Dr Bryant Villeponteau the formulator of Stem Cell 100 and other Life Code nutraceuticals was recently interviewed by Dr Mercola who owns the largest health web site on the internet. Dr. Villeponteau is also the author of Decoding Longevity an new book which will be released during December. He is a leading researcher in novel anti-aging therapies involving stem cells an area in which he has been a pioneer for over three decades.

Stem cell technology could have a dramatic influence on our ability to live longer and replace some of our failing parts, which is the inevitable result of the aging process. With an interest in aging and longevity, Dr. Villeponteau started out by studying developmental biology. If we could understand development, we could understand aging, he says. Later, his interest turned more toward the gene regulation aspects. While working as a professor at the University of Michigan at the Institute of Gerontology, he received, and accepted, a job offer from Geron Corporation a Bay Area startup, in the early 90s.

They were working on telomerase, which I was pretty excited about at the time. I joined them when they first started, he says. We had an all-out engagement there to clone human telomerase. It had been cloned in other animals but not in humans or mammals.

If you were to unravel the tip of the chromosome, a telomere is about 15,000 bases long at the moment of conception in the womb. Immediately after conception, your cells begin to divide, and your telomeres begin to shorten each time the cell divides. Once your telomeres have been reduced to about 5,000 bases, you essentially die of old age.

What you have to know about telomerase is that it’s only on in embryonic cells. In adult cells, it’s totally, for the most part, turned off, with the exception of adult stem cells, Dr. Villeponteau explains. Adult stem cells have some telomerase not full and not like the embryonic stem cells, but they do have some telomerase activity.

Most of the research currently being done, both in academia and industrial labs, revolves around either embryonic stem cells, or a second type called induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS). Dr. Villeponteau, on the other hand, believes adult stem cells are the easiest and most efficient way to achieve results.

That said, adult stem cells do have their drawbacks. While they’re your own cells, which eliminates the problem of immune-related issues, there’s just not enough of them. Especially as you get older, there are fewer and fewer adult stem cells, and they tend to become increasingly dysfunctional too. Yet another hurdle is that they don’t form the tissues that they need to form…

To solve such issues, Dr. Villeponteau has created a company with the technology and expertise to amplify your adult stem cells a million-fold or more, while still maintaining their ability to differentiate all the different cell types, and without causing the cells to age. Again, it is the adult stem cells ability to potentially cure, or at least ameliorate, many of our age-related diseases by regenerating tissue that makes this field so exciting.

Dr Villeponteau believes you can add many years, likely decades, to your life simply by eating right, exercising (which promotes the production of muscle stem cells, by the way) and living an otherwise clean and healthy lifestyle. Extreme life extension, on the other hand, is a different matter.

His book, Decoding Longevity, covers preventive strategies to prolong your life, mainly diet, exercise, and supplements. A portion of the book also covers future developments in the area of more radical life extension, such as stem cell technology.

If you would like to read the entire interview here is a link to the text version:

Click here for more information about Stem Cell 100

Transcript of Interview With Dr. Bryant Villeponteau by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Now researchers have found a way not just to stop, but, reverse the aging process. The key is something called a telomere. We all have them. They are the tips or caps of your chromosomes. They are long and stable in young adults, but, as we age they become shorter, damaged and frayed. When they stop working we start aging and experience things like hearing and memory loss.

In a recent study published in the peer reviewed journal Nature scientists took mice that were prematurely aged to the equivalent of 80-year-old humans, added an enzyme and essentially turned their telomeres back on. After the treatment they were the physiological equivalent of young adults. You can see the before and after pictures in the videos above. Brain function improved, their fertility was restored it was a remarkable reversal of the aging process. In the top video the untreated mouse shows bad skin, gray hair and it is balding. The mouse with it’s telomeres switched back on has a dark coat color, the hair is restored and the coat has a nice healthy sheen to it. Even more dramatic is the change in brain size. Before treatment the aged mice had 75% of a normal size brain like a patient with severe Alzheimers. After the telomeres were reactivated the brain returned to normal size. As for humans while it is just one factor scientists say the longer the telomeres the better the chances for a more graceful aging.

The formal study Telomere dysfunction induces metabolic and mitochondrial compromise was published in Nature.

Additional information published by Harvard can be found in the following articles.

Scientists Find Root Molecular Cause of Declining Health in the Old

Decoding Immortality – Smithsonian Channel Video about the Discovery of Telomerase

While scientists are not yet able to accomplish the same results in humans we believe we have developed a nutraceutical to help prolong youth and possibly extend life until age reversal therapy for humans becomes available.

New evidence that adult stem cells are critical to human aging has recently been published on a study done on a super-centenarian woman that lived to be 115 years. At death, her circulating stem cell pool had declined to just two active stem cells from stem cell counts that are typically more than a thousand in younger adults. Super-centenarians have survived all the normal diseases that kill 99.9% of us before 100 years of age, so it has been a mystery as to what actually kills these hardy individuals. This recent data suggest that stem cell decline may be the main contributor to aging. If so, stabilizing stem cells may be the best thing one can do to slow your rate of aging.

There are many theories of aging that have been proposed. For example, damage to cells and tissues from oxidative stress has been one of the most popular fundamental theories of aging for more than half a century. Yet antioxidant substances or genes that code antioxidant enzymes have proven largely ineffective in slowing aging when tested in model animals. Thus, interest by scientists has shifted to other hypotheses that might provide a better explanation for the slow declines in function with age.

Stem cells provide one such promising mechanism of aging. Of course, we all know that babies are young and vigorous, independent of the age of their parents. This is because adults have embryonic stem cells that can generate young new cells needed to form a complete young baby. Indeed, these embryonic stem cells are the product of continuously evolving stem cell populations that go back to the beginning of life on earth over 3.5 billion years ago!

In adults, the mostly immortal embryonic stem cells give rise to mortal adult stem cells in all the tissues of the body. These adult stem cells can regenerate your cells and tissues as they wear out and need replacement. Unfortunate, adult stem cells also age, which leads to fewer cells and/or loss of function in cell replacement. As functional stem cells decline, skin and organs decline with age.

Blood from world’s oldest woman suggests life limit

Time Magazine: Long-Life Secrets From The 115-Year-Old Woman

Somatic mutations found in the healthy blood compartment of a 115-yr-old woman demonstrate oligoclonal hematopoiesis

Abstract
The somatic mutation burden in healthy white blood cells (WBCs) is not well known. Based on deep whole-genome sequencing, we estimate that approximately 450 somatic mutations accumulated in the nonrepetitive genome within the healthy blood compartment of a 115-yr-old woman. The detected mutations appear to have been harmless passenger mutations: They were enriched in noncoding, AT-rich regions that are not evolutionarily conserved, and they were depleted for genomic elements where mutations might have favorable or adverse effects on cellular fitness, such as regions with actively transcribed genes. The distribution of variant allele frequencies of these mutations suggests that the majority of the peripheral white blood cells were offspring of two related hematopoietic stem cell (HSC) clones. Moreover, telomere lengths of the WBCs were significantly shorter than telomere lengths from other tissues. Together, this suggests that the finite lifespan of HSCs, rather than somatic mutation effects, may lead to hematopoietic clonal evolution at extreme ages.

A group of researchers from Penn Engineering have discovered through novel imaging techniques that stem cells can actually control their transformation into other kinds of cells. This means that cells may have more control over their fate contrary to previous thought.

Previously it was believed that transformation into other cells was mostly outside the cell’s control. The researchers studied how stem cells interact with their environment by using hydrogels or engineered materials which mimic body tissue composition.

The researchers designed a new imaging technique to visualize proteins that cells produce in their micro environment. They also developed two unique hydrogels with varied biophysical properties into which cells were embedded and used along with their labeling technique.

The team discovered that once cells were placed in hydrogels, they began to create proteins which changed the surrounding environment and influenced the behavior of the cells. They basically determined their own function through shaping their environment through the proteins.

To look further at the importance of the proteins on the behavior of the cells, the team blocked the ability of the cells to interact with proteins they produced and the ability to break down the proteins. When they prevented these proteins from interacting with the cells, the development process of the cells and the subsequent fate changed.

The findings that the secreted proteins meaningfully impact the behavior of the cells, calls for reevaluation of how hydrogels are used in the field. The biophysical properties of the hydrogels are often implicated in the behavior of cells. The work suggests that proteins which are secreted by the cells within hours after embedding in a hydrogel might supplement and possibly cancel out effects of the inherent properties of hydrogels which scientists are intending to study.

The research has important applications for the engineering of tissue, drug screening and more. The findings that proteins are released into a hydrogel environment is knowledge for trying to study hydrogel effects alone, which the additions of proteins would complicate. A new technique of labeling developed by the researchers might lead to a better understanding of how cell function is affected by proteins.

The team also conduct research on biomaterials which can be used to regenerate body tissues. They spearheaded a project in 2011 to regrow cartilage tissue.

Additionally, strides in cell research have been made by discovering the important tole sugars play in inter cell communication by using a technique known as atomic force spectroscopy.

Understanding cells and cellular environment not just as individual entities, but also as an interwoven system is critical to progress in biological fields.

A large scale observational study from Inserm, a French organization similar to the U.S. NIH, has found that people who consumed the most organic produce had a 25% lower risk of developing any type of cancer. While it might make sense to think all produce as equally nutritious, the growing scientific research evidence shows there is a distinct advantage to consuming organics.

The study involved 68,946 participants who consistently consumed the most organic produce during the 4 year study. While factors such as smoking, obesity and lack of exercise all play a role in whether a person will develop cancer, the findings were significant enough to lead to further studies and also justify the higher cost of switching to organic produce.

The difference in cancer rates between the consumption of organic produce and conventionally grown produce is due to the use of pesticides which are sprayed on the conventionally grown produce. The research team also show that the study provides more evidence to suggest pesticides in foods can be harmful.

They found low levels of the synthetic pesticides including some which are linked to cancer and other serious health problems in the conventionally grown produce. By choosing organics we are making a better health choice, but also making a better choice for the environment.

The pesticides most commonly linked to cancers are all pervasive in our environment. They include Organophosphates malathion, diazinon and glyphosate which is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s toxic Roundup product. The company is currently in court to determine its possible role in the development of cancer in a long line of people.

The study participants completed questionnaires in regards to their consumption of 16 different foods including vegetables, fruits, fish, eggs, meat, grains, dairy and soy based foods. Cancer was diagnosed in 1,340 of the participants between 2009 and 2016. The most common cancers were breast cancer and prostate cancer. The participants who made healthy lifestyle choices and consumed the most organic foods, were found to be 25% less likely to develop cancer.

Of course the best cure is always prevention by making healthy lifestyle choices. Getting enough sleep, exercising, drinking clean water, managing stress, avoiding smoking and alcohol, maintaining a healthy weight and switching to organics as confirmed by the study, can all help lower the risks of developing cancer.

To view the original scientific study click below.

Association of Frequency of Organic Food Consumption With Cancer Risk