Hello Health, Moms Empowered
Hello Health, Moms Empowered
Stem Cells in Regenerative Medicine with Caleb Granger and Pamela Wirth
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Most high-performers hit a wall they can't explain. They've optimized sleep, nutrition, hormones, peptides, even stem cells, and they're still losing ground. Recovery takes longer. Brain fog creeps in. The body that once kept up with their ambition... doesn't.
After 25 years in traditional medicine (spine surgery, neurosurgery, medical devices), Caleb watched the system fail people who needed it most. Reactive. Symptom-focused. Even stem cells didn't deliver: 99% of transplanted cells die within 24 hours. The real mechanism? Exosomes, tiny particles that carry regeneration without rejection.
Caleb built Apex Regenerative to deliver the highest-potency placental-derived exosomes available, designed to restore cellular signaling and reverse decline without drugs. In three years, he's helped nearly 12,000 patients recover faster, think clearer, and stop wondering if their best years are gone.
His mission: help driven people feel capable again, with proof, not promises.
Learn more:
https://www.instagram.com/apexregenerative
https://www.tiktok.com/@apexregenerative
Hi, this is Pamela Wirth with the Hello Health Podcast. And today I have Caleb. Caleb, you built Apex Regenerative to deliver the highest potency placental direct exosomes available. There is so much impressive results and things that can be done with inflammation, with disease. And super excited to have you here.
SPEAKER_00Thanks so much, Pamela. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
SPEAKER_01So just to kind of start it out, I've been taking my mom down to Mexico for cancer treatments for, I guess, going on three years now, twice a year. And what I learned when I was down there, because I I'd heard a number of stories about good or bad, you know, umzone IVs, stem cell IVs, um, and and I and and I met with several doctors down there. And I ended up doing it myself, and I felt fabulous. Um and would love to, you know, understand a little bit more about how you're using them, when people should be thinking about do they optimize their hormones first, do they introduce peptides? Um, should they be thinking about stem cells? Like, how does all of this come together with all of your experience and um kind of next steps when people are thinking about this, no matter what age you are?
SPEAKER_00Sure. Well, what a that's a large topic, uh what you're just introducing right now. And so uh what I want to hone in on is on the stem cell, so the cellular biologic regenerative side. Uh and that's the main thing that we do, right? Is as you mentioned in the intro, uh, placental and umbilical derived mesenchymal stem cell exosomes from zero-day old live tissue sources. And so that means taken after a healthy, full-term delivered pregnancy uh here in the US, we use FDA and American Association of Tissue Banks, AATB, accredited uh tissue processors to take that donated tissue on the same day, get the mesenchymal stem cells direct from that tissue. It's those are the most potent, most regenerative cells that the human body ever produces. We get those cells that day, elicit the exosomes from those cells. Exosomes are secreted from every cell, including mesenchymal stem cells. The exosome is the information-carrying microparticle that comes out of the cell. It is, we now know, how stem cells and other cells, but specifically stem cells, do their healing work is by secreting these tiny particles that carry all the proteins, growth factors, and regenerative signals. All the good stuff that does all the healing in our bodies is carried by the exosomes. We get the most potent cells that and most generative cells that the human body ever produces, take the exosomes from those cells, leave the cells, and there's a reason for that, leave the cells, and then what we're able to do is through a variety of modalities, whether it's IV, and I say when we providers are able to uh here in the US distribute them through IV and IV push systemically. That's incredible. Uh, we have a sublingual spray under the tongue, an intranasal spray, which is incredible for any skull-based or brain-based degenerative or inflammatory conditions, any uh degenerative or inflammatory condition. And then, of course, topical and sub Q and uh intra-articular or intratendinous, so in the joint or in a tendon inflamed or uh degenerated tendon or joint. And wherever they're put, they seek out any deficit from perfect and start repairing that deficit. The last thing they've done, their last job prior to coming into your body, was to create an entire, to process everything that was needed to create an entire perfect human being from two cells, right? That's what these cells have just been tasked with. When we get them in massive quantities and are able to process, uh package, and deliver them to you. So when they get into your body, they do the same thing. They carry all the healing and generative instructions for every tissue type in your body: brain tissue, nerve tissue, muscle tissue, heart tissue, lung tissue, you know, respiratory, pulmonary, eyes, all the inner ear, your joint components, all those things, they have the generative potential to regenerate those things. And that's what they start doing.
SPEAKER_01So do you recommend somebody to do this? And what sorts of things would you encourage people to start with? Whether it's um, I've I've I've heard about it in terms of autoimmune illnesses, I've heard about it in terms of autism. Um, I've heard it's not good for cancer because they can potentially make cancer cells replicate faster. But um tell us a little bit about your patient base and what they're using it for.
SPEAKER_00Sure. So we've now in the last three years treated almost 13,000 patients here in the US. There is hundreds of thousands of patients in the last five years in the peer-reviewed literature, so recorded in in peer-reviewed studies, hundreds of thousands. Last year, we did about 10% of all exosomes in the US were done through our company, Apex Regenerative. And so, you know, we've got a good idea of the types of conditions that this can work with, stop, and reverse. As you mentioned, they're degenerative and inflammatory. Autism is an incredible one. Uh, all of the brain-based, you know, dementias, right? Vascular dementia, Alzheimer's is about 70% of all dementia in the US. So incredible in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and all the orthopedic uh degenerative conditions, right? If you're uh bone-on-bone knee or hip, osteo or rheumatoid arthritic bone-on-bone knees and hips respond incredibly well. And typically, uh what we're doing is a protocol, and it's a protocol that may include an acute delivery via injection. It may, the majority actually don't, because the majority end up being a systemic protocol where there's, you know, that could be an IV with daily sublingual for 60 or 90 days. That's very common. Another thing that we do is we manufacture the only intracellular NAD supplement. So NAD is the only uh molecule that fuels all of your cells. It's kind of the cellular battery pack, is NAD. Many people are familiar with NAD supplementation, getting it via an IV or intramuscular injection or even an oral uh supplement. All of those commercial versions simply raise your blood plasma NAD levels. That doesn't raise your intracellular NAD level, which is what powers the cell. So when you get an NADIV or an NAD intermuscular shot, it temporarily raises your the NAD in your system until your body flushes it out. And when you get an NAD IV, there's a plaque enzyme response that flushes the NAD out of your system. People feel that as arrhythmias and, you know, they'll sweat or feel nauseous, right? And you have to slow down how much NAD you're taking as an IV. That's because it's hitting your blood plasma levels and increasing in your body. We have the only intracellular NAD. When you take it orally, uh you can take it at a clinic or you can take it yourself uh from home in a 60-day cellular reset. It only raises your intracellular NAD, 53% on average in five days, 300% or more in 60 days. And so I mention that because those are two foundational elements. I'm 50 years old. By the time I am 50, my NAD level, my cellular battery pack in all my cells has dropped at least 60% from its peak when I was 17 to 20 years old. So my cellular energy has dropped. I can reproducibly increase my cellular energy 300% in 60 days by with our proprietary, uh, it's called lathemized NAD. So we raise the cellular energy, then use exosomes to direct those newly powered up cells where and how to heal. It's the healing instructions, the healing blueprint is what we deliver systemically, usually with one or more IVs that deliver this incredible bolus of the most potent exosomes, which are the placental derived. We give a bolus of that, and just that has an incredible anti-inflammatory and uh systemic healing effect. It's made 20 to 30 percent more effective by daily sublingual spray under your tongue from home that delivers about 10 billion umbilical derived exosomes daily, uh again, from home out of your refrigerator. So when we combine those two things, that is the start of most of our degenerative protocols, chronic and acute degenerative protocols is IV and sublingual and LNAD in some combination and potency based on condition, duration, and severity of the condition, right? Uh, so we'll we'll play with those uh based on what's in the peer-reviewed literature, what our experience has been, uh, over 13,000 patients, and just you know, what what we see, what makes the most sense. We have protocols for each of these conditions. And what we reproducibly see, for instance, with one week of our typical degenerative protocol, which is one IV and six days of sublingual, we see a 500 to 1000 percent reduction in total body inflammation. And so this was done in a cohort of type two diabetics with no other lifestyle changes from you know in the 50s to the mid-70s age. And we were doing this, this, uh, these protocols, measuring pre-IV and then measuring on day seven after six days, after one IV and six days of sublingual. So that was essentially week one of uh 60-day or 90-day protocol. And in those type 2 diabetics, we saw their sed rate, their ESR going from the the high 100s or low 200s to the high teens or low 20s. So a said rate of 210 a week later, with no other lifestyle changes or pharmacological change, a week later, an ESR of 210 was now 17 or 19.
SPEAKER_01Which markers are are you testing exactly when you're testing inflammation? Just kind of for curious people that are like, okay, so I want to kind of measure where I'm at.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so ESR is one that that is very commonly done. If you get a normal blood panel, that is a very standard uh uh panel. It doesn't measure specific uh areas, it is a total body kind of very broad, the most broad uh measurement of total body inflammation. Another one that we measure is HSCRP. CRP. That is uh the most discriminating measure of total body inflammation. It's an incredible marker of heart, kidney, and liver uh health. And when that is high, uh, you know, you're that's that's bad news, uh, kind of looking forward for those organs. And so those are two uh that we really encourage. The ESR is is the easiest CRP, you're gonna have to specifically ask for that. Uh, but ESR is the easiest. And so, and that was the one that showed that 500 to 1000% reduction in one week. And so we knew, you know, that was a year and a half ago that we were getting those those measurements. And so we'd had at that point almost two years of experience seeing patients' response, right? And the main thing that we saw when we first started off, we were doing mainly orthopedic injury, right? You had a degenerated uh knee or hip, it was inflamed, it was it was potentially bone-on-bone. And we started mainly doing just injections. We really saw incredible results when we coupled those injections with systemic use, and then even started not doing the injection and getting still incredible regenerative results. But what we would see at the beginning when we were doing uh the initial systemic with the acute interarticular injection, people would have their joint pain in their right knee and their right knee pain would go away, as would their left knee pain. And their uh, you know, the swelling in their second knuckles would go away. And then their psoriasis uh that they'd had for three years that they were doing steroid cream every day for would go away. Right. There would just be this massive anti-inflammatory response where when we took away that inflammation and we didn't at that point know how much we were reproducibly taking away. Now that we know it's 500 to 1000% reduction, it totally makes sense, right? This is the response to expect.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so I love that. So what what you're saying is for orthopedic, for instance, you don't necessarily have to depend on doing injection after injection.
SPEAKER_00That's right.
SPEAKER_01Potentially do an IV with the injection, with the sublingual, and it just continues this path of recovery.
SPEAKER_00That's exactly right. You know, that there's acute inflammation, right? Inflammation is the body's alarm system that says bring healing here. And so that works when your total body is not inflamed. That works to have some inflammation in one part that needs healing. And then the body can rush your own natural healing capacity to that area. Well, when we have a low or medium grade inflammation throughout our entire body, we've totally overwhelmed our body's healing capacity. And so even the things that should heal that would have healed if we weren't inflamed can't heal. Even if we had the regenerative capacity to heal that one thing, the number of things that aren't healing keep piling up, you know, one on top of the other. And so it's really that's one of the most gratifying things is when you take away that total body inflammation, ultimately, what we're doing and what we can do reproducibly is the aging process is when degeneration overwhelms your body's regenerative, gross regenerative capacity, right? When you no longer have the regenerative capacity to overwhelm the degeneration that you have genetically, that you give to yourself and that is in the environment, when that time comes, you are now aging, right? Because your degeneration is overwhelming your regenerative capacity. We can reproductively raise your body's gross regenerative capacity until it outstrips your degeneration, just like it used to when you were a kid. That's what our protocols are doing. And because of that, even in the last six to nine months, we've got about 30 NFL and NBA guys who are kind of maybe they were at the end of their career, you know, long time uh career, and now they're doing these protocols, incredible elite athletes, just kind of the top of the top. It's not just for them, it's just for that group, their body and degenerative and regenerative capacity is their lifeline. That's their entire business, you know? And so, of course, they want to do that. Well, there's so many others that are weekend warriors like me, people that just want to be active. We can reproducibly raise your regenerative capacity until it outstrips your degeneration, like it did when you were a kid.
SPEAKER_01How often do you encourage people to follow this protocol? Or, you know, I mean, it obviously it'll differ between somebody who's an elite athlete versus um a 40-something-year-old mom who's exhausted and her hormones are probably on the verge of changing, her kids and work and everything else. I mean, what do you kind of suggest in terms of something?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, some of our most popular are 60 and 90-day protocols. Those are usually IV heavy at the beginning. So it might be uh, you know, a 90-day or a six-month protocol where you start with kind of a bolus of IVs to get you going, get that regenerative process going. Again, up your total gross regenerative capacity. And then once you've started that and and gotten it up, then we're maintaining it. And so uh kind of we have a uh what's called our superhuman protocol is doing at least one IV a month, daily sublingual and daily LNAD plus. So daily intracellular NAD, you do that again more at the beginning, kind of loading at the beginning, that 60-day time period when we can reproducibly get your intracellular NAD up 300% compared to baseline, then we can maintain that with a maintenance dose. So both of them, both on the raise your intracellular uh power and on instructing those powered up cells where and how to heal, we do that kind of a big amount on the front end and then maintenance dose.
SPEAKER_01And then do you um do you require people to come into your clinic or your office to do this?
SPEAKER_00So we're the manufacturer, we're based in Austin, Texas. We, of course, work with preferred providers throughout Texas, uh, throughout the nation. We're uh largest, of course, here in Texas, in Southern California, in South Florida, but we work with providers nationwide. Many people, because it's efficient, you know, to work directly with the company, will come straight into Austin and work with our preferred providers in Austin. Lots of times they'll do that over the course of a long weekend, for instance. You know, Austin's not a bad place to uh to visit. And so they'll do that over maybe like a Thursday to Monday and start that first week of their protocol, especially if it has to be administered uh intra-articular or intratteninous with an injection, then they'll do that uh, you know, and come into Austin. You don't have to. Some of the things that we can do also can be direct to patient, like sublingual and internasal can can uh essentially be direct to patient after we work with the provider. So, so and that's efficient. LNAD plus, the raise your NAD level uh can go direct to patient, and that's available worldwide.
SPEAKER_01That's cool. Um you you hear stories about how long stem cells can live or um exosomes. Can you kind of touch on the life cycle of each and what's what's normal, what's not normal? You know, because you hear stories from different people and um they probably enjoy hearing it from you.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's a great, that's a great question. So the main thing, I think the main misunderstanding that people have, and it's based on a mental map that we all had about how stem cells worked, how they healed in the body when you took them in as a transplant, whether they were your own stem cells, which are called autologists, or they were stem cells donated from somebody else, which are allogenic. Whether autologous or allogenic, when you get stem cells into your body, we could show that they were alive, right? We could show that they were a certain type of stem cell. So we knew that, and we know that now. You can you can for sure verifiably do that. Previously, for the last 20 years up until the late 2010s, right? So 2015, 2016, and beyond, through in that time previous, we thought that stem cells got into your body, if they were the right types of cells and you created the right environment, that they would engraft into your body, continue to duplicate, and eventually turn into the source, uh, the native material that you were trying to replicate. So if you put it into a knee, they would engraft around the knee. And eventually, if you had the right types of cells and the right type of environment, and you know, fingers crossed it all work together, that months later that would turn into new cartilage, for instance. We now know that is not what happens at all. We now know that 99% of stem cells, whether they're autologous or allogenic, 99% at least die or are flushed by your body within 24 hours. The ones that don't, the 1% that survive, don't survive longer than 72 hours. So that is there's uh hundreds and hundreds of papers that show that. The the creator of stem cells, a guy named Arnold Kaplan, Dr. Arnold Kaplan, uh in 2018 wrote a study saying that what were called mesenc, that he named mesenchymal stem cells, should instead be called medicinal signaling cells because they didn't replicate, they didn't engraft, they didn't turn into new tissue, they signaled the main mechanism of action for how they work in that 24 hours that they're alive is they secrete signals, i.e. exosomes. So they are uh expensive. Exosome carriers. Expensive, fragile. Stem cells are expensive, fragile, potential genetic load, bacterial, and viral load carrying exosome carriers. So we uh completely cut that middleman out. Uh, they're also stem cells are also very inflammatory. If you get them from your own body or if they're donated, they're also very inflammatory. If you get a stem cell injection, they'll tell you, hey, you know, days to weeks to expect uh inflammation for days to weeks. Exosomes are totally anti-inflammatory, they carry no inflammatory signals, just the opposite. And so that can actually be a meaningful safety difference. You know, you hear unfortunately about people having an anaphylactic response to cells. Well, it's because the cells are capable of carrying things that can create that response. Exosomes are uncapable of carrying those things, and so uh significantly safer, significantly more concentrated and healing. And we now know they are how stem cells work is through exosomes. So that's kind of a watch out for people. If you're going and getting stem cells, ask the provider, what is the idea around what these stem cells are going to do? You know, tell me in simple terms what they're going to do, what's the value when we're putting this in my knee or my shoulder or my hip, or when you're giving it to me as an IB, what do the cells do? You know? And what you likely will hear is again, nothing against these providers. They're just uh regurgitating something that is a 10 to 15 year old mental map of what stem cells, what we thought stem cells did 10 to 15 years ago. And it is uh not the case. What they do is for a very short period of time that they're alive, they release these healing signals. And uh that's their value. That's why people can get a good result from stem cells, you know, even though they die within 24 to 72 hours, you can still get a great result because in that time period they release signals. And and so, and your body needs those and will will eat them up, and that will start a regenerative cascade. We go straight to starting the regenerative cascade immediately with no inflammation.
SPEAKER_01Well, thank you. Um so when people want more information, uh, we've got the apexmedical.com. Is there anything else that you want to add?
SPEAKER_00Um Yeah, uh would would love for people to connect with us on all of our socials. So that's uh IG, TikTok, Facebook. We're at Apex Regenerative on all of those.
unknownAwesome.
SPEAKER_01Thank you so much, Caleb.
SPEAKER_00My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.