 Hey everyone, welcome back to the third annual Veil Scientific Summit. I talked with Dr. John Cook, a cardiologist based in Houston, who is now focusing more on the research aspects of his profession. All right, well telomeres are the tip of the chromosome. It's kind of like the tip of a shoelace. You need a tip of a shoelace to lace up your shoes. Well, for chromosomes, which maintain the DNA in our cell, that contains the DNA in our cells. For those chromosomes to work properly, they need this tip. It protects the chromosome. Now, this is a major determinant of aging, the telomere, because this tip of the chromosome shortens with every cell division. So our cells and we have a shelf life, the telomere shorten. It's the biological timekeeper. So at some point, the telomere becomes so short that the cells can't divide anymore and they can't function properly. They become senescent. They become aged. And senescent cells have a phenotype. They have a different way of functioning, a different way of being than normal cells. They make proteins that make other cells sick. They make proteins that cause inflammation. They make reactive oxygen species that cause damage to the surrounding tissues. So senescent cells within our body cause problems. They cause aging. And what we have learned is that we can reverse that process. We can make cells young again by reversing that telomere shortening. We can extend the telomere and by doing so, the cell is rejuvenated. It's quite amazing because that one effect of extending the tip of the chromosome is enough to make that cell behave as though it's young again. So we can rejuvenate cells by extending the telomere of the chromosome. So we've taken a lesson from biology. There are cells that can re-extend the telomere. So yes, the telomere shortens every time a cell divides, but there are some cells that can repair that erosion. Those cells are embryonic stem cells. So embryonic stem cells are what we are when we are conceived. Those cells, little cells, those embryos have to divide into trillion cells to make us, to make who we are. We're composed of a trillion cells. Now once the cells differentiate into brain or skin or pancreas or heart, they lose that ability to make the enzyme telomerase that restores the telomere, that can add back the telomere. And now every time the cells divide, that telomere gets shorter. And at some point the cells can't divide anymore, they can't function anymore. So what we've done is to make RNA encoding that enzyme, telomerase, and we've put that back into the cells. It's basically a direction for the cells to make this protein, telomerase, that can restore the telomere. Now this function that we restore is only restored for a short period of time. We can restore it for a period of days. But that's enough to extend the telomere so that the cell is rejuvenated. Well, our first step is to improve cells out of the body. We can do that fairly easily now. We can rejuvenate cells outside of the body. So we can improve cell therapies. We can improve cells that are being amplified outside of the body for cell therapy. So that we can do. What's going to be more difficult is to get this RNA into the body of people that need it. So our first, the first target, our first patients that we want to treat are these children with progeria. So in progeria, the problem is that the bodies are aging very rapidly. So these children, 13, 14, 15, have heart attacks and strokes at that age and die because of the accelerated aging. We've taken cells from these children and studied them and found that the cells age very rapidly, just like the kids. They don't proliferate very well. They don't function normally. So we sought to see if we could improve the function of these cells. We wanted to see if we could improve their ability to divide and proliferate and multiply. With our RNA telomerase. We did find in these children cells that the telomeres were shorter. So we said, okay, if we can extend the telomeres in these children, can we rejuvenate the cells? So we tried our therapy and we were able to extend the telomere in the cells and it rejuvenated the cells remarkably. So cells from these children can be rejuvenated with our telomerase therapy. So now what we'd like to do is to develop methods to get the RNA into the children. It's going to be difficult, but I think we're going to be able to solve this problem. RNA is very fragile. It needs to be protected. So we're working with several different scientific groups to develop nanoparticles that will allow us to get the RNA to where it's needed in these children. This has been a spectacular meeting for me because what Johnny, you are and the other organizers of the meeting have done have brought together people from different disciplines. Who have different perspectives. Some people are using stem cells, adult stem cells. Some people are using induced pluripotent stem cells. Some people are using small molecules for rejuvenation. Some people are trying to use senaletics to get rid of aged cells in the body. So everyone has a different approach and that's important because aging is multifactorial. For us to overcome this problem we need to work together as a community and thanks to Johnny Uard and his people for bringing us together because we have a community now that's going to work to address this problem of aging. While I'm a physician, I was trained as a doctor and I just want to be the best doctor I could ever be. Along the way I also became a scientist and I would like to see my ideas get translated into something useful and if I make one thing that's useful to humanity my life will have been worth it.