heart disease is the number one killer on the planet why don’t we talk about that I there are a lot of reasons but my opinion is let’s build a heart how hard can it be 350 people in this room have heart disease if it’s not them it’s you the good news is I can fix it the bad news is someone has to die for someone else live every 34 seconds someone on the planet has a heart attack and that really hit me hard lifestyle has an impact but that’s not the bottom line but if you need a pediatric heart where do you go I’m committed in the next 5 years I’m going to change that and so the work that you’re doing is nothing short of extraordinary I want to leave the world a better place and and this is the way I’ve chosen to do it welcome wel to moonshots and mindsets
[00:01:01] you know there are some extraordinary people on this planet who are doing things that up until now have just been in the pages of science fiction novels and one of those individuals is Dr Doris Taylor she is building new Hearts literally and figuratively creating brand new Hearts starting with a skin cell from you creating what are called plur potent stem cells and then growing you a heart she’s beginning by looking at the hearts needed for children where do you get a heart transplant for a child you know we don’t have many children volunteering their organs Dr Doris Taylor is a regenerative medicine researcher uh previously a professor at the Texas Heart Institute she’s just joined Dean Cayman at the advanced regenerative manufacturing Institute called Army in New Hampshire and her work is extraordinary today you’re going to join join me in a conversation with Doris
[00:02:02] from abundance 360 which is my annual private Summit uh enjoy this conversation uh the work that she’s doing is literally saving lives and Reinventing how we think about our health and our health span and if abundance 360 is of interest to you you can check it out at a36c all right enjoy the episode first of all thank you wow what a great few days this has been and now I kind of have some bad news and some good news the good news is I can fix it the bad news is 350 people in this room have heart disease and if you look around look to your left and look to your right and I’m serious look to your left and look to right if it’s not them it’s
[00:03:03] you because 48% of the people in the US have heart disease 48% and heart disease is the number one killer on the planet onethird of all deaths and in fact every 34 seconds someone on the planet has a heart attack and over the course of this session already this morning 105 people on the planet have had a heart attack now that’s a bad news and it affects men women and children so I have a question how many of you know a woman with breast cancer quite a few of you how many of you know a woman with heart disease many fewer and yet five times more women not three times as you heard yesterday five times more women have breast have heart disease and breast
[00:04:01] cancer but we don’t talk about that why don’t we talk about that I there are a lot of reasons but my opinion is because we blame people for their heart disease if you ate right if you if you live better if you didn’t smoke you wouldn’t have heart disease the reality is lifestyle has an impact but that’s not the bottom line and for the people who do have heart disease and if you’re one of the people who has a heart attack 10% of people die within an hour and everyone else loses heart function over the remainder of their life now that’s all the bad news except for the fact that kids are being born every day with complex congenital heart disease and it’s estimated that 1% of the US population is going to need a heart of babies born are going to need a heart transplant in their lifetime
[00:05:01] 1% if that were my child or grandchild I’d sure want that heart to be available but today the reality is that in our line of work someone has to die for someone else to live now the good news is in the next 5 years I’m going to change that I’m committed to curing the number one disease affecting Humanity heart disease and I can do it with the people in this room so in fact organ transplant isn’t just about Hearts the number of people who die every month waiting for an organ transplant equals the equivalent of two Jumbo jets with no survivors in the US we transplant 10 hearts a day and what that mean and
[00:06:00] there 2700 people on the waiting list what that means is that you have to be really sick to get a heart if you’re too young you don’t get one if you’re too old you don’t get one if you’re not sick enough you don’t get one if you’re too sick you don’t get one again if you’re lucky enough to be one of the people who gets one then you take drugs every day for the rest of your life to keep from rejecting that and those drugs not only cost a lot of money up to $32,000 a month a month but they make you sick every day you have to take that drug I had a young woman call me and she after she heard me give a talk and she said I I I had a heart transplant at 18 and every day every it’s been nothing but biopsies medical tests and drugs every day since then and she said I’ve gone from being
[00:07:00] it’s true I don’t have heart failure anymore but I walk around every day terrified that because I got busy and forgot to take my drugs I’m going to die she’s 24 years old that’s not okay the status quo is over we have to change that so I want to build personalized on demand human hearts and if they’re personalized that means you don’t need those drugs now big Pharma doesn’t love that but let’s not go there right now but it also reduces your risk it’s going to reduce a lifetime cost of a heart transplant by 49% and Transplant can become that Hollywood Story that we all hear about that’s a new lease on life instead of the way it is today it’ll improve the quality of life and more than that what
[00:08:00] I what I forgot to mention a minute ago is if you can’t afford those drugs you don’t make the waiting list for a heart which means that people of color are 90% less likely to get an organ transplant than the rest of us how do you say that to a mom or a dad or a son or a daughter who reaches out to you and says my Dad’s sick help we can change that so in 2005 I basically said okay let’s build the heart how hard can it be how hard can it be everybody it’s Peter I want to take a break from our episode to talk about a health product that I love it was a few years ago I went looking for the best nutritional green drink on the market so I went to Whole Foods and I started looking around I found three shelves filled with options I looked at the labels and they
[00:09:00] really didn’t wow me so I picked the top three that I thought looked decent brought them home tried them and they sucked first of all they tasted awful and then second nutritional facts actually weren’t very impressive it was then that I found a product called ag1 by athletic greens and without any question athletic greens is the best on the market by a huge margin first of all it actually tastes amazing and second if you look at the ingredients 75 highquality ingredients that deliver nutrient-dense antioxidants multivitamins pre and probiotics immune support adaptogens I personally utilize ag1 literally every day I travel with an individual packet my backpack sometimes in my back pocket and I count on it for you know gut health immunity energy digestion neural support and really healthy aging so if you want to take ownership of your health today is a good day to start atletic greens is giving you a free 1-year supply of vitamin D
[00:10:02] and five of these travel packs with your first purchase so go to athletic greens.com back/ moonshots that’s athletic greens.com slm moonshots check it out you’ll thank me without question this is the best green drink product the most nutritious the most flavorful I found all right let’s go back to the episode and fortunately I didn’t know what I was doing because if I had known what I was doing I wouldn’t have believed it was possible so what I said is okay let’s take cells what do you need to build a heart all you really need is heart cells and a place to put those heart cells and then a way to make those heart cells grow up and become a heart so I started that process and at the time I had no idea what I was getting into because let me tell you about the human heart it’s the most amazing ma machine in the body it’s phenomenal the heart’s about the size of
[00:11:00] your fist it contains 1 billion cells for every gram it weighs and in an adult like me probably I probably have a 125 gr heart and some of the people you’ve seen on the stage they probably have a 350 G heart they’re a little bit taller a little bit yeah that means we have to grow 350 billion for every one of those hearts that we build and we have to build them personally to match you or you we also have to build a heart that’s going to beat 60 to 80 times a minute every minute people have said gosh that sounds expensive and I’m like I can build you a cheaper heart I kind of want the one that’s going to be 60 to 80 beats per minute every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of my life but in addition the heart is such a an amazing machine that over the course
[00:12:00] of our lifetime it generates enough power to literally power an 18wheeler to the moon and back and it pumps 1.5 million barrels of blood throughout our lifetime so we have to build a machine that can do that every day for the rest of your life and so on the bottom here you see a heart and you see a heart that I’m going to show you we can wash the C out of to create a scaffold that we call a ghost heart we basically use baby shampoo to do that that should scare you a little bit but that’s a different issue baby shampoo so we can wash all the cells out of this heart and at the end of the day we have a ghost heart and one of the rate limits everybody says okay you 3D prin of heart no we don’t we use this scaffold why because this scaffold has the blood supply for a heart in 3D
[00:13:00] printing today you can’t create that blood supply and this is nature nature knows how to build the blood supply for a heart and let me show you there’s 60,000 miles of blood vessels in one of those hearts and if you hook it up to the blood system those blood vessels work so we can now build something that gets food clothing and shelter and put cells in there so I’m going to go so fast forward 10 years we started building a three G heart and it took me 14 years to solve the problems of building a heart double that size at that rate it was going to take me 42 years to build a heart to even fit a kid not okay so a year ago I said screw this I’m going to figure out how to automate this process and I got smarter I started we
[00:14:01] started a company and we began automating so we were able to take cell production from something we did by hand removing the cells from an organ from something we did again by hand in a Ru Goldberg garage to something we could automate and take the recellularization injecting those billion cells into something done by a robot and with Dean cayman’s assistance at army by Fab in Manchester New Hampshire we were able to shorten 14 years to less than a year for beating creating a beating human heart less than a year I Have A Five-Year Plan we’re going to succeed within the decade we’re going to be in people in 5 years with the right partners and it’s not just about building Hearts it’s
[00:15:00] about curing heart failure and I’m going to stop here so that Peter and I can talk about this but we have also developed a number of biologics because we’ve learned what heart cells need to be happy and we can also deliver those my group was the first group to do stem cells in the heart 1998 I’ve learned a lot since then the main thing I’ve learned is we can cure this with the right people in the right room at the right time with the right tools and we can save lives this episode is brought to you by levels one of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my Peak vitality and Longevity is to monitor my blood glucose more importantly the foods that I eat and how they Peak the glucose levels in my blood now glucose is the fuel that powers your brain it’s really important High prolonged levels of glucose what’s called hypoglycemia leads to everything from heart disease to alzheimer’s to sexual
[00:16:00] dysfunction to diabetes and it’s not good the challenge is all of us are different uh all of us respond to different foods in different ways like for me if I eat bananas it spikes my blood glucose if I eat grapes it doesn’t if I eat bread by itself I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels but if I dip that bread in olive oil it blunts it and these are things that I’ve learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the levels app so levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what’s going on in your body it’s continuous monitoring 24/7 I wear it all the time really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat remain conscious of the food that I eat and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics you know on this podcast I only recommend products and services that I use that I use not only for myself but my friends and my family that I think are high quality and safe and really
[00:17:02] impact a person’s life so check it out levels. link SL Peter give you two additional months of membership and it’s something that I think everyone should be doing eventually this stuff is going to be in your body on your body part of our future of medicine today it’s a product that I think uh I’m going to be using for the years ahead and hope you’ll consider as well I first heard your name 2 years ago uh on our longevity Platinum trip when we were visiting Dean cayman’s uh Army Advanced regenerate manufacturing Institute and he was buzzing about stealing you from Texas to go and uh and join army uh and you know we’ll talk a b about Army because I want people to get what what you’re doing there right uh and he asked a question it’s interesting right so if if you need a heart transplant today and those numbers were
[00:18:01] stunning only 10 a day and a 2700 person waiting list and that represents only those who can afford it which means it’s a fraction a minute fraction and so if if you need a heart today you’re effectively waiting for someone to die and donate it which is typically someone on a motorcycle without a helmet right just to be clear we tell people to move to states without helmet laws helmet laws if you need an organ transplant I mean it’s it’s we laugh at that because of how sad it is um but if you need a pediatric heart where do you go you can’t take a adult-sized heart and put it into a newborn and that really hit me hard it’s true uh and so the work that you’re doing is
[00:19:02] nothing short of extraordinary um can you just talk one second about uh what your vision is and what army is one second I want people to get a sense of what you and Dean are building there sure so Army biofab as a Department of Defense funded Advanced regenerative manufa facturing initiative because the realization it was made pretty abundantly clear that although we’ve been tissue engineering in Laboratories across the US for a number of years we haven’t gotten products to Market in this field yeah and that’s in part because we haven’t had the infrastructure to be able to build something complex every time we failed building our hearts it was because they got contaminated because we didn’t have the right closed infrastructure automated
[00:20:01] infrastructure somebody sneezed Dean said I can do that I’ve built a lot of businesses and he’s put together an amazing infrastructure that allows you they’re incubating companies there now but more than that they’re bringing together people who can speak process development in a complex way for those of us who didn’t grow up speaking that vocabulary uh another who went with me two years ago on the longevity trip to see uh Dean’s facility right and we’re going to go back there this year when we were there last he was uh he was building longev uh building ligament bone segments and Dean’s genius applied with Doris’s genius is he’s a manufacturer processing engineer and put stem cells or put skin cells created into induced blo stem cells in one end and get a heart coming out the other end um yeah I
[00:21:02] remember having a conversation with with Elon in which he said that the idea is the easy part even the design is the easy part it’s the operationalizing it uh making it into something that can be repeated over and over again that’s everything right and we’re at the slog through it stage we’re at the slog through it until we’re convin it’s I can do it with your C and your C and your C when people come uh this August and September uh and we visit you and Dean what will they see down there so what we will what we will show you is places where we are storing cells Place how we’re growing the cells and a clean room system you’ll be able to look in our clean room system see the robot injecting cells into hearts and the and the future is building a heart hotel where we have 40 hearts in a hotel
[00:22:02] behind the robot that live in that ecosystem every day we’re we’re partnering with Advanced Solutions a great robotics company to do this and I’ve already taught bab their bioassembly bot how to inject Hearts we do a fist bump at the end of those it’s pretty fun um but the reality is this is not science fiction anymore and it’s not BS you know um I had some surgeons come visit and they said darus we’ve heard about this for years but we couldn’t wrap our minds around it until we saw it and I and I said yeah some surgeons still think this is BS and 20 years away like We heard with Quantum and it’s not with the right people and the right resources it’s 5 years away that’s amazing can you imagine having a backup set of organs we have that for our cars or planes or
[00:23:01] dishwashers but the idea of having a backup set of organs to I mean people don’t realize and thank you for correcting me it’s five times the number of women than breast cancer thank you I have that in your data point um but people don’t realize how vicious heart disease and stroke is it it robs fathers and mothers uh and sometimes teenagers uh every 34 seconds um you said that that these uh that heart disease and aging is a failure of stem cells can you speak to that a second yeah I believe aging and all the chronic diseases associated with aging are a failure of endogenous repair yeah and that endogenous repair is stem cell-based and that as we age we’ve shown data first of all we were the first to show data that the stem cells you have if you’re a man or a woman differ that the composition of yourone you’re a who do you think who do you
[00:24:03] think I’m clear do you think I’d bring it up come on no seriously seriously we we were able to show that as you age as you develop cardiovascular disease men develop cardiovascular disease like this they get it earlier over time women develop it later and they catch up we the measure stem cells of blood and show that they directly paralleled amazing that development of we start as a a newborn with a huge supply of endogenous stem cells in every compartment of your body brain muscle every place blood bone marrow yeah and as you age that population goes down because the body was never meant to live past age 30 and because because we T every time we take a hit we use some of those cells right and that explains why when someone has a trauma traumatic injury they age
[00:25:03] very quickly thereafter and I just want to say stress is another word for inflammation and inflammation is basically Nature’s cue you fall down you scrape your knee this is the example I always use fall down and scrape your knee it turns red that’s inflammation yes that’s Nature’s cue to say hey help I’ve got an injury send me cells if you get the right cells there you turn off the inflammation if you’re 2 years old you regenerate that skin you don’t have a scar if you’re 62 you still get the same redness you still recruit cells but the cells are fewer in number and less potent and that was the whole night as for and the whole thought behind exogenous stem cell therapy in the ’90s when we started it was if you don’t have time or you don’t have the number let’s get the them there and what we’re finding as you’ve heard
[00:26:01] over and over here is that inflammation is basically a biomarker of whether or not that’s working and what I want to say is stress is another word for inflammation and if you don’t believe that I I measured I was privileged I got to measure stem cells in one of his Holiness Adali llam uh monks yes and I I drew his blood before and after he meditated on compassion for 15 minutes minutes wow there was a 40% increase in circulating stem cells in that 15minute time 40% increase that’s another reason to meditate everybody so so and if you don’t believe inflammation in another word for stress or Str vice versa look at a president after four years yeah holy cow talk about a job I would not want to have hey everybody this is Peter a quick break from the episode you know I’m a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is
[00:27:02] the only real news out there worth consuming I don’t watch the crisis News Network I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the World by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology how entrepreneurs are solving the world’s Grand challenges what the breakthroughs are in longevity how exponential Technologies are Transforming Our World so twice a week I put out a Blog one blog is looking at the future of longevity age reversal biotech increasing your health span the other blog looks at exponential Technologies AI 3D printing synthetic biology AR VR blockchain these Technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do if this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural Nets with go to demand.com blog and learn more now back to the episode I want to talk about uh how much
[00:28:02] money uh you’ve spent and how much you need to implement this 5-year Vision uh have you talked to us about your capitalization talk to us about uh how you’ve been supported and what you need going forward so so the company has brought in Grant mostly non- deluded funding and grants and my checkbook this has been me and um and a and few people who have worked with me because they believe in this for no compensation right now so we’ve basically existed on non-dilutive grants were and a little bit of of family money from families of individuals with heart disease to get through our clinical trials and have this approved $300 million that’s not a lot of money well relative to the size of the business opportunity and the lives saved but this is not a three-year 10x Roi this is a 10year
[00:29:06] 1,000x Roi what we really need is Partners we need people who are going to help us think through this plan who who have a vision who want to change the world because the reality is we’re everyone out there is building is changing the world every day the question is whether you’re doing it for the better or the worse and I want to leave the world a better place and and this is the way I’ve chosen to do it join with us let’s let’s do this let’s let are you here through tomorrow I am here through late tonight okay so if you’re interested on this moonshot please check out Doris at lunch or this afternoon or this evening I’m going to be bringing Doris back on stage uh for your questions in just a little bit let’s give it up for Dr Dorth Taylor [Music]