Let's start with highlighting the fact that for the last century or so (when original, natural medicine was replaced with pharmaceutical medicine), conventional medicine has been focused on trying to shut down or stop or interfere or block some process in the body, using a huge range of pharmaceutical, made-in-a-lab, synthetic chemical medication.

No question, it’s been amazing, and especially brilliant at neo-natal and emergency medicine, but we shouldn't forget that the body itself has this extraordinary healing power, this innate intelligence, this capacity for regeneration, renewal and repair, that we have yet to unlock.

As I'm sure you all know, I actively follow the ethos of the Institute of Functional Medicine, and I've recently listened to another of their podcasts, as always relating to human health, but again the theory of which we can easily translate to our horses.

The podcast talks about the latest in the world of stem cells and cell therapy, which some may say is the absolute future of medicine. We’ve likely all heard about it but don’t know much about it, including me, so this was a whole new area for me.

Meet Dr. Bob Hariri, a surgeon, biomedical scientist, and CEO of the world-leading human cellular therapeutics company, Celularity Inc., which pioneers the use of stem cells to treat a range of life-threatening human diseases. With over 170 issued and pending patents for discoveries, including placenta-derived stem cells, Dr Bob has also authored over 150 published chapters and articles. Oh, and he likes to fly jets – he’s a jet-rated commercial pilot with thousands of hours of flight time in over 60 different military and civilian aircraft. 😉

The podcast goes into all the nitty-gritty of stem cells, what they are, what they do, what the options are, how they can be used, and basically unpacks why this is such an important part of the future of healthcare and medicine. And it's one heck of a therapeutic concept, especially considering that we probably don't know it but we all actually have this within us - whether human or horse.

This is where we are now in the world of functional medicine. Locked within us are these innate longevity pathways, switches, systems that we can activate, and all through the power of understanding stem cells and cell therapy.

Back in the real world, though, we’re all sicker than ever, despite so many different therapies, techniques, knowledge, technology. So what are we doing every day to screw ourselves up and shorten our lifespan? We have all the tools - nutrition, exercise ... yet we’re still suffering from many of the same chronic degenerative conditions that have eroded our quality of life and performance for decades as we age.

We seem to continue to negatively affect the fundamental toolkit we naturally have in our body that is grounded in these remarkable stem cells, whose job it is to continually repair and renew and renovate the body during its lifetime.

The way we fuel ourselves through what we eat, what we consume - the nutritional platform; there’s now a lot of attention being paid to preservatives and other chemicals that are not necessarily natural (I’ve blogged about it many times 😉), and there’s no doubt that these chemicals are a burden on the body. The body’s natural detoxification organs (liver, kidneys, lymph nodes) are designed to deal with foreign chemicals, but when they have an impact on the programming of the body’s cells, or if they in some way disrupt the normal metabolic processes, the cells suffer, and so does the body’s stem cell population.

We all know excessive sugar and processed/refined carbohydrates are incredibly damaging; factory-made processed (fake) foods, supposed nutritional supplements that are produced in a chemical lab rather than from nature, clearly all have a negative effect. 

Then there’s stress. We still don’t recognise how important the neuro:immune axis is - the immune system is a giant stem cell factory and repository. What we do to ourselves creates a signalling from the nervous system to the immune system that over time will create chronic, cumulative damage, so avoiding stress could not be more essential.

Then there’s one of the most important areas we have to preserve, which is to take care of skeletal muscle tissue, because without it we don’t move, and nothing ages the body more than lack of movement.

Skeletal muscle is the largest wet body mass of the body compared to everything else, which means it’s the largest venous capacity organ in the body. This means that all the biological stuff that circulates around the immune cells and the stem cells will feature highly in skeletal muscle as well.

So, by looking after our skeletal muscle tissue, we’re helping to mobilise these cells into our body, which is how we effect the repair and renewal and renovation process that keeps the body healthy, and hold back the aging process.

So there we have it; nutritional issues, stress and declining muscle mass - the three weakest links. Long and short, we need to cut out processed, fake, junk food and sugar, deal with stress, learn how to regulate the nervous system, and make sure we build and keep our muscle as we age. Whether human or horse.

Pulling this together, it makes perfect sense to look at what we naturally have and use these tools, and why not create a really proactive approach to maintaining the quality of our lives and our performance into our older age? Healthy, comfortable aging is basically about maintaining mobility, cognition, and immunity, all addressable with the tools the body already has.

Whether human or (how we keep our) horse 😉

So that was the short version of this blog 😁! The rest delves deeper into the latest on human stem cell and cellular therapy, but the good news is that when it comes to equine stem cell research it's already out there in equine joint-related injuries, with a reinjury rate of less than 30%, so all promising stuff!

Stem cells

“When you deliver a stem cell to a site like the liver, it is capable of restoring any of the corrupted software in that organ and tissue.”
Dr. Bob Hariri

Why do we have stem cells? What’s the big hullabaloo about them? Why is everybody talking about it and why is this the promise of the future of medicine?

Stem cell therapy started to hit the airwaves back in the 1980s, but if we start at the beginning, we all originate as a single cell, created by the fertilisation of an egg by a sperm, a direct composite of the parental DNA. From that original single cell a further trillions upon trillions of cells then take on a very specialised form and function.

Which means, every cell in the body of every being, regardless of age, has its origins way back to the placenta. These placental cells retain their versatility, their ability to mature and specialise into a very specific form, i.e. a brain cell or a heart cell or a bone cell, with the ability to be one of these driven by signalling that occurs at the site of the tissue or organ that calls upon a repair and renewal process. 

Every human is made up of about 25 to 30 trillion cells, so if you think about this for a second, from that original one single cell, our body then produces trillions more cells which are then continually being renewed in the body during the lifetime. All originating from that original single cell, and each one of them capable of performing a vital function in the body.

Stem cells, first and foremost, are incredibly important because none of us would exist without them; they’re what builds us - you could say that the placenta is nature’s 3D printer that prints babies. They could also be thought of as a master boot disc that you’re using constantly to renew and restore the functions of the information system in your body. (For those too young to remember the early days of computers, we all had a ‘floppy disc’ kept in a drawer, and if our computer went on the blink, we’d stick it in a drive and reboot it from the original software on that disc. Oh yes - we’ve moved on – a lot!)

However. We know that even the best software in the best computer gets glitches over time, and can get corrupted. Our DNA is no different – it’s our biological software, a programming language, and the body’s stem cells are basically the delivery system for information. A stem cell literally has the full complement of biological information stored in an uncorrupted form.

Now to where the magic happens - when you deliver a stem cell to a site like the liver, or a joint, it’s capable of restoring any of the corrupted software in that organ and tissue. A stem cell is literally the master boot disc that can be used to recover the quality of that information, which is necessary for everything in biology.

So where do we find them? They’re in the bone marrow, they’re coming from the fat tissue, and we’ve all heard of placental and umbilical cord stem cells. They can be injected into the venous system or they can be directed into a particular organ like the heart or liver, or to tissue such as in a joint.

To quote Dr Bob, “When we are built, when we are going through the process (of embryogenesis and ketogenesis) to create the newborn baby. That newborn baby has every specialised cell type they need for their future mature functioning system. The cells that go on to build the liver of a newborn will be the source of cells to continually renew that liver during our lifetime.

That’s done not by the cells that you’re born with in that specialised tissue, but by the cells that are resonant there in this versatile stem cell form, which get called upon to repair and renovate the tissue. And so when you consider that when we’re 100-years old, we want to have a liver and a brain and a heart that have the elements that build that particular organ or tissue that are of the highest quality. As long as you have a healthy uncorrupted population of stem cells in your organs and tissues.”

Let’s just repeat that last sentence – “As long as you have a healthy uncorrupted population of stem cells in your organs and tissues.” Which means that stem cells will repair and renew us to perfection each time.

However. The problem is that our stem cells are subjected to all the bad stuff as well - bad nutritional factors, too much glucose, chemicals in our foods, etc etc. All creating cumulative damage to those stem cells, which means when they need to do the repair job that they’re supposed to do, it’s not going to be as good a quality job. Stem cell exhaustion is one of the hallmarks of aging.

What we’re talking about is all the trials and tribulations we go through throughout our life - the crappy food we eat, the lack of exercise, the stressors, the lack of sleep, the environmental toxins, nutritional deficiencies - all of this does a job on our stem cells and so we get less than perfect stem cells.

For us humans there is a medical way round this, when needed, but it’s far from easy. We’ve all heard of bone marrow transplants but it’s a painful, expensive procedure, and there’s always the risk of rejection. The good news is that stem cells are now being cultured, apparently without the problem of rejection. Again not easy; it’s only available in certain countries – Panama, Costa Rica, Saudi Arabia to name a few, and it ain’t cheap, but at least it’s out there.

Science now knows that stem cells can go in and totally replace and remodel an organ like the bone marrow. They go in and fill a gap because the cells there are missing, dying or diseased. Stem cells are apparently so clever that they know, when injected into the body, where they are in the body and/or where they need to go. This is how precise today’s cellular medicine is - they don’t necessarily have to be put in a specific location; they’ll find their way, and when they get there they do what they’re supposed to do as nature designed.

This means that if there’s a patient who’s got, say, liver damage as a consequence of cancer treatment, their chemotherapy or whatnot, if they then get an intravenous infusion of stem cells meant to replace the bone marrow, the cells that wind up in the liver actually help rebuild the liver too. This versatility and this very mission-focused ability of stem cells to replace and renew our tissues in an appropriate way, is fundamental to stem cells.

There’s a lot of other awesome ongoing work with publications out already on cellular therapy to treat movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease, with research having now identified the defective cells in the part of the brain that’s damaged. It’s a very exciting future for sure.

Let’s not forget, though, that the body has its own innate healing system, and it’s way smarter than pharma meds. A lot of the cancer immunotherapies are actually taking advantage of the body’s own army, its own defence system to help go and find and kill cancers. Rumour also has it that it’s working better than any therapies we’ve had for a number of different things. It’s not universally effective across all cancers, but it’s all very promising.

The thinking is also about prevention – preventing getting joint disease and having to replace the joint several times times in a lifetime with prosthetics. And it could go further, i.e. dementia prevention to clearing up arterial plaque. As I type there are several cases of rotator cuff and degenerative back pain having been successfully reversed courtesy of private stem cell culture therapy.

It's still early days – science is just at the beginning of starting to dig into the field of longevity, looking to activate the body’s own repair systems that then activate the body’s own innate intelligence. This is a field that’s going to continue to explode; we just need the regulatory boffins to do their job now and make it more readily available for everyone, including our horses 😉.