Sustaining us is made possible by fire heart.

Pitchers and viewers like you.

Thank you, Bill.

And thanks for joining us for sustaining us here on KLCC KPBS.

I'm David Huizar.

Later in the broadcast, we're going to travel to the Pacific Northwest in search of a most unique and ferocious creature that has baffled scientists and researchers for years.

First, though, you've probably heard the old saying health is wealth.

Good health is well, it's the key to everything.

That's why there are so many health care modalities to try and cure what ails you.

Everything from surgery, medications, MRI's, X-rays to vitamins, herbs, acupuncture and physical therapy.

The list goes on.

Well, some doctors are now adding stem cell therapy to that list.

And while the early stages of stem cell research began a few decades ago, more and more scientists these days are advocating for stem cells as a potential future of preventive and therapeutic medicine.

So we decided to identify a leading expert in this field that led us to Dr. Hans Keirstead, one of the world's most renowned stem cell researcher specializing in therapy development for various cancers and immune disorders.

A professor of anatomy in neurobiology.

Dr. Keirstead in the early 2000, founded and directed his Sue and Bill GROSS STEM Cell Research Center at the University of California, Irvine.

During his 15 year tenure with UCI.

Keirstead helped facilitate tens of millions of dollars to promote cutting edge stem cell research and mentoring of hundreds of students, all the while being granted over 20 patents for his work.

Discover magazine named Dr. Keirstead, one of the top 100 scientists of the year.

Keirstead was a founding advisor of the California STEM Cell Initiative, resulting in an eight and a half billion dollars stem cell phone.

Today, Dr. Keirstead is the CEO of a Beta Biomedical in Irvine, California.

After vetting his credentials, of which there are many.

We traveled to the city of Irvine to meet with Dr. Hans Keirstead.

The focus of my interview how stem cells could help with cancer and of the aging process.

I've read so much.

I've heard so much about stem cells, the cutting edge, the future of health care.

Why is that the case?

And what are you researching?

We've never known as humans a biologic that is more powerful than a stem cell.

It's the only biologic that has irrefutably the potential to treat every single human disease because they're made from them.

Every organ in your body, every tissue, every cell you have came from a stem cell.

So if we can take a stem cell and make it into I or heart or God or skin, liver, etc., which we can, then we should be able to use those things as models of disease and we should be able to use them as therapies.

Give some examples of what stem cells are used for in treating illness and then what you're doing here specifically.

Probably the greatest success in stem cells are blood transfusions for bone and blood cancers where someone's full body irradiation is preceded by an extract of stem cells from the bone marrow.

That's where all your blood comes from, all of your immune cells.

So you'd want to kill those with radiation.

You want to kill the cancer with the radiation.

So when one has blood cancers, you generally undergo whole body radiation, which would otherwise kill you.

But prior to that, some stem cells get taken out of the bone marrow.

The patient is irradiated, and then those get put back in to reconstitute their immune system so they don't die.

That's been going on for a few decades now, extremely successfully.

The advances in stem cells besides that have been fewer, but the potential is still there.

It's still fairly early stage in the stem cell field, but we are seeing phenomenal, phenomenal preclinical and now clinical evidence that these things can work in various disease states.

And is that what you're doing here at your clinic, your lab here in Irvine, California?

I like to be on the edge of new therapies.

So when I look at a sector like cancer and I see the drugs that have been developed, you know, largely they're what I call to buy for medicine, whack someone over the head with a two by four and hope it has an effect.

Chemotherapy is a brutal, brutal drug.

People who go through it have a common saying that I survived chemo rather than cancer and whole body irradiation pointed to radiation.

We're getting better.

The field is with new immunomodulatory immunotherapies like checkpoint inhibitors, the latest standard of care that's been introduced in cancer.

But the efficacy is low side effects are there.

They might keep you alive for a couple more years, but they're not doing the full job.

So I like to look at these big, big issues and how can how can we apply stem cell therapies to them?

If stem cells, as you say, have been around for a while.

Why is it we don't hear more about the success of stem cells or the stem cell research itself?

Because you're talking about cancer?

Every time I speak with someone who has or has had cancer, like, well, as you said, I've been through chemo, I've been through radiation or the surgeons cut the tumor out.

Why is that all we hear then?

STEM cell technologies have one great challenge, and my laboratory was the first in the world to overcome that challenge.

That challenge is to take a stem cell and make it into something useful.

So let's simplify or in my case, oversimplify it.

Unfortunately, no one's going to accuse me of being a researcher, a scientist or a doctor.

The idea wasn't there.

With that said, give me an example of what type of cancer a stem cell could help.

And how is a cancer?

How is a stem cell extracted where a stem cell place for someone who knows nothing about this.

Take me through it step by step.

Okay.

So every single cancer.

Everyone.

Not a hypothesis.

This is a fact.

This is probably the greatest discovery that's ever been made in the cancer field.

And the discovery that got my attention.

Every cancer comes from a tumor initiating cell or a cancer stem cell.

There's two phrases for the same word.

So a tumor, some bulk tumor is only 1% cancer, stem cell and 99% stuff.

The cancer stem cell makes the tumor.

The tumor is you.

It's your own hair.

Got skin.

Cartilage?

Yes.

All slightly mutated.

Cancerous, but it looks like you.

That's why your own body has such a hard time attacking and getting rid of it, because it sees self.

But the ticks, the tumor initiating cells, they are stem cells and they birth the whole tumor.

They are also the thing that leaves the tumor, runs through the blood and makes another tumor that's metastasis.

They are also the thing, perhaps most insidiously, that falls asleep in your large blood vessels or your bone marrow for years, 2 to 7 years on average.

They sit there quietly, a little stem cell sitting in the side of a blood vessel for seven years.

The patient may go through chemotherapy and radiation, surgical resections, checkpoint inhibitors.

They think they're all clean and clear.

And then 2 to 7 years later, they get cancer again.

That is known to be because of this cancer stem cell that wakes up, drops more daughters.

Some become sleepers.

Some become cancers.

So what we did was take a technology that our group had developed, frankly, years ago in making something pure, taking a stem cell and being able to amplify it and make it a pure product.

So we take a little piece of the surgical resection.

When someone has cancer, they're getting things chopped out of them.

We take a little cubic millimeter, a cubic centimeter or whatever we get, and we pull out that 1%, one in 100 cells that are tumor initiating cells or cancer stem cells.

And we know how to grow stem cells.

And so we purify them, we amplify them, and then we train the patient's immune system to kill them.

Where do you get the stem cells from?

I know back in the day several years ago, there was a lot of controversy surrounding the origination of where you get the stem cells from that controversy.

You're absolutely right.

What set the field back a lot?

The the populace thought that stem cells were procured from aborted human fetuses, which they're not.

They can be.

I've certainly never procured them from that way.

And I don't think anyone who really wants to make a true drug would do that because it happens to be illegal for you to make money using aborted human fetal tissue.

So just for that reason alone, let alone the ethics and the whole supply chain of getting it.

So that was a trouble for the stem cell field because people thought that we were getting stem cells from aborted tissues.

It was President Bush that actually tackled that quite successfully.

He was with a population of about 85% of people that thought that that was the case.

STEM cells are horrible.

It's chopping up aborted fetuses at the backdoor of abortion clinics and they were wrong.

What he did was allowed the field to go forward with a small set of stem cell lines that actually were not procured from that tissue type.

They were procured from the discard of fertility clinics.

That's state sanctioned.

That's federally sanctioned work.

That's helped a lot of people have babies.

And the leftovers from the fertility process are used to get stem cells.

Now there's even a more modern version where we can take your skin a little, little, tiny punch, biopsy of your skin, no scars, hardly painful, like a needle prick, and then make stem cells from the skin, reverse them back into a stem cell state and use that as a starting population.

In the case of cancer, we actually get them from the tumor.

We pull them out of the cancer patient, sort them, amplify them, teach the immune system how to kill them.

If this is the next best thing Dr. Kerry said, why aren't more physicians using this modality, so to speak?

And why aren't we hearing more of it in the mainstream.

Stem cell technologies using these more recent means of developing stem cells?

Are few and they are working their way through the clinics.

You know, I run a couple of companies that are working through clinical trials, some almost commercial now, like our cancer treatment, just getting commercial, our pathogen treatment for infectious diseases, and another one on anti-aging and longevity and immune modulator.

That's in the first stages of human clinical trials.

That's very exemplary of where the stem cell field is.

It's it's partway through to commercialization in the United States.

What we see as a problem of that is that the impatient patient population can't blame them are going offshore.

The impatient entrepreneurs we can blame them are taking non FDA approved drugs to Mexico, to Russia, to various places around the world, and administering them to humans without the safety and efficacy checks that usually precede a treatment.

What are the cancers that your stem cells treat.

At a veto?

Biomedical We have shown that our stem cell treatments for cancer are working in glioblastoma, brain cancer, melanoma, ovarian cancer, liver and kidney cancers.

I hear a lot these days about a possible cancer vaccine.

Are you only part of this equation?

I am working with the White House's moonshot program and we see that, yes, the focus is quite heavily on vaccines for cancer.

Let's get away from the cancer discussion because there's another health topic that seems to be so prevalent for everybody today, and that's longevity or staying healthy or staying young.

How do stem cells play into that dynamic?

You know, as a stem cell scientist, I've been pulled into many, many different fields because stem cells can affect every disease state.

And I think the most intriguing that I've been pulled into recently is the longevity field.

Every manifestation of aging, every one of them requires a different deficit, crapping out immune system.

Every one of us is that our immune peak when we're 27 years old and then it's downhill, we birth our immune system less frequently and it gets old and tired.

When you're birthing your immune system frequently, those youngsters, those young immune system cells secrete about 400 different factors that keep your immune system alive and healthy.

Well, we've actually figured out how to make that soup, that secret on that set of secretions that our that are keeping your immune system healthy.

So at Immune is Biomedical a company that I chair here in Irvine, California, we have taken human stem cells and for the first time in the world made them into a particular population of human cells and farmed them by the billions in dishes.

And they secrete every factor relevant to human immune system development and health.

It's it's one of the funnest projects I've ever been involved in, because every manifestation of aging is due to a decline of the immune system.

And here we have now the soup, the 440 factors that are responsible for immune system health.

And we can make those for very little money.

It's off the shelf.

And when given to most models of aged, of aging for various manifestations of aging, we have shown that we can prevent manifestations of aging in every model we've tried.

We can halt a reverse muscle atrophy, arterial stiffness, brain inflammation.

The actual decline of the immune system function itself.

And here's a big one.

Metabolism the slowing of metabolism is an immune mediated event that we can reverse in animals and immune as biomedical has recently been approved by the United States FDA to work on humans.

And we have begun that.

And I can tell you that the the first humans are hitting the primary outcome measures of the clinical trial.

It seems almost surreal.

It's like something out of a Twilight Zone episode or a sci fi novel.

Right.

Stay young forever.

I mean, that's here now, so to speak, is it not?

Well, we certainly have a pathway to it.

Aren't stem cells used in the field of orthopedics?

I know so many athletes who tell me I'm going in for a stem cell therapy.

They've got a bone on bony or a bone on bone hip or some sort of a sports injury.

STEM cells have been shown to be very, very efficacious in calming down hurts and pains around the knees, shoulders, wherever you have them.

Really.

Even some arthritis as well, showing very nice results.

It is a burgeoning sector.

And I have to say that probably seven out of ten of the places that are saying they're doing it aren't really doing stem cell therapies.

You've got to be very careful over the last few years that in the United States, FDA has put out hundreds of cease and desist letters to doctors who are doing this work because they're not doing it through the FDA.

So it is important for people to actually that are considering this to surf, Google, the name of the doctor you can put in Dr. Keirstead and then say FDA cease and desist letter.

And fortunately, you will not see a cease and desist letter beside my name.

But that's a good check that the FDA is actually policing this and trying to shut down the charlatans.

So who's the champion and who's the charlatan?

Unfortunately, it's up to the patient to figure it out.

But the work is real.

There are some really, really good data coming out of sports injury, orthopedic surgery, just athletic work showing that stem cells have a tremendous effect in calming down inflammation around a hurt joint.

You really believe, Dr. King, so that stem cells are our health future?

Correct.

Yes, I do.

I've never seen a biologic that has greater potential in stem cells, and I've devoted my career to it as a result.

Thank you so much, Dr. Hans Keirstead, for that interview.

Now from Orange County, California, to the Pacific Northwest, in search of the elusive Wolverine, the Wolverine has learned to survive in the wild after being nearly exterminated in that region during the 20th century.

Citizen scientists trekked into the North Cascades of Washington State to learn more about this amazing animal.

This story is part of our continuing content sharing partnership with Public Media and PBS stations throughout the U.S.. Our public media partner, OPB, Oregon Public Broadcasting, has this report.

Every winter the North Cascades Highway gets snowed in.

The only way into these mountains from the Matt Howe Valley is by snowmobile or ski.

Stephanie Williams and David Moskowitz are prepared to do both because the wild animal they're study lives only in remote mountain environments.

We're going to service one of our monitoring stations and it's about, you know, it's well over five miles from the end of the plowed road.

So we get here with the snow chain and we get our skis on and skiing out to the side.

Don't forget to meet.

Stephanie and Dave.

His passion for wildlife, biology and these mountains have inspired them to take on a mission that most might consider too inaccessible and impractical.

Stephanie is a professional mountain guide, and David is an award winning wildlife photographer.

These are handy skills to have and trying to locate and document what is truly the most elusive animal on these mountains, the Wolverine.

If this animal is literally mythical, right?

I mean, this is like this creature that has this ability to survive in this harsh landscape where we're other creatures flee, go down out of the mountains or go to sleep for the winter.

Wolverines just stick around.

I think of them as the spirit animal of the Alpine.

It's almost like they're playing in this terrain up in over steep chutes, over ridges, and to the top of mountain peaks in the dead of winter, as if it was flat ground.

Finding Wolverines takes funding, staffing and government support, but has been hard to come by.

So in 2017, David and Stephanie teamed up to create the Cascade Wolverine Project.

It's a citizen science effort to answer some very basic but unknown ecological questions, like, Are there Wolverines in this area?

And if so, where exactly?

They set up cameras where they think a wandering Wolverine might travel.

Like mountain settles and confluences of drainage valleys.

Then they return to see what their cameras recorded.

That's gone.

But it's gone.

All right.

Make sure this has been out for three weeks.

So see if the camera's working any more.

Yeah.

Still is half the battery power already.

We can see you, Martin.

In here.

All of their bait is gone.

But it wasn't a wolverine who feasted.

It was one of their cousins of the muscle it family.

A martin.

You can kind of see is his bushy tail.

Since their last visit to the monitoring station, their camera has taken several hundred images of a martin.

A very well fed martin.

Yep.

Typical.

We should actually be called the Cascades.

Martin.

Project Word.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Occasional Wolverine mixed in.

Yeah.

You kind of get your expectations up for a Wolverine.

It's so rare to get them that there's, like, some disappointment.

But that's normal.

Like, this is usually what happens.

Wolverines are hard to study because they're solitary by nature.

And there are wonders of great distances.

A single wolverine might have a home range of 100 square miles or more.

They're a small animal in a huge environment, so it's just the chances of coming across them are very low.

I've almost seen a Wolverine once.

It ran behind my back and I looked around and found its tracks across my ski tracks.

Among the research community in Washington, I think we had a roundtable of 20 field biologists asked to raise their hand how many times they'd seen a wolverine.

And I had seen them most twice.

I had seen the most.

So this is like it gives you a sense of how rare they are.

No one can say for sure how many Wolverines once lived in the North Cascades like there must have had cousins, the sea otters.

They were hunted for their fur and by the early 20th century had vanished completely.

Now biologists believe that Wolverines from Canada are slowly reestablishing in the North Cascades.

David and Stephanie's camera stations provide an on the ground way of witnessing what is happening in these remote and rather inaccessible mountains.

We have usually 10 to 12 stations throughout the winter, and we maintain them over the course of the winter, hoping for images so that we get simply presents.

Do these animals show up and for changes over time as land use changes?

This year we got here 500.

Photos all the time about like.

What it usually is here.

For here.

Part of what makes this grassroots effort so unique is the photography element.

Let's try to bring this down to that.

Yeah, I guess that's as far down as it'll go.

They use typical trail cameras, but David has developed his own setup with DIY ingenuity, trial and error and literally duct tape.

I'm doing like studio photography here.

You've got like different lighting set up at different towers.

And like, I'm using a really nice camera to get portraits essentially of these wildlife.

The photos of Wolverines at night have a really particularly kind of ethereal sense to them.

You're kind of like pulling back the blinds on this animal.

So it's like you just imagine them out here on this, like, snowy night in the winter, in the wilderness.

And then there's just this split second where there's lights exposing them and you get this kind of window into their world.

And that's what we're going for.

Awareness, excitement, a sense of wonder about a very cool animal that is facing a very unknown future.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife estimates that there may be as few as 25 Wolverines in the North Cascades.

Conservation groups have advocated listing the Wolverines under the Endangered Species Act for more than 20 years.

Without federal protection as an endangered species.

It's hard to get that continuous monitoring effort going.

No green screen is good, right?

The need for monitoring has been picked up by grassroots volunteer groups, forming a patchwork of survey areas from the North Cascades to Mt.

Hood.

We're always kind of scraping by each year.

It's sort of like, okay, how are we going to pull this off?

And then somehow we do.

With the cameras reset.

The last thing to do before heading back is to hang fresh bait.

Stephanie hangs a piece of roadkill that a local donated to the cause.

All right, that's it.

And we try to be as resourceful and scavenging as a wolverine is, but we run on a shoestring budget.

Right.

No Wolverines on the cameras today.

There's our Martin.

But we'll be back in a couple of weeks to check again.

Thank.

At least the trip out of the mountains is downhill.

I just the other day actually came across fresh Wolverine tracks.

That's kind of one of those things where, like, they really do exist, just like showing up in photographs.

It was like a mirage or something.

That definitely kind of catches my breath as I like, Oh, this happened within the last maybe 12 hours.

I just crossed paths with a wolverine.

It refuels my desire to do this.

Thank you, Oregon Public Broadcasting, for that report.

Now for more information about our program, just click on Kelsey dot org and then click contact us to send us your questions, your comments or your story ideas so we can hear from you or contact me at.

David is our news on X or just go to my YouTube channel?

David is our news.

Contact me there and be sure to catch our program here on PBS or catch us on the PBS app.

Thank you so much for joining us.

I'm David is are.