You might be scratching your head and wondering what exosomes are.
Well, let me break it down for you in simple terms.
Exosomes are tiny little bubbles that your cells use to communicate with each other.
Think of them as little messengers that carry important information between your cells. They’re like the postal service of your body, delivering essential packages to the right places.
You might be wondering why exosomes are so crucial for your health. Well, let me tell you. Exosomes are critical to everything from immune system function to tissue repair.
When your body needs to heal from an injury or fight off an infection, it sends exosomes to help coordinate the response. These little bubbles help your body communicate and work together to get the job done.
In this video, Susan Bratton chats with Dr. Jeffrey D. Gross, founder of ReCELLebrate in Henderson, Nevada. This is a regenerative clinic. Dr. Gross was a neurosurgeon and got tired of fixing things with surgery after they went on too long as problems. He turned to exosomes to heal bodies sooner rather than later. Dr. Gross shares his expertise on how exosomes can be used for various health conditions.
HEAL-THY-BODY
Dr. Gross explains that by unlocking the power of exosomes, we could usher in a new era of personalized medicine that treats each individual’s unique needs.
I went to ReCELLebrate for an exosome IV to help me recover more quickly from surgery. My personal experience was that I felt like I had light flu for a day and a half afterward. Dr. Gross said that is his favorite body response from exosome IV. The patients have more positive outcomes when their body reacts this way. I wish I could have quarterly exosome IVs for longevity and repair of my body’s aging. Exosomes are used for many applications now, and it’s just the beginning of this modality. I encourage you to learn about exosomes and watch how they explode on the functional longevity scene. Once again, I’m getting you to the head of the line for staying young, vital, and healthy. I don’t want to extend your sex span; I want to expand your whole health span for a long, active life. Exosomes are going to be critical.
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Transcript
“You mentioned that more focused treatments are possible when you do the exosomes. What’s concentrated therapy like? If you, for example, had an old knee injury and tore your meniscus, maybe you had surgery years ago, and it still gives you pain walking up and down the stairs, we would do an MRI if that were a residual problem even after an ID approach.
We can treat that by most efficiently going into the bone above and below with an injection of exosomes. We do that at the surgery center under sedation because it’s in the bone. There are some great studies in French literature. They don’t have as many regulatory issues as we do. In a 15-year plus follow-up, bone injections caused 80 to 85 percent of patients who were told they needed one before they joined the study 15 years earlier to be able to avoid a knee replacement.
Our body can heal. We have the programming. We have the genetics, not unlike a salamander can regrow its tail, or a starfish can regrow an arm. Our genes for that turn-off can be partially reactivated in small ways and regenerate cartilage when you inject the exosomes into the bone; you’re not doing stem cells; you’re doing exosomes into the bone.
We’re doing exosomes that activate your sleepy stem cells in the bone marrow, where the health of a joint comes from, most of the cartilage. We have natural rubber. There are not a lot of cells. There’s not a lot of metabolism or activity. You want to give it discs and help it get nutrients and blood flow from the bone above and below at the edge, called The subchondral bone.
That’s the target, and we know this is the issue because if you look at MRI scans of patients with degenerating discs, loss of disc height, and loss of the biological rubber, we see bone marrow inflammation above and below. Those are called modic changes, named after Dr. Michael Modic out of the Cleveland Clinic, who identified them when MRI became new. That’s our target. We want to treat those inflamed bone marrow areas and activate your stem cells into a more youthful state, causing the deposition of new cartilage in new chondrocytes and cells that can enhance and regenerate the mechanical structure causing pain.
That’s pretty amazing. You are a neurological surgeon and also a spine doctor. Those are very attached parts of our body. You got into this because you felt you could do less surgery and help people repair from the inside out with these new technologies. How have customers taken to these new therapies? Are you finding that people are willing not to do surgery and try these new capabilities?
We have a lot of interest. The main problem is health insurance does not cover this. This does step on the toes of big pharma. It dances on the toes of large companies that make surgical products like screws and rods.
I’m trying to do less surgery; only doing it is the last option. Adding this to our toolbox, adding regenerative medicine to our toolbox furthers that goal and accelerates it significantly. I also enjoy this more because we can help people. A spinal fusion can help, but it’s not itself a cure. It’s a remodel of the spine, and it’s significant and can cause problems above and below in other spots. Regenerative medicine is a different approach that our bodies have been able to do for a long time. I’m helping our bodies do it.
If money were no object, what are the five best cases for using regenerative therapies? In the case of exosomes versus stem cells, who can you help the most?
The low-hanging fruit, if you will, are people with joint problems, old knee injuries, and osteoarthritis, separate from the disease of rheumatoid arthritis. This is the degeneration of the joints we get with chronic abuse of the joints, age, other inflammatory factors, diet, and lifestyle. We could go on for a while talking about that.
People trying to avoid joint replacement are the first group. I’ll call it the joints—secondly, the autoimmune group. We have people with autoimmune conditions, whether thyroid or a neurological problem, or people affected with Lyons disease. This group is well known to respond to what we’ll call broadly anti-inflammatory treatment through regenerative medicine.
I’d say the third group is feeling the effect of age significantly. This would be called the senescent group; we have people with borderline neurologic issues and cognitive decline. They can’t remember where they put their keys to that lack of energy. I want to take those patients and easily give them a biological reset to a younger state. Those are people that might need periodic treatments.
That’s three groups. The fourth group is cosmetic uses. That’s not the main thrust of our practice. Although we have treated some people with thinning hair this time, we can’t take a bald person to regrow hair through exosomes. Yet someday, designer exosomes may be for that purpose, but we inject scalp.
Fifth. Sexual health. O Shots and P shots. Are you doing those P shots? We haven’t done O and P shots, but we’re getting into it.
Are you open to talking about price ranges for the various types of things that you do, generally speaking? To have an IV exosome approach here that runs under four thousand dollars is not from there. If we do multiple joints in the surgery center with the time and anesthesiologists, it could be over 12,000 plus. We can do many things in the surgery center because you’re under sedation. People come in with multiple joint issues simultaneously on an economic scale. We can do more doses. Our highest cost is the product.
Questions. Should a consumer interested in getting XSM IVs be asking their practitioner? There are different companies offering exosomes. Is it like probiotics? How many billion CFUs are there, or how are you a wise consumer?
I’m a consumer, too, and I have the same question. It’s a great set of questions. First and foremost, all we have to go on is numbers, but you want to ensure your exosomes come from a quality lab meeting the regulatory criteria. There are FDA criteria for labs. How they obtain, produce, and screen the patients or the donors. That’s important to me. The Second is count. It is like probiotics, in a way. I mean, there are products on the market for 10 billion particles of exosomes up to 400, and if we’re going to do it, we should do it at the 400 level, if we can, most of the time. I tend to use higher-dose products. By dose, I mean count.
One could say we don’t know what’s in the exosomes. We don’t see the strength and the effect; it will be individual. That’s why the labs we work with choose healthy young mothers delivering healthy babies who are screened. They don’t have any substance use. They don’t have any diseases and have all their vaccinations. These are the most beneficial, but there’s always individual variation in the concentration of growth factors in the exosomes and the RNAs. We’re not at a point where we can measure that. Our companies are working on that.
There are multiple and growing numbers of suppliers of biological stem cells, exosomes, and umbilical cord tissues in the U.S. These are domestic products. We can get international products. I just haven’t done that. I want to use a reputable source that routinely delivers what we need. Do we ask our patients if we are getting benefits?
I’m patient, too, so I feel comfortable with the product I’ve consistently used. What do the exosomes look like when you exercise and prepare them for IVs? Are they in a little vial?
We will take some videos of it, but we have a special minus-30 freezer to store them, which is much colder than a regular freezer. They don’t need to be that way, but we do it to keep them fresh. They get shipped on dry ice overnight. They come in tiny vials, each with a code number that can be traced back to the donor.
We have one cc and a tiny vial. We thaw it out with our hands and deliver it fresh from the womb. Do you put it in a saline bag? Is it an IV?
It’s so fast and easy. How many times have you done exosome IVs? I’m five or six times into it. Was there a moment when you realized I’ve begun to hit a critical mass of regenerative appreciation? Did you feel it was linear like you kept improving over time?
I feel great and need one, and I have those two bounds, and I’m riding that sine wave. It’s hard to measure internal cellular activity. The study is doing one of the biological age tests and doing either one treatment over time and repeating the biological age test to see if there is a marker of benefit from the cellular features of age, whether it’s a methylated DNA test or glycated proteins. We’re looking at that right now because we want to track it. We want to be able to publish it and look and have a measure besides how we feel.
The methylated versus glycation testing for biological versus chronological age. What are the pros and cons of those two things? Do you think some people have a lot of diabetes or pre-diabetic in their family?
How are you looking at the two biological age tests? You should explain biological age versus chronological age so people have a level set because that’s a relatively new concept.
Let’s start defining the terms because we speak the same language. When we talk about age, we always have since we were old enough to say how old you are. I’m three and a half. When we talk about age, we’re talking about a calendar, a clock.
How many years have you been on the planet? What time is that chronological age? Chrono means time or on the clock. However, if you look at two 80-year-olds, one 80-year-old might be youthful and active, riding a bike daily, playing golf, and socializing. The other 80-year-old might be in a nursing home lying in bed all day. Those two people are chronologically the same age. They have the same birth date, so why are they so different?
Because something’s different in their cells, biology, or physiology, people call that biological age. Physiological age makes more sense. We’re talking about cellular programming and metabolism over time. The youthful 80-year-old has maintained that whether it’s genetic or lifestyle. We’ll come back to that in a moment.
The older appearing and behaving one has accumulated more information, whether it’s hard living or exposure to toxins, smoking, or poor diet.
We accumulate those changes in chronological age. The more changes we get, the more effect on the physiologic age. You can somewhat prevent physiologic aging and stay physiologically younger while being chronologically older.
That’s the goal here to be the most youthful 80-year-old you can be, and we’re saying you look so young. Susan, how do you look so young? How do you feel so young? How do you have so much energy? Because you work at it. Anti-aging is a specialty of medicine, and there’s some discussion about whether or not aging is a disease.
That’s silliness. It’s rhetoric. It doesn’t matter. We all age. We will accumulate experiences. We will get energy. We will collect all kinds of things, and our cells accumulate junk, and some of those cells die off or become senescent and gum up the works. We need to work on that to keep ourselves younger, and the measure of that is biological age tests.
There are different measures. How messed up is your DNA? How does it affect your telomeres, the ends of the DNA? How many methylation changes do you have in your DNA? How many glycated proteins are circulating? These are different measures.
The tests generally correlate well, meaning one test isn’t specifically better than the other test. This has been looked at and recently published, so I don’t have a favorite yet. I think you do the easy, most affordable one and track it. You’re getting a data point and could follow the trend at least, and you’re compared to a group of thousands of others. There’s some idea of chronologic age and physiologic age comparatively. You are against your cohort. Then it turns out that most people believe that our genetics are responsible for about 20% of this. Savage epigenetics are the 80, meaning we all have the same DNA.
We were born with. Why is it not working like when we were 12? DNA is used to make proteins and things in the cell depending on how we influence it with diet, exercise, rest, breathing, sleep, and supplementation. We don’t get it through our diet, which is how we circle back to regenerative medicine. It’s probably the most powerful way to reprogram, even temporarily. The cells of our body behave program and act more youthfully, anti-inflammatory.”
