Bombshell: Explosive Medical Secrets That Will Redefine Aging (28 page)

I interviewed Dr. Andy Jurow for this book. He is an antiaging doctor in Burlingame, Northern California, and is certified to prescribe your supplement. He and his wife have been taking your supplement TA-65, and they are talking about amazing skin changes—smooth, young skin … noticeably so. My sister ran into them in downtown Burlingame and was blown away by how different they both looked. He also reported that his eyesight was better, and both say their hair is looking better. I feel that skin and hair are good indicators of interior health.

NTP:
The results vary with different people. My eyesight has gotten better since taking TA-65, but my hair has not gotten darker, although it looks healthier and plentiful.

SS:
How long have you been taking it?

NTP:
I’ve been taking it for four and a half years. When I turned
fifty (I’m sixty-five now), I started to notice the effects of aging and, like I said, I didn’t like it: stiff joints, low energy, and so on. So I started looking into antiaging medicine strictly to help myself. In that process, I heard a speech by Dr. Jerry Shay, a professor at the University of Texas Southwest, who talked about telomeres and telomerase and how it was possible to immortalize human cells.

After his talk, I asked the professor where I could get some of this immortalization stuff. He laughed and said his university had licensed all their patents to a company called Geron in Menlo Park, California, and that they were developing this technology for telomerase activation. The very next day I called the CEO of Geron, flew out to meet with him, and ended up investing in the company through a private stock placement. That investment helped to finance the development of what we now call TA-65, and later I licensed all Geron’s telomerase activation technology for nutraceutical and cosmetic applications.

SS:
Why wouldn’t Geron have kept this license for themselves? I mean, they are a giant pharmaceutical company.

NTP:
They ran into some financial constraints at that time. They had a lot of good science, but not enough money to properly develop all of it and had to decide what to emphasize and which to cut back on … they decided to eliminate telomerase activation and instead went forward on cancer drugs. Today, I think Geron is surprised and probably regrets having given me the license for TA-65 and all their telomerase activation technology.

SS:
Does TA-65 cure disease?

NTP:
Even if we did studies proving TA-65 cured or prevented diseases, we would not be able to make those claims because we are selling a nutraceutical and not a drug. To make any disease claims, you have to go through the full FDA drug approval process, which can take up to ten years and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I don’t have that kind of money and even if I did, I would not want people to have to wait years to be able to take TA-65. We are helping a lot of people right now and very glad to be able to do so.

Geron on its own has been pursuing research for drugs that are telomerase activators. There is definite reason to believe that telomerase activation can be beneficial in a number of disease states, and Geron, which is a drug company, has kept those rights for itself. A few years ago the company announced it was developing a drug for HIV AIDS, which is actually a telomere-shortening disease that
wears out your immune system. What happens is that the immune system senses that the HIV virus has gotten into CD4 immune cells, and certain other “killer” immune cells then attack those infected cells. The immune system keeps fighting this virus until the immune system becomes “worn out.” When that happens, immunologists believe that a person goes from being HIV positive into having full-blown AIDS. As you know, AIDS stands for acquired immune deficiency syndrome. The reason the immune system wears out is because the killer cells keep dividing to fight the virus, and every time any cell divides, its telomeres get shorter. When the telomeres get too short, the immune cells can’t divide anymore and you end up running out of immune cells.

SS:
Well, I imagine the only reason a drug company would pursue a product with the hopes of curing a disease is to get FDA approval and sell it as a drug. They are not normally into supplements, which I imagine is why they gave you the license. Lucky you.

NTP:
Yes, they are going for the drug or drugs that cure or assist in disease management. They can then apply for a patent and own the discovery.

I am involved because I got interested in the antiaging effect of TA-65, the thinking being that if you don’t age, you won’t get the diseases of aging.

SS:
It’s a theory that makes sense. It certainly has me intrigued. My inclination would always be to go for the nondrug first.

NTP:
Yes, but you are not the average person. You are much more informed and knowledgeable about medical advances. The average person who gets sick goes to his doctor and the doctor tells him what to do and he does it.

SS:
Just like they are children! And why not; we’ve been trained to think of doctors as gods. I remember my mother would never dare question a doctor. But that thinking has got to change because no one is going to care as much about your health as you, and with toxicity and environmental diseases at epidemic proportions, you have to be the one who is in charge of your own body. In that sense I definitely am different. I have my own ideas of what old age will look like, and it’s a very nice picture. I think my doctors like that I am informed. That’s why I write my books—so people have the information, so they can start connecting their own dots to their health. I believe doctors should actually be thought of more like mechanics you hire to fix your body. That attitude would get you better service. When you take your
car in to the mechanic, you are not afraid to ask a lot of questions; you want to know what they are fixing and why and how. Right? I mean, after all, it’s your car. And in this instance, it’s your life!

NTP:
Absolutely.

SS:
How do you take TA-65?

NTP:
I take a full dose of four capsules a day, two in the morning and two in the evening. One of our doctors, Dr. Ed Park, recommends that people take all four at the same time and in the evening. We offer three daily dose levels varying from one to four capsules; low, medium, and full.

SS:
I met with Dr. Park and was amazed by his transformation since taking TA-65. He showed me a picture of himself ten years ago, overweight and looking much older than the way he looks today. He makes the same claims: more hair, tremendous weight loss, energy, vitality, and better lung capacity. It was quite remarkable.

Do you take different amounts of TA-65 depending on your age?

NTP:
Generally, yes. If you are under fifty, take one pill a day; if you are from fifty to sixty-five, then take two; and if you are seventy or older, we recommend the full dose of four a day. But if you know the length of your telomeres, these age guidelines are not applicable. One person we tested was twenty-five years old, but her lab results showed that her telomeres were that of a fifty-year-old. Because of this we have given her two daily tablets, and she seems to be benefiting from it.

SS:
What caused her to age so rapidly?

NTP:
She had a tremendous amount of stress in her life, both emotional and physical; she had various disease problems along with severe emotional distress.

SS:
So in her case it is not only life extending, it appears to be lifesaving.

NTP:
Hard to tell at this point if it is life extending. Even with the telomeres of a fifty-year-old, at twenty-five she could still easily live for another forty years. Forty years from now would mean she might end up dying at sixty-five instead of living on into her nineties. At present, it is impossible to get statistical information on actual human life extension.

We recommend that everyone have their telomeres measured, but it’s not always necessary. If you are seventy years old, all I have to do is look at you and I know you are not forty anymore. Forty is the age when everyone should start to do something about their telomeres.

SS:
We measure our telomeres by taking a test. What are these tests? Is it the telomerase chain reaction test? The PCR test?

NTP:
There are now three different commercially available tests that measure the length of telomeres; this way we get a baseline. SpectraCell is a U.S. lab doing it, and there is a company in Canada called Repeat Diagnostics; both of these companies measure the mean (or average) telomere length.

There is also a third company, called Life Length, formed by María Blasco, head of the Spanish National Cancer Research Institute in Madrid, Spain. Life Length has a more expensive test, but it can measure the shortest telomeres. This test has recently become available in both the United States and Europe.

Ideally, people taking TA-65 should do a test that measures the shortest telomeres. It only takes one cell with short telomeres out of the ninety-two telomeres in every cell to send it into crisis (apoptosis), which is programmed cell death.

There’s another company called Telome Health in Menlo Park, California, formed by Professor Elizabeth Blackburn, the Nobel Prize winner who discovered telomerase, and Dr. Calvin Harley, who was the chief scientific officer at Geron. They are currently only doing work for academic institutions, but by the time this book is published, they expect to be doing testing for the general public. It will be interesting to see exactly what tests and pricing they will offer.

There is a gene called the
hTERT gene
(the “h” stands for human). This gene gets gradually turned off in normal aging. By the time we are adults, the hTERT gene has been turned off in almost all the normal cells in our bodies. We at T.A. Sciences want to turn it back on. TA-65 is able to turn on hTERT genes in healthy cells.

Cancer is caused by a series of mutations that cause the cells to lose growth control. These bad cells would soon die from telomere shortening, but they stay alive because the hTERT gene gets turned
on full blast and they are able to continue to divide indefinitely because they are telomerase positive. But TA-65 does not turn on the gene in cancer cells; it is already turned on by a mutation—a mutation that may in fact be caused by telomeres getting critically short.

To illustrate that telomerase itself does not cause cancer, let’s look at some healthy cells that also have telomerase turned on full blast: our germ line cells. These are our reproductive cells, eggs and sperm. Telomeres do not get short in reproductive cells because babies have to be born with baby-length telomeres, not the shorter telomeres of their aging parents. So the fact that you have that gene turned on all the time in healthy cells like eggs or sperm is a good thing. Telomerase simply allows cells to stay young and live longer; it doesn’t make them cancerous. While people get testicular and ovarian cancer, no one ever gets egg or sperm cancer.

As I have said, turning on telomerase makes cells younger and extends their lives, and we want to do just that for the fifty trillion aging cells in our body.

Another point: TA-65 rejuvenates the immune system, and a strong immune system fights cancer. We have thousands of people taking our supplement and we have not heard of even one person coming down with cancer after starting to take TA-65.

SS:
So TA-65 can rejuvenate and strengthen an aging immune system. Seems it’s worth it if only for that.

NTP:
To back up this theoretical argument, we and others have done in vivo studies and found that TA-65 did not accelerate cancerous growth or cause increased initiation of cancers.

SS:
Going back to the importance of strengthening the immune system, has there been any clinical testing?

NTP:
Luckily for us, strengthening the immune system is not considered a disease treatment by the FDA, so we can honestly tell people that taking TA-65 rejuvenates the immune system. We are also proud to report that there are several scientific studies on TA-65 that have established both efficacy and safety. One of them was published in 2011 in the English journal
Rejuvenation Research
. That trial showed that the shortest telomeres got longer in people taking TA-65 and their immune systems were rejuvenated. There were other good health benefits associated with TA-65 that are currently under study as we speak. We will have to talk again to update your book once those results are published.

If we do not get hit by a bus, all of us will get some form or fashion
of a disease. It is just a part of getting older. However, supporting cellular health and the immune system should go a long way in contributing to our overall health and longevity.

SS:
Well, I see this supplement as a step toward health and away from the present dismal aging paradigm.

NTP:
That’s the whole point of our business. The TA-65 molecule is found in the astragalus plant. It’s a very rare molecule. We spent five years testing for safety and developing the technology for extracting and purifying it before we introduced it to the market for human consumption. Even though it’s an extract from a plant, what we end up with is a single molecule. It’s not a normal extract. There are more than 2,000 molecules in the astragalus plant and we take out the other 1,999 so there’s only one left.