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Robin Daly
welcome to another edition of the Yes to Life show. I’m Robin Daly, hosting the show as usual and also founder of the UK charity Yes to Life that supports people with cancer in adopting what’s called an integrative approach to their cancer care, an approach that pays as much attention to overall health and well-being and lifestyle issues such as nutrition, fitness and stress levels as it does to the cancer itself. My guest on the show this week is Dr. Adeel Khan, a practitioner who’s pushing hard at the boundaries of what is possible in cancer care with a particular interest in harnessing the capacity of the immune system in a variety of ways. Adeel, very many thanks for coming on the show today.

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah thanks for having me.

Robin Daly
So while most practitioners are becoming ever more specialised you seem to be engaged in a whole raft of fields but I wonder is there actually a connecting thread that runs through all your chosen fields?

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, exactly. It’s so interesting you brought that up because I was just reading a paper the other day from this infectious disease specialist who proposed that our entire medical curriculum needs to be revamped. This was almost 10 years ago. Instead of being organ-based, which traditionally it’s like you learn about nephrology, the kidney, you learn about the heart, you learn about the brain, he proposed it needs to be mechanism-based. Because there’s an infinite amount of insults our bodies can have, but there’s only a finite number of responses. So if you learn what those responses are from a cellular physiological level, then you can understand the body much foundationally the way you’re supposed to be. And of course medicine, you know, 50 years ago, organ-based made sense, right? Because that’s what we thought how the body worked. But now we realize, hey, that’s not how the body works. Everything communicates with one another. And so exactly like you said, it’s funny because yes, it’s like I am kind of more specialized, but in a way I’m treating things that aren’t in my specialty because by training, I’m an interventional pain sports physician, meaning I treat chronic pain and injuries. But now I’m using regenerative medicine to treat inflammatory bowel conditions, autoimmune disease, cancer, all sorts of things. And it’s because it’s about mechanism. It’s about what’s the underlying pathophysiology of the disease that causes the patient to have this. And, you know, one of the best quotes I attended is that all disease starts in the cell. So once you understand all disease starts in the cell, it gives you a foundational kind of paradigm to go by. But unfortunately, a lot of doctors hate that stuff because it’s a lot of memorization, a lot of pathways, and, you know, they just rather focus on, hey, this is your problem. This is how you fix it instead of focusing on the underlying pathophysiology.

Robin Daly
Well, that’s very interesting, so a whole different way of looking at things. So, we’re talking here about, as you say, mechanisms that cross the boundaries between separate disciplines, as you say, focused on particular parts of the body. And so, would you say this was looking more at metabolism then?

Dr Adeel Khan
Well, metabolism is metabolic damage or metabolic issues is one of the ways a body can have issues, but really what it’s looking at is how can a cell become dysfunctional? There’s a lot of different ways, and so you have to go back to … In physics, they call it first principles, but in biology, a better term for it is what’s the root cause or what’s the root dysfunction? If you look at a cell, a cell isn’t that complicated. We all learned the cellular biology in grade eight or something. We learned that the mitochondria is the powerhouse. We learned that the nucleus is where the DNA is, and et cetera, et cetera. When you go back to that physiology, then you can go back to the basics, and once you have a strong grasp of the basics, then you can understand, hey, this is how disease actually starts. Obviously, because this is a cancer-focused podcast, how does cancer start? It’s really genomic instability, and that happens because over time, you get increased mutations that the body can repair itself, and then over time, that’s called genomic instability. There’s ways to even measure that now, but that happens at the nucleus, and why does that happen? Asking those questions, why does that happen, is what I’m very interested in and learning about, whereas I think conventional medicine, which has a place, obviously, is focused more on when to have the problem, let’s treat it.

Robin Daly
absolutely and yeah so yeah you’re absolutely right that question of like well why so there’s no good answers around and at this point when somebody else you buy what do you say why can’t

Dr Adeel Khan
Yes. Well, there’s a lot of different reasons, but why does the cell, why does the genomic instability start? Why does the cell become incapable of repairing damage that it normally could repair? This all comes back, this all comes back down to the immune system. And where is most of your immune system? It’s in the gut, 70 to 80 percent, and the rest is in your thymus glands and lymph nodes and whatnot. And so majority of it, interestingly, comes back to the gut. And so I think a lot of chronic disease, including cancer, is related to chronic immune dysfunction. And that dysfunction happens for a myriad of reasons. It could be antibiotics being exposed to environmental toxins, chronic inflammation, stress, processed foods, UV damage from sunlight, chemical factors. There’s so many things that can trigger that chronic damage to the immune system and that chronic inflammatory response and that inability for the body to repair itself. So if your immune system is functioning optimally, that is by far the best way to protect yourself from cancer. And how do you get your immune system to function optimally is really the question that interests me and what I’m really interested in. And that’s why I’m so interested in cellular therapy, because really the fundamental basics of cellular therapy, especially what we do, is really restoring immune function because it does what’s called immunomodulation, which means you’re changing the signaling pattern of the immune system from pro-inflammatory to anti-inflammatory, and you’re creating an environment that helps to prevent and or even treat cancer.

Robin Daly
Amazing, right. Well, we’re going to talk about that some more for sure. But first, I wonder if you give us a brief summary of your trajectory, the career path that’s led to your current interests and endeavors, starting with your reasons for engaging in medicine right in the first place.

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, I mean, I’m a, I’m a pretty simple guy. So for me, it was always about just wanting to help people. And that was really the basics of going into medicine. Uh, but once I got into medicine, it was basically like, you know, are we really helping people or are we just kind of putting out fires? And so I couldn’t, but they, you know, why are we not thinking about the cause and the prevention of everything? And that, and that was just maybe a natural inclination because I was always into health and fitness. And because of that natural inclination, I was asking those questions. And when I started asking those questions, it led me to integrative and functional medicine, which is what I started studying in medical school while learning allopathic medicine, but because I was kind of studying both at the same time, because med school is, you know, it’s relatively easy to pass. So you can do it, you know, without, without too much effort. And so it gave me a lot of free time to focus on other topics. So I was reading a ton of books on everything alternative to understand, hey, maybe there’s more to what they’re teaching us in medical school. And I got super fascinated and just, you know, got obsessed with that kind of whole functional medicine paradigm and going back to what the root cause of disease is. And then, you know, that led me into kind of regenerative medicine once I, once I finished my training, because it just seemed like that’s where the future is because regenerative medicine, essentially the definition of regenerative medicine is can we restore or repair function of a tissue back to a previous state? And so instead of cutting something out or instead of just giving a pharmaceutical, can we restore it back to a previous state? And so that’s a broad definition, but it’s coming to light now because there’s this really cool advancements in terms of cell therapy, gene therapy and tissue engineering and gene editing and all these, all these things that kind of fall under the umbrella of regenerative medicine that are coming together to allow us to actually repair tissue back to a previous state. And so I think, you know, 10 years ago, this was probably just a scientific, you know, dream and now it’s actually happening before our eyes. And so I’m super excited about the next 20 years because I think medicine is going to shift from being a reactive, primarily treatment based type of specialty to being more curative and being restorative.

Robin Daly
I hope you’re right. So looking now at particularly cancer treatment, you, as you’ve already said, you’re very interested in the immune system and you’re interested in immune therapies. You are involved with immune therapies that involve NK cells and dendritic cells, for instance. I wonder if you’d start off by explaining what each of these cell types is and what particular function they’d performed.

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, I think most people understand natural killer cells because natural killer cells are part of your innate immune system. They’re basically just like a type of white blood cell that helps to kill infections or helps to kill disease or something that doesn’t belong in your body. And it recognizes it and it’ll fight it off. That’s why it’s called natural killer. It’s a natural killer. It’s literally in your body there to kill things that don’t belong there. And so I think from an intuitive level, most people can understand that. Then did it excels a little bit more interesting. They’re kind of like the general that orchestrates your immune response. And so what they do is they actually help to present foreign antigens to your T cells. And the T cells are part of your adaptive immune system, which means it’s not innate. Over time it has to be trained. And so the ability for your T cells to function well depends a lot on your dendritic cell. And some people’s dendritic cells become dysfunctional and therefore their T cells don’t respond the way they should. And so one of the hallmarks of cancer is that they become amino evasive, meaning your body for many, for a possible variety of reasons can’t recognize a cancer cell and therefore it can’t kill it. But if they could recognize it, it could kill it. And that’s the interesting thing about some of the cell therapies, because essentially or gene therapies as well. And what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to say, hey, body recognizes cancer cell and kill it. And so that’s what immunotherapy does is it tries to and that’s why it’s called immunotherapy is because it’s using your immune cells to boost your immune system so it can try to fight off some of the cancer cells.

Robin Daly
Well that’s an interesting idea, it’s quite a different idea obviously to the traditional cancer therapies which is simply about trying to kill cancer cells, or trying to encourage the body to do the job itself.

Dr Adeel Khan
Well, it’s yeah, exactly. Try to encourage the body to do itself. Exactly. That’s exactly what it is. And that’s that’s one of our sayings and our company called Eterna is basically harnessing the natural body’s healing ability. So we’re trying to harness you have natural healing abilities and we’re just trying to harness them and empower your body to do what it can do.

Robin Daly
Well, sort of philosophically, if you like, it makes a lot more sense in many ways than the, say, the chemotherapy type approach, which is about killing cancer cells, because unfortunately, of course, it has the most destructive effect on your immune system, which, as you said, has played an enormous part in allowing you to get cancer in the first place, because it’s compromised in some way. So, as a therapy itself, it’s further weakening your ability to deal with cancer in the long term. So, to actually look to work in the other direction to actually support the immune system does make a lot more sense.

Dr Adeel Khan
Exactly. And clinical trials have actually shown that when natural killer cells are combined with chemotherapy, patients have better outcomes and less complications as well. So to me, it’s all about, I think you talk about this because I went through some, it’s all about integration. You know, and chemotherapy and surgery, they still obviously have a place in oncology. But why are we ignoring other cell therapies and integrated approaches? I mean, even supplements like Turmeric and cumin has been shown to help reduce the effects of chemotherapy. So there’s so many things that just don’t get, that just get ignored by conventional medicine, which always baffles me.

Robin Daly
It always baffles me as well, I mean it’s simple enough, they’re not pharmaceutical products and they’re not paid into it, so that’s the only reason why.

Dr Adeel Khan
people are waking up, people are waking up to that, which is the beauty of social media.

Robin Daly
Yes, absolutely. So yeah, there’s some marvelous things that will combine with conventional therapy and make them far less destructive, improve the quality of life substantially, and the evidence behind them is enormous. I mean, turmeric or medicinal mushrooms have got enough evidence to support their use everywhere.

Dr Adeel Khan
the big thing with those treatments, whenever you’re assessing an intervention in medicine, you need to look at what’s called number needed to treat versus number needed to harm. What is the benefit versus the risk, essentially? There is absolutely zero risk in taking turmeric and mushrooms, essentially. And so they’re super safe and they can be beneficial, whereas chemotherapy and immunosuppressants have so much risk with them. So you better have a lot of data to back that up. So I think it’s a very different paradigm. And that’s a whole problem with medicine. It looks at everything in the same lens, where you have to be more contextual and understand things in different contexts, essentially.

Robin Daly
Well, I’m very glad to hear you say that. It’s a point I’m always trying to back home is that you know Things that are essentially like food for instance, you know don’t need the same safety trials that chemicals do and Yeah, they shouldn’t be judged with the same set of rules

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, exactly and we know from a like my my favorite food just so I throw it in there is broccoli sprouts for cancer prevention Right the broccoli sprouts have the equivalent of like something like you know I get I think it was like 50 cups of broccoli right in one serving and you get like you get so much of those antioxidants and Sulfurofane which is hard to get through your diet unless you’re eating broccoli sprouts So and those things can from a mechanistic level help and we know in vitro studies help reduce the proliferation of cancer So what’s what’s the harm in adding a broccoli sprout a day and your smoothie or something, right? There’s so much potential benefit and no harm Yeah, so and that’s and I think that’s the thing with cell therapies and gene therapies to the new generation of gene therapies that There’s very little harm and there’s a lot of potential benefit whereas with chemotherapy radiation surgery There is a lot of potential harm and there may not always be benefits So I think you always have to look at the whole picture. Mm-hmm

Robin Daly
All right. Well, I want to hear more about this sort of safety profile of these treatments Interesting. So can we just step back? You are comparing NK cells and T cells and so NK cells They’re natural killer cells. They’re kind of part of our system built in ready to go T cells they need to learn they’re what you I think you used the word adaptive and so these these cells have got to be taught look there’s some bad guys over there you’ve got to go get them and This is what’s not working in the case of cancer quite often is that They’re not adapting in the way that we would hope and therefore doing the job. So the Dendritic cells you mentioned this is where they come in. This is their job here to actually Somehow inform the T cells of what the enemy looks like. Could you say a little bit more about that?

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, exactly. It’s a battle going on, right? And so essentially the dead verdict cells are like the general. They have to present to the T-cell to say, hey, this is the bad guy. It’s called the antigen presenting cell or APC. But essentially, they have to present it so that the T-cell can recognize it. But a lot of times, because cancer cells are smart, they don’t differentiate themselves that much from your own cells. So your immune system can’t recognize it, and therefore the T-cells can’t kill it. So this is a beauty of CAR-T, which is basically is gene editing technology to T-cells. So it’s called chimeric antigen receptor, and essentially what it’s doing is it’s doing genetic modification. And so it can essentially encode this CAR gene onto the T-cell. And this CAR gene, when it expresses this, it allows it to recognize the cancer cells in your body, and it can kill them. And so they take your own T-cells out of your body. They use a process called leukophoresis, which is essentially just a way to take out your T-cells, and they can use gene editing technology to attach this CAR, gene modified protein, and then they can expand the cells in the lab, and then they can infuse them back into your body. And when they infuse the T-cells back into your body, they can actually target the cancer cells. And then the cool thing about T-cells and B-cells as well, which is a neuropivium immune system, they have a memory. And so what that means is in the future, if the cancer does come back, the CAR-T cells will be able to remember and can rapidly deal with the cancer effectively if it comes back. So CAR-T is the perfect beautiful kind of, you know, symphony of being able to combine gene editing and cell therapy into a customizable approach to treat cancer. And it’s being used for mainly blood cancers, because that’s what it’s effective for, like leukemias and lymphomas. But they’re working on a lot of different CAR-Ts now for autoimmune disease, and for different cancers as well, because you can modify the T-cells to recognize and alter different cellular pathways. So, you know, I think CAR-T is going to get more and more traction. Right now, the problem with CAR-T is it’s very expensive. And so we’re actually working, you know, with our stem cell manufacturers and some geneticists, and we’re going to make our own CAR-Ts and try to bring the cost down by half. But our goal is to bring the cost down by a tenth, because right now CAR-T is $500,000 for a treatment. Really? Wow. Yeah, yeah, it’s the world’s most expensive cell treatment. But our goal is to, you know, I think in five to ten years, it could be $50,000, and that’s my vision with it. But I think that’s where it’s headed. You know, as technology improves, as cell expansion, cell manufacturing, all those processes improve, then you’re going to have, you know, cost reductions and savings for patients.

Robin Daly
One important question, one of the major shortcomings of a lot of cancer treatments is that they might be effective at the time, but a little further down the line they no longer work because the cancer itself has evolved and whatever the process was can’t keep up with it. So how does it relate here? Say you’ve trained your immune system to recognize cancer cells, do they then mutate? Does that training, is it still valid, does it still work or do you need to start again?

Dr Adeel Khan
No, you’d have to start again and that’s you know, and that’s where I think precision medicine comes in where you can actually Use there’s this technology. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this called cancer avatar. No, I don’t know that So an avatar you’ve probably probably heard the movie avatar, right? Where you know, yeah essentially It’s an avatar meaning they take the cancer from your body and they actually put it either into an animal Or they put it now now a technology has improved They can actually what’s called an organoid and organoids are 3d cell cultures that self organized So essentially they can make these organoids in a petri dish and they can put the cancer into that organoid and they can figure out Exactly what treatment would work best for this cancer right before they give it to your body Yeah, and and that’s where I think medicine needs to go because right now it’s so haphazard It’s just saying, you know, at least with breast cancer We’ve evolved a bit and there’s more specifics but the reality is there’s hundreds of different types of breast cancers and And and that’s what we’re realizing now and so it has to be precise and individualized customized treatment of cancer for each patient

Robin Daly
Yeah, it makes sense Okay, interesting. So you’ve got we’ve mentioned three different types of immunotherapy now using straight NK cells Working with dendritic cells to T cells trained up. Yeah, and then CAR T therapy, which I understand is kind of like much more sophisticated than the other two, is that right?

Dr Adeel Khan
That’s right, because there’s a gene editing component, whereas the dendritic and natural killer cells, we’re essentially just taking them either from your body or we’re taking someone else’s and we’re just infusing them into your body. And so it’s obviously it’s a fraction of the cost of CAR T, but it may not have the same outcomes. But however, having said that, you know, the clinic I partner with that does that isn’t is actually in Japan and they’ve been doing it for over 10 years because they’re one of the first in the world to use dendritic cells. And they have patients who were staged for, you know, pancreatic cancer, told they were terminal and had three, six months live, and they did the infusions of the dendritic and natural killer. They’re still alive 10 years later. Right. So I think, you know, obviously, when you have anecdotes like that and you get thousands of anecdotes like that, I think you have a hypothesis that that can be very interesting to see. We probably need more clinical trials, but I think the big thing again is those dendritic and natural killer cells have no harm and they have a lot of potential benefit. And personally, I’m doing natural killer cells on myself once a year because why not? It’s going to strengthen my immune system and it may help the cancer and I have access to it. You know what I mean? And so I think from that I’m all about prevention and I think that’s that’s one way to easily do it for sure. And I think the other immunotherapy that I think is very interesting are alkalitic viruses, which is basically a modified virus that can infect and kill the cancer cells. And and I think, you know, with with gene therapy, there’s now we have what are called plasmids, which are even safer than viruses because viruses are expensive to manufacture. And they’re also there can be risk with viruses as well. Whereas with a plasmid, a plasmid is essentially just a string of DNA that’s of bacterial origin. And so there’s no actual live bacteria in there. So there’s nothing in there to cause immune reaction. There’s no chance of infection. There’s no chance of something going wrong. And so but the plasmid can be just as effective as a virus. It’s actually plasmids only came out in the last like five years in gene therapy, but they’re super fascinating. And I think there’s going to be a lot of research done using plasmid gene therapies for a variety of things, one being cancer.

Robin Daly
So tell me, how do they work, they’re not actually a live virus, they’re not getting to have a direct effect in that way, what’s actually going on?

Dr Adeel Khan
There’s just this strand of DNA which can be modified to essentially insert and target any particular cell in your body. So for example, one of the plasmid gene therapies that’s out there is called fallostatin gene therapy and it’s essentially when you do the injection, it releases this protein or peptide called fallostatin every day at a low dose. And fallostatin is a really important peptide that decreases as you age and it helps to not only decrease risk of cancer because it activates something called boxo3 pathway, it reduces inflammation, it inhibits something called myostatin, which allows your body to increase lean body mass. So it has all these amazing benefits that you can get from one gene therapy injection. And that gene therapy is a plasmid vector that essentially releases that peptide every day at a low dose. If you had cancer, what you could do theoretically is essentially you could have this, you could have what are called micro RNAs inserted into the gene therapy to target a specific cancer and kill that cancer.

Robin Daly
Okay, all very crafty stuff. So, with this array of immunotherapies, can you give some idea of the effectiveness of these treatments and for whom they are effective?

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, I think, you know, the people that are going to, that I’ve personally seen have the most benefit from these type of things are going to be people who are not, you know, are typically not stage four, usually going to be stage two or stage three. And that’s where it tends to be more effective. Having said that, there are patients with stage four who have had good results. I think, as I was saying earlier, I think it can be one of those things that anyone really who’s going through chemotherapy should consider natural killer cells and dendritic cells. What’s the downside in having that as part of your chemotherapy? There is no downside and there’s a lot of upside. So to me, it’s almost the equivalent of adding turmeric or mushrooms or whatever to your chemotherapy regimen, because it’s essentially going to help to mitigate side effects and it may boost the outcomes as well.

Robin Daly
right so so that’s something you think could be a benefit to anyone pretty much Anyone fighting cancer, really

Robin Daly
But that’s just with the simple therapies you’re talking about there. How about you get with the more sophisticated ones? Who are those working for them? What kind of chances of a good result are they?

Dr Adeel Khan
I think CAR-T is very specific right now. It’s really only for blood cancers such as leukemia or lymphoma. Okay. And then, you know, so I think that’s those are the only ones really where we have the evidence and the use for. There’s still clinical trials going on for other things, but thus primarily what CAR-T can be used for. And then, although this isn’t immunotherapy, it’s still related to stem cells. It’s that, you know, stem cell transplants are increasing in terms of their effectiveness because we don’t necessarily have to just rely on bone marrow transplants anymore. You can use umbilical cord transplants as well. And umbilical cord, it can be more excessively create, obviously it’s more acceptable because there’s more, you know, it’s easier to get umbilical cord tissue. And it’s also something that is being worked on is using just genetic, it’s called genetic reprogramming, which is basically where you take a cell from the body and you reprogram it into an undifferentiated stem cell. So you could take any cell, any somatic cell in your body, you could take a muscle cell, a fat cell, and you can transform it back into what’s called an induced pluripotent stem cell. It was actually given the Nobel Prize in Japan, 2014, Yamanaka. It’s called the Yamanaka Factors.

Robin Daly
So this is kind of reverse engineering of cells.

Dr Adeel Khan
Exactly. And how cool is it that your body has this ability to turn back into a baby stem cell? I just think that’s so fascinating that your body can even do that. It’s basically just genetic reprogramming using certain transcription factors and just over expressing them causes your cells to go back into this naked stem cell state. And what that does is it allows you to create as many stem cells as you need that you can eventually use to replenish your bone marrow if you have some sort of myelodysplastic disorder, myelodysplasia, or some sort of bone marrow cancer. So I think you’re going to see a lot more IPSC-derived cancer treatments over the next few years. There’s already some being worked on. I believe there was one for HIV that was done successfully this year where they used a bone marrow transplant using and essentially a bone marrow transplant to cure patients with HIV.

Robin Daly
So this is not a replacement for transplants and it’s actually just a new source for the cells that you use in the transplant.

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, but you can have almost, because you don’t have to rely on the whole, you can basically create all the cells in the lab that you need, so you don’t have to rely on donors.

Robin Daly
Right, which is obviously a huge plus, because sometimes donors are hard to come by for rare types. Interesting. Okay. So, I noticed that you conducted a trial in Canada with mesenchymal stromal cells. Well, how does this relate to what we’ve been speaking about already?

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, the clinical trial we’re doing is essentially for osteoarthritis, which is obviously different from cancer. But again, if you look at the underlying mechanism of osteoarthritis, it’s related to chronic inflammation. And there is something called the gut joint access, which we know about, right? And the gut, I made a post one time about a leaky knee. What I mean by leaky knee is that your immune cells are penetrating into the cartilage and they’re causing this chronic inflammation and they’re causing degradation of the cartilage and you’re eating away at it. So again, it comes back down to a dysfunctional immune system. So it’s the same principles, just a different disease. But the problem with medicine right now still is that an orthopedic surgeon has no way to communicate with the oncologist because they just speak different languages. But I’m kind of taking a step back and I’m looking at the whole body from first principles, as I like to say, and try to understand what’s the root of it. And when you look at it that way, you realize there’s only a few root causes for every disease, every chronic disease that is.

Robin Daly
Right. Well, that’s something that’s becoming increasingly apparent that, yeah, the same factors are involved in just a whole range of chronic diseases, you know, and these same factors just happen to manifest in different chronic diseases in different people. And, you know, I think that’s pretty well the common currency in integrated circles now, and that is creeping into the mainstream as well. I think to some extent, whether it will have the effect of making the giant league that you’re making, going from this kind of a siloed approach to medicine to actually, you know, proper collaboration. I don’t know.

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, I think it’s really a paradigm shift, and it will take probably a long time for your traditional doctor to switch. But because patients are self-educating themselves so much, I think it’s going to put pressure on the system to change, or else patients will just travel outside of their countries, which is what’s happening. Medical tourism is at an all-time high. And why are patients leaving the US and Canada and all these quote-unquote great countries for medicine to go to other places? It’s because our systems are basically driven by pharmaceutical and surgical lobbies. And just to-

Robin Daly
So, coming back to the immunotherapies, some of them have got a long track record. I mean, dendritic cell therapy has been around for a long time now, hasn’t it? Whereas, you know, the ekarti work is obviously cutting edge. And they’re different costs. So, you know, they’re quite different beasts in a way, even though they’re all immunotherapies. What criteria would you use to choose between them in any one case?

Dr Adeel Khan
I mean, I think with CAR T, you’re really only limited to blood cancers, and I think with dendritic and natural, I’m using those more for solid tumor cases where surgery may not be an option, or they did surgery, but there’s still some remains, or they don’t want to do chemotherapy, or they’ve tried chemo and they’re still having issues. It’s a mix of patients, I would say, that we’re looking at, but I would say the most common, I think by far, are patients who just don’t want to do chemotherapy because they don’t want to destroy their whole body and they want to try something else. I think patients should have the right to choose that if they want to try an alternative that may work. I’m not saying don’t do chemo after if it doesn’t work, but if it was my mom who had cancer, why would I want her to go through chemotherapy first? I would rather her try the natural minimally invasive options first, and if that doesn’t work, then hey, fine, we can go to chemo, but natural killer cells and dendritic cells or CAR T, they’re not going to have any harm on the body. To me, it’s like if we can try those minimally invasive, these harmful interventions first, I think that should always be our guiding principle because in medicine, we’re always taught first to do no harm, but somehow that’s been forgotten.

Robin Daly
Yes, so I mean you keep talking about these non-harmful treatments, I mean is the safety profile of the more very high indeed?

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, and there has been there has been data on that. And there’s also if you come back to mechanisms as well, like, yes, there’s safety data, for sure, you know, in clinical trials and in vitro and in humans as well. But also, if you come back to mechanisms, what is like, if you think about it, if you’re putting, if you’re putting something that’s already in your body, but that is deficient, and you know it’s deficient because you have cancer, you wouldn’t have cancer in the first place if your immune system was working properly. So if your immune system is not working properly, and you have cancer, you know, and you’re doing something to try to boost your immune system with immunotherapy, you’re not really doing any harm. You’re just trying to restore something that isn’t working properly in the first place. Right. It’s the same thing. It’s the same thing when we treat like rotator cuff tears in the shoulder. We use stem cells to regenerate the tendon, because it’s not, there’s a gap or there’s a hole, we’re just trying to restore that hole. Why, why do we need to cut it out or try to stitch it back together if we can regenerate?

Robin Daly
Right, yeah, makes complete sense. So, these immunotherapies, are you tended to always think about them in combination with other therapies or do you occasionally use them as standalone therapies?

Dr Adeel Khan
No, I’m a huge believer in the integrative medicine approach, and I have integrative oncologists I work with that I think are good for, you know, supplementations, nutraceuticals, lifestyle, like dietary, all that stuff, optimizing all the lifestyle factors, because even if you treat the cancer, but you don’t change your lifestyle, it may come back. Right. So I think that’s where it becomes really important to make sure you have a good lifestyle. And so I’m a huge believer in combining that with treatments that we’re doing, because even if the therapy and the immunotherapy we do works, you got to change your lifestyle or else the cancer can come back. Right. So that’s kind of the way I like to approach it is I like to combine the holistic approach of lifestyle medicine and integrative medicine and then also regenerative medicine.

Robin Daly
So yeah, lifestyle you’re seeing then is a kind of ground base that needs to be looked at.

Dr Adeel Khan
Well, if you look at the, you know, why do most people get cancer? Like, you know, if we’re at the beginning of this conversation, it really comes back down to processed foods, stress, environmental toxins, like not exercising enough, not having enough muscle, like there’s, yes, genetics play a role for sure, but I think we know that it’s something like 80% of cancers are lifestyle related, so I think that is the majority factor in the development of those cancers. Like, we know there’s something called alco genes, and alco genes are basically, you know, if they get overexpressed, they can cause cells to grow uncontrollably, and there’s also something called tumor suppressor genes, which suppress the development of tumors. And one of the best ways to stimulate tumor suppressor genes and to also suppress alco genes is resistance training. Specifically, muscle, because muscle releases something called myokines, which is a type of cytokine, which is a protein that essentially sends signals to your body to activate the cellular pathway. So we, again, we know that if you’re doing those type of things, you can help protect your body from cancer.

Robin Daly
very interesting well yes as first time I’ve had that mechanism explained to me obviously I appreciate that you know exercise to big new kid on the block in terms of what it can do for you you have cancer so very interesting

Dr Adeel Khan
The mechanisms are important to understand because then you can really understand. It just gives you a better appreciation and I also think I’ve read some research. When you explain to patients the mechanisms, they’re more likely to follow the behavior change.

Robin Daly
All right, that makes sense. Yeah. Okay, so interesting. So it’s very, you know, I appreciate very much you’re well behind lifestyle medicine, you’re well behind integration. And you also appreciate that there is a place for the old traditional doctor therapies. I tend to see it in my, my own picture is that they’re kind of firefighting tools that you sometimes need to resort to at moments when things are out of control. And they can be useful for taking the momentum out of a particular situation to give you time to do something more constructive. Is that a fair picture, do you think?

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, no, I think that’s the perfect picture of how to, I think, approach cancer, yeah.

Robin Daly
But you really alluded to the fact that if you’re going to use these cell killing therapies like chemotherapy or radiotherapy, there are a mountain of things you can do to actually make them less destructive to the other parts of yourself that you’re actually not trying to kill and to help you to recover from the challenge of the treatment itself. Exactly.

Dr Adeel Khan
I think chemotherapy is just, you know, it served its purpose, I think, for a long time. And it may have a place in the future. But I think the way medicine is going, chemotherapy in 100 years from now, we’ll look back at chemotherapy being like one of those archaic medicine practices that we used to do.

Robin Daly
Yeah, I think you’re right. Hopefully not too long from now. Anyway, so based on your experience and your appreciation of the evidence, do you think there’s sufficient evidence right now for mainstream cancer care to look like integrative oncology?

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, I think there’s been sufficient evidence for quite a while, and I don’t know if it’s just the establishment doesn’t want to accept change, but there’s even fellowship training in the US now for integrative oncology. So it’s recognized. And so I think there’s no excuse to not educate yourself on that if you are an oncologist. And if you generally want what’s best for your patient, you would be educating yourself on alternative approaches because they can work synergistically with what you’re doing.

Robin Daly
Absolutely. So you mentioned, early on in the interview, you mentioned Eterna Health and its mission to empower the body’s natural healing ability. Great mission. I wonder if you can tell us a bit more about that, what you’re doing with that.

Dr Adeel Khan
We, so we’re rapidly expanding, we’re going into, you know, we’re opening up clinics kind of all over the world and like we have that partnership in Japan, we’re opening one to buy in Europe, we have, you know, US opening and we have partnerships in Mexico. And the idea is we want to bring a lot of the technologies we have and the treatments we have and make them more accessible. And also the raising awareness that, you know, that this is, this is the way medicine’s headed and people deserve to have access to these type of treatments. And some of them are still expensive, but I think, like we were saying earlier, like I think it’s five to 10 years, as with any technology, the price will come down. You know, just like with electric vehicles and cars and Tesla’s being so expensive, like to get a, you know, a hundred kilowatt battery was so expensive and now so cheap. And so I think, relatively speaking, like the size of the battery and the ability to manufacture it. So I think cell therapy is very similar. Cell therapy is manufacturing based and the technology of manufacturing cells is improving every year. So I think it’ll continue to improve, which means we’ll have better products and we’ll have cheaper products that are more effective. So, I envision a future where people can get effective cell treatments anywhere in the world in combination with their traditional treatments if they want. But ideally, you know, we create a world where people have access to treatments that can even, you know, that hopefully can prevent cancer altogether. I think using something like, something like there’s this test called Helix safe. Yeah. It’s a European company. You’ve heard of it? No, do tell me. Oh yeah. Helix safe. So it’s a European company. It’s an Italian company and the scientists behind it have published plenty of journal articles and essentially they’re the only company in the world that has evidence for supporting that they can pick up a world called cancer driver or drivers of cancer. So basically their technology, they’d like to say it’s cancer driver interception. So they’re interrupting the drivers that cause cancer. And what are the drivers that cause cancer? We talked about a few of them, genomic instability, chronic inflammation, there’s immune dysfunction, there’s mitochondrial dysfunction. It’s basically all cellular dysfunctions, it’s similar to the hallmarks of aging. So again, it’s the same principles as to why you develop cancer. And so this test can help to detect it before you actually develop cancer. And there’s a prodromal period that doctors don’t talk about. That’s between five to 15 years is estimated before you actually develop cancer. So you can intervene in that. If everyone had access to helix safe and you could intervene, then people wouldn’t even get cancer, but scaling that technology and putting the investment and infrastructure behind it is not good for the medical industry, right?

Dr Adeel Khan
It takes away from business. And so I think it has to be a grassroots movement driven by people. And that’s the way it’s going to go because people are waking up to the fact that this is controlled by the pharmaceuticals and by lobbyists who support the regulated areas and all that stuff.

Robin Daly
Yeah, so is this an expensive test? Was it a blood test?

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, it’s called liquid biopsy and it’s it’s a and essentially liquid biopsy just the fancy worker way of saying it’s just a blood test But the special technology and essentially it’s just yeah It just gets shipped out to Italy and it’s I think it’s between 500 bucks to $750 depending on where you’re doing Okay, so thought super expensive and it and they can be super

Robin Daly
Yeah, amazing. So that is a real lifestyle prevention tool in a way, isn’t it? Because it’s actually looking at the effects of your lifestyle, producing these precursors of cancer or chronic disease. And you could actually monitor whether your attempts to put them right are worky or not.

Dr Adeel Khan
Exactly. In those interventions, and there’s nutraceuticals, there’s even pharmaceuticals that you could use potentially, but there’s things you can do before you develop the cancer. And I think right now, the way the system’s designed, it’s essentially just hoping and praying you don’t have cancer. You get an MRI or you get a blood test and you’re just like, ooh, I don’t have cancer. But the heli-safe test can actually tell you, hey, if you don’t change your lifestyle or you’re going to develop cancer in five to 10 years depending on your risk. And so that’s why I really am a big advocate of that test.

Robin Daly
sounds brilliant. So look, we’re out of time. Do you want to tell listeners where they can find out more about you and about the therapies that we’ve been discussing?

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, our website is pretty simple. It’s just eternal.health, like eternal without an L. So just eternal.health is where we have all of our treatments and, you know, different specialists who work with us and partnerships. And then I’m pretty active on social media. My Instagram is at dr.acon, K-H-A-N. I’m going to be in a, there’s a Netflix documentary coming out later this year called Longevity Hackers. I think everyone should tune into that because I have a small feature in it, but there’s some big celebrities in there. Edward Norton from Fight Club is narrating. They got Halle Berry and Tony Robbins, Mark Cuban, a bunch of people in there. And I think that’s going to be really big because it’ll hopefully penetrate the mainstream audience to understand, Hey, there’s this whole other side to medicine.

Robin Daly
Okay. Well, many thanks for coming on the show, dear. It’s been quite a ride. Packed with cutting-edge information about the media therapists, of course, in particular, it’s been fascinating. Real pleasure talking to you today.

Dr Adeel Khan
Yeah, thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Robin Daly
Bye. I love Dr. Khan’s pragmatic approach to tackling cancer, particularly the clear distinction he makes between the need for a high degree of caution and evidence for potentially damaging treatments, for which the benefit to harm ratio is absolutely crucial, and approaches that are health-promoting with extremely low risk of harms. It’s also been fascinating to learn more about the recent developments in immune therapies, which is a promising avenue for many people with cancer. Thanks so much for listening today. I hope you enjoyed the show, and you want to join me again next week for another yes to life show.