Where Do MSCs Come From?

When conception occurs, a sperm penetrates an egg, genetics mix, and an embryo forms. That single cell divides into 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 cells. At that stage, each cell is an embryonic stem cell capable of becoming any tissue in the body.

The industry spent 20 years and billions of dollars researching embryonic stem cells. The verdict is in: they don't work therapeutically. They essentially want to become a baby.

But those 64 cells eventually grow into 110 trillion cells, and a baby is born. After birth, the umbilical cord is clamped and cut. The placenta, umbilical cord, and amnion—what we call the "afterbirth"—typically gets thrown away. But those tissues contain incredibly young, powerful cells.

That's where we derive our therapeutic MSCs. Not from babies—babies are fine and are never donated. We use donated placental tissue that would otherwise be medical waste.

MSCs Are Everywhere in Your Body

Blood vessels are found everywhere in your body—in every organ and tissue. And MSCs reside on those blood vessels throughout your body. They're in your bone marrow, your liver, your lungs, your heart, your intestines, your skin, cartilage, bone, and muscle. Everywhere.

There are three main types of stem cells working together to keep you healthy:

Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in your bone marrow produce your immune system—white blood cells, red blood cells, and platelets.

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are found everywhere there's a blood vessel and help regulate inflammation, support the immune system, and facilitate regeneration.

Tissue-specific stem cells are dedicated to regenerating specific tissues like your liver, lungs, heart, and skin.

What MSCs Actually Do in Your Body

MSCs perform four critical functions:

Control inflammation

Modulate the immune system

Stimulate regeneration

Provide energy to cells

Let me give you a remarkable example of the energy function. When you get an infection, your white blood cell count goes up. That happens within 24 hours—you go from a normal white count to an extra 500 billion cells in your bloodstream to fight the infection.

Where does the energy come from to create 500 billion new cells so quickly? MSCs in your bone marrow divide rapidly and donate their mitochondria—the cellular powerhouses that create energy—to the HSCs and progenitor cells that become white blood cells.

Without MSCs, you wouldn't have a functional immune system.

The Devastating Decline:

Why We Age and Get Sick

Here's something that will change how you think about aging and disease: I believe the majority of chronic illnesses are due to either a decreased number of MSCs or dysfunction of those stem cells, resulting in increased inflammation.

By the time you reach skeletal maturity—around age 25—90% of the potency of your MSCs is already gone. Ninety percent. And it only gets worse from there. By the time you're in your 80s, you have very few functional MSCs left.

This decline manifests in several ways:

Increased inflammation throughout your body

Dysregulated immune system (autoimmune diseases, allergies, chronic infections)

Decreased ability to regenerate (osteoarthritis, slow healing, tissue degeneration)

Decreased energy and cellular function

The Math of Cellular Decline

The numbers are staggering. Take one newborn MSC and grow it in the lab. It divides every 24 hours. Do the math: one cell becomes 2, then 4, 8, 16, and so on. In 30 days, you have one billion cells from a single cell.

But if you're 35-40 years old, that doubling time goes from one day to two days. After 30 days, you only have 32,000 cells—not a billion.

At my age, the doubling time is two and a half days. That same starting cell produces only 4,000 cells after a month.

Here's the critical insight: if you have a million-cell problem and you're only producing 30,000 cells, you're not going to get over it. Even if you're producing 900,000 cells, you're still not going to achieve complete healing.

The Power of Young Cells

Research from Harvard demonstrates this principle beautifully. Scientists took old mice with cognitive problems, skeletal muscle issues, and heart dysfunction. They literally sutured them to young mice, allowing them to share a blood supply.

The results were incredible. The old mice, exposed to the secretions from young MSCs, behaved much younger. They had increased capacity to repair skeletal muscle, improved neurogenesis in the brain, better myocardial function—everything improved.

We replicated this in our own lab. I took some of my own MSCs—remember, I'm older—and measured their doubling time: 36 hours. Then we took just the secretions (what we call MTF—mesenchymal trophic factors) from umbilical MSCs and put it on my cells.

My cells' doubling time went from 36 hours to 18 hours. The secretions of young cells made my old cells work twice as fast.