about 2013. When my son was diagnosed with type one diabetes, which is how BioViva came into existence, I was looking for cures for kids. And treating aging just hang on that we've got a cat here. She's scratching me. That treating aging actually expedites cures for kids. And so that's how we spun into being an aging company. But meditation is definitely something that I wish I would have done sooner. Yeah, absolutely. Good. Good advice. And yes. Yeah, a lot of the times people tend to take these things for granted. And especially like even like social connections, those things are have been found to be beneficial for longevity and people who have like families and friends, they tend to live longer. Oh, sure. And they're and they're happier. Because, you know, you're you have you have an open line of communication with people who love you with with people that you can talk about, you know, the inner workings of your life and rather than just maybe superficial things. And it's just really so important to have that in your life. So definitely work on your social communication skills. Because the world really we don't have a future even if we lived a really long time. If we can't get along, we don't have a future. And so you know, the trolls of the internet and those kind of people, they will they will fall by the wayside because their social life is unhealthy. Yeah, yeah, that's good to improve it. For sure. Well, it was really good to talk with you and you're looking forward to your future work. Thank you. It was great that you had me on. Yeah, what a nice what a nice weekend by day. All right, that's it for this episode. If you want to support us, then leave us a review on iTunes and the other social media platforms. You can also share with a friend. If you want to learn more about the topics that we discussed in this episode, then check out my new book Stronger by Stress. But on that, thanks for listening to this episode. My name is Siim. Stay tuned for the next episode. Stay empowered.