Gene Therapy Explained: How It Could Transform Your Health

What if the future of medicine is not just treating disease once it appears, but correcting it at its source?

In this episode of The Wellness Algorithm, Anshu Bahanda is joined by Dr Patrick Sewell, founder of Triple Helix Science, to understand gene therapy in simple, human terms. Together, they unpack a cutting edge and often controversial area of medicine, exploring how gene therapy works and why it is being studied for cancer, Alzheimer’s, muscular dystrophy, addiction, depression and even longevity. This conversation looks at what gene therapy could mean for the future of prevention, precision medicine and even the way we understand disease itself.

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Transcript

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Anshu Bahanda: Welcome to the Wellness Algorithm, where wellness is not fixed. It evolves as we do, with every new experience and every season of our lives. In today's episode, we’re going to step into one of the most important shifts happening in modern medicine right now: gene therapy. You may have seen it in headlines tied to cancer, breakthroughs for rare genetic conditions, or even longevity. But beyond the headlines, what does it actually mean? And how close is it to shaping everyday healthcare? Not just specialist treatment, is it something reserved for last-resort illness? Or could it play a role much earlier in recovery, in prevention, and in long-term health? To help us unpack this today, I’m joined by Dr Patrick Sewell, founder of Triple Helix Science. Dr Patrick is a world-renowned surgeon, researcher and pioneer in regenerative and gene-based medicine. Over the past two decades, he's worked directly with gene therapies in clinical settings, particularly with patients facing advanced-stage cancer and many, many other things.

Before we dive in, a small request. I do these podcasts to help you with your health and wellness. These podcasts are completely free, and my belief is that even if I can help one person with their health and wellness, I have achieved what I’ve set out to do. So please share it with people, it’s invaluable information. And please do subscribe. These podcasts are free and the only thing we ask you to do is subscribe to them.

Patrick, welcome to the podcast and thank you for being here with us today.

Patrick Sewell: My pleasure. Thank you.

AB: I know your time is very valuable. I know you’re doing some very important tasks, so I’m really grateful that you’re here.

PS: I’m happy to be here.

AB: So, before we dive into any of these questions, I want you to explain to us in layman's terms: what is a gene and what is gene therapy?

PS: Sure. So your genes, we also know them as DNA. And you get half of your genes, or DNA, from your mother and half from your father. And in the sperm and the ova, when they combine into you as a single-cell organism, those genes direct everything that happens after that, everything. They [determine] how it splits into two cells and then four cells and eight cells and sixteen cells. Those genes direct your kidney growth, your bone growth, how tall you will be, what colour your eyes are. The genes are the software of your body. They direct everything. And it’s amazing, all of that’s compacted into a sperm and an egg, a single-cell reproductive [cell], and it’s unpacked from there, for the rest of your life.

You come with that set of software. And when you’re born, that software runs everything the rest of your life, it directs everything: what’s going to happen to you, how you’re going to interact with life and how life interacts with you. And it’s an ongoing process from there. It’s not a static process. The DNA — the software, like in your computer — can get corrupted. Well, your software and your genes can get corrupted, and so gene therapy is addressing those corruptions. How we attempt to address the corruptions to date, and how we’ll do them in the future.

AB: Okay, thank you for that. So, now I want you to explain to us: how does gene therapy actually work? The process.

PS: So genes are made up of particles, you could call them. Proteins are made up of small components. A molecule is made up of atoms. If you take an oxygen and two hydrogen atoms, you get water. Okay, so we can make water, I can make artificial water by combining oxygen and hydrogen, but it’s identical to natural water. So, it doesn’t really matter if you call it synthetic or artificial. It’s the same thing in the end.

We can do that with genes, we can do that with proteins. So genes are made of subsets of base components, the bottom level of structure. And we put those together in the lab and we call it a synthetic gene, but it’s identical to the gene that you’re born with. It can be; we can make unusual ones, but in this case we try to make an identical one, and then we can take that gene and give it to you to replace a faulty one.

AB: And how do you give it to people?

PS: In the science of gene therapy, we can manipulate your genes in a number of ways. We can make them work better: dial up the activity, dial down the activity, put a new one in, take the one that’s in your body and kind of do surgery on it, and that’s called CRISPR, which a lot of people have heard of. But in this case we build it. It’s called gene edition. We take the gene and make it in the lab. We put it in a delivery system, like a DHL truck, and then we tell the truck to go to your house, somewhere in your body. Let’s say I want it to go to your brain, I programme the truck to deliver just to the brain. We put the package in the truck, which is the gene, and then we inject the gene into your bloodstream. And it drives to the brain, drops off the package, which is the gene. The package gets opened in the cell, and out comes the gene and it does what it normally does.

So, let’s pretend you’re missing gene X in your brain. We build gene X in the lab, we put it in a truck, which is a virus — in real life, it’s a harmless virus — and we inject that virus into your bloodstream. The virus takes gene X to your brain, drops gene X off. Now you have gene X. Well, you were born without gene X, but we put gene X in your brain, you’re no longer lacking gene X. Let’s say gene X does something very important, like allows you to open your eyes. Now you can open your eyes, whereas before you couldn’t open your eyes.

AB: So, I’d read in the New England Journal that apparently there was a rare blindness that was fixed by gene therapy, for a whole bunch of people. I mean, imagine that these are people who’d never seen their whole lives and there was no chance of curing it through medicine, and gene therapy sorted it out.

PS: Exactly. The absence of the gene caused their blindness. So providing the missing gene solved their blindness. That’s the essence of gene therapy. Now that’s gene replacement, but we can do gene repair, we can do gene dial-up, we can do gene dial-down, and we can do surgery on part of a gene. Those are all types of gene therapies.

The take-home message is: diseases, how tall you are, the colour of your eyes, whether you get cancer or not, it’s all driven by your genes. Everything in your health, in your whole lifetime, is driven by your genes. So if we have an undesirable event in our lives, like we develop cancer because of a genetic problem, if we can fix that genetic problem before the cancer occurs, you won’t get that cancer.

AB: Yeah. So what you’re saying to me is that it’s not just used for severe illnesses or last-resort issues. It can be used for prevention.

PS: It will be used for prevention, yes. In my practice we’re heading in that direction, but like everything in medicine, we start off with a new idea and there’s a tremendous amount of unknown. And we don’t know if it’s completely safe, a little bit dangerous or a lot dangerous. So we have a process called the scientific method. We start in the lab with bacteria, and then we do mice, and then we do animals. Eventually we get to humans. And that’s all called clinical trials. And then once we've done all of that in a sufficient number of all those, including humans, then it gets approved for anybody.

But even then there are unknowns. For instance, we have medications that are recalled 10 years after they’ve been on the market because something was discovered that’s harmful. So, that’s part of science, always learning. When we start off with gene therapy, we start with the people who have the most need. They’re facing certain death and there’s no treatment, therefore the risk is acceptable. But the risk is not acceptable to give that unknown to a healthy person with no problems. For instance, prevention.

AB: Okay.

PS: So, prevention comes around when we know all about that particular gene therapy and—

AB: We know all about the side effects.

PS: All about the lack or presence of side effects.

AB: Right.

PS: And whether the risk-benefit ratio is acceptable to use for prevention. We will get to that in the near future. Right now we’re in the stage of, we have horrible diseases with no treatment that kill people. And we have a hint, maybe some very good evidence, that this gene therapy will prevent that death. And so that’s when we utilise it in that situation.

But fast forward 20 years, and we've been using that for 20 years, and we know in the process of treating 10,000 patients, we might discover that it prevents a whole other disease. And we notice that we prevented a thousand cases of something, then it dawns on us: well, we should use it for prevention. So, that’s how that comes about.

AB: So, Patrick, it seems from what you’re telling me, that because it’s so fairly new, we don’t know enough about the side effects. Is that right?

PS: Yes, for some things. So keep in mind that, well, think about it like this. Every individual gene therapy is like a new medication. Think about how many pharmaceuticals there are, how many pills, different types of medications, okay? Each one of those could be a gene therapy. For instance, high blood pressure. There are 15 or 20 pills on the market for high blood pressure. We know all about the side effects of that one and that one and that one. Some have fewer side effects, but this one has more side effects, works better. So it’s a menu. That’s equivalent to 15 gene therapies for high blood pressure.

AB: Right, right, right.

PS: So you have to collect all the data. Eventually we’ll have a library of gene therapies, and we’ll know all about each gene therapy and the risk for that person versus the other person.

AB: Because we’re talking about all the genes that make a human being.

PS: Yes. We’ll have an accumulated knowledge of the gene therapies for options for various diseases. And it'll be millions of choices, eventually, you know. So to make a statement about whether a gene therapy is safe or not, you have to add a lot of information. Which gene therapy? How long has it been used? What are the other choices? Because safety is a relative choice. If you’re going to certainly die and you have a gene therapy that definitely won’t kill you, but might save your life, that’s a pretty easy decision. But if you’re not going to die and you just have a cold, taking a gene therapy with unknowns is not worth it.

AB: Yeah. So that reminds me of what we were talking about earlier, about what Angelina Jolie did when she found out that she had, I think, the cancer gene, and she went and had a mastectomy. Give me your opinion on something like that.

PS: So—

AB: She didn't do gene therapy, she had a mastectomy.

PS: Yes. In the future, we could fix that gene in her. It depends on what gene it is. We do that now sometimes. So she had the mastectomy because there was no genetic therapy for her genetic problem. But imagine two years from now, we have a way for somebody just like her to fix the gene, and there’s no need to get a mastectomy because there’s no more genetic problem.

AB: Wow.

PS: That’s the difference. And we’re talking a simple injection to do it. So instead of a mastectomy, which is a major surgery and all the problems that go with it, a simple injection to replace the gene that that person’s missing, or to add a protective gene that negates the one they were born with, and you’re done.

AB: Okay, and talk to me about the question that a lot of people have asked me, which is: what is the cost of something like this?

PS: Yeah, so the cost is in flux. In other words, it’s changing, it’s coming down. But I'll give you an example. We all know you can get your genome analysed, 23andMe or whatever. The cost to map the first human genome was $30 million. Now it costs $200.

AB: It’s down to 99, I believe, or something like that.

PS: Or 99 dollars. So the cost went from 30 million to 99.

AB: Wow.

PS: The same thing will happen with gene therapy. You know, it’s already come down. Since I’ve been using the technology, the price has decreased by 75%.

AB: Wow.

PS: Which is a dramatic drop. There are all sorts of things that go into how much medicine costs, gene therapies, and they don’t always make sense. There’s economics and there’s market price and, you know, things like that. But generally speaking, if we look at diagnostics from $30 million to $99, the therapy will come down too.

AB: And currently, if you give people an idea of what kind of prices we’re talking about?

PS: So there are approved gene therapies on the market and they cost millions of dollars. Not because they actually cost millions of dollars; that’s economics and big pharma and market price and things. What I’m going to tell you is public information, you can read about this. There’s a gene therapy on the market that they charge three and a half million dollars for, and it cost them $85,000 to manufacture it.

AB: Oh my goodness.

PS: So, they spend 85,000 and they sell it for three and a half million. Now they'll tell you, we’re recouping our research costs and all that. And that may or may not be true, to what degree, who knows. But you know, this is the pattern of medicine. This is why costs of medicine are out of control. Why the United States spends a fifth of their budget on healthcare. Because prices are what they are. In many cases they don’t have to be that way, but it’s business.

So I can manufacture that same $85,000 gene therapy and sell it for $90,000, if I violate the patent and make $5,000 profit, you know, that’s the reality. They want to make 3 million. So they sell it for 3 million.

AB: Wow.

PS: Yeah. But it doesn’t have to be that way. And eventually market forces, you know. Businesses working against each other. Two businesses, one wanting to undersell the other.

AB: Competition will bring prices down.

PS: Market competition will bring price down. That’s what always brings them down.

AB: Yeah, that’s why a monopoly is always not great for the economy.

PS: Yes, so if you come out with a gene therapy and you have a patent on it, nobody else makes it, your choice is pay $3 million or don’t get it. And they can charge $3 million because your [only other choice is to] not get it.

AB: Because no one else has it, yes.

PS: But as soon as somebody else — that patent expires — or somebody has a slightly different one that doesn’t violate the patent and is competitive, then they have the choice to drop their price or lose that business.

AB: And you’ve done over 130 treatments, clinical treatments.

PS: 185 patients.

AB: Wow, so you’ve treated 185 patients. Tell me, from your experience with these patients, has anything really surprised you about what you’ve done?

PS: I have a number of training specialties, but oncology is where I spent most of my life. And so I went into gene therapy for treating cancer. So I have a bunch of gene therapies designed to treat cancer, because we treat cancer very poorly. Our chemotherapy has horrible side effects and is not very effective. Our radiation has side effects. Immunotherapy is wonderful, but it still has limitations. And so I decided to foray into gene therapy and attempt to better treat cancer.

So I’ve treated — most of my patients have been cancer, treating their cancer with gene therapy. And what surprised me was not only did their cancer respond, but their whole body responded in many ways. Their energy came back because of some other effects of the gene therapy. That really made me realise that this is not like high blood pressure, where you give the pill to lower the high blood pressure. You give a gene and it has multiple functions, and some of them are extremely beneficial for just general health.

So that kind of opened up the world of, can we make people healthier with gene therapy? And that’s where the field is — one of the directions the field is going in now. Besides treating Alzheimer’s disease, MS, besides treating cancer, why don’t we take people who are just ageing and make them healthier so they live a healthier life? That’s quite controversial because they’re not super sick, so there’s a lot to it: who to do it on, what decision to make, and should you do it at all? There’s a lot of controversy around it. But what I did see from the cancer patients is their overall health dramatically improved, in many areas that were completely unrelated to the cancer.

AB: So, talk to me about your cancer therapies. Does it take away the cancer instantly? I know there are different kinds of cancer, of course.

PS: Yes. A few hundred cancer patients, in the big scheme of things, is nothing in terms of data. So I'll make some generalisations. I'll tell you what gene therapy can do, not what is done, but what it can realistically do for cancer. If given early enough in a person like Angelina Jolie, who has, let’s say, her cancer was because there was a solitary gene problem, and if I could fix that with a gene therapy, then she would not get cancer. We can predict she won’t get cancer. So, it would be gone before it ever happened. And that’s realistic. That is a realistic scenario now.

AB: Right, right.

PS: Given certain circumstances. Also, what we can do is, cancer is particularly aggressive because it turns off protective genes, and we can reinstall those protective genes into the cancer so it’s less malignant, so it responds better to chemotherapy. You need one tenth the dose, you need a lower dose of radiation, it responds better to immunotherapy. And in fact, we can have gene therapies that actually kill cancer too. It doesn’t kill all the cancer in some patients, or it kills all of it in that patient. It might need chemotherapy in addition, or a lower dose, but it’s a whole new tool for cancer.

I think the biggest benefit from gene therapy for cancer will be prevention, ultimately. We’re going to change medicine from treating cancer once it occurs to preventing it.

AB: To preventing cancer. It'll almost be like a cancer vaccine, so to speak.

PS: It'll be cancer prevention. We’ll do a genetic analysis. We will know, based on all of human medicine, that you will get this cancer because of your genetic makeup, in this amount of time. We will fix that genetic makeup deficit so you don’t get that cancer.

AB: Wow.

PS: That is realistic in the next 10 years.

AB: Patrick, I want you to share with my audience what you shared with me when I’d heard you talk in a public forum once about your personal experience with cancer, if you don’t mind.

PS: Yeah, so cancer is very common, as you know. And so all my life dealing with cancer, I’ve wondered what day I would get cancer and what I would do about it. So about two years ago, three years ago, I was snow skiing and my back was hurting me the next day. I didn't know if it was an injury or I had a kidney stone or something, and so I got a CT scan and I found cancer on one of my kidneys.

AB: Oh, wow.

PS: And so then I had to get an MRI because the CT is not that specific. So I got an MRI and I found cancer on the other kidney. So I had cancer on both kidneys. Now, normally I would have to go and they'd cut both kidneys out and I’d be on dialysis. That’s what I was facing. But I invented something 25 years ago called percutaneous renal cryoablation, where I built a device and a surgery and it’s approved in the United States, and doctors are trained to do it.

So I had my partner do that procedure on me. I went into the CT scanner, and an hour and a half later I came out and he had frozen both cancers and I had a Band-Aid on both sides and I went home and went to dinner that night, and my kidneys are perfectly there.

AB: Wow.

PS: But both cancers are dead. And I know because I follow it. I’m a radiologist too. That’s what we call precision medicine. Instead of giving me the therapy, cut your kidney out and throw the whole kidney away just to get rid of a small tumour, we can stick a probe in there and laser it, or freeze it, or microwave it and pull the probe out and put a Band-Aid on you. That’s precision medicine. It’s tailored to my particular problem. That’s what I do. That’s the highest level of cancer care.

Medicine is going towards that. So, gene therapy is another form of precision medical care. Your genes determine how I treat you, not that person’s genes. And your genes are different from that person’s. So everybody gets a genetic analysis and we act upon your genetic problem, and that’s the ultimate precision medicine.

AB: Okay, so now tell me, how much can people access this, and if someone wants to access this, how can they access this?

PS: It’s a very small industry right now, and I have a private practice, and I’m in several countries around the world that allow me to do this legally. And I’m working with several governments who want to bring it to all of their population. Right now people pretty much have to find me, or go mainstream, you know, the mainstream route. There’s not much option there. So it’s kind of difficult right now.

And it's a grey area in a lot of countries. You’re not prevented from doing it, but you’re not allowed. And so it’s controversial. But mine's pretty straightforward. Nobody really gives me a hard time about treating patients who are certainly going to die from cancer and giving them a chance, you know. That’s called compassionate use and nobody frowns upon that. But if I went out and wanted to do gene therapy to make your nose smaller, that’s completely inappropriate. So I don’t.

AB: So you’re saying you don’t do gene therapy for beauty?

PS: No.

AB: You do gene therapy for—

PS: I do gene prevention to help certain physical problems, diseases and other things. But out of that we’re on the verge of doing — as we find out the safety of certain gene therapies — the world of science is on the verge of offering that for what you could call beauty. I mean, you have a major life-threatening surgery to get bigger breasts, that’s perfectly acceptable. So it’s not a far stretch to say you can do gene therapy to get some sort of different outcome that you want. And I see that happening, you know, and there’s going to be a lot of controversy about it, but most of the controversy comes from assumptions about what’s being done rather than knowledge about what’s being done. So what I tell people is, you just can’t say gene therapy is bad, gene therapy is good. The context matters immensely.

AB: Yes, context matters and I guess it also matters per person, for each person.

PS: Exactly. I'll give you my perfect, my favourite ironic statement. In the United States I can’t treat your cancer with an experimental gene therapy even if you’re certainly going to die tomorrow. Legally, I can’t.

AB: Wow.

PS: But I can legally assist you to kill yourself?

AB: Oh my goodness.

PS: So how stupid is that? I’m allowed to let you kill yourself and assist you with that, but I can’t—

AB: Help you live.

PS: Help you with an experimental therapy, to save your life when we know, everybody knows, you’re going to die tomorrow or next week. That’s the absurdity of it. Things just need to be rational. They need to be appropriate. You know, and there’s so much inappropriateness. I’m not a proponent of recklessness. I’m a proponent of being rational.

AB: Yes, yes. And from what you’re explaining to me here, it’s also very important that people go to the right person for gene therapy, because this is someone who has access to your everything, your software. This is your operating system. You’re giving someone access to your operating system.

PS: Exactly. And it’s not something to be taken lightly. It’s of the greatest level of seriousness. And you just don’t go walk in the door, open the door and say, give me some gene therapy. There has to be a lengthy discussion. Why are we doing it? What’s the risk? What’s the potential benefit? How much do we know about this? What could go wrong? What could go wrong that we don’t know about? What’s predictable, what’s unpredictable? And so we’re in a world where we have some really good indications that it does some miraculous things, but we’re also in the world where [there is a lot we know it doesn’t do], as a general science, you know.

AB: Yes. I also want you to tell us a little bit about — remember when you were talking about cancer, you said it also made the patients well.

PS: Yeah.

AB: So talk to me about the fact that it’s given people energy and strength and mental clarity, which we were talking about earlier. So can you explain that aspect of it?

PS: So in most diseases, cancer certainly, but also Alzheimer’s and MS and ALS and you name it, your body is a collection of systems that interact. Meaning, your mitochondria and your respiratory system and your glucose use. All of those systems interact. So when one system starts to be damaged, the other systems inherently suffer some. Some a great deal, because of how closely they’re tied to the systems being damaged.

So if you take a cancer patient, they have a cancer and it’s doing certain known things, but it’s also subtly, or to a great degree, affecting other systems that have nothing to do with the cancer but are critical to your wellbeing. Critical to your clarity of thought, critical to your sleep, critical to how your intestines work. Even though the cancer is not directly attacking those, it’s indirectly through the interaction. And so if you can minimise the insult from the cancer, those other systems become less — the negative effect on them is minimised, and so they can show better energy and better sleep and better mental clarity and better mitochondrial function. And so they come back to life to a degree.

AB: Because everything's connected, of course, in our bodies.

PS: Yes, everything’s connected. Everything’s connected. And it’s impossible to unilaterally target one system in the body without affecting other systems, and so if you improve one system and other systems who are dependent on that, they come up too, they rise too. And so when I was treating cancer patients with gene therapy, that’s one of the things I noticed. Many, all the other systems started coming alive again when I got the main one under control.

AB: Okay. But on that note, that’s exactly what scares a lot of people. People say, oh, you’re messing with the DNA, maybe you don’t understand what you’re doing to some other part of the body. That’s the question which has come up a lot when I ask people.

PS: Yeah, so there are more unknowns than knowns in most of medicine, and there comes a point where we become comfortable with the potential side effects of something. But in the world of gene therapy, we have so much that’s unknown, there’s a lot to be easily afraid of — not surprising to be afraid of. Which is why we have to have deep conversations about what we’re going to do. We have to have reasons about what we’re going to do.

And I'll go back again to the dying person. It's very simple: take this therapy with unknowns or die. That’s an easy decision. But give me better hair, but with all the unknowns that could come with it, is not an easy decision. That’s a risky decision.

AB: Right.

PS: But here’s the thing. People are afraid of the unknown. And so if you don’t know the science, it’s going to be very frightening to you. So you have to depend on the expert. You’re not qualified to determine if this is dangerous. I’m qualified to determine if it’s dangerous.

AB: And I have to have enough faith in you, trust you.

PS: I’m more qualified. I might still not be qualified, but I’m more qualified than you. Ultimately, when we get to where this is mainstream medicine, we will have many experts and they will be able to guide you on what to do. We’re in a zone right now where it requires acceptance of unknowns. And that’s just the way new medicine goes.

AB: But just coming back to that note, one of the things that also worries people is that our DNA, our genes, are what makes us who we are. Will it change our personality? Will it change who we intrinsically are? Our identity?

PS: Right. Well, my answer to that is, as we go through life, everything changes us. Our experiences change us. If we get depression because our girlfriend broke up with us, we've changed and we’re forever different. If we get paralysed from the waist down, we’re forever different. As we age, our memory fails. We’re different. Ageing is DNA change. Your DNA becomes more and more faulty and things appear, which we term ageing now. When you get dementia, it’s your DNA that’s changed, that causes the dementia. So that’s normal. Your DNA — you never stay the same. You’ll never be the same. You change from your experiences.

They know that, but what people don’t understand is you change because of your biology, your whole life. Your metabolism changes, your body shape changes, your thought process changes, your alertness changes, your concentration changes. It naturally gets worse. It naturally goes in the wrong direction till you die. So that’s nothing new. The benefit is we can undo those DNA changes with gene therapy. That’s the proper use of gene therapy, to repair what’s always decayed in your DNA, but repair it with gene therapy so you don’t change into something bad. If you get dementia, we undo the dementia and your brain is back to normal. That's the promise of gene therapy.

AB: So you do see it, maybe over the next 10, 15 years, becoming part of mainstream medicine.

PS: Absolutely. Because right now we treat diseases, we address diseases with a treatment. Not a cure.

AB: Not prevention.

PS: It’s not prevention. It’s minimising the side effects or eliminating them as best we can. But gene therapy means removing the disease completely at source.

AB: At the source, yes.

PS: So you never need a treatment because the disease doesn’t exist anymore. That’s what gene therapy will do. And we will come to a point where a doctor will not give you a pill, he will give you a gene therapy in the office that will correct your genetic drift that’s come about because of your exposure to pesticides or something.

AB: And Patrick, I would love you to talk to people about your experience with treating people, I believe, with Alzheimer’s, with muscular dystrophy, you know, things which there’s really no treatment for.

PS: No, I agree. And in fact when I started getting very busy with my gene therapy research and trying to address other diseases, it was shocking how many diseases we don’t have any treatment for. There are way more than you realise that we have no effective treatment for, or no treatment at all, or a minimally effective treatment. So, you know, Alzheimer’s, MS, ALS, all the neurodegenerative diseases in the brain, we can’t do much about at all. We can slow down the decline a little bit. Gene therapy has the potential to cure it. Done. Fix it so it’s not there.

AB: Have you actually fixed Alzheimer’s?

PS: I have actually reversed Alzheimer’s in five patients.

AB: Wow.

PS: Yes. And I have a gene therapy that will be entering clinical trials this year for Alzheimer’s. And I predict by 2027 we’ll have either a cure for Alzheimer’s or a gene therapy that basically makes it gone for 20 years.

AB: Wow. Now that in itself is life changing.

PS: Of course, if my predictions come true, and I really think they will, then we will have an effective cure, which means the Alzheimer’s doesn’t manifest at all. A treatment. You call that a treatment. Or we’ll have a cure where it will never come back. Because of gene therapy, I really believe we’re there in the next year or two.

AB: Wow. And you were talking about muscular dystrophy, which again, there’s no cure for in modern medicine.

PS: There’s no cure for it. There have been some gene therapies that went through FDA trials in the United States for a couple of types of muscular dystrophy. There are multiple types of muscular dystrophy, which most people don’t know, and they’re all dramatically different. The only commonality is they all affect the muscles and cause muscle weakness. So, finding a cure for all the muscular dystrophies is like finding a cure for seven different diseases.

One or two of these diseases was addressed with an FDA clinical trial and they had some benefit from a gene therapy. Not enough to go on and have a three million dollar therapy. And that was several years ago. Now we have much better science and we’re much closer, before 2030, to having a very effective cure for several of these muscular dystrophies.

AB: Wow. And tell me about longevity. I mean that’s the big buzzword for the last four or five years.

PS: It’s an attempt to undo ageing. And ageing is decay of genetic function over time. When you’re born, your genes are functioning the best they ever will, the day you’re born, and they start declining immediately. And by the time you’re 30, you know, baldness may show up in a person because of genetic changes. Or you’ll gain some weight because your metabolism slows down because of genetic changes. We have a repair system called DNA repair, damaged DNA repair, DDA, and it repairs the decay in the genes but it can’t keep up. And so the result is what we call ageing.

Well, imagine if we could make the damaged DNA repair better, so it did repair all the DNA. Then you wouldn't have ageing or you'd have a different kind of ageing, slower ageing. Or it would manifest differently.

AB: Right.

PS: Ageing is simply poorly functioning DNA that accumulates over time. So if we can avoid the decay of DNA function, you won’t age, generally speaking. Appearance-wise and stuff like that. I’m not talking about living till a million years. That's a different problem.

AB: I was going to ask you about that.

PS: That’s a different problem. But it’s still related to your genes. But it’s a different problem. The physical appearance and the body changes in athletic ability and weight and all that of ageing are genetic, end of story. And so if they’re genetic problems and we can fix genetics, then we could fix ageing.

AB: Does that mean — I mean there are people there who are trying to live forever.

PS: Yeah, I know it. Yeah. I think the genetic science is there right now to take people to about 130, but past 130 there are some different problems that there’s not a clear solution for. But I’m not talking living as an old person to 130. Living as a 50 year old or 40 year old to 130 and then suddenly dying, like boom.

AB: Wow.

PS: Yeah, you’re healthy, healthy, healthy, and the next day you die. Dramatic shut off.

AB: You live well, you don’t live as a sick person in bed with a bad—

PS: Nobody wants to live like a 90 year old, age 90 to 130, 40 years as a 90 year old. So we’re talking living as a young person, a middle-aged person, until age 130.

AB: Okay, and Patrick, tell me, over the next 10 years, finally, over the next 10 years, what are you most excited about in this field of gene therapy?

PS: I think that we will switch completely to rapid diagnosis and rapid office treatment. A shot in the arm to fix what are now incurable medical diseases that cause a lifetime of misery, morbidity and ultimately death. What we see as incurable diseases will be easily diagnosed and addressed with genetic therapy. It’s going to change everything about how we see medicine. Everything. Which will mean that if people are not getting horribly sick, they’re not going to be in the hospital all the time.

And if we spend half of their medical care in the last two years of their life because we’re giving a bunch of stuff that doesn’t help, that will go away. The economic burden will go away, the suffering will go away. The dramatic medical infrastructure we need to treat people chronically in hospitals all the time will go away.

AB: My god.

PS: Yeah, so we won’t have people living in hospitals because they’re suffering from diseases we can’t do anything about. We’ll prevent the diseases or we’ll treat them in the very early stages, when they aren't sick, and get rid of them.

AB: This is as big as AI, isn’t it? People are just not seeing it.

PS: Way bigger. It’s going to change — this type of medical shift will change everything. The way sickness impacts the world will change completely. It will be minimised. It'll be a fraction of the economic burden on countries. The United States spends one out of every four dollars on healthcare. It will go down to a penny or something like that, out of every $4.

AB: My God, that in itself is incredible.

PS: And I’ve done some research and I’ve plotted out the cost of gene therapy. What now costs 300,000, in 10 years is projected to cost $100.

AB: Amazing. Amazing.

PS: Yeah. Gene therapy.

AB: On that note, Patrick, I’m going to do a rapid-fire round with you. I’m going to give you a question and you tell me whether this is something which gene therapy can do already, which it might do in the future, or something that’s pure science fiction. So a daily pill that edits your DNA every morning.

PS: Yes.

AB: Wow.

PS: Demethylate. Here’s how our genes become faulty. They get methylated. A methyl group — this is organic chemistry — a methyl group, which is a carbon and three hydrogen atoms, latches onto the gene, a portion of the gene, and inactivates it from being read. See, if you can remove that methyl group, the gene functions again. A pill can remove the methyl group. We can do that now. We just can’t target it solely to that gene. So as soon as we figure out how to demethylate a specific gene and only that gene, only the gene we want, then that'll happen.

AB: My goodness. Okay. I feel like I’m in a futuristic conversation. This is amazing. A one-time treatment that treats drug-resistant depression.

PS: I have that now. I'll be going through clinical trials on that this year for alcohol, nicotine, amphetamines and opiates. I mean, these are estimates but my research suggests that it'll eliminate 90% of the craving for these drugs. The need, the physiological need.

AB: Depression?

PS: Depression, too. Depression, schizophrenia, mental health diseases. These are biological diseases. These are biology in the brain. They’re chemical reactions, they’re enzymatic reactions, and these are driven by genes. So if we can uncover why that person has — that person has depression because this gene is malfunctioning, and we can repair that gene, then it won’t malfunction and there'll be no depression. Even addiction.

AB: Yeah. Wow. Changing the eye colour.

PS: I have a product — eye drops to temporarily turn your eyes blue.

AB: Permanently?

PS: If you quit taking the eye drops, they'll go back to your natural colour in four to six months.

AB: And reducing the genetic risk for Alzheimer’s before it’s happened.

PS: Yeah, that’s easy. We’re on the verge of that right now. Yeah.

AB: Thank you, Patrick. That conversation has just blown my mind. Thank you so much for giving us all this information about gene therapy, and I hope we've managed to alleviate people’s fears a little bit and explain to them what gene therapy is, how life changing it can and will be going forward, I think, and how important it’s going to be. I mean, you heard Patrick say it could take away the requirement for hospitals. Imagine that. Imagine if you could never be sick again.

And on that note, this is Anshu Bahanda for Wellness Curated. I hope you enjoyed this conversation. Please do share it with people. This is a very important conversation we've had today. Please share it with people. And please subscribe to Wellness Curated. Thank you, Patrick. That was an amazing, amazing conversation.

PS: Thank you.