Transcript of Liz Parrish: Why She Risked Everything on an Unproven Treatment

In the face of tremendous technological development at unprecedented and exponentially increasing speeds, we stand at a pivotal moment to decide whether or not we actively accelerate humanity's natural evolution. And if we do, then how? Welcome to Superhuman. Okay, enough with that. Are you guys ready to learn about your biological future? And I'm going to tell you why you guys are all superhumans already, but how you're going to be even more superhuman in the future. So, first of all, what we're going to go back and look at is death records. We're going to look at how we naturally die. And I'm going to prove to you that through technology, you're living longer than ever. So, when you take the step up to come and become a GMO like me, you'll be ready. So in the 1600s, how we died vastly was infectious disease. As a matter of fact, almost everyone died of infectious disease. Only 1% of the population died of something called aging. It was very odd for people to just grow old and die. And a few people died of accidents. And in these first records of how we died in the UK, it actually talked about falling down church steps. That's a little ironic. But when we moved forward to 1900, because we got so serious about infectious disease, we started to get it under control. And this was the change for everyone. By the year 1900, only 50% of the population died of infectious disease. And that's actually science working for you. By 2010, you can see that infectious disease is down to 3%. and dying of infectious disease is so freakish now that when we have a pandemic aka COVID or anything like it, we freak out. To have someone die of an infectious disease is very rare. And it's because we took it very serious and we scienced the heck out of this. So when we look at how we died in the 1600s, this is how we went along. We were healthy, we got sick, and we were gone. We actually died very quickly. today's uh basically failing experiment of medicine and I mean it is great it is all longevity medicine the statins you take the prescriptions and all this is probably extending your human lifespan but what it does is it just takes you up to a death curve a natural death curve that we would die of now since we've extended the lifespan of humans and what that looks like when we we zoom out is it looks like a long slow fade to enough. So, in this cartoon, I think this is really cute. This guy says, "I eat right. I exercise. I don't drink or smoke, but I'm still going to die someday." That changes everything. That reminds me a little bit of Brian, right? Where we want to do everything right. But if we're going to die anyway, that pretty much sucks. But this graph here would tell us that you shouldn't go back to smoking and drinking because the only major lifespan gain that humans have gotten in modern history is the sessation of smoking. You can add six years to your life by just not doing that one thing. But now we're going to enter into a world of gene therapy. And this is my world. I've been at this for 10 years. I've taken 10 gene therapies. We're the first company in the world to redose gene therapy. We were the first company in the world to treat Alzheimer's patients, psychopenia patients, metabolic disorder, gross obesity. And we've done this all through routes called investigator initiated clinical studies. So these are ways to get drugs to humans. But I want to explain to you what gene therapy is. So when we do gene therapy, we don't do short acting gene therapies. We do the gene therapies in which the science is based on. These are vector delivered gene therapies that go into your cell. They go into the nucleus of the cell. They deliver therapeutic genes that make the cells behave more youthfully. And then the net effect is a longer lifespan. Every gene therapy that we use has been proven to extend the lifespan in model organisms and hopefully even better in humans. So here it is delivering its genetic material. In the case of gene therapy, your cells actually become a drug factory. The fastest approvals in the world through regulatory systems are now gene therapies because they deliver exactly what we're looking to deliver. It's not taking a pill, damaging the liver, damaging the kidneys, and having a maybe downstream effect of lower cholesterol. These are exact technologies. And then the proteins uh are delivered to your body. Some of you might know about peptides, amino acids, different proteins. Well, this creates them at the cellular level for the rest of your life. And when people come up to me and they ask me, well, isn't gene therapy a future technology? Aren't you guys pushing the bounds? You've gone too far. Isn't this sci-fi? It's not. There's actually 13 approved gene therapies and these have revolutionized people's lives. These were really a proof of concept that we could actually pull this off. Gene therapy was hypothesized as early as the 1960s. But by 1984, we had the first sematic cell gene therapy delivery in stem cells. And we showed that we could revolutionize people's health. And now from severe combined immune deficiency to cickle cell disease, people have a cure. So this is actually in thousands of people all around the world. And here is an example of gene therapy. This is a boy with musculardrophe. Uh this is a disease of muscle wasting and young people and it generally leads to death at least by their early 20s. This is him trying to climb stairs. This is him three months after gene therapy. This is a gene called folstatin. Um it's been shown to protect the body against three types of cancers. It lowers uh inflammation in the body. It increases muscle mass which increases metabolic sensitivity to things like insulin. This has been used globally now. Uh and it really was the lowest hanging fruit. And stabilizing this protein at the cellular level, upregulating it permanently is where we get the biggest gains. So you might be wondering, I dropped the word GMO. Well, actually the acronym, that's a scary word for a lot of people. We we've actually been told that we should hate GMOs, but I would tell you everything you eat is a GMO. There's nothing that we eat today that looks as it did in nature. They used to radiate food. They used to splice it with other food. They'd splice plants together and they started to make basically Frankenstein food and now we can actually genetically modified food. So, that's not a debate I want to get into, but I'm telling you that is the most tested food on the planet. But when I talk about being a GMO, I'm talking about my body. And I want to tell you why I took the journey, and I believe that you will, too. We were talking about AI earlier. And I talk a lot about fighting for our biological relevance. I believe that these two technologies are converging at the same time for a reason. I believe that in the memes of the mind, ever since ancient civilizations, we have been building something. We've been dumbed down as a society and so we started building slower and slower, but now we're moving more quickly. Gene therapy gives us the advantage to push evolution to make it so that we can actually survive things like global climate change. So we can survive living in depths under the sea and actually in space. We have four targeted genes for space travel. And this could be critical for resources for us as a human species. But what drove me was not any of these things. This is a very difficult picture. So I'm not going to look at it. This was my son being diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2013. And it's very hard for me because I didn't even know that kids really still suffered from diseases. You know, we all get something in the mail trying to raise money for kids that we've never seen and we've never met. But the world of Children's Hospital is teeming with life and hope. And when my son was diagnosed, I had already spent two years in regenerative medicine. And I asked them what type of technology was available to cure his disease. But they told me that that was experimental medicine and we couldn't use that technology in children. So I got mad. And in 2015, two years after his diagnosis, I created a company called Bioviva, and we took the gene therapies that were the lowest hanging fruit in research. They had the most animal studies on them, and I took them myself. So, what came of that? A lot of came of that. Longevity is burgeoning in the gene therapy space. We can do a lot. We have treated over I think 300 people now through medical tourism. We have four licensing partners. I'll talk about them in a minute. But here are the things that we can do. We can lengthen your tieumirs. Lengthening tieumirs lengthens your lifespan. We can increase your muscle mass. We already talked about that. That has a myriad of benefits. We can enhance you cognitively. We get a cognitive result of one standard deviation almost in every patient that takes a gene therapy of ours called clotho and this is detrimental to people who have things like cognitive decline and dementia. We did a five patient study and we published on that we can protect your kidneys, your mitochondrial health, your cardiovascular system. nerve regeneration is coming and epigenetic reprogramming is well described and we've been able to do that for quite a while. But in 2015 when I took these gene therapies, let me tell you, the media had a heyday. And big pharma went after me. I mean, you could not read more bad press about somebody's mom who had gone out to try to change the world than you could believe. I felt so sorry for my children, but they really stood me up. And this is actually a picture that I took at the Guardian and that's about how I felt out after that interview. So if you want to go read some bad press, go go ahead and do it. But we were kind of in everything and National Geographic was was pretty thrilled about it. But then we started publishing papers and we published one paper after another and we continue to do so. So uh the skeptics have now come become believers and the people that used to say really bad things about us say this team might just do it. But we've had these technologies in research for a long time actually over a decade. So how would you actually get a hold of these technologies? How do we get patients data? We're a US company, so we can't treat patients. But what we can do is license the technology and we can license it to groups who are in locations where they can legally disseminate these therapies to patients who need them most. I work in regulations. There are new countries going on board this year with laws. You will see you will be able to travel now and get gene therapies legally and ethically under scientific review and IRB. But these four companies are amazing. Our partners in um China, they're taking our CMV platform forward. It's the first in the world cytogala virus platform to deliver larger loads of gene therapy. Um we were really happy to spearhead that in 2018 and we were published in PNAS I think in 2021. Unlimited bio fantastic group working out of Rowaton. Integrative health systems has been in business since 2018. So if you thought it wasn't there, it's been there. And Regen cell is set on reprogramming your stem cells, taking your stem cells out of your body, reprogramming them to a youthful state, putting gene therapies in them, and then putting them back in your body. Because you see that the stem cells that you might get from someone else are not going to reimplant, but your own stem cells will. So this is revolutionary stuff. I don't have a lot of time to tell you about everything, but you can watch any of our other talks. Um, they go on and on and on. All the information is out there, but mostly I want to stick with you with this because we don't get to do question and answer and and you still may have a lot of thoughts about why would we change things? You know, look, science came along. You can now get a pig heart valve if you need one. you know, you can you can have your you can put stances in if you're clogged, but I would say that gene therapies are the best type of therapy because they're clean, they're effective, and they work fast. And I'd also leave you with this. He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institute that rejects progress is the cemetery. you are 100% likely to die of biological aging. Taking a chance on the future might just leave our kids with a better world. Thank you.