It was born in Nashville, Tennessee. My uncle and dad were both boxers, and so boxing was
a big part of my life growing up, watching the fights every single week. But I started
wrestling and I started competing heavily in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Got a scholarship
to wrestle in college and at 18 I was able to go to these different mixed martial arts events.
Head play, very impressive. I was doing professional fights traveling across the country,
but I was thinking about going down more of a training route. And so I opened my martial arts
gym and in five years I had one of the largest MMA schools in the country. It's my clothing line.
We were the largest manufacturer of Brazilian jiu-jitsu martial arts uniforms. I had one of
the highest rated non-syndicate sports show in the country and everything was going extremely well.
It was dust in the west. Got a busy day. Just trained hard.
One day I was training a guy and I threw a kick. Kind of in a warm-up session but
he checked it really hard and I tore my LCL, PCL, and meniscus. And so I was taking the pain
medication for a couple years and when I went to stop I went through a draw. And the therapist
said America's behind the times when it comes to opiate withdrawal. Google iBugging.
It supposedly stopped 100% of opiate withdrawals but it was illegal in the United States but it was
available in Mexico. And so I went to Mexico City. I did iBugging there. I was home 72 hours later,
never had a craving, never had a withdrawal. And I thought to myself well what else is out
there? My mom has a rare form of rheumatoid arthritis and she broke her back and she
got tuberculosis. Multiple staff infections all due to the side effects of the medication.
And I had read about a study called Coley's Toxins for rheumatoid arthritis and it was from 1923
from a doctor named William Coley. Coley's causes a fever. Basically after the fever was done
people would have a relief in their symptoms. You know what we do currently for autoimmune
diseases is we suppress the immune system and this stimulates the immune system. And
had Coley's Toxins. And there was a hospital in Mexico that had it but it had closed two years before.
I knew my mom was sick and I wanted to find answers for her and I wanted iBugging that to become
mainstream one day. And it sounds crazy but my two partners and I we purchased the hospital,
hired back the original staff with a mission to try to help people. But our first patient
was my mom. She came in she was in a wheelchair after three weeks she was in remission. All of her
joint pain was gone. It was like a miracle. In 2021 we launched our stem cell program.
My friend Eddie Bravo came down and he had a labrum tear in his shoulder. We injected
the tear and four or five months later he called and said Ed this thing is like it's
unbelievable how good I'm feeling. Joe Rogan did an interview with Eddie Bravo on the podcast.
He mentions us a lot. You know I got the stem cells in my shoulder. We should let everybody know
this is the place that's in Tijuana. It's run by Scotty Nelson, Ed Clay. My friend got serious
stem cells down in Tijuana where they could do wild. Did you go to the place in Tijuana?
Yeah. Ed Clay's place? Yeah. Shout out to Ed Clay. And the hospital started blowing up.
As it was a huge change for the hospital but it was definitely pushback from conventional circle.
It was oh that stuff doesn't work they're just taking advantage of people. That's quackery down
in Mexico. But the American health system is absolutely broken. It lacks compassion
and common sense. It treats patients like a number. Seeing my mom get better and other
patients get better. I knew we were on the right path. People know us for stem cells but stem cells
is like it's very simple science to us. Our capabilities is really the future of medicine.
If you just cut all that red tape these geniuses do what they do. We could cure two-thirds of
solid tumor cancers in the next seven years. I truly believe that. Well it's my absolute
pleasure right now to be joined by Ed Clay. Ed thanks for coming in. We've been wanting to do this
for some time. I appreciate you having me. I ran into you a bunch as I was you know we were running
around during the election and around Robert Kennedy Jr. and you were very supportive of
Maha and helping make a lot of things happen there. But just getting back I mean you know
I just think about my story like I never would have planned on being here and what a crazy
journey. People must ask you all the time how did you get into this? Did those moves feel
where they work? Were they orchestrated? Did you feel guided? How did you come into this? To go
from MMA? You're running your own training facility and then decide to get into building
a hospital? I mean that's a pretty big jump. There's a big jump. My mom was sick and I
have a big faith in God and just kind of leaned on him during the pressure. That's what got me
through it. But we needed answers for her and there were no answers in the U.S. And so it was
like what can we do? And when I read the study on Coley's toxins it made sense to me. They've
been suppressing her immune system. The side effects that she was getting were unbearable
and we didn't have any more options. So I found Coley's toxins. You know the hospital
had closed a couple years before in Mexico and we just figured it out, bought it.
Well, how did you talk the Wii into it? I think that's a big thing too. There's one thing of
having a dream but then enrolling other people around you into that because it was your mom
not theirs. Were those partners from just earlier? Were they the same partners you had at your
gym? No, not the same partner. Scott Nelson, he's been one of my best friends for 30 years.
He owned an MMA company called OTM and it's like his mom too. He's very close to my mom.
And then Gedrick Peary, he did work with me at the gym. But I showed him the idea. We were all
single at the time and we were like, let's just do it. She changed the world. It made
sense. I remember we were trying to get people to invest with us and I couldn't understand
why people didn't want to invest. Now, 11 years later, I'm like, I would never invest in something
like that. You know, no way. But we lived in the hospital the first six months because we
wanted to learn everything we possibly could about a hospital and just work really hard.
Seven days a week, it was wake up. We lived together after we moved out of the hospital,
wake up, drink coffee together, talking about work, get home late, have dinner together,
talking about work and it was just constant for the first five years.
What were the first steps? I mean, I find this fascinating because people always ask me,
what can I do? Or they'll say, I want to change the health systems. I'm like,
well, start with a clinic or something. I think we set goals sometimes that are too big
and miss the steps in between. But what are those steps? You're not a doctor, so you
go in. So are there already doctors there that you're just like, show us how this whole thing
works? What was the process? Yeah, we hired back the original staff that was running the hospital
before and then hired hospital administrators and just people that had experience with it.
But all in Mexico? All in Mexico. All speaking Spanish or they speak English?
They speak English as well. Okay, good. That helps. And we just
just grinded it out, hired good people, hired maybe some bad people too that we had to
go through. But it was just this faith that we were going to make it work. I mean,
I remember seeing the first tumor I saw shrink with Coley's toxins injected intertumorally
and it was undeniable. It's one thing in a scan where you just see it on a screen,
but when you see this guy had a tumor coming out of his neck and within three weeks,
we got it to go down probably two thirds on something that's not supposed to work.
I just knew. I just knew. And that was immunotherapy. Coley's toxins, if you look in the textbooks,
it's considered the first immunotherapy for cancer. And so from there...
They ditched it. It just was like, what happened to it?
Yeah, so Dr. Coley from 1891 to 1936 had a higher success rate treating many cancers
than we did up until about 2018 when the checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapies really got popular.
That's when they won the Nobel Prize for cancer. But you figure from the 50s to 2015,
it was all chemotherapy and radiation. And the immunologist, Franco Marincola,
is our chief scientific officer. He was the former chief of infectious disease and immunogenetics
for the NIH. And he was an immunologist. And he said, what I did 20 years ago wasn't considered
real science. So here's this great scientist that believed in immunotherapy for cancer.
But even back then, 20 years ago, it was like, oh, this will never work. The immune system can
really never have that effect. And Franco saw one patient, I believe it was in the late 80s,
maybe the early 90s, that was cured of melanoma with IL-2. And IL-2 is very toxic, but
he knew that if he could figure out the mechanisms that caused that person to be cured,
that we could eventually one day cure cancer. So he stuck with it. Him and Steve Rosenberg,
who's still at the NCI, they've been really pioneers of this immunotherapy for cancer
movement and a lot of others. But they knew that it was possible. And I think we're getting
science to the point now where we can really pinpoint. And I do think that we're fairly
close to a cure for solid tumor cancers. So you have a former NIH scientist expert
who, in order to continue his work, really has to be doing that in Mexico. So what is it?
Because I remember when I first started hearing about this a few years, I'd be like, oh, I'm
getting my teeth done down in Mexico, or I'm getting this. I just thought it was just a
cheaper way to do things. Then I started meeting people that were having life-changing
procedures done in Mexico and other like Switzerland. They leave the country, though. I
can't get this here. So, you know, why? Why is it, why is this immunotherapy, why is
Coley's toxins? Why is that not, why is the NIH not working with it right now? Because we're
assuming we're under this impression America wants to be the leader. We want to be the
best of the best at everything we do. We certainly have the most funding. We are on top of science
and medicines. That's what HHS is, CDC, FDA. What is it about it that is not promoting
the advancement of science? We grew up in a country like we landed on the moon.
There's always the moonshot. Why are we missing the moonshot?
Well, Franco can work for whoever he wants. Okay. So he, we have a lab in Boston and
Nashville. We have, I think right now, 16 full-time PhDs. Harvard, Yale, MIT,
education PhDs. And Franco loves the model of translational medicine. He founded the journal
of translational medicine, which is from bench to bedside and back, back from bedside to bench,
the bench of the scientists to the bedside of the patient. And so the model that we've
created in Mexico, TAM Center, on the sixth floor we have the scientists and doctors working
on the same floor together next to one of the best labs in the world. I will say, I think we
have the best lab in the world for diagnosing cancer. Full clinical laboratories, genomics,
proteomics, digital pathology. We have cellulia manufacturing, all on the same floor that
the scientists and doctors work on. So we can make quick discoveries. We can make quick
changes. We can find out what's going on in the lab, which is really the best thing for
the patient. You know, I think modern healthcare treats patients like a number instead of an
individual. And we really focus on the individual and, you know, we make individualized treatments.
We're heavy on science. You know, people, you know, 10 years ago could have said, oh,
that's alternative. That's not real science. Now they can't knock our science. We can have
bioethical debates, which is reasonable. But what does that mean? What is a bioethical debate?
What do you mean by that? Well, you know, how the clinical trials are run is,
I don't think the way that the clinical trial model is run right now is ethical.
So our model is set up to where, okay, it takes five to seven years in the United States to get to
a phase one safety trial with the FDA and 30 to 50 million dollars on average. We can do that in
as little as six months for less than a million dollars. So we have our biotech company where
we're developing new therapeutics and we can get them into humans quickly, see how well they
work. If they work well, we keep them going. If they don't, we don't keep using them.
And so the model, that is a more ethical model to me. I mean, why should a patient wait 10 to 15
years when they don't have 10 to 15 months? It doesn't make any sense to me why we keep these
patients waiting. And now, you know, with the genomics and the multiomics, the differentomics
that you can put together with patient samples, we can really dig in to targeted treatments.
I mean, we do a, what's called whole exome sequencing on a tumor, RNA sequencing,
HLA typing, and then we make predictions off of that with our bioinformatics team
on the top 20 neoantigens, antigens that are found on the tumor, but not
in healthy cells. And then we make targeted peptides to them. But we can only do that by
having the scientific equipment and the great scientists that can make those predictions
and understand that. And so it's really a more logical to me ethical approach. I don't think
patients should have to wait. Conventional science might say that, oh, you know,
we need to stick to this old archaic process of clinical trials that doesn't put the patient first,
that uses patients as a number. And I don't think that is correct.
Would people then, the argument would be, let me push on the other side though,
is that you're using patients as an experiment, that they're, you know,
your advancement, but do they know that they're in a trial space, that that is what
they're doing there, that they're taking a risk, we don't have a long-term safety
profile. I mean, obviously, you know, you're talking about this is something that's really
common in America with right to try. You're talking about patients that are dying of a cancer
or AIDS or whatever, you know, ailment, and we were denying them access to a trial drug that
they wanted to try and they're like, I'm going to be dead by the time you determine that that
product is safe. Yeah, I think we try to change informed consent to informed decision
making. I think we go further than normal informed consent where we partner with the
patient on all of their options. We give them lists of clinical trials all over the world.
We give them on and off-label approved medications. So we really partner with the patient to
have the best knowledge that they can to make a decision themselves. We believe
patients are smart enough to make decisions if given all of the information. And so I
understand that and someone could abuse it, by the way. There are people who abuse that
and take advantage of people. That is not what we do. We're, I mean, very high science, very
high ethics, and we take it very seriously. We just don't agree with the, you know, the
current thought process. The current thought process to me, I think it's well intended.
And a lot of people try to bash them. I'm not one that bashes them. I think it's
well intended, but I think it's old. And we need new ideas based on where science is today.
Well, and science is moving faster. I mean, always is moving faster. You know,
I said at the beginning of the show when I was on the doctors, all the guys that were really pushing
the envelope and working miracles. I mean, I got to see the best of the best. And it was the cool
thing about that show was I could just reach out and say, hey, you've got a new surgery,
whatever. Would you like to present it for free? I've got someone that has that issue.
They need help. And we would just make them famous on the show. But the most miraculous
things I witnessed while doing that show every single time, those practitioners or those geniuses
were completely under attack here in America, mostly by their peers that just didn't want to
change, didn't want to move. And I think that, you know, for my audience, I mean, I'm fighting
for informed consent. I'm calling my nonprofit informed consent action network, but really
in the vaccine space, because what's ironic is how much red tape there is for a product like
you want to test to get through the gauntlet here in America, hundreds of millions of dollars,
years and years of studies. But when it comes to a product given to a perfectly healthy child,
they're not even doing what you're doing. There's just, we're going to assume safety,
doesn't make an antigen, doesn't create an antibody, boom, it's on the market,
five day safety trial for hepatitis B. Oh, you know what? Let's put it in day one,
old babies, even though mostly only tested on adults, kids, older kids, let's go in day one,
old babies. So I'm hesitant in this space, which is the issue I'm dealing with. I believe
we're being poisoned by these products because they never went through a safety trial. But I
will also say when I'm in debates, a cancer patient is different. It's a different risk
profile. Right? I'm dying. I am willing to take the risk. We should be really careful with risks we
take of perfectly healthy kids and we are giving them less safety and attention than we are for
drugs for people that are in serious circumstances. So let's get to, you know, your investigations
and your studies. A lot of people are going to Mexico and clinics like yours or, you know,
hospitals like yours because you are doing cutting edge things, some of them old, some of them
like Coley's Toxins. But there's this idea that pharma is hiding the cancer cure,
right? That, you know, if they found the cure, I think I picture it like Raiders of the Lost
Ark. You finally find the Ark, Merck buys it, and then they go down into a basement somewhere
and they hide it away so that no one ever sees it. Is that what's happening with cancer in your
opinion? I don't personally believe that. I mean, we've tried every possible alternative
type treatment for patients over the last 10 years. Even the ones that doctors apparently
have died for GC MAF being. Yes. Have you tried GC MAF? Yes, we have. Yes. Okay. I mean,
leitro, everything. And so if there was a hidden cure for cancer, like we would have
found it. You're looking for it. It's my passion. Right. You know, I would love to be able to tell
the world this is it. But you know, there's no magic bullet to cancer. The reality is,
in the alternative field, which I don't necessarily consider as alternative anymore, but
alternative and conventional, nobody has a great answer for stage four metastatic cancer.
And you had both sides throwing stones, all the while patients are dying and kind of stuck
in the middle of this throwing stones fight. You know, we are seeing incredible gains with
immunotherapy for cancer. The checkpoint inhibitors have changed the game. But we have,
you know, a long way to go. But I do think we're close with all of the new diagnostic
technologies. I mean, if you can pinpoint certain things within the cancer, if we can
figure out what creates an immune response to cancer, we work on the cancer dark matter,
which is the non-coding region of the cancer. We work on what's called viral mimicry right now,
where we're trying to mimic a virus in the tumor to create an immune response to trick the
immune system to thinking that the tumor is a virus. And, you know, I think that we're making
really, really good gains. We have really smart people working with us. You know, but
I talked to Franco, for instance. And Franco says, yeah, if I had seven years and unlimited
funds, and I could just get all the red tape out of the way, you know, he really believes that we
could cure two-thirds of solid tumor cancers in that five to seven-year period. And so my job,
as I see it, is to make it as easy as possible for him. We have a very favorable regulatory
environment in Mexico. We have a good relationship with the cofa priests. We have all the
licensing set up to where we can do these faster trials, phase zero trials, really, and translate
these discoveries very fast. And so my job really is to help Franco have what he needs with as
little friction as possible so we can make that vision, you know, come true.
What's some of the most exciting advancements you've had?
Well, I think on the cancer side, you know, we went through thousands of tumor cell lines
in silico, so in computerized model, and we picked the top 10 most immunogenic, meaning the immune
system could see that tumor cell line the most. And then from that 10, we brought those 10 in
the lab and tested them in the lab to find the most immunogenic tumor cell line. Then we
knocked down genes in different tumor cell lines to see what gene knocked down caused the most
immunogenic cell death. Same process in silico, same process in the lab. And then we're knocking down,
we're using the most immunogenic gene knocked down in the most immunogenic tumor cell line,
and we've developed a secretome from that, which is like a super adjuvant for cancer.
And I'm very excited about that from their same process. We're also doing extracellular vesicles
or exosomes out of those as well, and combining that with our dendritic cell vaccine, which is
another pretty advanced vaccine. So those three things in combination, I think, are really cool.
And these are vaccines that are essentially trying to inspire the immune system to attack
the cancer that's in your body. Like finding some part of that cancer, I guess, basically put,
like you would a virus, growing it, putting it inside it, and then saying, here's a way that the
immune system recognizes, oh, that's my enemy, and then attacks the cancer, which it should have been,
I mean, really cancer is supposed to be being attacked by our immune system, correct? I mean,
isn't that- Yes. I mean, I don't have cancer right now, even though I have cancer cells,
because I have an immune system that is perpetually fighting and attacking cancer.
Yes. We have cancer going through us all the time, and cancer grows kind of secretly in the
immune system. The immune system doesn't see it. If you can make the immune system see cancer,
it will attack it and kill it. The hard part is getting it to see that, and that's our focus.
How do we get the immune system to see the cancer, and then how do we create a death in the cell
that creates the immune system to see it even more? So we do something called cryoablation,
where we'll freeze a tumor, we'll inject it with different adjuvants. So let's say you have a tumor
in the lung with a goal from the cryo there to get a tumor in the leg to go away, called the
abscopal effect. So that's technically a vaccine inside the person's own body. We use the patient's
own tumor as many times, though. So it's autologous therapy in those cases.
Superdue, any new patents? Do you try to apply for patents coming out of Mexico?
Oh, yeah.
Those American patents? How does that process work?
Yeah, they're American. We have a biotech in Boston, in Nashville, and yeah,
we have a new one for the secretome and the EV product. We have something called a map cell
coming out, which is a new stem cell that we're really excited about. There's something called
a MEWS cell, and there's a doctor out of Japan that's done some really good work on that.
And we took a lot of what she had learned and made it even better. So they had, at least for what we
could understand, scalability problems and really how do you scale what they do? Well,
we've figured that out and found other markers in the stem cells that they
didn't know about that might even make that cell drive even better,
and we're very excited about the map cell.
Wow, super. So what's your recommendation of someone that's like,
do I want to go to a clinic like TAM? What's a part of the decision-making? Obviously,
I'm going to get conventional here. Everyone's getting the same thing in America.
It's standardized, but when we're going to Mexico, why does someone make that choice?
Well, I think for herniated discs, for instance, for stem cells, we are...
Yes, we're the best at that. We do about 20 herniated disc procedures a week, and we're about to
publish over 500 patient study showing the success of that. But I would go to Mexico all day long
if I had a herniated disc. Before surgeries of knees, shoulders, etc., we're great at growing
back labrums. We're great at knee injuries. And then for cancer, for diagnostics, if you
want to get as much information as you possibly can about your cancer, you would want to come
to us because we can get that information. And that's not part of the standard of care in the U.S.,
and then you can take that information and potentially use it in the U.S. with your
oncologist because they might have extra targets to... with targeted approved medications to
attack, or we can do some customized treatments in Mexico as well. So we work with a lot
with oncologists in the U.S. We don't see them as opposition or anything like that.
And we really want to build a bridge. And honestly, build bridges not walls. Like, how do we work with
other groups? And because ultimately, the patient does better when people are working together.
And they're not being told, oh, you can't trust them, or this or that, or, you know,
so conventional is all bad. I don't think most oncologists are bad. I mean, oncologists,
they have one of the toughest jobs. I mean, can you imagine they have metastatic cancer patients
coming in that have a small chance possibly of surviving, and they're seeing that day in and
day out. So a lot of them seem cold, but no telling what they're going through emotionally
inside. And I think, you know, we should probably give them a little grace, but
you know, we want to work with the other side. We want to, you know, basically give
the patient the best chance for recovery of anything that we're working with.
Where's the whole stem cell world at? I actually, you know, I was telling you before the show,
I had an opportunity because I broke some rib skiing. I think it's like six weeks ago now.
I got sent red lights. I'm doing really well. I think I healed pretty quickly,
but I was just about to, like, do I get a stem cell injection? I know they're saving,
I mean, I've heard the miracle statements, but I'm just asking myself, like, how many stem
cells, is there too many stem cells in a body? That's my number one question. And anyone asking,
everyone's like, oh, I have a product that increases your stem cells. This increases your
stem cells. Like, it's all about stem cells, but I'm a skeptic. I think people that watch this
show know on all sides, like I'm always going to ask the question, what do we know about
stem cells now? Are there too many stem cells? Is there injecting the wrong places? Does
I'm a skeptic too, by the way, on a lot of what's being advertised as stem cells? I've seen the
supplements. I don't know anything about that, so I don't know how that works, if it's true or not.
Sounds almost too good to be true, but maybe. I think I've got some peer-reviewed literature we
could read. But there are meta-analysis showing what the minimum effective dose of specific
stem cell treatments are. And so I could show you the meta-analysis, and maybe for your
shoulder, your rib, we could go based off of the literature. There's different types of stem
cells. There's bone marrow-derived, adipose-derived, umbilical cord-derived, mesenchymal stem cells,
and you can choose which one you want. We have adipose and umbilical cord-derived.
We grow ours in hypoxia, so there's most people grow theirs in what's called a
normoxic environment. It's at like 20% oxygen, and it's a very simple cell-growing process.
We grow ours at 5% oxygen, because that's the oxygen level inside most of the places in your body.
Going into a disc, for instance, you want to have a cell that's grown in low oxygen that's
similar to where it's being injected into. Interesting. Yeah, but we did a study recently
where we ordered five or six of the top Wharton jelly products in the U.S., because people are
claiming Wharton jelly, minimally manipulated Wharton jelly, is a stem cell, and they're
marketing it as stem cells. And there were virtually no stem cells in those products.
We published this in the Journal of Translational Medicine, and between 81% and 100% of those
cells were dead. So, you know, now does that say that Wharton jelly, you can't get
stem cells and plate them and grow them? No. That would be something similar to what we do,
but the Wharton jelly being marketed in America, most of it is not actually a stem cell product.
So, you know, I could point you to literature and let you make an informed decision on kind
of what's best for you based on the science. I think you've briefly probably met Bobby Kennedy,
but, you know, when you think about, you know, we have, I think we have a very,
you know, porous group now open to, I mean, I got to sit in some of the conversations.
I know Marty McCary wants to look at new technology. He wants to fast-track things
that are working. Dr. Oz obviously spent his life doing shows like this. He had his own show
celebrating things that were working. I know Bobby, you know, but what would be,
you know, what would you say to them? What do you think needs to happen inside the U.S. government
agencies to put America back on top of medical and science research? What has to happen?
Well, I think for stem cells, for instance, let these companies jump to phase three and
let's do a big study, you know, and maybe have the NIH help fund, you know, those studies
because the idea that a stem cell that is a legitimate biotech company that's been
doing it has to go through phase one and phase two and wait five to seven to ten years to get
the trial done is pretty ridiculous when we know the safety and we know that it has signals of
efficacy. Yeah. You know, for healthcare overall, especially with diseases like cancer or,
you know, something that is considered terminal, I think we need early access. And I think
they're doing a pretty good job with that right now. But they really need to figure out
how to lower the cost across the board. So, for instance, if we were to go into a phase three,
we'd probably have to sell to Big Pharma because we can't fund 100 million, 500 million, however
much it is type study. And so there's got to be ways kind of around that. We've solved the phase
one problem with our model in Mexico. It was based to bypass the broken system in the U.S.
where we can do trials in Mexico, give the U.S. FDAR data, hope that they take it and let us jump
to phase two or phase three. So we don't waste that first five to seven years. So that's one way
to do it. But they really need to figure out a way to lower the cost of that phase three trial
because, you know, we've never taken an outside investor. There's still just three of us.
And we've done it intentionally because we don't want to be beholden to
Big Pharma or some corporate interest. Now, it's really hard. You can imagine it's really hard to
do, but that's what we've tried to do. We will hold off as long as we can, but maybe one day we have
to have to do it. But I wish that weren't the case. And I wish it could be more reasonable
to get a drug through the phase three process, especially when we see,
you know, like, for instance, with our disc injections, how well it's working.
One of the interesting conversations I had was with Jim O'Neill, who I don't know what happened to
him inside of the government. He was there for a little while, but he was really caught up in
the fact that FDA changed its mandate. It was supposed to just be focused on safety
and then let efficacy be decided by doctors, patients and all that. Very interesting
if we return to that. The idea though being, and I see more and more of this,
whether or not returning to just safety is the way to go. But what he pointed out to me was that
efficacy was changed by pharma. They wanted, as soon as they made FDA responsible for efficacy,
that's the $100 million trials. That's where you just make everything way too expensive to
have any competitors. They'll complain about the red tape, but as you just said, only big
pharma can afford it. And so it keeps all competition out. And it also sort of
instantly turns FDA into a promoting body because now it's giving you this seal of approval
and you're off and running. There's an argument to say, what if we took that away from them?
Let's get back to efficacy being decided by results. Hospitals can show the results,
patients can go where they're seeing results. All you have to do is prove that this product's
safe and relatively safe. But that idea, making it cheaper, I think pharma is behind
making those things really expensive. They want you to have to go through these double blind
studies that they'll skip them whenever they can, but they want you to have to go through it
because then you can't compete. We get no new ideas. It slows the entire thing down.
If the government could do like a lot of the CRO work, the clinical research organization work
and do the testing for some of these biotechs, I mean, for instance, we had acquired a team
from Boston, what they were spending $800,000 or so a month on, we're spending about $60,000 a month
because we've fully vertically integrated. So we do all of our tests. We do everything in house.
But most biotechs don't, I mean, nobody else really has that. That was our model.
But if the NIH or NCI could do testing for these trials, it would dramatically lower the cost.
I mean, the cost for the testing when they send out the samples, the markup is outrageous.
And so that really hurts smaller biotechs from being able to really progress their research
because everything costs so much, but it really doesn't cost that much when you do it in house.
You have to have a certain amount of sample sizes. So if you run a flow cell on a sequencer, you
need to make sure that flow cell is full because you're going to spend, whether you have
one sample or 50 samples, the same amount. But if you can really solve those problems
understand the math and the samples for the clinical trials, you can drop the cost tremendously.
That's what we've built within our own system. But we're kind of the only ones, at least that
I know that are like that. But that's what the model needs to do is to lower the cost,
use common sense. We use first principles on everything. We question every way something
is done. If it's just the way it's done, like, well, why? Why? Why? Why? And I think that is a
way to get the cost down a lot. Just safety trials with the FDA. It's an interesting idea.
I don't know how insurance would pay for these things afterwards if we don't know if they work.
I'm sure he's thought about that, so I'd be interested to see what he has to say about it.
But there's a lot of good ideas to do this, but people have to be open to it.
And we've got to be open to breaking everything down to first principle.
And that's where you can really find the savings in the health care.
If people are interested in watching this, they have a cancer or an issue,
where's the best way? Like website, where's all of your information?
The tamcenter.com for the degenerative disease or cancer side, cpistemcells.com on the stem cell
side, musculoskeletal. And we'll have our TAM Global and TAM Bioscience website up soon.
All right, very cool. Look, I know part of your story when we were interviewing you was,
you got arrested and actually went to jail right before your life made this transition.
Can we talk about that on off the record? Maybe how that affected you?
Sure, let's do it.
In motor video? Okay, awesome. Well, look, if you want to know a little bit more about TAM,
here's an incredible video that shows you what they got going on.
Approximately 600,000 people die every year in the United States of cancer.
700,000 people die of heart disease.
And chronic disease is an epidemic of monumental scale.
There's too many people that are dying because they don't have the access they need
to the leading edge scientists to the advanced diagnostics and the next generation therapeutics.
It sounds dramatic, but I was planning my funeral.
I felt like you're shooting myself in the head.
My oncologist at Dana Farber Cancer Center said no one's lived longer than three years.
I can't tell you how I'm going to live, but I have a choice of how I'm going to die.
I do believe that an individual has the right to at least make an informed decision about what
is their best option for anything in life, including treatment of their own terminal disease.
As it stands right now, it could take anywhere from 10 to 15 years
for patients to get access to certain treatment.
Why should a patient wait 10 to 15 years when they don't even have 10 to 15 months?
I think it's important for the world to understand TAM is trying to see
and then help propagate a new model.
It's going to have a ripple effect.
The idea of TAM Center started with a question.
What if we could put some of the leading scientists in the world,
the manufacturers, the inventors, the creators of these leading edge therapeutics and diagnostics
into one location, working side by side with medical doctors
so their breakthroughs aren't so far away from the clinic and the patient?
What if we could have the scientists working directly with the doctor,
solving these complex problems in a regulatory environment that
favored the patient's outcome over the red tape?
We are recruiting the best scientists.
We're recruiting the best doctors.
We have Franco Marin-Cola who is the chief of infectious disease
and immunogenetics for the National Institutes of Health.
He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Translational Medicine
and he's the co-editor of one of the main textbooks that oncologists use
for immunotherapy for cancer.
The TAM leadership are revolutionizing
beyond the boundaries, the healthcare landscape.
We have Elias Adi as our new chief innovation officer.
He invented the very first proteomic product using next generation sequencing.
You can get the best genomic data, you can get the best proteomic data,
you can get the best methylation data,
but we're the first to combine it in a true multi-omic approach.
Multiomics is the comprehensive tools that look at human health at different angles.
They're expanding the different options that a physician has to treat the patient.
We want to help the people that nobody else is willing to help.
We want to go that extra mile to do whatever it takes when everybody else is given up.
We are at the intersection of revolution.
The patients are demanding.
It's making the ultimate difference of saving lives.
There's nothing bigger than that.