#415 Longevity Doctor Shares Regeneration Protocol - Alexis Ortega MD

Alexis Ortega (0:00)

You have enough stem cells for several lives. There was one study in which already exhausted stem cells could be rejuvenated by simply injecting.

Siim Land (0:12)

Alexis, welcome to the show.

Alexis Ortega (0:14)

Thank you.

Siim Land (0:15)

Yeah, we actually had, or you joined one of the retreats I had in Iowa, which is where we met, and there we had some nice conversations about all things longevity, and you have your own clinic in Barcelona. So yeah, I was figuring, hey, we should have a podcast and talk these things, and not just us talking in privately, so we'll do a podcast about it. So I'm happy to have you on the podcast.

Alexis Ortega (0:39)

Thank you very much. Happy to be here. Well, it was a pleasure to share one week with you and all the others, and spend some time with like-minded people, people who apply longevity strategies to their own life. And on my end, I could add my little grain of salt into the conversations, since my background is medicine. And I started working in the longevity and regenerative medicine field back in 2019 Well, maybe first I should introduce myself. So my name is Alexis Ortega, and I'm a medical doctor in Spain. And as I was saying, yeah, I started working in longevity back in 2019 after attending the I'm Doing Aging Conference series in Berlin, hosted by Aubrey de Grey. And I must say that he was a huge inspiration for me. And I really liked the damage repair framework that he works with. And that was my main driver to decide to become part of it, of this world. And then I finished five master's degrees in five years, one board certification in regented medicine by the International Society of Stem Cell Applications. And with this knowledge, I began developing my own strategies, which I...

So my main idea is that they should be able to be implemented with existing technologies and bring them to the public. So this is the idea behind AdastroClinic, which I founded in 2023 to integrate cutting-edge diagnostic and therapeutic tools to rejuvenate the body, extend healthy lifespan, and treat age-related diseases, including aging of the skin or external signs of aging.

Siim Land (2:41)

Wow, that's pretty new, like only one year old.

Alexis Ortega (2:45)

Yes, it's only one and a half years old now. I started in January, but it's really promising.

Siim Land (2:50)

Nice. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people are starting to get more interested in these rejuvenation therapies and longevity. I guess, you know, you mentioned Aubrey DeGree, and he has a pretty grandiose vision of this.

Alexis Ortega (3:05)

He's very ambitious. Let's leave it there.

Siim Land (3:08)

Yeah, so I wanted to ask, what do you feel as a practitioner in the field? What's available right now? Let's disregard the costs, so like what is actually, if you had unlimited budget, what is available for rejuvenation technologies, and like how much effect would it have on your longevity right now?

Alexis Ortega (3:29)

Well, first, on the side of measuring, there is a lot of things available, and on the side of therapies, there isn't as much, but the field is growing at a really fast pace. So we still don't have much of the tissue engineering therapy side of it, but we do have some, in my opinion, basic stuff that we can combine, integrate, as I said before, and obtain good results. We're always talking on the basis of supposition, right? because we don't have clinical trials for lifespan in humans. But based on the animal data, and based on the in vitro studies, there's a lot of promising stuff. And I can share some of my clinical feedback. We've obtained really good results in some age-related diseases, which is the best way to measure the impact of what we do. So back to your question.

In my Clinics protocol, everything starts with a phase 1 assessment or measurement. And we have several options depending on budget. But if you had an unlimited budget, as you were saying, I would basically do first of all, a general checkup. Let's not forget the Clinics. These general checkup would include body composition analysis, of course, and all the usual mainstream medicine metrics. Then that would be followed by a series of tests. We would be measuring the NAD levels. We would be measuring at least one epigenetic clock. The immune function, which is a really innovative test based on cell culturing your own cells from your immune system. Your telomeres, your toxic heavy metal load, which is really impactful, especially if you have it. The sequence of your entire genome, probably that would be really useful if you had this huge budget we're talking about. This is the most expensive test, but I think it's essential to be able to work on the patient's genetic risks. Otherwise, we're blind in that aspect. And then, from there, we would obtain a panel of biological ages. And I insist that's plural, because we have one vascular age, we have one metabolic age, we have one epigenetic age. Epigenetic age is the closest thing we can have that correlates to life expectancy, but it's not, I don't like to call it biological age. So it is the age of your epigenome. Then you would have the age of your chromosomes as well, which would be the telomere length. So from there, we obtain an idea of how your hallmarks of aging are. If they correlate to your age, if they're older, if they're more advanced, or if they are better than what's expected for your age and health condition.