 Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Janati Stolier of the Second. I am very pleased to be with you today. I am the chairman of the US Transhumanist Party and the chief executive of the Nevada Transhumanist Party. And today with me, I have a guest with whom I'm conducting an interview for the Movement for Indefinite Life Extension, or MILE. My guest is named Ira Pastor. He is the CEO of BioCork Incorporated. And Mr. Pastor has 30 years of experience across multiple sectors in the pharmaceutical industry, including pharmaceutical commercialization. He also has experience in biotech drug development, managed care, distribution, OTC, and retail. He served as vice president of business development for drug development company Phytometics Incorporated, raising $40 million of private equity, consummating over $50 million of licensing deals, and bringing lead drug candidates from discovery stage to phase three development. Prior to that, employed by Smithcline Beach and Pharmaceuticals, working in sales marketing and business strategy positions. Mr. Pastor has also served as vice president of corporate development for the Pharmacy Benefit Management Company Prescription Delivery Services, which was acquired by Cygna Health Insurance. He has an MBA from Temple University, bachelor's of science in pharmacy from Rutgers University. He is also a board member of RegenerAge, SAPI to CV, a clinical company, focused on expedited translational therapeutic applications of regenerative and rejuvenative healthcare interventions. He is also a leader of the Rianima project and a member of the executive council of the World Academy of Medical Sciences. So it's a great honor to have you with us today, Ira. And my first question for you is, could you please tell us about some regeneration and repair mechanisms in non-human animals? Absolutely. And thanks so much for having me here today. Yes, I mean, we have spent the last several years studying the dynamics of regeneration and repair in non-human species. And you have basically a fascinating array of capabilities in lower organisms. Many people in your audience are probably quite familiar with the ability of members of the amphibian kingdom to regenerate significant parts of their spinal cord following a major lesion or injury. This also occurs in terms of their limbs. Many of these organisms also have the same regenerative capacity in their critical organs. So heart, kidney, liver, eyeball, the major parts of their brain. But the fascinating thing is basically how they do it because of the major forms of regeneration that exist in nature that humans possess, namely physiological turnover, hypertrophic regeneration and wound healing, which basically, for lack of a better word, are a bottom up form of regeneration where form may be recapitulated, the function is not always gained. What you see in lower organisms is the recapitulation of both form and function, basically a re-initiation, let's say, of the development process again. And this is something that from an evolutionary perspective died out a few hundred million years ago. Many of the evolutionary biology world will tell you it has due to the fact that we as humans and mammals and so forth, due to the fact that we bleed very rapidly and we die of loss of blood very rapidly, could not afford that payoff anymore. And as a result, the human system ultimately was much more biased towards wound healing and scar formation and the preservation of life in that context. But what we're in essence looking to do is really study these dynamics in more detail. And they are very complex dynamics. It's much more sophisticated a process in nature, in terms of epimorphic regeneration than for instance, just replacing some cells. But really understanding these biological dynamics and ultimately crafting new products, biologics, to recapitulate them in humans and restart these capabilities creatively in the human system for both purposes of cellular repair but also cellular regeneration. So basically addressing a wide range of therapeutic opportunities that spin off of that. That's very interesting. And it is fascinating to me that there are creatures who evolve these regenerative capacities a lot earlier than the human species even evolved. And we may be the most sophisticated life form on the planet, at least from an intellectual standpoint. And yet we lack some of these regeneration abilities. So my question for you, you mentioned there's this, let's say tendency toward healing wounds very quickly because humans bleed a lot. Can you expand upon that a bit more? And also on what some of the other obstacles in humans and other complex mammals would be to these regenerative capacities existing naturally? Yeah, I think that is a major one. I think the balance that we must maintain as a mammal and the fact that beyond just the surface wounding, anything of a substantial impact which leads to the rapid loss of blood has to be controlled. And it's the case in many lower organisms that they do not possess that rapid bleeding. You'd see the capability still genetically or epigenetically to initiate this, let's say more passive form of healing and regeneration. Now that's not to say that we don't maintain some of it. I mean, we do, as mentioned, we do have a very nice physiological regeneration capability in terms of rapidly turning over tissues in terms of epithelial layer of skin and our blood and of course our hair and nails. We have this hypertrophic ability in the human liver and of course our wound healing response. Now, one of the tricks here because obviously regenerative biology and the study of this entire area of epimorphic regeneration has gone on for decades. The heyday was, I point to a period between the 1940s and the 1970s when tens of thousands of papers were published on these particular dynamics. But one of the issues, as we stepped into more of the molecular biology era and the initial thought that, hey, well, there might be some genes that are involved here that we can just turn on and reignite these processes. Well, you unfortunately run into brick walls there because due to conservation amongst the genomes of us and many of these other organisms, we possess all those genes. The problem comes to the fact that they're related to proliferation of cells and growth and unfortunately just turning them on uncontrollably sort of in a genetic engineering context isn't gonna get you that far because uncontrolled proliferation, the genetic level is a path towards uncontrolled cell growth and oncogenesis. So that's not the direction that we're going. We took out a slightly different strategic perspective and saying, okay, the issues don't have to do with where numbers or copies of the genes, but in essence, how they are controlled differently with the regulatory architecture of the genome. So the higher level control mechanisms that we see at play in the gene regulatory networks, the cellular regulatory networks and sort of the nested hierarchies that exist above the genome and how we can creatively, when going back to nature and studying the proteins and the microRNAs and the various other factors that are at play, how we can bring sort of a holistic approach to targeting this type of regeneration in humans. It is not, and once again, I spent enough time in the pharmaceutical industry, which is the place that loves sort of single magic bullet answers to things. This is not an area where the single magic bullet will ever work because there's just so much going on. So we really have to think creatively of what our bioproduct or a drug is going to look like at the end because it is going to be complex and we term combinatorial in nature having to address many targets simultaneously as opposed to just a single drug compound or a single gene. So in terms of the compound you're thinking of and how it will be applied ultimately if everything goes well, will it be taken in the form of a pill or will it be some other type of treatment or series of treatments that you have in mind? We are primarily looking at proteins and peptides and microRNAs that are involved in the epimorphic regenerative cascade, some of which are responsible for the underlying cellular reprogramming process in epimorphosis, some of which are responsible for a targeted histolytic event, so the ability to clear away dead tissue and the degraded extracellular matrix. There's another part of the puzzle which has been extensively reported on over the last several years and that is how the lower organisms in the animal kingdom utilize their innate immune response as part of the regenerative mechanisms. And there's been some wonderful studies recently just showing how you shut down the innate immune response in a salamander or a planarian or one of these organisms is so great regenerating they don't regenerate anymore. So we think of in humans, the innate immune response is being solely related to sort of allergic events, but at a low level these species wield it as part of the regenerative dynamic that occurs following that, we'll say that insult to their tissue. So there's a lot going on and we are basically creating and we call biologics that have more than one bioactive moiety within them. And specifically we spent a lot of time studying the biologic moieties that are found in ooplasms. So the cytoplasm of a primarily because this is the one area in humans where we see the sort of combined capabilities of reprogramming and remodeling occurring. And in humans only occurs in this very brief window of time following the formation of the early embryo. This is the only time in the human experience where age is reset, where the genome and the epigenome are cleaned up and the new embryo is prepared with a full sort of biologic regulatory suite of capabilities to move forward and transition to embryogenesis and morphogenesis. So we are studying those bioactive moieties and comparing them and spending a lot of time and analyzing them versus what is found in the, for instance, the regenerating limb of a salamander is an example. And studying really in detail what is required for this full sort of capture of these biologic events and how we can ultimately then apply them either perenerally or potentially orally or topically in terms of skincare applications in humans. That's what we spent a lot of time working on the last few years. Yeah, so it seems like you're still investigating various delivery mechanisms for these kinds of treatments. Is that an accurate description? Yeah, and we have drug delivery and drug administration is a science all unto itself. And we're taking clues from the experts that have been there in the past. And the good thing is that strategically we are going along a line of development where in essence regulators, whether that be the FDA or MA or what have you have seen substances like this in the past. So we are not dealing with anything creatively new in the context of antisense or genetic engineering and what have you, but really working with traditional technologies for biologics development and production. But the biologic at the end of the day is a little more complex than your insulin or your growth hormone or your interferon. Yes, and that's I think a good bridge into the next area of questions I had in mind in terms of bio quarks research and the products and treatments you're seeking to develop. Could you tell us a bit about the regulatory system in the United States that applies to these and do you find it convenient to work with or do you see significant obstacles to achieving your goals in the status quo? No, I think we're fairly comfortable with our pathway in the United States in the sense that what we have in the vial at the end of the day is in essence a biologic as described by both FDA and EMEA and so forth. So basically you have an existing definition of protein or carbohydrate or protein-carbohydrate combination that is derived from a living cell system where its characterization is much more based on its production system versus its physiochemical characteristics. Pretty straightforward stuff. On top of that, because we are dealing with heterogenic bio products which make production a little more complex would give us a lot more intellectual protection on the back end. This is also something that FDA has seen in the past and they know sort of how to regulate in the sense that there are several fairly well-known products on the US drug market today which are not new chemical entities but are mixtures of entities. So FDA has seen both historically and in recent regulatory niches the new drug ingredients or NDIs that are mixtures of bioactive substances so they know how to look at those as well. I mean the issue like anything is that the US FDA process is long and expensive no matter what you do. Even if you're going after an orphan indication or fast-tracking you still have a lot of work and a lot of money to raise. So we as a company have a multi-focused strategy. We are a East Coast based drug development shop doing drug development 101 year in the United States and that is one component of our business. We also, due to the fact that we are working with it's in the context of natural product based raw materials there are other non-prescription opportunities for us in terms of consumer packaged goods and dermatological products where obviously your claims change because you cannot make drug claims in the United States on non-drug products but there are some unique business opportunities there for us as well in the United States. Now taking a step back for a moment while we are a US based company we are under no illusion that there are 200 other countries out there that have different regulatory systems and of course the smart people in this industry will tell you that as much as the United States means to the total drug spend around the world that there's dozens of other countries coming online in the developing world that are gonna be a much bigger piece of that pie 10, 20 years out. So we need to look at those countries as well because everything that is a drug in the United States is not always the drug in Germany or Thailand or Turkey or China. So we have to look at these opportunities as well and whether you call them medical tourism or regulatory arbitrage we are seeing an extensive sort of development in this space beyond the sort of the typical services that that industry has employed in the past towards more sort of compassionate use experimental options. And there was a wonderful example recently a couple of months ago where Merck and one of the world's largest drug companies for one of their main cancer antibodies got approval in mainland China but then compassionate use approval on an island off the coast of China designated by the Chinese government for compassionate care opportunities for the same product. So we think that things are definitely changing around the world and it's not a matter of the old model anymore of raise a couple hundred million dollars and develop your drug here in the United States first and then worry about the rest of the world because the rest of the world is coming online both with the purchasing capabilities but also the unique regulates worry models so you cannot just put your head in the sand and think you're only US company anymore you have to think rather broadly for how this regenerative medicine anti-aging whatever you wanna call it on the grand scale of things gets done. Yes and it's interesting that progress and the rest of the world where the testing and approval process might not be as expensive as it is in the United States might eventually catalyze progress in the United States with these advances trickling in perhaps and the safety of certain treatments once they've been tested elsewhere being more recognized and achieving a greater comfort level with the US regulatory authorities. Now it's interesting that you mentioned the term biologics as perhaps being subject to less FDA, how shall I say it? Barriers than perhaps other types of drugs other types of treatments. And you said the FDA has a specific definition of biologic. I wonder if you could elaborate on that and how a biologic would differ from other substances that the FDA would review as drugs. You know, I just make that point because biologics in the existing definition go back to, I mean, the 1920s in essence to the development of insulin. So I was more or less making a point that FDA knows what a biologic is and sort of how to regulate it or how to regulate the development. When you bring something that is different to sort of your small chemical entity or your biologic, there is, even though it's the FDA and it's a wonderful resource, there's a learning process there. And I'll give you an example. About 10 years ago, I was involved in the development of drugs. Once again, based on natural products, the FDA had developed in 2004 a regulatory path known as the botanical drug, which basically for the first time in the United States, and this is, you know, you can do this elsewhere, Germany, China, some other territories where they understood that, for instance, an herbal extract did not always fit either as a drug or a dietary supplement, but somewhere in between. And so FDA developed this new niche. They developed it back in 1996, but the final regs went through in 2004. And it was just one of those amazing things where some people got it, right? That, okay, there's this drug, it's an extract that may have 500 chemicals in it from some plant. We understand it has a biologic effect, but all right, now what do we do with regard to our traditional model of how we look at these things? We typically like to look at pharmacokinetics. How do we study pharmacokinetics of 500 bioactive moieties? You have, you bring to the table, for instance, history of human use in some other country where you have 2,000 individuals that have used the product in large-scale clinical trials. How do we, what do we then do about the early rabbit and guinea pig models that we want you to do? So, you know, when you bring something that is non-conventional, a lot more questions are asked, and it might take a lot longer. And that's why not to say that some of this more cutting-edge stuff isn't going to get through, ultimately, but there's just going to be those intra-regulator hurdles beyond your scientific development program that are just going to take time. And we think there's a major learning curve there, so that's, you know, once again, hence why we wanted to craft our own program around something that at least they have seen, seen stuff they look and they know basically how to proceed with it from a regulatory angle. Yes, and it seems, based on your comments, the primary obstacles to a more accelerated approval are time, money, and regulator comfort with awareness of the emerging treatments. And I wonder along those lines, what political reforms or regulatory reforms would you favor to accelerate the ability of your work at BioPort to bring major health benefits to the public? Well, it's a great question, and obviously there's been a lot with Mr. Trump's, President Trump's new potential FDA head coming on board and a lot in the US press about pulling regs out from under the system. But without getting that drastic, I mean, I definitely think exploring something like what Japan has recently done with conditional approval of earlier-stage clinical assets makes a tremendous amount of sense in the fact that, look, you have, you always have these studies where you have a wonderful phase two study that blows an active comparator away and then you have their phase three study, which falls flat and the drug company actually just throws the product away. And it's not that the product didn't work, it's the fact that we sit here in 2017 and we really don't know anything. The next to nothing, despite what you might read about, we know very little regarding pharmacogenomic and more importantly, toxicogenomic differences within heterogenic populations of people. So why something works in phase two and it fails in phase three, we really never know. And the point that I think is very prescient and what I think is wonderful about the Japanese experience is they're willing to create a modified system that says, okay, it makes sense. We have good phase two data. Let's get it out there and let's not waste any more time for the people that really need it and we're gonna lose hundreds of thousands of people that are dying every year because of breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, what have you, waiting for the phase three data, let's get it in front of people that want it today, that could use it today and gather a much wider basket of experience and ultimately generate what is much more representative of the total population of people that potentially would use the product as opposed to what you typically see in these registrational drug designs where ultimately every drug company knows the product is gonna work in a very small percentage of the people that studied it in just because of the design of the studies. So I think something akin to, once again, what Japan has done with conditional approval makes a lot of sense, whether there's the political will for it here, I don't know. It seems to me that Mr. Trump is moving more in that direction with regard to things, but we'll have to wait and see what happens. It's interesting. I had read about the Japanese reforms with regard to giving conditional approval to drugs that had passed the phase one and phase two trials and my understanding is those are predominantly focused on safety and then once the drugs are generally recognized as reasonably safe for consumers to purchase, consumers would have some choice whether or not those drugs ultimately prove to be efficacious, at least they get to try them and if they happen to be efficacious, then those patients will benefit. Whereas in the current system, it might take 10 to 15 years for a drug to get through all of the trials before it's even eligible to be marketed to patients. So I do think that would constitute major progress for accelerating the arrival of those treatments. Now, I wanted to also ask you on Biocork's website, it is stated that the main product that Biocork is currently researching, the main substance is called BQA and I'd like you to talk a bit more about BQA and what studies has Biocork conducted with it? Sure, so BQA is the current code for our lead agent that is a, it represents a highly purified but still combinatorium mixture of certain proteins found in ooplasm that is being developed as our API, our active pharmaceutical ingredient or active biologic ingredient. It is based, the research program once again goes back to the historical studies on bioactive moieties derived from this particular source of ooplasm that go back to their 1950s in the original cloning experiments conducted using the species Xenopus lavis which is a species of African frog. But the more interesting research from our opinion is what happened in the 1970s when the first studies on what were known as the egg-free reconstitution experiments were conducted where basically for the first time, and this is what allowed the species to become so popular originally in the pharmaceutical industry, basically the ability to study the act of biologic dynamics once the ooplasm and its constituents were separated from the egg. Basically it had this very unique property of sort of maintaining life outside of the egg so that people could study all sorts of molecular and developmental biology in the petri dish. And that goes back to the 1970s. We wanted to sort of take the research to the next step and say, okay, there is a wonderful array, thousands of bioactive moieties that have been studied for the last few decades now via this material source. We wanted to really drill down and sort of extract sort of principle moieties that were responsible for the events that we're most interested in, namely the reprogramming and the remodeling effect on somatic tissue. So ultimately, think of this BQA as any natural product derived biologic that's been on the market. So you can go back to porcine-based insulin, calcium, salmon, calcitonin, streptokinase, even into today's modern world product like Botox, which is, once again, a very popular biologic derived from a non-human source. We have been studying the first couple of years. We spent a lot of time recapitulating the previous sort of petri dish experience on the ability of these bioactive moieties to reprogram somatic cells in a petri dish to a stem cell-like state. But that is only one part of sort of the rubber band. We need to capture the events moving back in the other direction, so for the remodeling of tissue. So that led to our work in a variety of disease and damage models. And we've studied a bunch today. It's a melanoma, traumatic brain injury, various skincare models, and basically looking at this underlying dynamic, which exists where basically you have a reprogramming event followed by a tissue remodeling event. And we've seen some very exciting things in both regeneration in terms of the central nervous system, in the traumatic brain injury models, and also remodeling events in tumors. So now this is sort of a side story, but people always ask about the oncology connection. And one of the most fascinating things that, once again, you have to jump into the literature and it's kind of shocking how much medical history has forgotten. But in the developmental biology era, the regenerative biology era, a lot of studies were done on the ability of these same species, the regenerators, and their ability to revert tumors. So basically cancer is an extremely rare killer in species that have an effective regenerative mechanism. Why? Because the same way that these species are very good at reprogramming and retasking tissue into new tissues, they're very good at taking tumors and turning them into normal tissues as well. And it's one of these fascinating things because you always see this sort of double-edged sword in the sort of regenerative medicine space with uncontrolled proliferation. But the truth is those species that are great at regenerating are the hardest to kill with cancer because they just like to turn into something else. So that is the reason why we are also looking at the oncology models. And that's been a very fascinating piece as well to see real-time reversion events. So taking your mind away from sort of the kill-centric methodology in oncology nowadays isn't thinking well, why don't we go back to nature and really look at how the experts at getting rid of cancer do it. Has nothing to do with killing. It has to do with turning tissue into something else. So that's a lot of that has been the basis for our internal program. We then took some time to work with, as mentioned, formulators here in the United States in terms of the non-prescription and non-RX components of our business, namely looking at dermatological formulations and skincare opportunities, as well as the fact that, you know, there is a nutritional or sort of superfood component to the potential range of products as well in the sense that this raw material source in sub-Saharan Africa goes back a couple hundred years in an ethnomadicinal sense. So there are a lot of documented evidence that the source has been used as a food supply in various indigenous peoples in Africa and there's some unique opportunities there for us as well. But from a straight drug development perspective, we are at the stage where we are still raising money for implementing a now translational program into humans in the United States. And that's interesting. You seem to be involved in a wide variety of areas of wide variety of possible applications. Now, I'm curious in terms of the methods of your studies, you said that you've conducted some studies in somatic cells. Do you also use computer models, animal models, any human trials at this stage or is it too early for that? Oh, you know, we have quite a few animal models that we undertake in the lab currently, primarily rodent. But yeah, so we have, in part of our non-US program, we have a bunch of licensees in various countries that are working with us on first and human applications both in terms of skincare in both countries. Therapeutic and aesthetic medicine as well as some early first and human exploratory work in diseases of unmedical need, primarily spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury. Very interested in the central nervous system. So yes, we are definitely getting our research footprint out there and working within the context of the systems that we can work in. The US program is as a defined program and that will take its time like anything else, but at the same time, we realize the need to license our technology in other territories where regulatory options move faster and we can gather the first and human experience both from a therapeutic perspective but at the same time to create the portfolio data that can ultimately help support the US program back home. Yes, that's very interesting and you've also touched on potential implications for fighting cancer which are quite different from currently common approaches of just killing the cancerous cells after they've proliferated. So it seems like if you're successful, this could be an immense market and could help a lot of people who are struggling with cancer today. I'm also curious with regard to potential gains in overall lifespans that your approach could achieve for humans and what is your estimated timeframe for success in achieving such gains provided that everything goes according to your plan? Well, we've conducted one study and it was a mouse study, started at six months of life and it went through the natural lifespan of the animals and we saw, and it really wasn't set up as a gerontological study per se, it was more of a long-term observational study looking for all sorts of things but we saw a 70% boost in lifespan versus the control group. And once again, while it wasn't our initial goal to focus on life extension per se in that model, it did give us further clues to the fact that just like we are experimenting with these concepts of inter-kingdom signaling and semi-chemical communication, basically the ability of signals, biochemical signals of one species to affect the genome of another. The fact that ooplasm is the one place in humans where age is ever reset to zero gave us a clue that there's something here, something that may be a little more encompassing than traditional approaches to anti-aging. And then not to say that typical approaches and the research that's going on right now, whether they be in calorie restriction or metformin or rapamycin or any of that stuff is no good. I mean, it's all great research but basically once again coming back to what nature teaches us and the dynamics that are typically involved in taking that age of genome and taking it from point B back to point A, we think we have a very interesting, let's just say potential side effect on our hands and the ability to in the context of retasking a cell, a cell within a tissue that has taken on a regulatory state. When we say regulatory state, we're talking about sort of the complete transcriptional state of that particular cell and tissue at that point in time and pushing it to a previous time, potentially could have very interesting outputs not just the downstream diseases of age, old age. I know there's a lot of debate whether diseases of old age and aging are the same thing. I'm not gonna get into that whole thing but whether you can not only deal with the genomic outputs of aging but also deal with the cellular regulatory state and nudge it back. And as we know, once again, we love nature and we love studying nature, there's one organism on this planet, the immortal jellyfish toward tepsis nutricula that does this. It grows up, it lives its life and it decides later on, I wanna be a kid again and it just turns back transcriptional regulatory state of every one of its cells to a younger state. I think this is the logical connection to that ability in humans. We're obviously not there yet because we're only at the very beginning of our own human experience but I believe that that is something that, let's say in a full portfolio of opportunities and options to deal with the diseases of old age may be very sort of beneficial and adjuvant to other approaches. Very interesting. And yes, the turatopsis nutricula or turatopsis dornii jellyfish has fascinated me for quite a few years. I was also curious to find out more about your mouse studies where you were able to achieve 70% life extension in the mice. I know that the record holder, at least the winner of the Methuselah mouse prize for longevity is Dr. Andre Bartek who was able to render his mice to live for almost five years. And I'm curious by comparison, how long the life spans of your mice were? They went out, I have to look at the exact, I think it went out to three and a half or something like that, I have to look at the, go back to the data. The, with the keep in mind that that was a, there was not beyond sort of just traditional daily dosing. There wasn't a lot of dose escalation or significant discipline that went into that particular regimen beyond sort of the nature of what the context of what that was all about in terms of just sort of an observational study for many things. But ultimately, we think that the ability to see those effects in humans will be translational. And we're fairly confident because of what we have seen in terms of the inter kingdom translation of regenerative abilities that normally end well before mammalian systems and being able to translate those into mammalian models and ultimately humans on the therapeutic side that there will be some very nice connections and benefits translatable here. And I just bring that up because we talk about mice obviously we have to admit that as in cancer, for instance, we cure cancer thousands of times a year in mice. And it's really, it's less about the experiment in mice as it is in the translational event up into humans. And so, yeah, we could play around with mice some more but ultimately, I think like anything in this space, the goal is proof of principle in humans. Yes, well, as I'd like to say the moment even one human being lives to age 130, pretty much everybody is going to be paying attention to that and the possibilities it entails. So I am curious also in some of your previous interviews you mentioned animals that could essentially reanimate after death or what would be death and the analog of death for us. And I wanted also to ask you how that ties into the reanima project and its goals. Sure, sure. So yeah, I mean, there's only one organism on earth that is known to die and reanimate and that's Dynacoccus radiodurans which has this fabulous ability to live in nuclear waste and have its genome shattered only to reassemble. We're talking a little higher up the evolutionary ladder you run into species like planarians, like certain amphibians whose brains could pretty much be blown apart only to reform the epimorphic processes some which whose brains can be removed entirely and grow back. And this was one of the cornerstones behind our thinking about the reanima project. Maybe it goes back a little more than that. We, the natural world and it's the animals within it and their ability to lose and thus regenerate not just brain tissue, but memories in brain tissue has always been a fascinating area for us combined with sort of the recent high profile cases in the United States in terms of that sort of brought the topic of brain death to the public for, namely those of Jai MacMath and probably Christina Brown, really got us thinking along this line because you have this rather wide area of the so-called disorders of consciousness of which brain death or irreversible coma is at one end of a spectrum that in essence, nothing in terms of how we talk about funding of some of these conditions really no money ever goes to it let alone persists the vegetative state or coma and thinking, okay, here we have wonderful evidence from nature of higher central nervous system regeneration. You have a evolving set of technologies in the regenerative medicine space and you have this third area which is a little less well known but which has gone on in the United States and many other countries for decades now which is the area of living cadaver research or the ability to study the recently deceased and basically bringing those three factors together which led into the idea for the reanima project which was basically how we can use an existing research model that is completely legitimate and ethical and legal to not study, for instance, high dosing therapy that would normally somebody but instead begin to study the dynamics of neuro regeneration in the ideal model which is the human. And so that was sort of the basis behind the idea for that project. Now, the fourth component of it is that since we spent a lot of time studying traumatic brain injury and traumatic brain injury models and central nervous system regeneration in lower mammals and really wanted to put these dynamics together into a platform that not necessarily is going to bring life back to the dead tomorrow but definitely has a defined target because we talk about this 150,000 people we lose every day and a hundred and thousand of them with aging well, there's 50,000 every day that don't die of aging and whether you die of aging or whether you die of some sort of traumatic injury you all pass through this final disease date at the end of the day which is the death of the brain and we felt it was a fertile ground to work on and hence why we designed that particular project. It is a moonshot of ours. It's definitely not in our core portfolio but we believe the trickle down effects on all forms of central nervous system regeneration whether that's for chronic degenerative diseases or whether it's for acute damage is completely translatable. And I certainly wish you all the best of success with that project. It could have some very interesting ethical and political implications. For instance, if a person is brain dead or in a persistent vegetative state and is hooked up to life support and some people want to keep that person on life support other people want to cut off the life support now with work like that of the Rianoma project if it succeeds a legitimate argument could be made that that person might perhaps be brought back. So perhaps it wouldn't anymore just be a matter of that person needing the support indefinitely. So that's very interesting. Now I was also curious of course there are some life extensionists who don't believe that the technology for rejuvenation will come in time for them. So they have designated essentially that they would be cryopreserved after their legal debts. Is the work of the Rianoma project going to potentially have applications for them perhaps several decades down the road? I guess that question is more for the cryopreservation technology community and how that particular component of the cryonics story evolves because and I'm not by no means an expert in that because right now the goal at least on Rianoma side is working with fresh tissue and basically under the current living cadaver research definition, so beating heart, breathing and certain nutrient and trophic support. What happens in a future of a, and I apologize for a defiling event and what is there to work with, I can't say at this point. What we do like to say is that we think that while the cryonics model is about somebody smart 500 years figuring something out, I think that it is equally important to work on this problem today with the tools we have today because we might find out, hey, we succeed next year. You don't need really, you don't need cryonics anymore. What you need is something else. You need something in between cryonics and intensive care whereby you sort of a way station for non-reanimation and you will not have to go as far as the deep freeze. But that will stay in the time comps. Yes, so perhaps a near term hope would be say for an auto accident victim or the victim of another kind of accident who has recently died to essentially be brought back to life after some serious repair of the tissues and organs of the body. Right, right, that's exactly it. So somebody in the, and although there's argument within the neuro intensive community whether it is truly a gray zone, there are some pretty smart people out there that say yes, there is something between coma and irreversible coma and that cannot be ignored because there's a few dozen cases in the literature over the last 30 years of so-called brain death reversal, none of which ever had a positive outcome and they're primarily and very young, but nonetheless, the fact that they're reported dynamics say that there is something unique going on. There is a gray zone there and it's not always completely absolute in this curtain definition part of the Harvard criteria. We make a point. Look, that's where the Reanima project is meant to focus today. No brain death as an incurable chronic disease, no catastrophic brain death that you may find in a war zone, no time sensitive brain death such as a murder victim that doesn't get found for five days. And lastly, just obviously there's been a lot, we're not working with corpses and we don't do anything beyond the living cadaver definition of basically the intensive care patient. So, but even though that means we will not be, Reanima succeeding next year doesn't mean you've solved death entirely. You would have made substantial progress towards now looking at all these other instances and really at some point in the future dealing with these harder forms of death that confront us every day. Yes, and well, any progress in this area would be wonderful in my view. Now, I also wanted to ask you because my over movement for indefinite life extension is aimed at building awareness of and support for research in biotechnology, medicine, life extension how important would you say it is to hasten the buildup of awareness for a work like yours? And would it help, for instance, if five million people tomorrow became aware of your research and were considering the importance of treatments that could reverse aging or beat back certain diseases? Absolutely, it would be invaluable. The one thing I always point out, having grown up and spent most of my time in the drug industry is people are well aware of the sums of money that we spend globally. We spend seven trillion dollars nowadays around the world on healthcare. We spent a trillion on drugs, 200 billion on medical devices, couple hundred billion more on new R&D. They see these incredible numbers, but I don't think they ever really drill down to what are the possibilities? They just see the numbers and, well, hey, but there should be beginning to realize where's my cure for Alzheimer's? Where's my cure for breast cancer? Where's my cure for diabetes? And it is not there today. And so I think there needs to be a better understanding, better education of sort of what the status quo is, what we're spending the money on, where we can better spend it. And whether that be on research, whether that be on rigs, what have you? I think the, what you're doing in terms of awareness and really moving the conversation to this concept that most people might think of science fiction or even beyond science fiction today, but understand that there's a lot of people working on this problem and it might be a lot sooner than they think if the right resource could be mobilized and if the right regulatory infrastructure could be set up around it. So it's wonderful. Thank you. Thank you very much. And for those of us who want to help in terms of accelerating these advances, what recommendations would you have in terms of ways to get involved? What to look for, what to study and how to communicate with the general public? You know, from a study perspective, I'm a strong proponent of studying medical history and studying not just the individual technologies, but the interaction between areas that might rarely talk. I mean, as I said, we spend a lot of time on the non-human world, well, non-human world, but people forget that the majority of that trillion dollars we spend anywhere around the world on drugs comes from natural products in the natural world, but we sort of forget about these things. So spend a lot of time looking at a diverse range of disciplines that impacts this area, not just the thing that's hot, not just the immunotherapy that's hot today or this gene engineering approach that's hot. Look broader than that. I think answers, just like we find our car keys between the pillows of our couch, answers are gonna be found between disciplines by the interaction disciplines. And the only other suggestion, you know, from an investor perspective, I've always been a big proponent that, you know, you see these billionaires out there that spend a tremendous amount of money on basic science, which is wonderful, but the real problem this industry has always had is not the basic science, but it's the translational sort of valley of death phase and the amount of stuff that just gets lost to time due to the fact that we sort of ignore those near term translational opportunities and getting them through humans and out to people. And so this is another very important piece, not just looking at the core science, but looking at, look at as many companies as you can do research, find out who's doing what and how close they are to potentially translational human opportunities, as opposed to maybe just writing some more papers and putting them in the archives. Yes, well, thank you very much, Ira, for your excellent answers today. I think we covered a broad range of topics from the emerging research that you and Biopork are delving into to political and regulatory implications to societal implications to prospects for the future. I think our members and supporters of the movement for indefinite life extension are going to find this video to be an invaluable resource. So thank you very much. Thank you so much for having me here today. This was wonderful. It was great talking to you. Likewise.