EPISODE 107: The Exponential Power of Cellular Therapies

Episode 107: Timothy Nelson MD, PhD

Dr. Nelson, a scientific physician as he calls himself, is the director of the Todd and Karen Wanek Family Program for Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome at Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota, and a general internal medicine practitioner, with a specialty interest in regenerative medicine. His areas of expertise include congenital and degenerative heart disease, clinical trials for regenerative medicine, and stem cell therapies. translational transplant medicine, and application and ethics of stem cell technologies in treating degenerative diseases.

A Cure is in the Works! Can you believe it? The exponential power of cellular therapies has expanded massively beyond the bone marrow transplant that we know from decades ago. And these advances continue to give hope to millions of people while educating millions more about the regenerative power of our bodies.

Find out more about Dr. Nelson’s amazing work at heartworksinc.org. And support the fundraiser for A Cure is in the Works 2023 through webuildhearts.org.

Find Dr. Tim Nelson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-nelson-cause2cure/

Show notes

• Started in bone marrow transplant. Having to wipe out their immune system and reconstitute that with someone else’s stem cells is a miracle of medicine.
• The evolution of CAR-T therapy has taken that to a whole new personalized level. There’s so many opportunities to leverage cell-based therapies to make small and big parts of our health better.

• If we ground your body up and measure how old your physical body is, it’s the best estimate that the average age of the cells in your body is 7-10 years, no matter how old you are.
• Regenerative medicine happens every hour, every day to the degree we don’t fully comprehend. The drugs we take, the exercise we do, and the food we eat and how that affect our regenerative ability have probably the biggest impact on how we age, how we recover, and how we grow. These are areas we weren’t taught in medical school, but science made us realize how important it is to protect and promote the regenerative capacity of our body. And that unlocks the miracle of medicine in the future.

• One of the tissues in our body that does not regenerate very well is the heart muscle—just about 1% growth rate in a year. This makes it inadequate to repair heart attacks or missing parts. Science is trying to find fertilizers and seeds that we can use to stimulate the heart.
• The fundamental game-changer that Heart Works is the world’s first to offer is the ability to bio-engineer new seeds to grow new heart muscle. This technology of producing autologous heart muscle has the potential to cure many diseases.

• Because of the economics of producing autologous tissue (one product: one patient), most people argue it’s not feasible, practical, and sustainable. I believe otherwise. An example of that is bone marrow transplants that we’ve done for decades. That doesn’t mean it will not be expensive and it is not right for everybody.
• If you replace tissue with an allogeneic tissue, you will need immunosuppression so your body will not reject it. Hence, there’s a real possibility, for example in a heart transplant, that you’re trading one disease for another because you may be able to live longer with the new heart but will develop some kind of cancer in the future because your immune system has been knocked down. So using autologous heart muscle is a much healthier, ideal way of doing it.

• From a regulatory standpoint, in the US, people are not allowed to pay to participate in a clinical trial, which is not the case in other countries. This maybe is the fundamental difference in terms of regulation.

Other episodes you might be interested:

Relevant Links:

Other YouTube videos to enjoy: