Kimera YouTube Video
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Well, hello. Hello, guys. You're listening to Beauty Bites with Dr. K, secrets of a Plastic Surgeon, and today's podcast is going to be a fascinating one. We are gonna learn all about exosomes.

We're interviewing the CEO and founder of kymera. Mira exosomes are super well established, they're fabulously effective, and I want you to learn everything from the CEO and founder Duncan Ross Duncan, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, so I wanna dive right in and I wanna tell the audience a little bit about your journey becoming the founder and CEO of an exosome company.

Tell me where did it start and how did it all begin? It started, um, probably 20 years ago when my father had leukemia. So I, uh, I had studied immunology in undergraduate, but I got myself back to undergraduate school and I did a PhD in [00:01:00] biochemistry and then one in, uh, immunology. So I was in school for quite a long time, learning cellular therapies and then how to manipulate proteins on a protein scale, and then later cells on a cellular scale.

At that time, regenerative medicine was kind of starting to take off. People were talking about abusing umbilical cords for everything from osteoarthritis to autism. And I found that kind of interesting, uh, because all I understood umbilical cord cells to be good for was transplantation. And I thought about hematopoietic stem cells more than what they were being used for, um, in, in regenerative medicine.

But it peaked my interest. And so then I started attending conferences and seeing what people were up to. Uh, and then when I left school, I, I started my own little laboratory, um, doing stromal vascular fraction transplantation and bone marrow transplants for these types of diseases, uh, with my plastic surgeon partners, um, who were very generous to me and gave me their kitchen at their ambulatory center to [00:02:00] build a hundred, uh, square foot lab.

I put in a great big hood and an incubator and kind of got to work with them. Now we're having a 27,000 square foot lab, and that is all due to the fact that cellular therapies work. Um, but there were some challenges to cellular therapies specifically that the older we get, the less functional our cells are.

So as I started to see that in doing hundreds of different transplants with different aged people, you know, I'd have a 65-year-old who cells worked like a 20-year-old and I'd have a 90-year-old who cells didn't work at all. And that was very, uh, disappointing to me that I could not promise them reproducibility in these, in what we were doing.

Uh, so then I started, uh, expanding these sales and I still saw this variability and. Older and younger cells. And eventually I decided, you know what, if I just take placental cells that are the youngest ethical cell that I could get and use those, um, I'm going to get all of the good stuff that a young cell [00:03:00] secretes.

Uh, and in doing that, I started to see that, well, what if I just, what if I don't need the cell? What if I need the secretion of the sale? And at that time. I didn't know what exosome was and many people didn't. Um, they were thought of as trash cans of the cell and they certainly weren't being used in therapeutic, uh, clinical uses.

Uh, so I had to devise A GMP, which means good manufacturing practice method of creating a clinically applicable exosome. And I did that in 2014. Mm-hmm. And we've been treating everything from COPD to aesthetics, uh, ever since. Wow. Fascinating. So it started with just buying your own hood and getting a little place.

Yeah, exactly. And then just, well, I was, I was gonna go to Sloan Kettering, but there was a sequestration on the grants at that time, so I had to come up with something. That's what I came up with. I love it. How did you choose the name Kymera? Well, I've been thinking about that since before I graduated because, uh, Kymera Dolly the sheep was a kymera.

And, [00:04:00] uh, the first thing I actually did was not create Kymera Labs, the for-profit company. I created a nonprofit called the Cera Society, and the idea for that was to be able to fund transplants, bone marrow transplants for people that could not afford them. Um, I was very depressed in my journey with my father that, you know, we couldn't get him transplanted at Harvard or.

At the Fred Hutchinson mostly because they, he was a little sicker than they would transplant. Mm-hmm. But I could have taken him to Medellin that has a very good transplant program, um, would've cost me a hundred, $200,000. But it occurred to me at that time that there are options besides what we have here.

Mm-hmm. And that's what I was trying to, trying to do, you know? Yeah. Why do you think exosome science and, um, you know, stem cell science in general, is so suppressed in the US and. Who's the most far ahead right now in the game? Well, that's a good question. Um, I think that the cellular therapies have been suppressed, um, mostly [00:05:00] because the FDA's a little overcautious and it's hard to create a reproducible cellular therapy.

The cells are changing all the time. Mm-hmm. And so you can't deliver a, a final product to the FDA. That's one of the reasons I got excited about the exosomes is that even if the cells are changing, I can create a reproducible exosome. And characterize that and get that approved by the FDA. And slowly they're starting to understand that.

Um, and it's moving forward now, as you're well aware, things have changed, at least for the next four years. Mm-hmm. Um, some very interesting things happening. I was actually, I've been at Dr. Oz's house three times in the last two months. Uh, and the last time I was there, RFK Junior was there, and Novak Djokovich was there.

I walked through the door, I looked to the right, and there they are. I. I didn't know they were gonna be there. And, and I grew up playing tennis. So, I mean, you know, he is one of my heroes, Nova. Um, and I was able to give him, I, I have this new concept of play [00:06:00] forever with exosomes. Play some sport. If we're gonna regenerate you, you must do something.

You're going to must walk, you must work out. We can't just do it for you, you know? Um, so I made these play forever towels with tennis balls on him, and he was the first person in the world that I gave one of these towels to, is the number one tennis player in the world. Thought that was kind of funny.

Goodness. But the point is that when I, I spoke to RFK Junior, I said, I, I make exosomes. He said, oh, I've done exosomes. I did them in Antigua. You know? Mm-hmm. What a different thought process now for our regulatory body that not only does he, may they embrace them, but he's already, quote unquote, done them.

Now, I don't know what he really did. There's a lot of people that promote exosomes that don't actually make exosomes, but it's just a much different thought process. The other day, I actually emailed one of the investigators who came to my lab. Last time I've been, I've had three, um, inspections and I got from the, from FDA info.

Yeah. DA inspections. Right. The last one was really good. It was one day. [00:07:00] And the lead inspector was, I looked through her history. She's the one who shut down all the other exosome labs, and I emailed her last week. I haven't heard from them since August, but I emailed her last week to see what was going on, and I got an autoresponder from March 12th.

I don't think she's there anymore. Wow. You know, so all these things you're seeing on tv, I mean, they're, they're actually coming into my real life, so. It's just interesting where this is going. Yeah. I mean, that's very problematic. 'cause if you get a good report, we wanna move forward with, you know, progress and more science.

So, and if nobody's there to give you validity, then what? Well, I, I don't think that's the case. I think that there is the, the regulatory and the compliance side of, um. Of the FDA and the regulatory are all PhDs that actually look at your IND application. I'm hoping that that has not been affected because that's really important for me.[00:08:00]

Mm-hmm. The compliance side is kind of, they can be a little bit, they're not really trained in what they're inspecting and they're coming in and kind of bullying everybody. Um, so she left from the compliance side, so it could be beneficial, um, to all the practitioners. I mean, I, I've looked at these regulations ad nauseum as to what you have the right to do as a clinician.

I mean, you have really crazy things you can do. You, you can, you can compound pharmaceuticals in your clinic. You have the right to do whatever you see fit in the art of, of, of treating patients. Um, and sometimes the FDA really oversteps that boundary. So, um, I think that might have been, been curtailed by, by these cuts.

Oh wow. Um, I wanted to go back to sort of like for people who are new to the exosome concept, you mentioned, um, what is an exosome? Can you dive a little deeper into that because we're all seeing a lot of advertising thrown [00:09:00] at us as, as to, you know, exosome science, and I wanna go over like, what's your definition of an exosome and what criteria should people look at when they're choosing exosome to work with?

When we, we've known that when we inject cells into your body that something is happening. Some positive thing that stem cell therapy does work. Um, but you can see that cell. So when a, when a doctor is, is giving you, um, some kind of therapy, the better ones will open a microscope and, and, and look at the cells and make sure they have cells in there.

Right. Um, we've, we realized, and I was one of the first in this country to realize that, is that the cells themselves aren't doing something. It's what they're secreting and in my mind as a biochemist, they can't just be secreting proteins and and RNA because those will break down in your body too quickly for you to use.

Something must have been protecting them. And so when I figured out that there was a, a fat ball [00:10:00] protecting them, I got very excited because now I understood. So now I had to characterize that fat ball and make sure I had the right amount of them and had something inside of them. But the hardware to do that didn't exist.

So you were kind of having to do it. Like we're having to figure out whether there is a Planet nine right now. You look at gravitational waves, you look at all kinds of things, but you can't look at the planet, so you can't look at the exosome or you couldn't. Um, and so what has happened is I, I, I, I've driven a lot of my staff crazy over the years thinking that we were putting out a product that wasn't reproducible because it was so hard.

Um, but I had to explain to them, look, if, if it's therapeutic, if, if it's working in the dish and we can see it working, and I can see it working on humans, it's working. Now we've gotten to the point where we have nine different methods. We have a microscope that it can actually see the exosome. It's a $450,000 microscope.

Um, and there's only 50 of them in the United States. But a, a lot of the [00:11:00] exosomes on the market are using the older technology, which really just shows you a particle. And if you looked, if you took this water bottle. Put it on that machine, you would see a lot of particles of plastic. Um, and so those particles are being sold as exosomes right now.

Uh, even though there's no exosomes in the product and we have characterized all these exosome products, um, that's, so for instance, if you took, um, uh, umbilical cord and you broke that up and you filtered it, you're gonna see a lot of particles. Um, but you're not gonna have exosomes in there that are therapeutic.

Uh, and unfortunately that's what's being sold because it takes me eight weeks to create a, a highly hyper purified exosome. Mm-hmm. It takes, takes 24 hours to take an umbilical cord, break it up and sell it as an exosome. And what happens invariably is that labs that do that kind of thing end up contaminating patients with e coli or whatever [00:12:00] it is, because they don't have the safety systems in place.

And then when the DA. Inspector that I just told you about comes who's not a scientist, and they look at the vial and it says exosome on it. Well, now they start putting out public warnings against exosomes because, well, they told us it was an exosome. It's not their job to figure out whether it's an exosome or not.

It's their job to warn the public against products labeled as exosomes. Mm-hmm. Um, and it's been a huge issue for me. Um, and, and it's, that's why it's taken me till my third inspection to calm them down as far as I'm concerned, you know? Mm-hmm. You're talking about electron microscopy is what you're using to look at exome particles?

Well, ours is light-based. It's, uh, called D storm. So it actually takes thousands of pictures of, of the cell, of the exosome, and then it compiles those into an image. It's, it gives you the same resolution as electron microscopy, but electron microscopy takes five, six days to do. Whereas I can do this [00:13:00] in seven hours.

So that's new technology. Right. Yeah, it's a puzzling concept because it's almost like people are throwing things into a blender, pulverizing, and like you said, creating like an exosome broth with umbilical cord or placenta, whatever the tissue is. And then how does the consumer even know, begin to know what they're getting or how did they quantify?

Like we see a lot of, uh, aesthetic companies marketing millions upon billions. 30 billion, a hundred bi billion exosomes per vile, right. What are they really doing out there? That was, well, those mach, the, the machines I was telling you about. Um, you can set them to whatever you want as far as their precision is concerned.

So when I started, and I, I mean, I was the first exosome I made, I set the machines very precise because I wanted to, I didn't want any noise. I wanted to make sure I had what I thought I am. Um, as my first, second, third competitor came out, they would just loosen that [00:14:00] machine and, and start saying, well, we have more than Kymera.

You know, they say they have a billion, we have 10 billion. Then the next one would say, we have a hundred billion. Then the next one would say 300 billion, and it just, it just went like that and it was. Super frustrating for us. Um, so that's why we came up with a formula, a unit, which we now use, which takes into account the RNA, which which is really what's doing the regenerative work there, the proteins, which is the secondary regenerative work.

And then we use those concentrations to come out with a unit. So we provide the same reproducibility. We don't count the particles anymore because we don't want to be in that fight. Mm-hmm. I mean, we do count, we count 'em, we give 'em to you. But, but we're not relying on them for reproducibility. 'cause as I said, they're not reproducible because there's d different kinds of particles in there.

I. That's what drove my staff crazy, was trying to put out lots and seeing that the particle numbers were changing when the protein concentration wasn't changing. Mm-hmm. And saying, which one do we rely on? So we said, [00:15:00] we're not gonna rely on the particles, we're gonna rely on the protein concentration and the RNA, and that's how we've gone forward.

I, I almost feel like the companies that are the most reputable in their exome science are not advertising the quantity per the billions and millions of exomes. They're, they're more aware of the scientific issues and are just not even advertising those numbers. 'cause they're not, they're not meaningful.

And one way you can tell with, with the safety of the product is, is that my product was made from a cell line. Uh, I made that cell line in 2018. Every time I go to make a new lot, I go back to the freezer and I take out cells from 2018. I have not been replicating them since 2018, and so whatever I make for you today is exactly the same quality as what I made for you in 2018.

So if you've been using my product for six years and you have a patient who comes in with whatever indication, say it was, um, say it was an aesthetic indication, or you're doing a surgery and you wanna make sure you stop that inflammation, it's [00:16:00] gonna work the same today as it did then. And you also know that we've treated 500,000 patients who have not gotten contaminated.

And you further know that we've spent $20 million characterizing that for the FDA. So testing it for every virus known to man. Whereas when you get a tissue exosome, which is a ground up placenta or available port, they cannot afford to do $20 million worth of testing on that one. 300 vial batch. Mm-hmm.

So they rely on the testing of the mother. Mm-hmm. Um, and then they look at which they're only tested for 12 different things, uh, uh, H-I-V-C-M-V, those kind of things. Uh, and then they do sterility for bacteria. Um, and then they try to release you. The problem is if they've got 300 vials and they test 1215 for sterility, they don't know that these are not, are sterile.

Mm-hmm. That's why so many contaminations have come out and that's why the FDA is trying to close it down. I don't particularly think it's the [00:17:00] pharmaceutical companies. I don't think there's a conspiracy. I think it's the number of adverse events because I get sent these adverse events all the time. But practitioners that that know people who used another exosome product and then they have this sepsis from using contaminated product.

Um. Other than bacterial infection from, um, you know, contamination in the product, what are the other possible, uh, side effects or complications you've seen? Have you seen much immune stimulation where, you know, uh, yeah. The HLA antigens on the surface of the cells of this foreign person or coming into your system, right?

If you grind up, uh, an umbilical cord again, and you're going to get a lot of HLA in there from those cells that you. Ground up. Uh, when you have a hyper isolated exosome, there's no HLA on the surface of that, so that's why it, it doesn't cause an immune response. And I've heard many times, uh, well, I did [00:18:00] somebody else's exosomes and I, I felt something, and when I did yours, I didn't feel anything.

That, that's the point. You were not supposed to feel anything. Um, if you did feel something, you were having some kind of immune response. Um, what what I'm looking for for you to feel something is three to four to eight weeks later after you start having a regenerative event. Now, it depends on what we're talking about.

If you're talking about chronic fatigue, that could be immediate. But if you're talking about regenerating the spine, that's gonna take a period of time. If you're talking about microneedling or laser. Um, within three days, that three to four days that topical laser will have healed, uh, as opposed to seven to 10 days.

Um, so yeah, that's what we're looking for. But if you had caused inflammation, the reason you're healing in that three to five days is because I stopped the inflammation. Mm-hmm. I stopped it in your body. Uh, if you had that HLA, you're gonna cause even more inflammation and that recovery time is gonna be even [00:19:00] longer.

Yes. Now, the, um, pluripotent, are you using flury, puttin stem cells or what level of There are Multipotent? Multipotent. So placenta, these are the ones in your lab are derived from what source and what origin? Um, mesenchymal stem cells from a c-section placenta that we isolated cells from and created the cell line.

Back in 2018. Okay, so they are multipotent, so they're not at that pluripotent stage. So they have some MHC or HLA antigens on them, but the cell, the cells do, but the exosomes don't. And so I'm, I'm not using the cells, I'm, I'm just the exosomes. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And is that because of the size of the exomes or, I thought everything has HLA antigens unless it's developed by those HLAG type of molecules.

It's cause of the size. So if you took a [00:20:00] thousand exosomes, one of 'em might have one HLA marker on it. Yeah. But the, the remaining don't, in staining hours, we have not been able to find HLA on the surface and staining 'em and looking at 'em with that microscope I just told you about. That's the beauty of it.

With an electron microscope, I could not stain individual things. I could, I could look at things. With this microscope that we have, I can specifically stand in for HLA and the other markers of an exosome CD 63 9 and 81 and see if I see any HLA. And we don't see any HLA. Interesting. So a consumer looking at exome should look for the source, the origin, um, the purity.

Um, what other factors do you think are really important? I think, I think every, everything is anti-inflammatory. So as long as you have the safety profile. Now if it's made from a cell line and that cell line has been tested and many people have been [00:21:00] treated by that cell line, then you're safe. Um, there, the argument out there by the tissue providers is, oh, well, we know how KYMERA does it, but we prefer fresh.

And that makes sense in everybody's mind, right? You prefer fresh orange juice to pasteurize. But why did we create pasteurized orange juice to begin with? Is because to, to get it out to the market, we needed to make it safe. We had to pasteurize it. Mm-hmm. So fresh might taste better in an orange, but it is much more dangerous.

Than, um, a cell line derived. Uh, and I, I have trouble getting that, that argument out there. Uh, if, remember, I, I used to make fresh, I used to make amniotic fluid. I know how easy it is to make fresh. It would cost me much less. I would not need 50 employees to make a fresh product. Yeah. But I do this so that I never have an adverse event, so that my company never.

Uh, gets shut down, honestly. Uh, so that's why we do it that way. Are your [00:22:00] exosomes lyophilized, and what do you think about the whole Lyophilized controversy? Um, I know for the consumer listening, that means, you know, dehydrated down into a powder freeze dry that gets reconcentrated later. Well, I, I think about it like astronaut ice cream.

If you tasted astronaut ice cream, it doesn't taste the same as ice cream, but they're both nourishing, right? So I have lyophilized, our exosomes. I do have them in the lab. I sell 'em outside of this country. I don't sell 'em in this country because the frozen is so much more potent. And I, I had it made, the first thing I made was a cream in, in 2010.

I. Why was that not the first thing that I put out to the public? Because I knew that the frozen exosomes were much more effective, and I didn't wanna ruin the brand of kymera with the cream. I wanted it to go directly into your hands, Dr. K, and then you know how to use it. And so you would microneedle, you'd laser.

Then you would use my [00:23:00] exosomes and then you would see the potency. So I wanted to build the brand of exosomes, and I really, I made one mistake when I started is that I talked about exosomes, and now everybody can claim to have an exosome. I should have just talked about kymera zones. Mm-hmm. Um, but I wanted the potency of this new, uh, evolution of science to be recognized.

So I, that's why I sell 'em only as frozen in the United States. Um, if I want to sell them to the consumer, maybe I'll, I'll sell 'em freeze dried, but to the clinic, uh, it has to be frozen. Okay. And then there was a recent published paper that talked about Lyophilization of xms and how, looking at many of the brands out there that.

There just really aren't active live exosomes present in the powdered formulations. What, what did you think of that paper? I think that there probably weren't exosomes in the, in the starting, uh, yeah, product, because I have tested our live, live exosomes and. We, [00:24:00] we do, we have different kinds of, of, of, um, testing that we do in vitro.

We don't just test the concentrations of things. We have dermal fibroblasts growing that we create a wound, a scratch test in. We have anti-inflammatory tests that we do. Uh, and that's that we have seen that the lyophilized, we'll close the wound. It will not close it as rapidly as the frozen. And the phenotype, what the cell looks like is not as pretty, it's not as stem cell, like as the frozen.

Mm-hmm. So, so, you know, it it what you would intellectually think. I mean, I, I know that when you freeze dry something, you have to take the water out. You have to put the sugar back in to, to represent that water. The protein does not fold the same way. So the proteins are not gonna be as effective. I already, I knew that before I did these tests.

Then I did the test and they came out the way I just told you. So good for a consumer, not so good for a, a clinician. How do you kind of see [00:25:00] exosomes evolving over the next five to 10 years? And this leads right into some very exciting news that you might wanna tell us about. Oh yeah. I. Well, uh, we have an exosome right now that we have not gotten to the limit of, um, we, we keep learning new things about it every day.

Uh, it's working very well. That's not to mean that we can't create modified exosomes in the future, and I, I have created some, think of your favorite stem cell protein. You can meld that together with the exosome and then the exosome can get to where you want and do that work so you, you can improve on what we're doing.

But one thing I never could figure out. And this is the benefit of having been in this business for so long, is my collaborators. One thing I could not figure out is how am I going to rejuvenate the entire body? I know for sure I can't get enough exosomes into every cell of your body. It's just not gonna happen.

Right. [00:26:00] Then I met a group in, uh, in la a group of neurologists who had been working with targeted focused ultrasound, and this is the same ultrasound. Used in heart transplantation to monitor for, um, for, for embolisms. Hmm. And if you, if you put that ultrasound on tissue for long enough, well it is hitting the tissue because a wave is coming back to you that you're reading.

It is affecting that tissue, it turns out. This was not known before, but it's known now. And so now a lot of neurological disease is being treated with by just modulating the tissue there, maybe opening the blood brain barrier. So this brilliant scientist, physician, Dr. Sheldon Jordan came up with this thought, well, if we focus ultrasound and give exosomes intravenously, um, will more go to where we focus the ultrasound.

Hmm. So, uh, Chimera funded a rat study at the City of Hope. We show that [00:27:00] indeed we knew that exosomes were already crossing the blood-brain barrier. When I tell you we have exosomes in our vial, I can find them in the rat of brain, but where we focus the ultrasound, we found 10 to a hundred times more exosomes.

So now you've created this method of targeting. Which is really going to improve these outcomes for neurological disease. But then he went one step further. Well, there has been literature coming out since 2017 showing that if you rejuvenate the neural stem cells in the hypothalamus, the rat lives five, six times longer.

Because the hypothalamus then tells the pituitary gland to start secreting all the same growth hormones you did when you were a child and, and that's how you regenerate yourself. Not with my exosomes per se, with my exosomes, rejuvenating the organism. Which is a complete game changer, you know, and, um, so we have filed patents on that.

And we also submitted that as our [00:28:00] application to the Longevity xprize. And if your viewers don't know what the XPRIZE is, um, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and all these companies began at the xprize, uh, 20 years ago that Pierre Dand is funded for the first private company to get to space. And since that time, he's done many X prizes, carbon capture, X prizes.

Water in, in, uh, places like Africa doesn't have a lot of water. Uh, now they made a longevity xprise. If I can demonstrate that I rewound your aging by 10 years. There's a $61 million purse, 20 years, $71 million in three years, $81 million. Now, we just found out, and this is the first place where this will be publicly, um, mentioned that we have been accepted as semi-finalists out of 550 competitors in the world to compete for this brand.

Woo hoo. This is amazing. This is really a big deal and we're all very excited about it, and I'm excited [00:29:00] because, you know, to prove these things. I mean, it takes funding and, and now I'm gonna be able to bring together the groups that I can do all this testing because I have to demonstrate that I can rewind your, your physical power by 10, 20, 30 years, your mental capacity by 10, 20, 30 years, and your immunological capacity by 10, 20, 30 years.

Wow, that's a, that's a lot of work. And, and it has to be done over 80 to a hundred patients, you know? So, um, and someday your beauty also. And, and beauty, right? So, so now we're talking about, and, and a lot of people in aesthetics, they say, oh, it's, it's anti-aging 'cause I'm making you look younger. Well, now we get to do both.

We get to make you look younger from the outside and the inside and I think extend our lifespan till 300 years. So, um, I I, but you guys were chosen. As finalist as semi-finalists. So semi-finalists. Okay. So now we have some work to do. Incredible. Then we have seven, $7 [00:30:00] million purse, and then we have more work to do for the 61.

Wow. Has your mind blown when you got that? Um, did you get my mind's, my mind's been blown since I had this done to myself because I've been do, I've been giving myself my exosomes for 10 years. You can argue, I can show you a picture of myself 10 years ago that I look more or less the same, but I, my, my age may have slowed, but it was not rewinding.

Now, after I, I did this, which I did in July of last year, I can, I got my tennis timing back. I can play tennis like I a professional tennis player like I did when I was a kid. Um, I had lost that timing and ability about 20 years ago. Wait, you did the microfocused ultrasound treatment. That's right. With some infusions.

Hmm. That's correct. Wow. Okay. So you're a, you're the. NN of zero right there. N of zero. So, well, we've been doing this in Costa Rica, so we do have a little bit larger n [00:31:00] Okay. Um, but now I'm, uh, everybody is reporting this type of thing. I can jump over things when I didn't want to jump, you know, I'm turning 50 this year.

Mm-hmm. Um, I can jump up and down off my boat without slipping, which I had done a couple times last year. Um, and I can see it. And so my mind was blown with that. My mind is now blown that it's being recognized. And it's blown that I'm gonna be able to bring this to the public in the coming years. Um, because we have FDA approval for intravenous administration of our exosomes.

Mm-hmm. I have to file another IND for this use, but if I hadn't already had this approval, it would take me another six to seven years to get it, you know? Mm-hmm. So, so putting ourselves, you know, you only get one shot putting ourselves in the right. Place and time is really starting to benefit pale. Your FDA approval for exosomes, that's for like extremely sick patients in the ICU and like that was for post covid, post covid treatment, intravenous administration.

[00:32:00] Yeah. Um, I just uploaded some final data that they wanted last Sunday, and now we're putting in all these different, uh, applications. One is for aging skin, which is applies to you. That's topical micro kneeling. The second one is for post laser treatment. Um, and the third one is for this longevity, uh, as well as keloids and some others.

Amazing. Wow. So there's more research ahead, um, for you to, A lot of work to do. Yeah. So you envision in the next five years being able to get exosome therapy with microfocus kind of ultrasound directed at an organ of, you know, injury or damage where you're aging or having a. Neurologic Neuro neurodegenerative disorder, stroke or, or TBI, I mean, that's, that's really what I get more excited about.

The brain. Um, the brain because I've seen many stroke patients benefit. Um, we can, we have also [00:33:00] looked at renal failure, all kinds of other things, but, um. You know, if you're not cognizant, that's that's not much of a life you can, you can get a kidney transplant. Uh, um, well, I'm not easy. Yeah. It's, it's a lot different than, than a stroke.

How is that administered? Is it like a, a helmet that It's a helmet, directs ultrasound waves towards the hypothalamus and, yeah. So we're all gonna have our own helmets where you, you have to go get an mri. Yeah. And then you have a 3D printed helmet. Wow. And then the transducers put into the helmet and specifically knows where to target.

And interestingly, I was just talking about this with Dr. George two days ago. You could put multiple targets on there when you make that helmet. So we could put one up here for depression. The frontal goretex. If you'd had a stroke, we could put one targeting where that stroke was. Um, we could have one point in a hypothalamus and then you keep that helmet in your garage and, and once a year, whatever you, when you go to get your therapy, you take your helmet with you.[00:34:00]

Very cool. Yeah. And for Parkinson's patients too, I imagine that you could direct therapy to that area of this. Very much so. The nigra. That is fascinating. Wow. And then in the infusion of exosomes, you'd get simultaneously would be your own harvest exosomes, or these are kymera derived, uh, it would be the kymera derived, right?

Yeah. And, uh, we have tested your own harvest exosomes and it doesn't work as well. So that goes to show you, and, and there's literature out there that I can show you that, um, a 40-year-old mesenchymal stem cells secretes about a hundred growth factors. A, uh, day zero placental me mesenchymal stem cells secretes 300 to 400.

Yeah. So, you know, that's why we're dying. We're not secreting all the growth factors we did when we were young. Right. Uh, you know. Wow. Okay. And that, I mean, does that lead us down a path where someday in the future, like for me and my own kids, I harvested their umbilical [00:35:00] cord blood, every kid when they were born and like, should we just be doing this for everybody?

We should be doing, uh, harvesting their umbilical cord or, yeah, like getting very young cells, their amniocentesis fluid, their umbilical cord blood, or, you know. Well, the, the issue is, and yes, I do think you should do that. I think you should do it for a number of reasons. First of all. The child has autism.

Duke has shown that using the the child's cord blood does improve their symptoms, so that's a nice autologous way to use it. Umbilical cord blood does not have a lot of stem cells in it. In fact, some will argue that there's no mesenchymal stem cells. There are definitely hematopoietic stem cells, but if I wanted to transplant you, I would need three umbilical cords, and so you're gonna have to use two from somebody else anyway.

Um, now if you could tip the tissue, you could expand cells out of that and then you could give your children their own young exosomes or their own young [00:36:00] cells later, um, that's, that's a possibility. That's also gonna cost you a large amount of money. What I am doing is providing an off the shelf. Yes, it's not your child's own, but it has all the same stuff in it and it's been tested and safe and, and reproducible, so.

Amazing. Mm-hmm. So are you, you must be super excited about the xprize. I can't even imagine, like this is gonna put you in a zone of funding, hopefully, and, you know, meeting the best scientists in the world. Uh, just as your peers, when do you get to present all your data for that? So the event is May 12th in New York.

Uh, I'm beyond excited, you know, I've funded this lab myself since the beginning. I have no investors and, um, it's, it's hard to get past the stages that we're talking about now. Just based on a market that is now flooded with these other quote unquote exosome products. When I was the only exosome in the [00:37:00] world, I could buy $450,000 microscopes, no problem.

And I did. But now I have to compete against, uh, cheaper to make and cheaper to purchase products. And so this is coming right at a time that is really gonna take this forward. Well, I think you have a really, um, unique way of explaining the science. It's obvious that you're like truly so scientifically passionate and you've, you, you've done every experiment yourself with your own hands, and that really shows when you're talking and, and the understanding of the science is what we need to convey to the public and also just to the aesthetic providers out there that are, you know, by not asking the right questions, they're driving the industry in the wrong direction.

So I, I. I saw someone today say that today was National Exosome day. It wasn't my, wasn't my company. It's like they gave you the right to do that, but I get more, more excited in, in surgery and plastic surgery [00:38:00] that the pre-treatment of the patient with IV exosomes would make their recovery much more rapid and, and we done any studies to support that or have you seen that in practice?

I may have done it to myself. Um, but, and, and I, I, we have to do an interview after the interview. We've done it with other people. Um, but that's, that's another IND that I wanna do. And, and, and that might not just apply to aesthetic surgery, although it does. But even think gallbladder surgery, one of the main.

Um, adverse events is scarring after that, you know? Yeah. And so if we could stop that scarring, we can make all of our surgeries much, much safer. Yeah. Or for heart attack patients to not stenosis their stents and like, you know, exactly. Those all kind of healing issues. But yeah, I can envision scarless surgery coming for sure.

Coming for sure. Yeah, sure. That's in our lifetimes, I believe. The advent of scarless face lifter you like, I mean, [00:39:00] eventually the idea that maybe we would support the ligaments of the face and the, the fibroblast turnover and the collagen production so that we don't get skin laxity and all these issues.

Right. That's the goal. Yeah. Um, are you a fan of microneedling, um, exosomes, injecting them subcutaneously, intradermally or iv or some combination of all the above. I think it's a combination of all the above. What the micro, the, uh, aging skin that we're putting into the, I, uh, FDA right now is topical, um, after microneedling.

So I do like that. And we have the data. Dr. Chernoff has published this data, if you wanna read it. Um, I think in burns, like, like post laser, we want to do that topically and intravenously. Um, because what I have seen is, is, and this was really blew me away when I started a long time ago, was J plasma.

Right. And how invasive is that? Right. What would you say the downtime is for [00:40:00] jpl? Yeah. Seven to 10 days. Easily. Easily. Right. Well, we took a patient, they did Jay plasma, we applied. Exosomes topically from, well, he injected them pre subq then we applied them topically and topically every day for three to four days after no inflammation ensued.

And, and so he was writing to me and sending me pictures saying, I've never seen this before. 'cause he had sent me pictures of other patients where they were, but they, well, like weepy leave. Weep, weep. Yeah. Right. And, and he was so excited. And then they ran out of exosomes on day four. Oh. All the inflammation came back as if we hadn't touched it.

So that's what told me that inflammation, once you cause it, it's not where you see it. It's in the lymph nodes. It's in the spleen. Mm-hmm. And so if we're really going to stop that, we're going to have to try another method of delivery. And so that's why we want to try to test this. Um, for burn patients.

It's this intravenous administration as soon as they come in, um, or pre in a patient that you would have in [00:41:00] your office. Um, and then topic, uh, thereafter. And see if we can really mitigate that. Yeah, I think that that's kind of the key to, do you need a little inflammation to heal or do you feel like you can suppress it fully and heal better?

I think with laser you're, you're pretty much getting as much inflammation as you need with microneedling. You do need some inflammation to heal. Um, and so you're right, the timing of that is, is pretty key. We, we need to microneedle actually the way I, we have a kit that I sell and. What I tell people to do first is, is in the microneedling device, put hydrogen peroxide, use that first.

Now you're gonna get even more inflammation. So more cells are gonna come. Mm-hmm. Wait, wait 20, 30 minutes now come back and, and, and re-roll with the exosomes. Hmm. To, to try to do, bring the right cells into the area for healing, and then you need to turn off their angry [00:42:00] features, but leave their healing features.

Right. And you just got to the key there. Why I didn't release this, the, the cream earlier. Because when I used the cream on myself, it worked. And three days later I thought, who is this? You know? Mm. Who's the soft person? But when I used it on my mother, it didn't work. And when I used it on a friend's mother, it didn't work.

And. That made me realize, without your intervention in the clinic, I'm gonna ruin the brand. Exosomes you, the intervention must happen. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah, that's very true. What advice would you give to practitioners who wanna start bringing exosomes into their practice? I. I, I think that just working with microneedling and topic application afterwards, you're gonna, you're gonna start to see it.

You have to keep in mind that even microneedling, without exosomes, you're gonna see a benefit, right? So I think that's why a lot of these exosome products have sort of gone away with it was because, oh, look at what a great outcome we got. Well, that was, you did that, you know? [00:43:00] Mm-hmm. The needle did that, right?

The needle did that. Uh, but you do get a greater outcome when you use better exosomes. Um. I've tried all kinds of exosomes, I've made cucumber exosomes for Europe, you know? Mm-hmm. Um, I have tested them in in vitro and they are 20% anti-inflammatory, uh, in our assay, but our human ones are 80, 90% anti-inflammatory.

So, but that's, that's all Europe's gonna allow. Then that's what Europe is gonna get. Um, yeah. So, yeah, that's what you think about it. The science has been slow to evolve in, in the European side and like, what are we gonna do in the, the research and developments at Kymera to help push along, you know, permissions from the FDA and the ability for us to use the products more aggressively.

'cause I think we want that, well, this XPRIZE is gonna give me the money to do that even though it was for longevity that brings the investors in that I can now use [00:44:00] part of that money on, on the aesthetics. I'm gonna move as quickly as I can. So give me, gimme a year, year and half. We'll do it. That's it.

Okay. I am so excited to be the first to congratulate you on this amazing news for being an xprize, semi-finalist. I've heard about the Xpr, you know, and I've really been excited to see what it can do in this space for aesthetics and for plastic surgery. For surgery in general, for longevity. This is huge for you guys.

It really is. Actually, there's future XPRIZEs coming that I'll tell you about. It's someday, but I can't wait to compete in those, but they're related to, to women's health. So. It's just fun to be part of that organization now, you know, they, I have a little pin says xprize. Don't know why I'm not wearing it, but Oh my gosh, how cool.

How cool is that? Um, well good luck with your presentation coming up in New York for the future xprize. And where can people find you if they wanna get more information about Kymera or [00:45:00] about Duncan Ross himself? Well, they can just go to exosomes. Oh, that's a great website. That's great that you got that one.

Well, when you first, you, you can get it right. Yeah, that's right. exos.com to front learn more about Kyra. Well, this has been fascinating. I can't thank you enough for coming on the podcast and, um, I definitely wanna come down to Kymera headquarters and visit with you. And I love Greg Chernoff. He does amazing work.

He and I have talked so often about your product, so I'm really glad to finally get the chance to bring you on the podcast. And, and I appreciate that you said that. And, and that's one last thing to say to your providers is if you have not visited their lab, how do you know they have one? You know, a lot of these companies are markers, and it is absolutely vital you do that.

And that's why we invite people to, to come visit us. I mean, I, I put that image that you're seeing behind me. You can see that from a window in our lap so that you know, you know where it's coming from. So I invite you to please, please come. It's a pleasure to talk to someone who's a [00:46:00] scientist and an op entrepreneur, but I love that you have a vision.

I love that you're using these products and you feel like you're 30 again. I can't wait to learn, can't wait to try that for myself. Absolutely. I mean, we, I, I don't know if you're looking for, to have a strong menses back, but that's another indication. Um, we have been. Uh, bringing, we've, I've created 10 children by making the, the partners fertile.

Wow. I have actresses who have not had menses for four months that I now have having one every month. Wow. Um, and just the opportunities are endless with young exs, right? Yeah. Well, ovulation is one of the biggest signs of staying young, and, you know, as that turns off women age exponentially. So, yes, I think definitely there's a, a room for, you know.

Turning on, you know, the longevity in our ovaries, which will improve women's health tremendously. Yeah. Thank you [00:47:00] so much Duncan, for all of this amazing content and um, I congratulate you for the Xpr Summit, me finally. So I'm excited to see what you're gonna do in the episode world in the next five years.

Thank you. Hope to see you again, Sue. Stay tuned guys. That's it for now. Don't forget to find me on my Instagram. It's beauty by Dr. K-D-R-K-A-Y and our website is the same beauty by dr k.com someday to have an exosome product, but not until Duncan proves it. And, um, I hope to see you in the office for a microneedling, topical lips, exosome treatments, and someday in the future IV treatments, which will be widespread.

I really think that that's the future of what we're gonna be doing in our industry. Um, I hope you guys live long and prosper. Think about your longevity every single day. What things we can do now to form future you. So important that you start thinking outside of the box. That's it for now, guys. Stay beautiful.

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