001Hello, I'm Luelan King, the host of White House Chronicle. I'm joined as always by Adam Clayton Powell III, my co-host. Today, we're going to take a look at longevity, wellness, and staying younger with two extraordinary people. They are Dr. Jason Williams, founder of the Williams Cancer Institute, and Rex Paris, co-founder of Ree Paris, a regenerative medicine company. He is also, by the way, mayor of Lancaster, California. Welcome, gentlemen. And let me ask you, uh, Dr. Jason Williams, are we winning the battle on cancer? And what is it about your unique treatment of cancer that is so hopeful and promising? Yeah. Well, certainly now with immunotherapies, we're seeing a lot of improvement. You know, unfortunately, I think, you know, one issue is the system is set up where, you know, people are being paid to do
002more and more treatments and not necessarily the best treatment. And so that that inhibits things. And our treatments, what we do is we actually go into the tumor and inject amunotherapies directly into the tumor. Um, we're also saying that really cancer treatment should occur at the time of the biopsy. When the patient first is diagnosed, when you stick a needle in a tumor, that's your chance to actually start treating. You could actually do things like pulse electric field ablation. You can inject amunotherapies into the tumor to go ahead and get that started right at that point. And so these are the things we're trying to change. We have several clinical trials and things that we're working on just trying to change the the system and the way that cancer is is treated because normally everything
003is from sort of the the outside end you know giving uh you know introvenous therapies giving oral therapies to get to the tumor but we really need to target the tumor directly. So imunotherapies are drugs that allow the immune system to see or attack the cancer. Now cancer has various ways to hide from the immune system. One is that it will produce certain substances that sort of block it, like shield it. And so you can use drugs that block those receptors and allow the uh the immune system to actually see the cancer. Uh because cancer, you know, wants to hide and disguise itself. It is part of your own body and it tries to take over the immune system and get the immune system to recognize that it's part of the body. And so what
004it'll do is it will send those signals and these amunotherapy drugs will block that or there are certain ones that can stimulate uh you know T- cells B cells to want to attack the cancer and it's a combination of these drugs that actually where we're seeing the the real effects. Doing some reading about this uh in articles and papers. One phrase that is repeated over and over again is longetivity biotechnology which sounds like the end the goal is to extend human lifespan. Yeah, we've seen some interesting results with some of these amunotherapies. So we've been working with amunotherapies and we started seeing that it actually seems like it's making the patients younger and so this is one of the things that we figured out that the immune system is what helps keep us young and
005healthy. And so by boosting the immune response against the cancer actually the immune cells also will start killing older cells. So you have you know cancer and aging are a very similar process. Uh cancer is a cell that has a mutation and it wants to work for you know its own thing. It doesn't want to work with the body. Uh an old cell is a cell it doesn't have mutation but it's not doing its job and it should be eliminated but it doesn't want to die either. Neither one of these cells want to die and they send signals to the immune system to stay alive and when you block those signals the immune system kills it and allows younger cells to come in and flourish. And so this is what we've been seeing. Um Rex
006tell us about Reparis and where does it fit into this whole world of medicine and longevity. Reparis came out of uh another company we started which is called Carthronics which is is right now targeting arthritis and they're going into clinical trials on a drug and it uses a a a u it modify it modulates the GP130 receptor which controls the inflammation and the fibrosis both of which are essential for metastasis. is you know 45% of all death is fibrootic. Tell me a related disease that doesn't doesn't involve a great deal of inflammation or a aberrant inflammation inflammatory response. From that though they then looked at the the kynise inhibitors in instead of the GP130 uh modulation and that's much further down the pathway in the cell. That's how this the the inter the internal organels
007in the cell communicate with each other. If we can uh inhibit the kynise that signals the interlucan 6 and the interlucan 11 we're going to live a lot longer. I mean that that's just the way that's just the way we age. You it's very hard for the body to age without inflammation and fibrosis. Uh you know you have a heart attack. It's the fibrootic response that eventually kills you because it it's the scar tissue that that uh overcomes. What we've seen in uh again doing some research on this is that your approach is not only applicable to cancer but also arthritis uh and other age related diseases. So again it seems like what we're seeing here is the beginning or the opening the door to again addressing things that make us old. Yes. Yeah. It's
008uh you know we reach a certain age and we quit regenerating. We repair. Repair is fibrosis. Regenerating is you actually have a whole different it fixes it. It's all brand new. You know children tend to regenerate. That's why they don't have lasting scars uh of any note. the uh and that's what we're attempting to do is to turn back the immune response, you know, and I think that's correct. It's it what occurs is our own body kills us, you know, it uh it's a hyperactive response. Not too long ago, I had septic shock and uh you know, at my age, I should have been dead, but because that's the biggest cause of death of people in hospitals is is uh sepsis. So that's what killed everybody with COVID was sepsis, which is the body's immune
009response just out of control. U and it I guess essentially what we're doing is we're coming up with different proteins and drugs that slow that immune response down. And you know, it's the it's our reaction to it that ages us. Rex, what will be the products that your company will bring to market? Well, the the CX11 drug is is now in clinical trials. We're going to do the clinical trial in Australia. We're we're pretty confident the impact that's going to have on arthritis because we've tested it in large animals and it it uh the cartilage regrows you know it and more importantly though the pain is immediately there's a sess sessation of the pain immediately with repairs with the kynise inhibitors you know we're now able to modulate just how much inflammation the body produces
010how much fibrosis because you need both of those responses, but now we're able to modulate it. You know, the the thing I fear with all of these drugs, however, is the current regulatory system. It is highly unlikely that any of them are going to see the light of day if the current regulatory system remains unchanged. You know, sepsis, uh, it's a oneanddone drug. There's there's not a lot of return of investment on it because if it costs $3 billion to take a drug to market, which is the average today, you need you you need a drug that you're going to have to take a lot of for a long period of time. You know, I have a friend who used to work for one of the major pharmaceuticals and the CEO was was asked a
011question about uh genetic therapies, you know, and what he said is we are a disease management company and that type of treatment the disease goes away. You know, now that doesn't mean these people are evil or ill-intentioned. Their job is to return investment to the shareholders. the the drugs we're talking about do not have that big of a return because they're one and done. You know, you you you take it one time. Uh the uh until we change that system and we change the way uh we do clinical trials which make it which create that business model, I don't see a lot of hope for a lot of this. Uh but I what I do find great hope in is the new administration. And I think it's going to change all of that. I think
012we're going to have a a 2025 response to how you test drugs. It doesn't have to cost $3 billion. And you know, the problem with aging drugs is how do you do clinical trials on them? You know, I mean, you we we haven't even defined the the biometrics of aging yet. you know, once that happens, I think we'll see a different uh different attitude from the FDA. But until the FDA changes, I I just see more of the same because the business model makes it that way, not the people, it's the business model. We have to change that. Let's stay on that for a moment. Uh you support what you've called the right to try. What is that and why is that important? Well, you have the right to try act which is if you
013are suffering from a terminal disease such as cancer and there is no treatment, right? The FDA will allow the a pharmaceutical to give you the drug and you and you can take it uh without clinical trials. Well, I'm 73 years old. What does it matter what I take? I mean, you know, I mean, my lifespan is just not going to be that much longer. And so, we're we're trying to get what we call an accredited patient. Uh, it once you turn 70, you can try whatever you want to try as long as you're of sound mind and all the risks have been explained to you. Now, look at the benefit of that. Now, you now have real data coming in from all of these patients that have elected to do this. you you uh you
014could accelerate the process of then approving these drugs for everyone, you know, uh and you know that you're not going to have any uh der of people wanting to do it during co 30,000 people agreed to be infected with COVID after they had taken a vaccination to see if it worked. Now the FDA wouldn't let them do it. They couldn't do that, but it would have accelerated that process uh considerably. For the benefit of our listeners on Sirius XM Radio's POTUS channel 124, you're listening to White House Chronicle, I'm Llewellyn King, executive producer and host. Co-host Adam Clayton Powell III joins me. Our guests today are Dr. Jason Williams, founder of the Williams Cancer Institute, and Rex Paris, co-founder of Ree Paris, a regenerative medicine company. He is also mayor of Lancaster, California. White House
015Chronicle airs nationwide on PBS public educational and government access channels. Subscribe for full episodes of White House Chronicle each week as a podcast on your favorite audio platform. Watch this and previous episodes on the White House Chronicle website whle.com. For more information on co-host Adam Clayton Powell III's University of Southern California project, contact him at trueuvote usc.edu. edu. You can now find me on Substack. Jason, you have had success in treating cancer, but I understand you had to take one gravely ill patient out of the US uh to succeed. Is that correct? Yeah, well, that's correct. It actually happens a lot. And I think everything that that Rex is saying is spot on. I mean this you know the problem is the system and the way it's set up makes it very difficult and the
016model is not uh helping you know we need to be uh a system that's rewarded more for results and not the way that things are now but yeah you know unfortunately um I you know I work in the US I work I work in Mexico we we do various things we have you know stuff all over and we have clinical trials in both countries um in Mexico we have a little bit more options so we we can do broader right to try uh versus the US. The US has right to try but if you have cancer patients um when you need certain drugs you've got to apply to that company. They don't have to give it to you. It just takes a lot of time and then the hospitals don't want you to to necessarily
017do it. So becomes very difficult. In Mexico it's a little easier. The hospitals will be you know will let you do that and and then you could get the drugs a lot easier. So yeah we we definitely do that. Jason, is there hope for cancer? Cancer is, I've said, and I think it sums it up, is the sum of all human fears. When you're told you have cancer, this is a terrible diagnosis. This is a uh this is the beginning of the end for most people, or at least in their minds, they fear the cancer and its mortality, but they also fear pain. And friends of mine who suffered from cancer had terrible pain. And uh it's not been a pretty situation. Is there hope and is there a lot of hope? There is definitely
018a lot of hope. I think you know we know when we have the drugs that we need to cure cancer. They exist. They just need to be applied. And so it's it's the drugs in the right combination and that's what you know some of the work that we're doing and others are doing trying to bring that forward. um where you know you do these combinations of immunotherapies and going into the tumor but you know sometimes also systemically but there's other you know ways to approach this and that that's actually working quite well uh we we we just need to be able to get it all together and get it uh you know through the system get you know FDA approvals but you know I think all the agents that we need to cure cancer we
019have we hear that cancer treatment and treatment of so many other diseases now can be individual ize that that for each patient has his or her own individually maximally effective treatment. Is that part of what your work is focusing on now also? Yeah. So, so you know definitely a lot of cases are individual. you have different genetic uh aspects of the tumors and so that may change the medications that you use with the patients and so so yeah you really need that ability to take you know an individual approach. Uh the the key though is that we need lots of the weapons, you know, because there's lots of drugs that are out there, but you know, a lot of them are in development, but they're not FDA approved because they're only looking at them at
020that one drug by itself, not what it does in combination. And so, you know, the drug by itself may be very minimal and nobody really wants to develop it, but in combination, it's, you know, it's it's helpful. I mean, you you know, you have to have it's just like combination of safe. One number doesn't get it for you, right? But you have them all together and you can open the safe. And so, you know, that's that's what what we're seeing. And yeah, I think that uh you know, we're just trying to get all the pieces like approved the best we can and then sort of unite it together and and so it's it's a long process. That's why amending the right to try act would be we would be able to do that. Yes. Well,
021we we do we do it in practice. I mean, we do we're able to treat people in that way, but what we're trying to do is get in an official capacity of getting, you know, FDA approval. So this is has access to everybody because right now it's only access to very limited people. Jason, the idea of the cocktail is not totally new. It's been used in treating childhood leukemias very successfully and AIDS quite successfully. So you're saying that for many more diseases we need cocktails of drugs rather than sequential drug use. So what what we're finding in our our work is that, you know, we see pretty good results with four drugs. We see really good results with eight and we see spectacular results with 12. And when you use 12 drug combinations, that is
022what really starts knocking down cancer. Um and and and you know there's there obviously there's few to tweak here and there, but that really gets it and that's that's what we're seeing. We're focusing on aging and extending lifespan, but is this something which also is uh of use uh for treating younger patients as well? Well, so one thing is is that you know a lot of problems a lot of uh diseases one are are diseases of aging. So like you know uh you know coronary disease you know high blood pressure uh things like diabetes those are all disease aging. So if you keep a person young they won't won't achieve you know they won't get those problems. Uh certainly for younger patients I guess it depends on on their issues. Certainly cancers yeah we can
023treat cancers in younger patients. Uh but you know I think the the real key is that you know when we're younger we have less problems. And so if we can make the person younger which we can then that is the solution. Um what is the role of artificial intelligence in cancer treatment going forward? Uh to get your 12 drugs presumably AI can identify the drugs and their interactions with each other and any uh contraindications that might be anticipated. That's correct. So, so the way things are going with this is that you would have the patient's the the AI would have all the data of the patient. It would have their tumor DNA, their RNA, the proteins, everything that you know about the patient. You would know about the patient's gut microbiome, all that. And then
024the AI would analyze and then give you a recommendation of what drugs you would use in that situation. We're actually working on developing this type of thing. And then and then we're going to even take a step further where that AI analyzes the images of the patients and then and in the future we'll attach to robotics where the robotic system will then target the tumor and treat it. So then you would have a robotic system that's loaded up like an inkjet printer with all different drug options and the AI would tell it what drugs you're going to inject into the tumor. You you see the you see the difficulty with that is is our current regulatory system would require the person getting the 12 drugs for us to do literally hundreds of those patients which
025is impossible. Now you have with the and the only way you're going to be able to do 12 drugs is with AI. Let me pick up on something Guwellyn was asking a few minutes ago which is that cancer is viewed by so many with great fear and one reason is it's associated with u surgery with uh uh very uncomfortable uh inconvenient and painful remedies. But one phrase again that's been associated with your your treatment is minimally invasive. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. I mean, so you know there's a few things. One, obviously we we go in with needles into the tumor. So just like you're getting a biopsy, you're but then you're injecting the medications. Uh but but clearly the the big thing is this is that we also have ways to prevent people
026from getting cancer because we can use some of these same medications which will actually boost the immune response and lower your risk of cancer. And so uh we we actually have study that we're doing with with Harvard where we're using some of these medications and we we we give them to the mice it makes them younger and then we try to give them cancer and they you can't give them cancer they fight it off. So this is actually like a cancer preventative. So, so in the future we want to keep people from getting cancer. But the other thing would be, you know, early detection, you know, picking up cancers by MRI, by blood test, and then treating them, right? Right. Then don't don't biopsy and then wait and then, you know, schedule patient for surgery,
027chemo, all that. No, you at the time of biopsy, you start the treatment then. And that's that's that's the key of a real success. Um when you uh approach a patient, you say you want to start the treatment at the time of biopsy. U how you going to do that? You haven't yet got the result of the biopsy. Yeah. So well, one thing is I'll tell you that when we're biopsying, generally we know that we're biopsying something that's cancer. We can determine that by imaging. It's very rare that we would biopsy something that's not uh but but we do actually have a technology that's a cancer detecting needle. Uh so you can actually put in there will tell you it's cancer and then the other thing is that you can also biopsy at the at
028the time let the pathologist look at it at that moment and say okay yeah this is definitely cancer and go ahead and treat. That's there's several options on that. Uh tell us something if you would Jason about your institute. uh and how it operates, how big is it, how can people get in touch with it, and if you're diagnosed with cancer, what should you do? Not everybody can be treated by you. That's correct. And so, you know, one of the things that we we try to get information out trying to get other doctors doing this. We want other people doing it. We don't want be the only one. You know, I I wrote wrote a book trying to get, you know, educate patients, the immunotherapy revolution. Um and and then we're you know we put
029out lots of videos and try to get other doctors to to know and understand and do and educate the patients as well so they can talk to their doctors. But yeah, we we have office in in Beverly Hills. We have office in Miami. Uh we also work in in Cabo St. Lucas, Mexico. Uh we're we're expanding we have uh we work simultaneously. We have a biotech that's called Sinkermune. Uh we have clinical trials in the United States. So well United States and Mexico both. But uh they can find us like on clinical trials.gov. Uh but Synchroimmune is the is the company that handles that and uh yeah and then we you know Williams Cancer Institute we see patients uh as well. Patients can contact us and send us their their information and we review it
030and determine uh try the best way we can help the patients. Uh we try to help as many as we can but obviously yeah we're you know we're we're one entity. We have several we have many doctors so we we can we can take on some people but uh certainly if we can't take them on we try to guide them the best way we can. I'd like to ask a question about peer review. Uh is that in fact constructive or does it often lead to siloing and to repetitive actions and uh ideas? Yeah, my opinion, I mean, obviously I think it's somewhat important, but I think also, yeah, it does lead to where some people have agendas and can push things away and so it can be difficult to get some information out. You know,
031we just don't really have a good system for that because, you know, there's there's lots of things and if if there's people have agenda against it, they will not want to publish that and so uh that may uh hide things that are very useful. The classic open-ended question, what haven't we asked that you'd like to talk about? Yeah, I think clearly one of the things that we're figuring out is that, you know, cancer and aging are a similar disease and now that we're understanding how to solve cancer and I think that we we have the tools to solve it uh that we're also seeing the the ways to solve aging as well and so you know and is really interesting uh and I I you know uh work with some other people you talk a
032lot with like David Sinclair at Harvard and his work parallels a lot of mine where using some of the similar drugs. Uh, you know, he's reversing aging in mice. Uh, we're using the same drugs to treat, you know, cancers. So, that's, you know, it's really interesting how those diseases are really one and the same. And now we're coming together and fixing potentially these two major problems. And I think I think we've got got everything we need to do. We just have to to go through the official process to get it out there. So, is aging a disease? It it is a disease. And the thing is, you know, I I think that if the immune system stayed alert, we would not get old. It would keep us young. I think we we should be in
033a younger state, but I think what happens is that we're missing some of those factors. And if if you give that that the immune system will then keep you young. And so now I can take it you can take an older person and make them younger again just like taking a cancer patient and like getting rid of their cancer. But a young person theoretically in the future we can give them medications and keep them young. Yeah, that I think that's clearly where it's going is the people that will live forever are the ones that are children today. I have a a final question for Jason and that is some years ago on this program we were approached by a group of brain surgeons who were very frank. They said we are lying to our patients.
034We are giving them chemo and radiation and they are dying and we are telling them that don't worry we're giving you chemo and it should work and it didn't work and they wanted really to revise uh the way that they were testing people and again to get more latitude to do that and that was very interesting to what extent either of you do cancer oncologists lie to their patients And is there any other option? Well, I think I think the oncologists are well-intentioned, but I think they're misguided. So, you know, they they may want to do the right thing, but they they're doing what they're taught. Um, you know, chemotherapies obviously had a role and may still have a role. Uh, but you know, when you look at chemotherapy, chemotherapy is stuff that actually ages
035you, right? So, you're looking you're looking at cancer and you're what you're saying is that you've got old cells there. let's make them older and try to make them die. But that's why you don't really chemotherapy doesn't usually get rid of all of them. Um and so now but now the concept, you know, what we're doing is, you know, to make them young. Don't don't try to make them older. Make them young. And and so uh yeah, you know, I think that uh there, you know, I mean, again, the doctors, I believe, are well-intentioned and making the patients think that they're, you know, going to help them, and they believe it, but they really know it's not going to help them very well. And I think it's it's unfortunate. That's our show for today. I
036thank Rex and Jason for coming on and sharing hope with us. Stay well. We'll be back next week. Cheers. [Music]