Peptides: The Science, Uses & Safety | Dr. Abud Bakri

1. 0:00 – 3:33

   Abud Bakri

   1. ABDr. Abud Bakri0:00

      People are now stacking their GLP-1 as their insulin sensitivity tool, their growth hormone or their GHRH-

   2. AHAndrew Huberman0:07

      Mm-hmm

   3. ABDr. Abud Bakri0:07

      ... and their androgen mo- modulation therapies as this trinity stack.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman0:11

      Trinity stack?

   5. ABDr. Abud Bakri0:12

      To get very fit, very healthy quickly. So a lot of these transformations you see in CEOs and celebrities and stuff is using a combination of those three things. You know, your TRT plus tirzepatide or retatrutide, whatever it may be, and then using a growth hormone modulation with your, if you can afford growth hormone, or tesamorelin, ipamorelin. And you're seeing people lose a lot of fat, gain a lot of muscle in short amounts of time. Is that healthy? We'll find out, but that is, like, the celebrity protocol.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman0:38

      Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Abud Bakri, an internal medicine physician who is also extremely knowledgeable on the science and use of peptides. When I say peptides, I mean both FDA-approved peptides, such as the GLP agonists. You probably know these as things like Ozempic, Mounjaro, and retatrutide, as well as peptides such as Body Protection Compound 157, or BPC 157, which, as you'll learn today, has a very long history of being used in humans for gut health and tissue repair, and many interesting studies in animals supporting its potential use in humans, but a minimum of formal studies in humans, meaning one. We discuss BPC-157, what it does and how, as well as things like growth hormone secretagogues, like tesamorelin, MK-677, and others. And we talk about things like GHK-copper, which nowadays many people are using to promote collagen synthesis and repair for aesthetic reasons, like improving skin, hair, and so on. We also talk about peptides that have been studied for the purpose of DNA repair and longevity, like epithalon and pinealin, which also have been touted to improve REM sleep and for improving cognitive function. You'll also learn what is known and what is not known about these peptides, both in terms of function and safety. During today's episode, you will come to appreciate that Dr. Bakri has truly encyclopedic knowledge about these peptides. He is also formally trained as a physician, and as a consequence, you will learn how to think about peptides based on whether or not they have known receptors or not, that turns out to be very important, and what their real safety profiles are, as well as what particular concerns you ought to have if you are considering using peptides of any kind. As a formally trained board-certified physician, he comes at this topic through the lens of a physician, but also somebody who is very interested in the current status and future of peptide medicine. Today's discussion, thanks to Dr. Bakri, is a true master class on peptides. By the end of today's discussion, I promise you, again, thanks to him, that you will be among the most informed, doctor or otherwise, about peptides from the GLPs to BPC-157 and all the others that I mentioned, including some that I didn't mention here in the introduction. So it is a real gift and honor to have this knowledge presented to all of us. So buckle up. You're about to learn a lot about peptides. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Abud

2. 3:33 – 6:26

   What are Peptides?, Receptors

   1. AHAndrew Huberman3:33

      Bakri. Dr. Abud Bakri, welcome.

   2. ABDr. Abud Bakri3:36

      Good to be here.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman3:37

      Peptides.

   4. ABDr. Abud Bakri3:38

      [laughs]

   5. AHAndrew Huberman3:38

      Huge topic and huge category of biology and medicine. So we should start off by breaking this into categories-

   6. ABDr. Abud Bakri3:47

      Sure

   7. AHAndrew Huberman3:47

      ... so that people can wrap their minds around it, because that word, peptides, has come to mean stuff people buy and take and maybe should or shouldn't buy and take. But-

   8. ABDr. Abud Bakri3:57

      [laughs]

   9. AHAndrew Huberman3:57

      ... there's a lot of important and quite simple biology to understand before anyone should even be thinking about any of that. So if I just push the word peptides towards you, how do you carve that up in terms of thinking about it as an MD, as a clinician, and maybe also put yourself into the mind of a interested, let's call it a peptide curious person-

   10. ABDr. Abud Bakri4:20

       [laughs]

   11. AHAndrew Huberman4:20

       ... out there?

   12. ABDr. Abud Bakri4:21

       So scientifically, I would say it's one of the languages of the human body, right? So the body likes these different languages to communicate between cells, going from DNA to RNA to proteins, which are, can be broken down into polypeptides and peptides. And peptides are one of these languages. Steroid hormones are another language, and then peptides can be broken down further into subcategories, whether or not they have receptors or they have no receptor.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman4:44

       Hmm.

   14. ABDr. Abud Bakri4:45

       And that kind of changes the clinical effects we'll see, like the GLP-1s, which have a very strong clinical effect, w- compared to these obscure peptides like BPC-157, TB-500, TB4, that don't have a clear target.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman4:56

       They have receptors, but they just have many of them, or they don't even have receptors?

   16. ABDr. Abud Bakri4:59

       We don't have a receptor identified for BPC-157 or TB4.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman5:03

       Just stopping you right there. There's a very interesting-

   18. ABDr. Abud Bakri5:04

       Yeah

   19. AHAndrew Huberman5:04

       ... distinction. I don't think anyone else has described peptides this way. Let's take BPC-157-

   20. ABDr. Abud Bakri5:09

       Yeah

   21. AHAndrew Huberman5:10

       ... for the moment. We're gonna talk a lot about it today. If it doesn't have a receptor, what are some ways that it could impact cells and organs-

   22. ABDr. Abud Bakri5:17

       Yep

   23. AHAndrew Huberman5:18

       ... a- and so forth? Or is it that there are receptors, we just don't know what they are?

   24. ABDr. Abud Bakri5:23

       It could be that.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman5:24

       Mm-hmm.

   26. ABDr. Abud Bakri5:24

       The latter, that maybe the, the receptor is still elusive, or it could be that it's modifying certain proteins that already exist or linking different pept- uh, proteins together in a more favorable fashion for-

   27. AHAndrew Huberman5:34

       Hmm

   28. ABDr. Abud Bakri5:34

       ... gene transcription. The Russian peptides are all epigenetic modifiers, that they bind to the groove of the DNA in certain spots that either open up or close the chromatin to certain areas of genetic expression, and they've modeled this out.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman5:44

       Like a steroid hormone?

   30. ABDr. Abud Bakri5:46

       So steroid hormones bind, uh, like they bind to a, like the androgen receptor, binds DHT or testosterone, goes into the nucleus, turns on all the androgenic genes. Like this-
3. 6:26 – 11:19

   BPC-157, Discovery, Animal Proteins

   1. AHAndrew Huberman6:26

      All right. I know a lot of people are interested in GLPs, and I wanna go there, but because I know most people are probably listening to this foremost because they wanna hear about the other stuff-

   2. ABDr. Abud Bakri6:36

      [laughs]

   3. AHAndrew Huberman6:37

      ... let's start with BPC-157.

   4. ABDr. Abud Bakri6:38

      Sure.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman6:39

      What is it? What do we know about it? We'll explore safety, and what is your stance on it from the perspective of a consumer and a clinician? So first of all, what is BPC-

   6. ABDr. Abud Bakri6:50

      Yep

   7. AHAndrew Huberman6:50

      ... 157?

   8. ABDr. Abud Bakri6:51

      The best way to look at it is, you know, as humans, we've been looking for medicines in plants for thousands of years, and in the last, let's say, 150 years, we've been looking for medicines in cells. So animal-derived versus plant, plant-derived medicines is-

   9. AHAndrew Huberman7:04

      Mm

   10. ABDr. Abud Bakri7:04

       ... the way to think about it. You think about aspirin, you think about metformin, the statins. Those were all discovered in, you know, plant tissues, um, statins more so fungi, but you get the point. Now we've been looking into animal tissues to find cures, medicines, treatments. So a group in Croatia in the '90s looks out for this peptide called BPC, that they, they, and, and, uh, eventually named BPC. It's a 40,000-dalton giant peptide called BPC. BPC-157 is 15 amino acids from that giant peptide. We don't naturally make BPC-157. That's what you'll commonly hear online. We make BPC the big, uh, protein.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman7:42

       Did this group go looking for-

   12. ABDr. Abud Bakri7:45

       Yes

   13. AHAndrew Huberman7:45

       ... body protection compound? For those that aren't familiar, in, in the laboratory you can take a tissue, grind it up. You can do what's called fractionation. You can start separating basically cells and tissues and liquids a- according to the size of different proteins, like different filters will bring, like, just like certain filters will let sand through or pebbles through or boulders through.

   14. ABDr. Abud Bakri8:02

       Yep.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman8:02

       That's kinda what you do, and then you figure out what the sequences are, and then you throw them on cells or put them into animals and you try and figure out what they do.

   16. ABDr. Abud Bakri8:08

       Yep.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman8:08

       Why were they motivated to look for what eventually became BPC?

   18. ABDr. Abud Bakri8:13

       So Pavlov, the famous, uh, scientist that would do the do- the experiments on the dogs with the bell and, and making the dogs salivate, the other work he did was on gastric juices of dogs. What he'd do [laughs] is he'd put a hole in dogs' stomachs. He would, um, feed them food and then get the gastric juices and sell that as a medicine. They-

   19. AHAndrew Huberman8:29

       That's how he made his money?

   20. ABDr. Abud Bakri8:30

       Yeah, that was part of his business.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman8:31

       So he got a Nobel Prize. He was also kind of like, what did he have a, like a, um, a call code? It was like, uh, like enter Pavlov [laughs] for dis- for discount at checkout?

   22. ABDr. Abud Bakri8:40

       Yeah. Yeah.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman8:41

       Amazing.

   24. ABDr. Abud Bakri8:41

       So this is BPC before BPC-157 exists. There's probably other peptides and compounds in there, but they, they found that gastric juices had positive effects on healing, on people that had, you know, GERD and these kind of issues.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman8:52

       Wait, so people were taking BPC-

   26. ABDr. Abud Bakri8:53

       Yeah

   27. AHAndrew Huberman8:53

       ... in the time of Pavlov?

   28. ABDr. Abud Bakri8:54

       They didn't know what BPC was. They were taking gastric juices from dogs.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman8:57

       For what?

   30. ABDr. Abud Bakri8:58

       GI distress, GI discomfort. Um, some people would try it for wound healing. There was a big push in this era for, like, finding animal tissues and putting them into humans. That science fizzled out. At the same time, there's a scientist, Hans Selye, that's coming up with, uh, the stress adaptation theory, and he notices that animals are stressed out, three things happens to them. Their adrenals will get really big, so they make more cortisol. Their gastric lining gets destroyed, and then their thymus gland and their lymphatics shrink down. And he, he has this p- published paper where you have clear adrenal from a stressed animal versus a non-stressed animal, a thymus from an animal that's stressed versus not. So this group is looking and thinking, "Hey, Pavlov had this gastric juice. Hans Selye said that there was damage when, during stress. There must be some kind of cytoprotective or organoprotective compound in the gut." The stomach is a very rich endocrine, uh, tissue. It makes ghrelin, all these other hormones. So they're like, "There must be something else in the gut juice that protects the gut lining from further damage."
4. 11:19 – 12:27

   BPC-157, Animal Data, Regeneration

   1. ABDr. Abud Bakri11:19

      that might have gut effects.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman11:19

      So this Croatian group, um, isolates this 15 amino acid-

   3. ABDr. Abud Bakri11:24

      Yep

   4. AHAndrew Huberman11:24

      ... kind of mini segment-

   5. ABDr. Abud Bakri11:25

      Yep

   6. AHAndrew Huberman11:25

      ... of BPC. They and others start injecting it into mice.

   7. ABDr. Abud Bakri11:28

      Mice

   8. AHAndrew Huberman11:29

      Inducing injuries to nerve-

   9. ABDr. Abud Bakri11:30

      Yep

   10. AHAndrew Huberman11:30

       ... to tendon. Maybe describe a few of those effects. I've, I'm familiar with that literature, but I can tell that you are far more familiar with it. So what are some of the impressive effects that they observed that led to where we are today?

   11. ABDr. Abud Bakri11:41

       Yep. So they did all kinds of horrible things [laughs] to these mice. They would, you know, sever tendons and then give them BPC through oral or injectable intraperitoneal, uh, administrations, and they'd have faster healing times. They would sever ACLs of the mice. They would, uh, do burn wounds. So when a patient has a burn wound in, like, the ICU, they end up having crazy gastric ulcers. But if they were able to put BPC on topically for the mouse, they would have no gastric ulcers. They name it as this anti-stress compound, is how they, they, they look at it. Now, when they do that Achilles paper on the mice, that's what explodes the bodybuilder interest

   12. AHAndrew Huberman12:14

       And leads us to today where we are like, "Oh, MSK injuries must be BPC, tendons and, and, and, and muscle injuries." But the original idea of BPC was to use it as a gastric treatment, not to use it as a musculoskeletal.

5. 12:27 – 14:51

   Sponsors: Eight Sleep & Lingo

   1. AHAndrew Huberman12:27

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6. 14:51 – 19:27

   BPC-157, Regeneration & Healing, Neurological Effects

   1. AHAndrew Huberman14:52

      Let me pause you here. People are probably saying, "Should I take it or shouldn't I?" Yeah. Just hang in there, folks- [laughs] ... 'cause this is really, really important. What is so striking to me about BPC, and by the way, that's not an endorsement for BPC, just what's so striking to me because my lab worked for a long time on optic nerve repair- Mm ... and neural regeneration. Nerves don't like to regenerate in the central nervous system. Peripheral nervous system, they do it. They do it slowly, but they do it. Yep. Not in the central nervous system. Ask anyone who's had a stroke or- Yeah ... an optic nerve injury. It's a tough road at best. Mm-hmm. There are data that I've seen with my own eyes that show that, you know, you can accelerate healing of tendon- Yes ... of ligament, of nerve pathways. In animals, yes. In animals, yes. Thank you. And that it just generally promotes, quote, unquote, "repair". Yep. That's kind of weird. It is weird. Right? Very. Because I could spend the next 10 hours or more telling you about all the ways that people have tried to get nerves to regenerate and couldn't, and as you point out, this thing doesn't really have one specific at least known receptor. Right. So the data on the gut make a lot of sense. This is, after all, a gut peptide. It makes sense that that gut peptide could get lots of places in the body. Right. But what is it doing mechanistically, if we know, to support regeneration or replenishment of all these different tissue types? Because a neuron is a very different cell type- Yep ... than, you know, a fibroblast- Yep ... or one of the bits of collagen that make up different connective tissues. Yep. It's modulating a lot of these growth and healing pathways. Like i- in the models of damaging the, uh, endothelial layer, uh, or the epithelial layer of different tissues, you'll get more VEGF signaling. So that's the, the vascular endothelial growth factor. So you get more blood vessels, angiogenesis being formed, which creates a lot of the controversy around BPC safety. You'll get cell migration, especially when coupled with TB-500 and TB4. You'll get, you know, more access of the healing factors to the area through angiogenic pathways. On top of that, you'll get an anti-stress effect. So the other big thing that they did was they'd give corticosteroids with BPC-157 to these mice, and usually when you have a wound and you ta- you give corticosteroids, the corticosteroids will slow or even stop the wound healing from happening. When BPC was administered, the, the, the healing was either the same or even better. Is BPC considered anti-inflammatory? Because based on what you just said, it almost seems like it helps maintain some of the pro-inflammatory response. Yep. Some people might be thinking, "Why would you want inflammation?" What Dr. Bakri just said is if you block inflammation with corticosteroids- Yep ... you aren't gonna call in the signals to repair tissues. Yes. So lowering inflammation is a dicey thing that maybe we set aside for later in the conversation if we have time. But is it thought that BPC is lowering inflammation, or is just somehow hitting the gas pedal on all these regenerative, restorative biological processes? It's more putting the gas pedal on these processes to bring in the immune system, the healing factors. For example, in one tendon model, they noticed that it increased the amount of growth hormone receptors on the tendon, so theoretically, this would allow more growth hormone to dock in and, and cause the outgrowth of the tendon and the, and the, and the regrowth of it. So there's that theory there. Downstream, it'll modulate, uh, nitric oxide synthesis, so that's a big thing when it comes to wound healing 'cause you need to, to dilate the blood vessels. You need to call in different cells. So it's really changing the way cells behave at, at that level, but that's only for, like, the tendons side of it. They also did weird things on the neurological side. Like, they would make these mice drunk.

   2. ABDr. Abud Bakri18:16

      Okay? And they would then give them BPC, and they'd get less drunk and when they go through mazes.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman18:21

      Oh, boy.

   4. ABDr. Abud Bakri18:22

      Okay. [laughs]

   5. AHAndrew Huberman18:23

      We did not just recommend you take BPC with alcohol.

   6. ABDr. Abud Bakri18:26

      No, no.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman18:26

      I just want to be very clear [laughs] . Um, but people are gonna, you know, will do their own interpretation.

   8. ABDr. Abud Bakri18:30

      Yes.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman18:30

      So I'm being semi-facetious, but very interesting.

   10. ABDr. Abud Bakri18:33

       And then also, they would give them, give the mice drunk, and then have them withdraw from alcohol.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman18:36

       Mm-hmm.

   12. ABDr. Abud Bakri18:36

       And y- uh, like withdrawal is deadly. If we have a, a patient in the hospital that withdraws, they could die during that withdrawal if they're not given benzodiazepines. They got BPC, and they didn't have the withdrawal sym- symptoms. I'm like, "What's going on here? This is a very interesting compound." I think it gets, it gets all the hype for the MSK stuff, but I think the neurological, neuropsychiatric, let's say, and then gastric effects are way more interesting when it comes to that 'cause it's modulating the gut-brain axis in an interesting way.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman18:58

       Mm.

   14. ABDr. Abud Bakri18:58

       We'll have people come to us and they're like, "My Adderall's not working since I've been taking oral BPC."

   15. AHAndrew Huberman19:02

       Are they happy with that effect?

   16. ABDr. Abud Bakri19:04

       No, they're not happy.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman19:04

       Okay.

   18. ABDr. Abud Bakri19:04

       They're very mad because like it seems like it's blunting their Adderall.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman19:08

       Mm.

   20. ABDr. Abud Bakri19:08

       So it's doing something to ph- dopaminergic signaling both, on both sides, both withdrawal, uh, when it comes to like the GABAergic side, but also the, the peak of signaling. So if you like peruse Reddit, which you should never do, um, you'll find all these anhedonia, um, discussions about BPC. People feel like depressed and low-energy.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman19:25

       Incredible.

   22. ABDr. Abud Bakri19:26

       So, so it seems to be homeostatic.

7. 19:27 – 29:41

   Adverse Events, Clinical Trials & Legality of BPC-157

   1. AHAndrew Huberman19:27

      In terms of effects in animals-

   2. ABDr. Abud Bakri19:28

      Yes

   3. AHAndrew Huberman19:28

      ... and anecdotal reports in humans, because I think both your and my excitement about this might be occupying a substantial amount of the force field here, let's do something that normally I would do in a few minutes. I'm gonna ask you some very direct questions-

   4. ABDr. Abud Bakri19:44

      Yep

   5. AHAndrew Huberman19:45

      ... about this and y- and I don't hold you responsible as being like BPC, uh-

   6. ABDr. Abud Bakri19:49

      [laughs]

   7. AHAndrew Huberman19:49

      ... you know, spokesperson, but here you are. Um, that's Pavlov's job.

   8. ABDr. Abud Bakri19:52

      [laughs]

   9. AHAndrew Huberman19:54

      Um, and he's dead. Are there any known adverse events, uh, from people taking BPC, known and documented-

   10. ABDr. Abud Bakri20:02

       Okay

   11. AHAndrew Huberman20:03

       ... adverse events where it's unrelated to, uh, contamination or something of that sort?

   12. ABDr. Abud Bakri20:10

       In the literature, when it comes to, um, the animal data, they've injected animals with, you know, a thousand times the dose of BPC with no real adverse effects. So there's n- we don't even know the LD50 of BPC, which makes it hard for it to become an FDA-approved-

   13. AHAndrew Huberman20:22

       Maybe define LD50.

   14. ABDr. Abud Bakri20:23

       Yes. LD50 is, is the dose of which would kill 50% of the animals if it was administered to them, so we don't even know what that is.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman20:28

       And that's actually an important number as, as, you know, barbaric as it sounds, to determine for any drug.

   16. ABDr. Abud Bakri20:33

       Yeah.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman20:33

       What's the LD50 for caffeine?

   18. ABDr. Abud Bakri20:35

       Yeah.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman20:35

       What's the LD50 for aspirin?

   20. ABDr. Abud Bakri20:36

       Yes.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman20:36

       What's the LD- this is every drug you take, folks, on or off the counter-

   22. ABDr. Abud Bakri20:40

       Yeah

   23. AHAndrew Huberman20:40

       ... you know, a prescription or non-prescription, has gone through LD50 testing-

   24. ABDr. Abud Bakri20:43

       Yeah

   25. AHAndrew Huberman20:43

       ... in animals.

   26. ABDr. Abud Bakri20:44

       To be a clinician to prescribe this, we need to know what that is-

   27. AHAndrew Huberman20:46

       Mm-hmm

   28. ABDr. Abud Bakri20:46

       ... which, which limits us. Now, there was two very small phase 1 and phase 2 trials on rectal BPC enemas, um, in the early 2000s from that same Croatian group, so that's the big c- concern of BPC. All the data comes from one group, so people can be skeptical. There's a couple of Chinese groups that have also replicated some of their work, but, uh, those groups wanted to try to treat ulcerative colitis. It's a very, you know, miserable condition of where the immune system attacks the lining of the gut in multiple spots. Uh, and they use enemas of BPC up to like 80 milligrams, which is much more than, than people would take, uh-

   29. AHAndrew Huberman21:17

       Most people are injecting micrograms.

   30. ABDr. Abud Bakri21:19

       Yes.
8. 29:41 – 35:25

   GLPs & Compounding Pharmacy; Peptides & Gray Market

   1. ABDr. Abud Bakri29:41

      'Cause what, what happened in the, in the field is the GLP-1s come online, you know, late 2021, 2022, uh, with, with Ozempic and Wegovy. They get the FDA approval for weight loss. There's not enough of a supply from the traditional pharmaceutical versions of the GLP-1s, so people start looking elsewhere to get their weight loss drugs. I know people that would drive down to Mexico and pick up pens, 'cause a pharmacy in, in the United States would cost, you know, $1,500 for an Ozempic pen. Pharmacy in Mexico, one-hour drive, 100-

   2. AHAndrew Huberman30:06

      Same drug

   3. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:06

      ... same exact drug.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman30:07

      How much relative cost?

   5. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:08

      150 versus 1,500.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman30:10

      Wow.

   7. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:10

      So 10X.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman30:11

      And this is the thing that Trump has been-

   9. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:13

      Yes

   10. AHAndrew Huberman30:13

       ... you know, very vocal about-

   11. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:14

       Yes

   12. AHAndrew Huberman30:14

       ... like, that we, that we're getting overcharged for drugs here.

   13. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:16

       We, we, we definitely are.And the, the Trump Rx has lowered a lot of these prices, by the way, for, for a lot of these drugs. Now, that time, there was a shortage of semaglutide and then eventually tirzepatide, so the compound pharmacy game shifted into making these drugs, compounded versions. So they're not the FDA-approved versions, but when there's a shortage of a medication, the compounders are allowed to make these drugs to meet the shortage. And, in fact, the FDA was reaching out to these people telling them to do it. Like, Brigham was, uh, talking to him last week at the NHANES games, and he's like, "Yeah, the FDA told us to make this stuff, and then they're getting us in trouble."

   14. AHAndrew Huberman30:44

       This is Brigham Buhler-

   15. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:45

       Yeah

   16. AHAndrew Huberman30:46

       ... who runs Ways to Well, and-

   17. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:47

       Yeah

   18. AHAndrew Huberman30:48

       ... he ran a pharmacy for a long time, right?

   19. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:49

       He's the best, yeah

   20. AHAndrew Huberman30:49

       ... compounding pharmacy.

   21. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:50

       Yeah. One of the best-

   22. AHAndrew Huberman30:50

       Yeah, we've never actually met in person

   23. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:51

       ... one of the best ones, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

   24. AHAndrew Huberman30:52

       This is not an ad for pharmacies.

   25. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:53

       Yeah.

   26. AHAndrew Huberman30:53

       We have no re- I have no business relationship to Brigham.

   27. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:55

       Yeah.

   28. AHAndrew Huberman30:56

       So if there's a shortage-

   29. ABDr. Abud Bakri30:57

       Yeah

   30. AHAndrew Huberman30:57

       ... compounding pharmacies can jump in the game.
9. 35:25 – 41:32

   Manufacturing, Compounding Pharmacies, Gray Market, Black Market

   1. AHAndrew Huberman35:25

      sources." As a physician, what is your stance on this?

   2. ABDr. Abud Bakri35:29

      So the API for all of these, active pharmaceutical ingredients, comes from China. There are no such thing as American-made peptides. It gets finished here. So the API-

   3. AHAndrew Huberman35:38

      They're all from China?

   4. ABDr. Abud Bakri35:39

      Everything's from China.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman35:40

      The raw materials?

   6. ABDr. Abud Bakri35:41

      The raw materials, like the semaglutide you're getting from a compounding pharmacy or a research pep- peptide website, retatrutide included, comes from China and then gets, either the, the raw material gets, you know, packaged here into the vials.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman35:54

      Wait, raw materials or is- or synthesized compound? Because there's a big difference between getting, like, the raw materials for something and getting the thing.

   8. ABDr. Abud Bakri36:01

      The synthesized semaglutide-

   9. AHAndrew Huberman36:03

      Yeah

   10. ABDr. Abud Bakri36:03

       ... gets made in China. It'd be very expensive to make it here. There are people starting to look at that, 'cause that's, that's the next, you know, thing in the, in the arms race, to make American peptides, right?

   11. AHAndrew Huberman36:11

       So they're all Chinese peptides.

   12. ABDr. Abud Bakri36:12

       Everything's Chinese peptides.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman36:13

       There's no, uh, Guatemalan peptides? There's no, uh-

   14. ABDr. Abud Bakri36:16

       China's-

   15. AHAndrew Huberman36:16

       The-

   16. ABDr. Abud Bakri36:16

       ... is the best at it, at doing it. Now, the compounding pharmacies d-Vary in grading. Some of them are really good. They do all the testing, sterility, they have very good quality control, so you get a good product. But they usually have to compound it with something else to get by the regulations, like they'll add on a B12 or a B6 to say, like, the patient had nausea from the traditional semaglutide. We can compound them with B12 or B6 to get around the nausea, and that's, that, that meets the patient rule. Because there's two ways to get compounded medications. There's a shortage or there's a unique need that the patient has.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman36:47

       Do we know that compounding with something else actually deals with the nausea, or is that just a, a slight event?

   18. ABDr. Abud Bakri36:52

       It might help some people.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman36:53

       Got it.

   20. ABDr. Abud Bakri36:54

       Anecdotally, people will say that they respond better to the pens, like the actual pharma pens than to the com- compared to the compounded stuff. The research stuff is all over the place. Like, some of it could be better than compounded stuff. It could be the wrong [laughs] substance. Like, there was a, there was a guy went viral on Twitter a few weeks ago. He got retatrutide, started getting darker. He's like, "I don't think I'm injecting retatrutide-"

   21. AHAndrew Huberman37:12

       Skin got, uh, g- got-

   22. ABDr. Abud Bakri37:13

       Yes. He was inje-

   23. AHAndrew Huberman37:14

       So he was Melanotan II.

   24. ABDr. Abud Bakri37:15

       He was injecting Melanotan II.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman37:16

       And folks, I realize that we're, we're going places that not even I predicted we would go, but this is super informative. So all of the raw materials are coming from the same source.

   26. ABDr. Abud Bakri37:25

       Yes.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman37:25

       Then they're getting filtered into these different, let's just call them stringency bins.

   28. ABDr. Abud Bakri37:29

       Yes.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman37:30

       Standard pharma, quote, unquote-

   30. ABDr. Abud Bakri37:32

       Yeah
10. 41:32 – 45:17

    Peptides & Tumor Growth?; Angiogenesis

    1. AHAndrew Huberman41:32

       it. Now, to be fair, I, I wanna touch on the, the question about adverse events again.

    2. ABDr. Abud Bakri41:37

       Yep.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman41:37

       We're gonna spend a couple minutes talking about some incredible things that we've seen and heard about BPC-157 in terms of its positive effects.

    4. ABDr. Abud Bakri41:44

       Yep.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman41:44

       The concern I've always had was the angiogenesis, the growth of vasculature. If somebody happens to have a little tumor or s- what will eventually become a tumor sitting on their liver or in their gut or in their pancreas, in theory it could vascularize that tumor and cause it to grow more quickly. Is there any evidence that that's actually happened? I wanna be very clear I'm not loading this question.

    6. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:05

       Yep.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman42:05

       'Cause it sounds like I'm kinda, like, leading the witness-

    8. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:07

       Yeah

    9. AHAndrew Huberman42:07

       ... when I say that. I want to know.

    10. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:09

        Yep.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman42:09

        I'm not currently taking BPC-157. I'm, fortunately I don't have an injury at the moment, so that would be the only condition which I'd take it, unless you tell me there are other reasons. But I don't wanna give myself-

    12. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:18

        That risk

    13. AHAndrew Huberman42:19

        ... like, that risk, and I think most people don't wanna give themselves that risk.

    14. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:21

        That's right.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman42:21

        So what is the, the realistic risk based on h- observations in humans or animals?

    16. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:26

        Yep.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman42:26

        Have we ever seen tumors grow more quickly?

    18. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:27

        No. Like, for example, most compounds, if they're, you know, carcinogenic, we will see that signature in the animals, like, you know, with Cardarine GW, uh, was a drug that was very po- was very promising 'cause it had, you know, diabetic implications for metabolism, and now it's a bodybuilder drug they use for more cardio. Uh-

    19. AHAndrew Huberman42:43

        What is this called?

    20. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:44

        Car- Cardarine GW.Uh, you might have seen it on, on, on-

    21. AHAndrew Huberman42:47

        Okay

    22. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:47

        ... the Reddits and-

    23. AHAndrew Huberman42:48

        Okay

    24. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:48

        ... and those forums, but people use it for, for-

    25. AHAndrew Huberman42:49

        I stay out of Reddit.

    26. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:50

        Yeah, good.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman42:50

        Yeah.

    28. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:50

        Uh, it increases your cardio, um, capacity.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman42:53

        Gotcha.

    30. ABDr. Abud Bakri42:53

        And so it's banned on, on the WADA list of course. But it was- it had promise for, uh, treating diabetics 'cause it changed metabolism in the liver. It had a signal of cancer in animal data, so that whole thing was scrapped.
11. 45:17 – 47:01

    Sponsor: AG1

    1. AHAndrew Huberman45:18

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12. 47:01 – 54:19

    Pharmaceutical Patents, Clinical Trials for BPC-157, Potential Outcomes

    1. AHAndrew Huberman47:01

       When is there going to be a formal randomized control trial on BPC, and who holds the patent?

    2. ABDr. Abud Bakri47:07

       There's multiple patents on BPC-157, depending on which salt they're in. The patent has been passed around a couple times th- through different places. Unfortunately, the company that had the patent under the Pliva got acquired by Teva. Teva is this, this generic pharmaceutical company, and they don't... They make, you know, Adderall. So they, they have, they're making tons of money making Adderall. They don't really care about BPC-157. So they have one of the patents. The other patent expires in like 10 years. I think Szekanecz still has it. Dr. Szekanecz is, is the guy behind BPC-157. He's-

    3. AHAndrew Huberman47:34

       He's in Croatia.

    4. ABDr. Abud Bakri47:35

       He's in Croatia, yeah.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman47:36

       Would Teva, um, sell the patent?

    6. ABDr. Abud Bakri47:38

       I'm sure they would if someone made an offer. The, the problem is I don't, I don't see the purpose of even having the patent, because you can add on one chain to the amino acid. This is the problem with, with peptides. This is what e- Li- uh, Lili, uh, Eli Lilly's coming into when it comes to making Redda, is that patent laws for peptides kind of suck. Because you can add on one amino acid, you can modify one thing on it, and suddenly it's a different compound.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman47:57

       This is true for other pharmaceuticals.

    8. ABDr. Abud Bakri47:59

       Yeah.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman47:59

       Like I- I'm familiar with some of the ketamine and Ibogaine trials.

    10. ABDr. Abud Bakri48:02

        Yes, yes, yes.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman48:02

        And there's a company that took Ibogaine and basically added a magnesium component-

    12. ABDr. Abud Bakri48:06

        Yeah

    13. AHAndrew Huberman48:06

        ... to it, and you can make that a completely new drug.

    14. ABDr. Abud Bakri48:09

        Exactly.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman48:09

        I'm not saying that doesn't work. I think they have a good rationale for doing that. But so this game of sort of protecting patents, um-

    16. ABDr. Abud Bakri48:15

        It's rough. And plus, m- millions of people have already used BPC-157 through research use only websites. So I, I think it would be millions is fair. But now how do you reel that back? Like, it's already, the cat's out of the bag. So, like, it- there's no financial incentive to run the giant study, unless, like, we, we crowdfund it as, as, you know, peptide-curious people. [laughs]

    17. AHAndrew Huberman48:34

        Within the category of, um, interesting, uh, anecdotal data-

    18. ABDr. Abud Bakri48:38

        Yep

    19. AHAndrew Huberman48:39

        ... and in your role as a physician, I realize you're not suggesting these things, but y- you have a different picture of this stuff at the level of mechanism, and you're a clinician that works with, you know, uh, truly FDA-approved drugs, and you're, you're... I want you to share f- with folks, I said it in the introduction, but internal medicine means that you spend your days what?

    20. ABDr. Abud Bakri48:56

        I'm on the, on the wards of the hospital, admitting patients from the ER to the floor to the ICU, managing very complex disease ranging from, you know, a simple pneumonia to a coronary artery bypass patient. So-

    21. AHAndrew Huberman49:06

        Yeah

    22. ABDr. Abud Bakri49:07

        ... that whole spectrum.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman49:07

        Okay. So that lens applied to this as much as one can, would you say that, uh, like of the, the reports that you heard directly from people you trust and from people that- who are not incentivized to say these things like, "Oh, you know, it made me happier. You know, their skin looked better," all the things that w- one can find in a, with an affiliate code attached to it?

    24. ABDr. Abud Bakri49:27

        Yeah.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman49:27

        Of those, what do you think are the most interesting potentially valid claims? And I ask that because if we were going to fund a f- a clinical trial-

    26. ABDr. Abud Bakri49:39

        Yep

    27. AHAndrew Huberman49:40

        ... we'd need to pick an endpoint or a couple of endpoints.

    28. ABDr. Abud Bakri49:42

        Sure.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman49:42

        Is it going to be recovery from injury?

    30. ABDr. Abud Bakri49:44

        Yep.
13. 54:19 – 1:01:22

    BPC-157 Healing, Patient Experiences

    1. ABDr. Abud Bakri54:19

       it may be.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman54:19

       This would be a good time for us to, you know, bracket what we're about to say by saying this is purely anecdotal-

    3. ABDr. Abud Bakri54:25

       Yep

    4. AHAndrew Huberman54:25

       ... but filtered through... I consider myself a skeptic-

    5. ABDr. Abud Bakri54:28

       Yep

    6. AHAndrew Huberman54:28

       ... on many, many things, especially things I would put into my body.

    7. ABDr. Abud Bakri54:31

       Yep.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman54:31

       I'll tell a, a story. What's your favorite personal BPC story involving you and your body?

    9. ABDr. Abud Bakri54:37

       Yeah. I tore my tricep a few months ago. Um-

    10. AHAndrew Huberman54:39

        Tore?

    11. ABDr. Abud Bakri54:40

        Yeah. Tore tricep lifting with people I shouldn't have been lifting with. They're much stronger than I was. Purple from here to here.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman54:45

        Oof.

    13. ABDr. Abud Bakri54:46

        Like i-i- the pictures, I, I posted them on, on X. It's, it's brutal. I'm like, "Oh, I'm gonna have to have surgery. This sucks. I, I don't have time to have surgery" 'cause you're in a, you're in a brace for like three months, and I put BPC in locally. Don't try this at home, not medical advice, but locally in the tissue spot with a couple of other peptides, and within three weeks my, my PT's like, "What the hell are you doing? Like, th- this is healing so fast." Would I have healed that fast anyways? I don't know, but that's typically a grade 2 tricep tear with, with purple arm from, from top to bottom. It wasn't grade 3, uh, 'cause I could, I could still extend my, my elbow.That's usually a three-month recovery, and to be back in three to four weeks was, was fantastic for me, which is why I'm so excited.

    14. AHAndrew Huberman55:22

        What dosage were you injected?

    15. ABDr. Abud Bakri55:23

        Uh, a larger dose than people would, uh, typically-

    16. AHAndrew Huberman55:26

        Not, not micrograms.

    17. ABDr. Abud Bakri55:27

        No, no.

    18. AHAndrew Huberman55:27

        You were up in the grams.

    19. ABDr. Abud Bakri55:28

        Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    20. AHAndrew Huberman55:29

        Roughly.

    21. ABDr. Abud Bakri55:29

        A lot higher. I, I think, um, personally and in some of our, our, our people, we've used bigger dosages.

    22. AHAndrew Huberman55:34

        Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

    23. ABDr. Abud Bakri55:34

        I think that's the problem, the low dosages. And even though that translates well from the mice data, for humans I think the dose is way higher.

    24. AHAndrew Huberman55:41

        Mm.

    25. ABDr. Abud Bakri55:41

        But people just go based on the dosage that would fit in a pinealon [laughs]

    26. AHAndrew Huberman55:44

        Mm-hmm

    27. ABDr. Abud Bakri55:44

        ... through a, you know, peptide sciences website rather than what actu- we don't have know what, what the human dose is-

    28. AHAndrew Huberman55:49

        Mm-hmm

    29. ABDr. Abud Bakri55:49

        ... for BPC-157, so we have a lot of work to do to just to figure that out. Like, when we spoke to the, to the orthopedic group, they're like, "Yeah, we're gonna start with, you know, 250 micrograms." I'm like, [inhales] "I don't know if you're gonna see an effect at, at that low of a dose."

    30. AHAndrew Huberman55:59

        Mm-hmm.
14. 1:01:22 – 1:07:25

    Physician Counsel, FDA Legality, Malpractice

    1. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:01:22

       Same.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:22

       So here comes the question.As a physician, I realize that you are more than peptide curious, you're very peptide friendly in your own life, you know? If you have a patient who has, you know, just their gut is a mess or they're dealing with, you know, post-surgical issues and you know that BPC from the right source is either going to be benign or could potentially help them, what kind of position does that put you in?

    3. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:01:48

       Yep.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:48

       As an American board-certified physician.

    5. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:01:50

       Very uncomfortable position because if I'm s- you know, rounding on a patient in the wards of a hospital and like, "Hey, you should take BPC instead of your pantoprazole," I'll probably get my license revoked. So not a good idea. Don't do that.

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:01

       What about in addition to?

    7. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:02:02

       In addition to, so like if they come see me in clinic, that might be a place where we can have that discussion. We're gonna see very shortly here what the FDA's gonna tell us about BPC and all these other peptides on the legality of them. If they get moved to the category one list and then the states say like, "Hey, the FDA said so, we're not gonna look, we're not gonna care about this, you can do what you wanna do as a physician," and you counsel the patient, like you have a honest discussion with the patient, I think that's what it should be. It should be between the physician and the patient. Like, "Hey, there's this promising compound. It's not FDA approved. We have minimal to no human data, but we have anecdata. Are you willing to try this on yourself? And we'll monitor you. We'll have clear endpoints for that."

    8. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:40

       Mm-hmm.

    9. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:02:40

       That should be what this looks like-

    10. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:42

        Okay

    11. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:02:42

        ... like a frank discussion between a physician and a patient. Now, if that patient has an adverse effect, they can go to a medical board and say like, "Hey, Dr. So-and-so gave me BPC-157 and I had a bad effect" and I would be like, "Hey, you gave him a non-FDA approved compound, A, for injectable. B, the problem is there's orals that are being sold as supplements now, like BPC-157 as an oral available supplement, 'cause it's not a medication. It's never been, uh, approved as a medication in the United States. So what is the BPC's legal status? Is it dietary available therefore? 'Cause if you, you know, cut up an animal and ate its stomach, you'd hit- probably get some BPC in there.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:15

        Well, I can buy desiccated liver tablets.

    13. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:03:16

        There you go.

    14. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:17

        I'm eating livers.

    15. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:03:18

        There, there's tons of-

    16. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:18

        You can go buy liver at the, this like one Michelin star-

    17. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:03:21

        Yeah

    18. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:21

        ... restaurant not down this road, but-

    19. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:03:23

        Yeah

    20. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:23

        ... a different road.

    21. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:03:23

        Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like Dr. Cavensan identified many peptides in livers, like livagen and ovagen that you'd find in your desiccated liver supplement that you eat. It's like the, the biggest distributors of peptides have been these organ meat companies because each organ has a signature peptide that comes out of it. And many-

    22. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:36

        Do they get absorbed?

    23. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:03:37

        Yes.

    24. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:38

        Are they bioavailable active?

    25. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:03:40

        Dr. Cavensan's work s- uh, suggests that it is. Dr. Vladimir Cavensan's this Russian Soviet scientist that gives us epithalon and thymalin and pinealon and all these Russian peptides. Di and tripeptides can be orally available if they're the right shape and size.

    26. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:53

        Hmm.

    27. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:03:54

        They're not very well, uh, available, but they can be available.

    28. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:57

        So you won't necessarily get it from the organ, uh, isolate or from the, or eating the organ. Like, like if you eat heart, probably very rich in L-carnitine.

    29. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:04:06

        Yep.

    30. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:06

        Can my body make good use of that?
15. 1:07:25 – 1:18:17

    Pinealon, Epithalon, Discovery; Sleep & Cognitive Performance, Risks

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:25

       ... to patient.Let's talk about pinealon.

    2. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:07:27

       Yeah.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:27

       Pinealon is one that most people probably haven't heard of.

    4. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:07:30

       Mm-hmm.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:30

       I'll just go on record saying I've tried it a few times or more. I don't take it regularly, but I tried it before sleep.

    6. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:07:36

       Yep.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:36

       If I take it at the beginning of the night, it reduces my deep slow-wave sleep and gives me far more REM across the night. Not a great situation.

    8. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:07:45

       Yep.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:46

       Great situation is if I go to sleep, get my usual ration of deep sleep. If I happen to wake up in the, the middle of the night to use the restroom once or so, not uncommon, if I do a very small injection of pinealon at that point, the one and a half hours of REM that I would get in the final hours of my sleep, now I'm getting three hours.

    10. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:08:05

        Mm.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:05

        In the same amount of sleep, it's just a higher fraction of REM.

    12. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:08:07

        Yep.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:08

        Sometimes wake up feeling a little groggy, but it is a whole other life to get that much REM.

    14. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:08:14

        Yep.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:14

        I don't do it regularly.

    16. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:08:15

        Sure.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:15

        It's not... You know, I would say maybe three times a month. But here's the interesting thing. It improves my percentage of REM on all the other nights in between those three injections.

    18. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:08:26

        Yeah.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:26

        So I'm coming clean here.

    20. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:08:27

        Lingering effects.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:08:28

        Very cool. You're interested in pinealon for a whole other set of reasons, but first of all, what is pinealon and where does it act? Does it have a known receptor?

    22. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:08:35

        Known receptor. So pinealon is a tripeptide, uh, EDR discovered by the mention of Dr. Vladimir Kavinson. He's a Soviet researcher that comes out of this Soviet-era research to make soldiers, astronauts, and pilots, uh, better. There's concern that the US might be using lasers to, to shoot at soldiers, so the Soviet Union, um, tasks him with identifying peptides to defend soldiers, their eyes, and then their aging. Because what would happen is they'd be in a submarine for a few months, they'd be a nuclear sub, and they'd, they'd come back to shore and they'd be like, you know, these submariners, let's call them, would look 10, 20 years older.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:10

        Also happens to astronauts.

    24. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:09:11

        Yes.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:11

        Yeah.

    26. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:09:11

        So then the same, the same thing. As astronauts are coming back, they're, they're aged. So Vladimir Kavinson's looking at this and he's like, "Hey, there's, there's got to be a solution for this." There's been literature about using extracts of other tissues, notably the pineal gland and the thymus, from, you know, late 1800s till this, this 1970s, uh, point that we're, that we're, you know, starting our story, and he starts grounding up these, um, extracts and injecting it into these people and then undoing a lot of these aging effects through pineal extracts and thymus extracts. Because these... What do these soldiers have? They had very bad circadian rhythmicity, so they, they can't, couldn't sleep properly. They had terrible immunity. They'd get sick often. They'd be, uh, have autoimmune problems, all these conditions that come with it. And then they were able to undo this using these organ extracts. So Vladimir Kavinson takes it a step further. He looks like, hey, what's causing this effect in these, in these tissues? Like, people have been injecting pineal glands in different research models or taking out pineal glands from rats from the 1800s onwards. He finds peptides in these extracts. He's like, "Huh, I wonder if these effects are from the peptides and not from the s- the gland itself." So then he sequences from the pineal gland, uh, epithalon, and from the thymus gland a couple different, uh, peptides, thyalon, thymogen, christogen, that you'll be hearing about in the next few years, that on their own do a lot of the effects that the whole extract would, would do.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:10:31

        Now, you're talking about epithalon, but pinealon and epithalon-

    28. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:10:34

        Is not from the pineal gland

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:10:35

        ... is not from the pineal gland.

    30. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:10:36

        Even though everyone-
16. 1:18:17 – 1:19:55

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17. 1:19:55 – 1:29:38

    Pineal Age Deterioration, Epithalon, Eye Health

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:19:55

       What about epitalon, which turns out comes from the pineal?

    2. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:19:58

       Yeah.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:19:59

       I'd love your thoughts on this. I've heard, and I thought it was complete nonsense when I first heard it, that the pineal becomes calcified as people age. The reason I thought it was nonsense is I used to co-teach neuroanatomy when I was at UCSD, uh, before moving my lab to Stanford, with a guy named Harvey Karten. You guys can look him up. Unfortunately, he passed away. He was in his late 80s, and he had this incredible career as a, I think one of the greatest neuroanatomists of the last 100 years. And he has a... That's a good category to be in because we have, like, Cajal, who's like-

    4. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:20:28

       Hmm

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:20:28

       ... discovered everything basically, and then the rest of neuroscientists are just kind of tinkering around with what he predicted. And then a few other neuroanatomists like Ted Jones is there, but he's like the neuroanatomist of my generation. And I asked him about this calcification thing c- 'cause he had looked at the brains of so many different species, including humans. He was also an MD, by the way. And he goes, "Yeah, I don't know whether or not this calcification thing is real."

    6. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:20:50

       Hmm.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:20:51

       And he kind of brushed it aside, and I thought, "Well, Harvey doesn't take it seriously, so I'm not going to take it seriously." But even though he was absolutely right about many, many things, I think he might have missed that one.

    8. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:21:01

       Sure.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:01

       Because when I go to the literature now, it's a little bit tough because the cadavers that you looked at in medical school, uh, not all of them are processed on the same timeline.

    10. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:21:09

        Sure.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:09

        Right? It's not... Thankfully, it's not a controlled science, right?

    12. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:21:11

        Yep.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:11

        These are people that g- generously donate-

    14. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:21:13

        Right

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:13

        ... their bodies to science, right? Does our pineal calcify? And even if it does, does that somehow in- inhibit its ability to communicate with our other tissues?

    16. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:21:23

        It's, it's a big kind of debatable thing in, in the pineal research. If you look at the pineal gland Wikipedia, it's very under, uh, developed, let's say.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:31

        Mm-hmm.

    18. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:21:31

        Uh-huh. 'Cause it's kind of woo-woo. Like when you think of pineal gland, you think of someone who's gonna sell you-

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:34

        No neuroscientist chooses to work on the pineal gland.

    20. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:21:36

        Yeah, exactly.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:36

        They should, but it's not a very sexy-

    22. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:21:38

        It sounds like someone's gonna sell you crystals or something.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:40

        Yeah.

    24. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:21:40

        But you-

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:40

        It's, it's not very sexy

    26. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:21:41

        ... you know?

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:42

        Yeah.

    28. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:21:42

        But I think it's, it's a key aspect of aging and longevity.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:21:45

        Mm-hmm.

    30. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:21:45

        So that, that's, uh, that's what gives us, you know, our interest in it. The pineal gland, um, it seems from Caviness's work that the decrease in pineal gland function with aging is more of a physiologic than a anatomic problem.
18. 1:29:38 – 1:38:13

    Thymus, Age Shrinkage; Thymosin Alpha-1, Immune Function

    1. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:29:38

       taking people.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:38

       Appreciate it. Wasn't aware of that study.

    3. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:29:40

       Yeah.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:40

       Perfect, um, tee up for, uh, no pun-

    5. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:29:44

       Yeah

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:44

       ... uh, for the thymus.

    7. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:29:45

       Yeah.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:45

       Tell me about the thymus. Um, super interesting organ.

    9. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:29:48

       Yep.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:49

        Wee gland.

    11. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:29:50

        Yep.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:50

        We all have one when we're born.

    13. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:29:52

        Yep.

    14. AHAndrew Huberman1:29:52

        By time we're what age is it mostly gone?

    15. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:29:55

        So the thymus is grown under the influence of a lot of these youthful hormones, melatonin, growth hormone, um, DHEA, um, and then is shrunk at the moment you hit puberty. So until from your, the day of birth until puberty, you grow this massive thymus.

    16. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:10

        Where is it sit?

    17. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:30:11

        It's right above your heart.

    18. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:12

        Okay.

    19. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:30:12

        Right behind this, the collarbone.

    20. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:13

        How big is it?

    21. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:30:14

        It's a, in, in a baby it could be quite large on, on the chest. Like-

    22. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:18

        Big as a baseball?

    23. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:30:19

        Like maybe, uh, the size of half the heart, let's say. Maybe bigger. Depends on, on, on, on the size. Right now i- in our bodies, it's gonna be a bunch of fat with a couple of different globules of thymic residue.

    24. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:30

        Tiny, tiny.

    25. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:30:31

        Te- very tiny. In fact, most surgeons will just remove it, um, when they do surgery nowadays for, like, open heart. Uh, but there's, you know, good data from New Eng- New England Journal of Medicine that removing the thymus tissue, residue tissue, leads to, uh, a mortality signal within the first five years after those surgeries, so-

    26. AHAndrew Huberman1:30:47

        So people have died because of thymus removal?

    27. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:30:48

        They, they'll have, like, either higher rates of cancers or, you know, higher rates of, uh, autoimmune diseases if they have their, their thymuses removed. Now, there are thymomas where people have to have their thymuses removed, but we're talking about people that, you know, the surgeon's going in to do a coronary artery bypass surgery.

    28. AHAndrew Huberman1:31:02

        Is the thymus neurally innervated?

    29. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:31:04

        Yes.

    30. AHAndrew Huberman1:31:05

        So it's getting signals from, from brain?
19. 1:38:13 – 1:49:13

    TB-500; Pet Health; Thymic Peptide Doses, Thymulin, Zinc

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:38:13

       own experiment. When we hear about Thymosin Alpha, we usually hear about TB 500-

    2. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:38:16

       Yep

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:38:16

       ... also. What's TB 500 and how are, are the two related-

    4. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:38:20

       Yes

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:38:20

       ... if at all?

    6. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:38:20

       So while Cavenson's finding thymulin and he's injecting that into people, the Goldstein lab finds thymosin fraction five, which is this giant, uh, protein that has many different peptides in it, Thymosin Alpha-1 being one of them, and then Thymosin Beta-4 being the other one. Thymosin Alpha-1, Thymosin Beta-4 were discovered in the thymus, but they're not exclusive to the thymus gland. They're also made in other tissues. Uh, Thymosin Beta-4 seems to be, uh, this 43 amino acid, um, peptide that helps in the actin cytoskeleton of cells. So if you think about it, immune cells have to move a lot.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:38:48

       Mm-hmm.

    8. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:38:48

       So they have to re- reorganize their actin cytoskeleton quite quickly. So it seems to upregulate that movement.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:38:52

       Hmm.

    10. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:38:53

        Which, you know, the horse community for doping, uh, and other athletes have found a niche for Th- Thymosin Beta-4 to use it as a doping-

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:39:00

        You say the horse community?

    12. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:39:00

        Yeah, horse races, Thymosin Beta-4 is a very common doping agent.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:39:04

        For the riders or for the-

    14. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:39:05

        For the horses

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:39:06

        ... for the horses.

    16. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:39:06

        Yes.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:39:07

        Do they test the horses for doping?

    18. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:39:08

        Yeah, no, there's, there's like a big doping scandal when it comes to, to horses and, uh, Thymosin Beta. I don't know if they test them or they like-

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:39:14

        You know what's funny? Uh, this is a re- very relevant tangent. Occasionally someone will say, "Hey, does all this morning sunlight stuff, does that work on like dogs?" And I go, "Listen, I hate to tell you this, but like a lot of the literature came from animals."

    20. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:39:25

        Yeah, yeah.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:39:25

        "Not necessarily dogs, and they have melanopsin ganglion cells."

    22. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:39:28

        Yep, yep.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:39:28

        "They have super charismatic," like-

    24. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:39:30

        Yeah

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:39:30

        ... yes, yes, and yes.

    26. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:39:31

        Same physiology.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:39:31

        And then recently, won't say who, it wasn't me, um, truly I have a friend whose, uh, dog was injured, and the question becomes like, "Would BPC work?" And you can actually say, "Well, there's a lot more animal data than, uh, human data. Talk to a couple vets," and vets will... They're a lot more adventurous than we might think.

    28. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:39:49

        [laughs]

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:39:49

        And I thought, well, listen, you know, now of course these are pets. They're-

    30. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:39:52

        Yep
20. 1:49:13 – 1:50:33

    Sponsor: LMNT

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:49:13

       I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, LMNT. LMNT is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, all in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Proper hydration is critical for brain and body function. Even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish your cognitive and physical performance. It's also important that you get adequate electrolytes. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium, are vital for the functioning of all cells in your body, especially your neurons or your nerve cells. Drinking LMNT makes it very easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. My days tend to start really fast, meaning I have to jump right into work or right into exercise. So to make sure that I'm hydrated and I have sufficient electrolytes, when I first wake up in the morning, I drink 16 to 32 ounces of water with an LMNT packet dissolved in it. I also drink LMNT dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. LMNT has a bunch of great-tasting flavors. In fact, I love them all. I love the watermelon, the raspberry, the citrus, and I really love the lemonade flavor. So if you'd like to try LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free LMNT sample pack with any purchase. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free sample

21. 1:50:33 – 1:55:32

    GHK-Cu (Copper GHK), Collagen

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:50:33

       pack. GHK-Cu copper.

    2. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:50:36

       Yeah.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:50:37

       Most of the questions I, I get about it are from women.

    4. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:50:39

       Yep.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:50:40

       I sent out a little informal poll to the, uh, I have to be careful how I say this, the women in my life- [laughs] ... um, including siblings and things like that. And, and almost all the women said, "What about GHK-Cu copper? I hear it can be good for my skin. Should I use it topically, take it orally, or inject it? If I inject it, should I inject it locally?" I'm like, "Please don't inject it in your face," 'cause I don't... A- as much as I'm comfortable with people giving themself, like, a little- Yeah ... you know, a sterile injection in a, you know, the belly or something, like, I get worried about non-experts injecting themselves [laughs] in the face and other, other tissues. [laughs] So lot of interest in this. Yeah. What is it? Why has it made it into this kind of, um, aesthetic category? Because I'm guessing it has a lot of other effects, too. But it's kind of funny how things kind of land in one region. Yeah. Like, creatine was, like, the muscle thing for a long time. Then it got some kind of like, maybe it's good c- for cognition, maybe for people with Alzheimer's, maybe women should take it, too, for all those reasons and more. And it kind of reverted back to, like, the muscle thing. GHK-Cu is a tripeptide, um, with a copper, uh, ion in the, in the middle. It's gly- glycine, histidine, and lysine. Um, it's actually found in type I collagen fibers. So, and- Tell me where type I collagen fibers are. All over your skin- Great ... hair- Okay ... and, and it's connective tissue. So, uh, just like Vladimir Khavinson discovers these 40 different peptides and liver peptides, brain peptides, pineal peptides, whatever it may be, there's a American researcher, Lorne Pickhardt, Dr. Lorne Pickhardt, uh, who's passed now. He discovered GHK-Cu, uh, in the collagen tissue, and he's like, "Hey, this might be the, the factor that controls collagen synthesis and also collagen breakdown." So he does a bunch of studies. H- his work is all about this. So almost all the, the, the literature comes from this one lab, a, a common theme in peptides, unfortunately. Um, he discovers it in maybe the mid-'70s. It's, um, found to be very high in youth, in, in serum levels. So you, you'll find this in the blood of, of anyone that we test, um, up to, like, 200, I think, nanograms, whatever the, the unit was, and then it gets down to, like, in the levels of the 60s by the age of 65. So it dramatically decreases with age. It's thought to be maybe what leads to the youthful appearance of young skin, and with age you lose that effect. So he did a bunch of trials both topically for skin, for hair. Um, there's now injectable work being done. So similar to the BPC they would, you know, cut rats open, inject GHK copper, uh, in a different site, and they'd get faster wound repair- Mm-hmm ... uh, of the, the skin tissue from injecting this. So that's, you know, it's become synonymous with BPC-157, TB-500, the Wolverine Stack, which, uh, someone online just made up. And- That's, that's the Wolverine Stack? It's those two. Yes. TB-500 and, and BPC alpha. And, um, uh, no, the- Sorry ... TB-500 and BPC-157. And BPC-157. Yes. Okay. Now people will add on GHK copper and call it the Glow Stack. The Glow Stack? Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Okay. Some- someone has made it up in a research chemical- No, I like it ... company and- I like it. Glow, Wolverine. Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's a big debate about whether or not mixing those together will, causes, you know, denaturing of different peptides of ... That's beyond this discussion. Point is, GHK copper, it both upregulates the synthesis side of collagen and the breakdown side of collagen. So 'cause when you're, you're remodeling tissue, if you're just rebuilding it, you're, you're gonna get, like, very pathogenic, uh, structures, and if you're just breaking down you're getting bad structures. So you're doing both. So the idea is does it, number one, have a skin effect, which it seems to be. The, Pickhardt's, you know, compared it to, to retinol and vitamin C creams and all these things with positive, uh, effects, and people anecdotally talk about, like, you know, their crow's feet going away, and topically it does good for them. There was a study on hair that didn't seem too promising, so it's not gonna ... Uh, uh, the peptide sites try to tell you, like, "This is better than minoxidil." Mm, not really. Maybe it could be an adjunct, and a lot of patients will, will, will have that success, uh, using that with some other, other topical, um, hair, hair loss agents. And now there's a Chinese group studying it for, um, lung regeneration, 'cause there's a lot of connective tissue in the lungs, uh, between the different, uh, alveoli, and there's some, you know, hype there of using, um, GHK copper as a regenerative from that side. How many people are trying to regenerate their lungs? Is this for, like, COPD? COPD and, and smokers. It's, that's a big, big industry. Maybe long COVID from what I hear is a real thing. Mm-hmm. Lung damage from COVID. Yep. I know some people debate it. Sure. But it seems like there are enough people walking around who were vaccinated and non-vaccinated who claim that they have- Yep ... symptoms post-COVID that have lasted a long time- Yep ... AKA long COVID. So that might be an interesting place for them to remain peptide curious. Yeah, and, and thymic atrophy is, is a big part of the, I suspect- Post-COVID? Yeah, because, uh, any infection actually leads to ... We talk about the thymic involution that happens with age. There's thymic atrophy that happens after every infection. The thymus kind of shrinks down, and then the idea is that you, you know, recover, you convalesce. We used to have convalescent homes for, for sick patients, and then you regenerate your thymus in the state of health. And the problem in modern day, people are stressed out, they're at work, they get sick, and they get, keep getting sick, so they never get this, this chance for that thymus rejuvenation. So then they're c- constantly getting hit down and they're ending up with these diseases of aging that could have maybe been augmented, ameliorated, maybe pushed down had their thymus function been better in youth.

22. 1:55:32 – 2:04:01

    Illness Recovery, Thymic Score, Tool: Blood Test & Immune Cell Counts

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:55:32

       Raise my hand. Yeah. Professor Bakri, um, I'm, I'm only half ki- I really feel like I'm in school. This is so cool for me. I, I'm truly in heaven right now. If you look back at the literature on convalescing, how long were people, uh, recommended to take some time off after a, a cold or a flu or some other- That's a, that's a good question ... because, because I think this would tell us, like, are we ... Just like with, um, sort of, uh, how long, um, maternity leave- Yeah, yeah, yeah ... type things, like, you know, the idea now is people are being forced to go back too quickly in countries- Right ... like in Scandinavia perhaps where they get more time. Yep, yep, yep. They get positive outcomes for baby and mom. Like- Yep ... I think it's an interesting and important question because our biology hasn't changed that much- No ... in the last, you know, couple thousand years- Mm-hmm ... at least. Like, after one has a cold, typically people go back as soon as they deem themselves non-infectious- Yeah ... which really worries me. Yeah. [laughs] Um, but do you think people are getting back to work too quickly? Yes. I mean, I understand the reasons why, but do you think that adding a stage of, of really getting back to full functioning without getting into the, you know, back to the gym, back to work- Sure, sure ... back to everything is, could be beneficial for these longevity effects? Right, right. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about it

    2. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:56:38

       Nothing that they do once they come back is, is, you know, additive to healing. Their, their circadian rhythms are, are thrown off. They're under mal-illuminative lights all day. They're not getting sunlight. They're not... Their vitamin D levels are atrocious. Their blue light exposure at night is, is high. Their stress levels are, are very high. Their guts are inflamed from, from eating processed, hyper-processed, hyper-palatable foods. They have obesity or they're pre-diabetic. So all these things now lead to this inflammatory state, and they just got sick, and their thymus didn't bounce back.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:57:05

       Mm-hmm.

    4. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:57:05

       So then they get sick the next time in two, three weeks. Like, uh, post-pandemic, a l- a lot of my colleagues were like, "Dude, I get sick three, four times a winter now before I'd get sick, you know, once a winter." So this is where the, the interest in thymic peptides i- is very elusive. We have to figure out if the STPs or the PTEs are the, the, the more interesting ones. There's synthetic thymic peptides, Thymosin Alpha-1, Thymosin Beta-4, thymulin, and there's purified thymic extracts.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:57:28

       Mm.

    6. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:57:28

       These are the, the two different research committees that exist when it comes to the thymus. Which one will be more advantageous? Vladimir Khavinson came up with the thymulin inject- injectable and oral versions of that, and he had positive, uh, immune markers, and he showed, like, CD4 cells c- come up and CD8 cells improve and all, all those, um, immune markers become a more youthful state, let's say.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:57:48

       Mm-hmm.

    8. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:57:49

       But unfortunately, what's happening here is we don't have thymologists. Like, we don't have a branch of medicine that's dedicated to this aspect of immunity.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:57:57

       Mm-hmm.

    10. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:57:57

        Like, there's im- you know, allergy, uh, uh, allergy and immunol- immunologists, but they focus more on, you know, allergies to different, uh, agents or very severe immune diseases. They're not really addressing the immunity of the general public and how you can boost that. And I think post-pandemic, a lot of people started asking, "Hey, how can I have better immunity for myself?" Uh, and now finally people are starting to talk about the thymus. Unf- unfortunately, it's been a little, too little too late. That would've been great during the pandemic, uh, because we could have used these thymic, you know, focused interventions, whether it be zinc or, you know, uh, thymic peptides or your purified thymic extracts to augment immunity of the population as a whole, especially 'cause, you know, Dr. Khavinson was doing this in the '70s in, in Russia. Even in Russia, they don't really look kindly to this research. Um, the Soviet-era research has been kind of pushed aside, and it's, like, more big pharma style 'cause it's more profitable, 'cause how many thymuses are you gonna inject [laughs] into people, and how many thymuses exist on the planet to make these different peptides from?

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:58:56

        But you could inject a lot of synthetic-

    12. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:58:58

        Yes

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:58:58

        ... uh, Thymosin Alpha, TB-500-

    14. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:59:00

        Yes

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:59:00

        ... um, and maybe BPC. So Wolverine stack plus, you know, thymus, you know?

    16. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:59:05

        Yeah, so it'd be very interesting if, if we can get that 'cause now that everyone's getting, like, these Panulo scans and different full body MRIs-

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:59:10

        Mm-hmm

    18. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:59:10

        ... we can see the thymus size.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:59:12

        I was gonna ask you, can w- can I get some sense of my thymic size and output from a blood draw, or do I have to do whole body imaging? I've done whole body imaging. It is somewhat costly, and that's-

    20. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:59:20

        Yep

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:59:20

        ... that's a pro-

    22. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:59:21

        It is costly

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:59:22

        ... a barrier for, for people. But if people can afford it, I actually think it can be useful. I have a number of friends-

    24. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:59:26

        Yep

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:59:26

        ... including a neurosurgeon friend who said that he's, um, uh, some people are still alive now because they got that scan. A lot of people get scared about what they see.

    26. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:59:35

        Yep.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:59:35

        Uh, wouldn't you rather be scared about what you see and be told that it's okay than not know it's there and then have a catastrophic event?

    28. ABDr. Abud Bakri1:59:42

        We always have a patient that comes in, you know, car accident, young 45-year-old car accident, comes in, has a pancreatic mass they, they would have never known about had they not had that accident. They get a CT scan just to check for any kind of internal bleeding. They find the pancreatic mass. That gets removed. It ends up being a malignant mass that had they waited six months, they would have, you know, had stage four pancreatic cancer and passed away. So that's, that's a theory. There is a concern about false positives and false negatives when it comes to these screening modalities. Like, any screening modality is not perfect, so there's a big debate on whether or not to do, do these that we'll leave to people and their physicians. But i- I've, I've been trying to lobby them to give the thymic score to everybody who gets one of these scans.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman2:00:17

        Great.

    30. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:00:17

        'Cause they could see, like, hey, can you, can you see where the thymus is at?
23. 2:04:01 – 2:15:36

    Growth Hormone Secretagogues, Age Decline, Cancer Risk, Insulin

    1. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:04:01

       Yeah.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman2:04:01

       Take a look. There's a category of peptides such as growth hormone secretagogues.

    3. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:04:05

       Yep.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman2:04:05

       Tesamorelin, ipamorelin, MK-677, that we could, we could do the deep dive-

    5. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:04:09

       Sure

    6. AHAndrew Huberman2:04:09

       ... uh, on all those, but I'll just batch those.

    7. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:04:11

       Sure.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman2:04:11

       And maybe, and maybe we parse them a little bit. And things like melanotans.

    9. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:04:14

       Sure.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman2:04:15

        Um, these are, to my understanding, FDA-approved for certain indications, so they've gone through the randomized control trials for, like, uh, growth hormone secretagogues for, uh, small stature. I- in kids they might use it for that or for, um, post-surgical, uh, burn, uh, recovery. I think that-

    11. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:04:34

        Tesamorelin is for-

    12. AHAndrew Huberman2:04:34

        Some are HIV

    13. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:04:35

        ... for HIV lipid secret-

    14. AHAndrew Huberman2:04:36

        HIV. So the idea here, the sort of framework that, uh, I'm, I'm teeing up, is that th- these molecules are, have been explored-

    15. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:04:45

        Yep

    16. AHAndrew Huberman2:04:46

        ... for their known biological function in animals. It's established. These molecules lead to an increase in growth hormone above what would normally be secreted. They do it indirectly by, so they're sort of the gas pedal on that system.

    17. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:04:58

        Mm-hmm.

    18. AHAndrew Huberman2:04:58

        Growth hormone secretagogue cause more growth hormone to be secreted, not actual growth hormone. They vary in terms of how much they stimulate hunger or don't stimulate hunger.

    19. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:05:06

        Yep.

    20. AHAndrew Huberman2:05:06

        And on and on, you should take them, if you're gonna take them before sleep, uh, but, uh, not having eaten in the last two or three hours, all, all that stuff. We can save ourselves some time here.

    21. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:05:15

        Yep.

    22. AHAndrew Huberman2:05:15

        Most people who are taking these things, whether they get it from pharma or compounding pharmacy or gray market, research purposes only- [laughs]

    23. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:05:24

        Mm-hmm

    24. AHAndrew Huberman2:05:24

        ... um, or black market, God forbid, they're doing this because they want to lose fat, gain muscle, recover from exercise more quickly, and look more youthful.

    25. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:05:33

        Yep.

    26. AHAndrew Huberman2:05:34

        Can we assume that those effects are real given that they were FDA-approved for other things?

    27. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:05:39

        Yeah, so when it comes to, let's parse out the effects and, and the different types of, of compounds that exist in this category. So there's the ghrelin side, the ghrelin agonist, like MK-677, not FDA-approved, orally available pill that, you know, makes you bleed out, uh, growth hormone. Like, you make so much growth hormone in response to that.

    28. AHAndrew Huberman2:05:53

        Mm-hmm.

    29. ABDr. Abud Bakri2:05:53

        And in non-pulsatile fashion. Growth hormone's a very circadian hormone that gets released in the first, you know, 90 minutes of slow-wave sleep. Um, and if you miss that big pulse, you're gonna get small pulses throughout the day. The question is, is that big pulse better than small little, you know, um, mini pulses throughout the day? These secretagogues will, uh, address the, the broader category of something called somatopause. So you've heard of menopause, you've heard of maybe andropause. Somatopause is this event that happens somewhere in the 30s where growth hormone production dramatically decreases. So if we kind of paint a picture, your pineal gland's aging, uh, before puberty, your thymus right after puberty, you know, in your 20s, and in your 30s you're having somatopause. That's where your growth hormone production is decreasing. You're having a, they call it adrenopause, where your adrenals stop making as much DHEA and the different ratio of cortisol. And then you're having menopause, andropause, and all the other chronic con- conditions. So that's like your first 50 years of your life, that's what you have to ex- expect. The question has been, and it's a big debate in the medical community, is replacing growth hormone and addressing somatopause useful? 'Cause you can measure if we had your IGF-1 when you were 18 and your IGF-1 when you were 30 and 50, that's gonna be a dramatic decrease in that. Should we now replenish this IGF-1? The proponents will say IGF-1's important for skin and, and good quality sleep and for muscle recovery and joints and all these things, and those are true. We know growth hormone has all these beneficial effects on that. We also know growth hormone is thymoregenerative because it stimulates the regrowth of an aged, involuted thymus gland based on Dr. Fahai's work. The question is, is there an oncogenic signal when it comes to growth hormone?

    30. AHAndrew Huberman2:07:27

        Does it cause cancer?

Episode duration: 2:48:22