Read the full transcript of Tunc Tiryaki’s talk titled “From Vampires to Stem Cells and Exosomes: The Human Quest for Longevity” at TEDxAthens 2023 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Quest for Longevity
TUNC TIRYAKI: Thank you. If you had a chance to choose, when would you like to die? Seventy is too short, right? What about eighty? Hundred. And what if I tell you that your last twelve years will be spent in pain and suffering? Would you still insist? I would.
You know, if you imagine in the early 1800s, the global life expectancy was around thirty years only. As of today, it is seventy-six years. Huge improvement. That’s, of course, because of antibiotics, vaccines, and obviously, medical care. Unfortunately, this improvement in our lifespan did not translate itself into our health span. Our lives lived without disease is just sixty-four years, leaving us a good twelve years of pain and suffering, and then we die.
Historical Pursuit of Immortality
Our decay seemed inevitable even centuries ago, but our ancestors never gave up fighting. Our cultures are full of heroes searching for the grave, like the Knights Templar searching for the grave for immortality, Spaniards searching for the fountain of youth in Latin America, elixir of life vampires—they are all different sides of this story. We know, for example, Cleopatra was bathing in spoiled donkey milk. Clever. It works.
And Greek gods here were consuming ambrosia which kept them young and healthy. You might ask, where do I know all these stories? Well, actually, I listened to them from my father. My father was a professor of molecular biology and biophysics, not related, right? But he was a visionary.
He was one of his first kind who understood the importance of longevity, started learning about it and then teaching it to his peers.
He was a tall man, a bit like a crazy scientist, with long hair, and he was so passionate to keep the human body young and healthy, he was taking eight grams of vitamin C every day and he played basketball until he was seventy-six.
The Discovery of Stem Cells
I did obviously not choose his path of basic science and I didn’t know actually our paths would just criss-cross again and again. One day, when I was younger, kind of like a young consultant, I was just checking a research paper, then I was suddenly struck by reading, “There are stem cells inside.” Now stem cells are little magical cells which keep the capacity to turn into any different cell type of your body.
If you need, they can turn into your blood cells. If you need, they can turn into your bone, muscle, whatever you want. There are two basic types of stem cells: embryonic stem cells which you harvest from embryos, obviously, with legal problems, ethical problems and anyway, we cannot use them. But the good news is all of you have stem cells in your body and we can harvest them. I can get your bone marrow and use those stem cells for only bone marrow related diseases or I can get fats, your fats, isolate the stem cells and use them for the rest, for your muscles, for your bones, for your cartilage.
Now, imagine I’m a plastic surgeon, I can get as much fat as I want. I can do liposuction, liters of fat, but to get the stem cells out of it was not my game. By chance, that night, we had a family dinner. This is a true story, by the way. We went to my father’s house and in between small talks, I found the right time to ask him, “Hey, dad, you know, there are stem cells in the fat. Can we get them out?”
His answer was, “Yeah, why not? Let’s talk about it on Monday.” Obviously, next week we were in his labs. Yes, we did isolate the stem cells and, like, today, actually, it’s common practice to get your fat, isolate the stem cells, and use them for many different purposes.
Applications of Stem Cells
Let’s take a look at what we can do and use with stem cells. This is, for example, a patient who had a wrong injection over the right hand shoulder. What I did was take her fat, isolate the stem cells, and inject them into that soft tissue coverage, and you can see the improvement. This is one and a half years afterwards.
This is a Romberg syndrome, where half of the face just disappears. What we do there is, we again take a bit of the fat, isolate the stem cells and inject them to the face and give the life back to this guy, actually. And of course, if I can combine these cutting-edge treatments with traditional techniques like a facelift, I can easily erase fifteen years from somebody’s face, externally of course.
Using stem cells is like deploying aircraft carriers to a battle zone. Very effective, very efficient, but very expensive. Similarly, obtaining and using stem cells also have their limitations. For example, if you want to use them, you have to do a small surgery. Even though the prices of harvesting stem cells decrease dramatically, it is still an expense and it’s a small surgery.
And if you want them more powerful systemically, you might expect real complications of your cardiovascular system. And even aircraft carriers don’t do anything themselves. They just send fighter jets out. So, the question is, is there anything like that for stem cells? Are there any fighter jets or messengers of stem cells?
The Vampire Connection
Well, some mythical creatures with sharp teeth seemed to know the answer centuries ago. Vampires were immortal because they were consuming something which kept them young forever. And, except for only stories, there are real examples of this in history. For example, there is a 16th century Hungarian Countess, Elizabeth Bathory, known for her crimes of torturing and killing young girls and unlike innocent Cleopatra, she was bathing in their blood to preserve her youth. Yes.
Interestingly enough, science says that there might be really some substance in those stories. In the very famous 2014 Nature publication, about parabiosis, parallel living, researchers literally fused young and old mice together. When the blood circulation came together, what happened was the old mice started getting younger in a few days’ time and even more spooky, the young animals started getting old very fast.
Exosomes: The Messengers of Youth
This information transfer of youth is done through little messengers in the blood plasma and these messengers are called exosomes. Now, if you inject exosomes somewhere, they don’t do anything themselves. What they do, they take a small piece of the cell membrane, fill it with information and order, these inside are called endosomes and this information is sent out, hence exosomes, and they go to the target cells.
When they hit the target cells, they force the target cells to regenerate, rejuvenate, tissue repair, even anti-inflammation and they trigger more stem cell work. We can say exosomes are sort of like the messengers or fighter jets of stem cells.
Of course, we have to be careful where we get the exosomes from because they carry the messages of their source. If you get them from a wrong source, that’s dangerous. We have to make sure we are using safe sources. As of today, the safe sources we know are either human cell cultures, stem cell cultures, or young tissue, placenta, amniotic fluid, cord blood, and not necessarily from humans, also animals.
There is huge research going on all around the world on exosomes from cancer research to cancer diagnosis for cellular treatments. And in our own labs, we have also promising results by using hybridized animal origin cord blood exosomes, which is actually a waste material. So what we do, we hybridize them so we don’t only use the useful information in the exosomes, but we can use them as cargo ships as well to carry the necessary supplements to whichever organ you want to send them.
Real-World Applications of Exosomes
These are what you can do. This is a hand burn and just a topical exosome cream, and one week after, you can see a significant healing without anything else. Sorry about the photo. This is a fingertip amputation. Now, the patient somehow didn’t want to have surgery. Again, three weeks of exosomes literally closed the wound, totally regenerated the skin. This is not miracles, this is science actually.
And, of course, you can use them for your face. Like this, the middle picture is like one week, one month and the other one after two months of topical exosome usage. Exosomes are very important because it is very easy and way cheaper than stem cell treatments to produce them.
Even more important, there is no rejection because they are so small they don’t have name tags, so basically, you can get other people’s exosomes and even you can get animal exosomes for the same source. They keep the hope and capacity to democratize all regenerative treatments for all of us for a much wider audience and not tomorrow, actually today.
The Key to Internal Aging
The most important thing though is they keep the key for our internal aging. Now, traditionally, we thought we are wearing out like an old car and science says that’s not true. Basically, we know, for example, if you put some really old cell into a young cell culture, the old cell suddenly starts getting younger and younger and younger again.
That means the genetic information of youth is there. It is largely intact. What’s the problem? The problem is not genetic. It’s actually epigenetic. It’s about the communication. Imagine if your DNA is like your encyclopedia for your life. Your cells are using photocopies of that DNA and in time, the photocopies are becoming unreadable.
According to the new information theory of aging, our cells actually do not lose their inherent potential to stay young. That’s very important. It’s just the communication within the cell and in between the cells is getting dazzled. This can be likened to biological entropy. According to the second rule of thermodynamics, all closed systems, all of us, decay, must decay. The only way how to keep that system up and running is to import information and energy from outside.
Consider this analogy. If your cells are your hardware, the information your cells process to function is your software and all the biohacking treatments, good supplements, proper foods, diet, exercise, they are great to keep your hardware up and running, but not enough.
A Personal Loss and a Lasting Legacy
My father was a true believer of a future where we might beat disease and death. He did everything in his hands to keep his hardware up and running. When he got cancer, we didn’t have any software treatments. He lost his battle one and a half years ago. This lifelong passion of his was not about vanity. It’s just about human dignity. We deserve it.
Conclusion: The Fight for Biological Survival
Coming back to our initial question, our quest is not only about how long we live but actually how healthy we live. Our take of today shall be this. The fight for our biological survival has three key pillars.
First of all, if you want to win a war, you have to believe that you can win that war. Our most important weakness is actually our conviction or belief that aging is inevitable. It is not inevitable. Don’t forget that.
Second, we have to differentiate between the hardware treatments, you have to do them, proper supplements, proper food, exercise and everything but third, that’s not going to be enough. In order to keep young, we have to have young information. We have to import young information from outside, possibly in form of young exosomes.
Now, the medicine is going exponential. Seriously, we are just getting everything better and better and we have enough hope if we can use these new treatments and if we can go through the regulatory walls, we will be able to stay young, healthy and productive much, much longer and actually, believe me, very soon.
I cannot tell you, to be honest, whether we can ever win this war about our disease and death, but I can tell you with the new tools what we have in our hands today, at least we can fight a good fight. Thank you.
