Last month Dr. Peter Diamandis, recently named by Fortune Magazine as one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders, the founder and executive chairman of the XPRIZE Foundation which leads the world in designing and operating large-scale incentive competitions, and New York Times bestselling author of two books, took a trip down to the Stem Cell Institute in Panama City with Dr. Bob Hariri (co-Founder of Human Longevity Inc.) to get stem cell injections in his knee and shoulder as an alternative to reconstructive surgery.
While there he interviewed the directors of the institute, Dr. Jorge Paz Rodriguez and Dr. Neil Riordan, as well as Dr. Bob Hariri, to discuss the future of stem cell therapy. The question: as we age, our supply of stem cells begins to diminish as much as 100- to 10,000-fold in different tissues and organs, but what if you could restore and rejuvenate your stem cell population?
Dr. Diamandis writes that many scientists and physicians are now obtaining stem cells from the placenta or umbilical cord, the leftovers of birth. These stem cells, available in large supply and expressing the undamaged software of a newborn, can be injected into joints or administered intravenously to rejuvenate and revitalize. Over the last decade, the number of publications per year on stem cell-related research has increased 40x. The stem cell market is expected to reach $170 billion by 2020. The top four areas to watch in this budding industry are tissue engineering, stem cell banking, clinical applications of mesenchymal stem cells, and parabiosis according to the co-founder and vice-chairman of Human Longevity Inc. (HLI), a genomics and cell therapy-based company focused on extending the healthy human lifespan.
