You do not need to search far and wide to discover the secrets of living longer. All it takes is the right scientific methods and the right understanding of your own body. Daniel Weinberg sits down with serial biotech entrepreneur and investor Diederik Van der Reijt, who talks about his companies dedicated to democratizing access to cellular therapies: Celljevity (cellular rejuvenation) and NKore Biotherapeutics (immunotherapies). Together, they take a deep dive into the benefits of supercharging the immune system, as well as shifting from reactive medicine to proactive healthspan optimization. Find out why we need to stop relying on band-aid solutions when it comes to longevity and take that much-needed step to level up preventative medicine.
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Inside The Science Of Living Longer With Diederik Van der Reijt
On this week’s show, we have Diederik Van der Reijt, a good friend, CEO, and founder of two cutting-edge bioscience firms, Celljevity and NKore. Finally, it is great to have you on the show. I have been trying to get you for a long time now, Diddy, so welcome.
Thank you. Glad to be here.
Where are you right now?
I am in Shanghai at the moment.
You are in Shanghai. Of course you are. We are going to dig in today with Diederik Van der Reijt, who has been on this incredible journey to the frontier of where science is taking us, particularly with regard to health and longevity. I have known Diddy for a very long time, for many decades. We met each other back in Australia. In the earlier part of our careers, starting out in the world, we both began in financial markets.
We have always had a really good relationship and rapport with each other, and we have gone on completely different paths. I have been connected with Diddy for close to 25 years. If anyone wants to know, I have got some great stories about Diddy for another time, but where Diddy is today, I would never have predicted. We are going to dig into two particular companies, of which he is the CEO and co-founder.
The first one focuses on natural killer cells, which are something that was very new to me up until last year, which most people do not know about, including doctors. I have a doctor that I regularly see for longevity and preventative medicine, and they were very unaware of the whole idea around natural killer cells and the measuring and monitoring of your natural killer cell levels.
After that, we are going to dive into what I would call frontier science in the stem cell therapy space, but it is stem cell therapy plus. That is the best way I am going to describe it. The remarkable results that we have already seen from the treatments. We are going to go deep into it. Diddy, welcome.
How Did Diederik Find a Career in Cellular Therapies
I want to start with how you segue from financial markets, private and venture capital investment, which is really the path that you pursued, and how you fell into and came to this focus on, let us start with the natural killer cell space? Maybe start off with what natural killer cells are? Explain the importance of them, and explain how you got into this whole situation.
Thank you. Where to start? Basically, as you know, I was running my own high-frequency trading business, which was at that point headquartered in Hong Kong. I had offices in Sydney, New York, and San Francisco, and it was great. Together with my brother, I was running this business, and we were doing great. At some point, I looked at all these computer screens in front of me, and I said to myself, “I cannot be doing this for the rest of my life.” At that moment, I decided to sell, so my brother bought me out. I moved back to Europe, and I started focusing on my portfolio investments.
I was always very interested in plant-based medicine and holistic therapies. I started to dabble around and make some investments in this space. As it always is, one thing leads to the other. Quickly enough, through a friend of mine, who is very close to your friend still, and now my co-founder in NKore, I was introduced to Professor Jewett at UCLA in Los Angeles. That must have been in 2018.
In that first meeting that lasted for two hours, one of the first things she told me is, “Diddy, I believe I have developed an incredible immunotherapy for cancer patients, potentially a cure if you are stage one or two, but even for stage three or four, it is a treatment that is very beneficial because it boosts your immune system with natural killer cells.” To be perfectly frank, going into that meeting, I did not know what NK cells were.
By the end of the meeting, I was fully convinced because of what I found, first of all, and let me tell you, what are NK cells for the people that do not know, which is probably many of our audience. She explained to me that NK cells were discovered at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden in the 1970s in Stockholm. No one seriously studied these cells until Professor Jewett, my now partner at NKore, opened the field in the early ‘90s. What are natural killer cells?
Healthy people have around three billion NK cells in their bloodstream. These cells are generated in your bone marrow. They move to your bloodstream, and they only live there for 2 or 3 weeks. They have one job and one job only, which is to look for disease and kill it. Be it cancer stem cells, flu, or COVID. In other words, if your immune function is functioning well, you have good NK cell function, which typically means that 15% to 20% of your white blood cells are natural killer cells.
The body’s natural killer cells have one job and one job only: to look for diseases and kill them. Share on XYou will be fine. You do not get sick. As we age, we all know this, slowly your immune function and your NK cells start dropping. Typically, what we see in cancer patients is not three billion natural killer cells, but only 300 million. Often, that last 300 million is dormant, inactive. That is where you get into trouble. What they stop doing is they stop releasing gamma interferon, which is the hormone that makes them recognize and differentiate cancer stem cells.
That is where you get into trouble. She explains further, she says, “Now, this therapy that I have developed.” Her story is wonderful, by the way. She was originally born in Iran, of Armenian descent, and moved to UCLA in 1982 to study medicine. All she wanted since she was a little girl is one thing to cure cancer. When she finalized her study, she realized, “If I become an oncologist, I might cure some people, but to cure cancer, I need to be a researcher.” At that moment, and we’re talking early ‘90s, all the researchers were focusing on T cell therapies.
In fact, now, 35 years later, we see all the CAR T-cell therapies that came out of that time. At that moment, she made a radical decision to study natural killer cells. I liked that because it meant that she is a contrarian, and I, as a trader, with my background, am always made very alert. Someone is going in a different direction. “This is interesting.” At that moment, she started studying natural killer cells, and she actually opened the field of research.
She did all the early discoveries, like the maturation cycle and mechanisms of action. She explained to me that when the rest of the world discovered, maybe fifteen years ago, that NK cells were the most important cells in our innate immune system, she had been studying these cells for twenty years. She was light-years ahead of everyone in terms of the knowledge base that she has built up. At that moment, she started working on the therapy.
When I met her in 2018, the therapy was ready. What is this therapy that she has developed? She says, “What I do is the following,” and there are different approaches here, but this is the approach that she follows, and now we’re doing that with NKore, which is taking natural killer cells from healthy donors. This is an allogeneic therapy. The difference between autologous. Autologous is your own cells. Allogeneic refers to donor-derived cells, which could be umbilical cord or fresh donors.
You collect those natural killer cells either from the placenta of newborn babies?
That is an option, which we at NKore do not do.
What do you guys do?
At NKore, we use fresh donors.
What does that mean?
We get a fresh donor in, just a healthy young person with good NK cell function. That person donates a vial of blood, just one vial. That vial contains perhaps two million natural killer cells. We then work on these cells for six weeks to expand and activate them with probiotics. This is holistic therapy. After six weeks, the two million cells have become two billion cells. Now we can infuse 5 or 6 people. In the meantime, these cells have not only expanded, but they have also been supercharged.
They are more aggressive and more effective in killing tumors. She explained all this to me, and I was like, “Amazing. Have you tested it?” “Yes, of course.” As you know, you test drugs on mice or rats. “Typically, when you test drugs on mice, does it then work on humans?” “It is 50-50.” “That is not good enough for me.” I realized I only want to work with humanized mice. I am sitting there like, “What? Humanized mice?” “Yes.”
What are humanized mice?
Humanized mice are BLT mice. BLT mice stand for human Bone marrow, human Liver, and human Thymus. These mice actually pump human blood. If you ask her, she will tell you, “I replicated the immune system of a human being inside these little rodents.” In fact, one of these mice costs $20,000. This is very expensive. Their DNA is 98% similar to yours and mine. Just so you know, 99% of researchers work with NCG mice. These are immunocompromised, so very hard to replicate.
Whereas BLT mice are very special because essentially they are very close to humans. She says, “I put cancerous tissue of humans into these little mice. After two weeks, these mice get really sick.” She tried 25 different types of cancer, from pancreatic to melanoma to glioblastoma, lung, and ovarian. “After two weeks, these mice get really sick. I give the infusion with the supercharged natural killer cells. Guess what?” She says, “Within three weeks, all the tumors are completely eradicated.”
I am sitting there again, layman, I’m like, “You are basically telling me this is a cure for mice. I am not sure if it is a cure for humans, but there has to be some therapeutic benefit to humans if these mice are so similar.” This was my understanding at that moment. Of course, I read most of her papers within the next two weeks. I said to her, “What can we do?” “What we can do is we can set up a company in the US. We can start and put some funding in.
We can start an exclusive negotiation period with UCLA to negotiate a licensing agreement to commercialize my intellectual property,” which, of course, is now owned by UCLA because that is where she has been affiliated for the last 40 years. Within a week, I set up that company, also because after that meeting, to give you an example, I said to her, “Dr. Jewett, this is absolutely amazing. You are going to win a Nobel prize.”
She says, “Diddy, but I am not interested in awards. My journey is to cure cancer.” I quickly realized this is a very special person, very spiritual, and doing this for the right reasons. She had been killing herself in the lab for all these years, working on these therapies, never taking a holiday, and very much focused on this. Within a week, we set up NKore Biotherapeutics together with my other partner, Tracy. That is how that journey started.
How Cellular Therapy Cured A Girl From Cancer
I want to know. You got the company going and tried to go and create a commercial pathway. What I am most interested to hear is that my recollection from your journey was that what really opened your eyes was observing in real-time the curing. I remember there was a little girl involved in the curing of her cancer. It was a very heartwarming story.
You recorded this, and you have had some other anecdotal examples of the power of this. I want you to talk us through that. I want you to highlight how hyperrelevant this became with the onset of the global pandemic of COVID and what natural killer cells mean for the COVID virus. Let us start off with you having this case with this young girl. What was the case and what happened?
The reason I got connected to Dr. Jewett initially was through my dear friend Tracy, with whom I was already in a different investment previously. Tracy and Josh are the parents of Sophie, who is now twelve years old. She was diagnosed with a brain tumor at nine months old.
Brain tumor at nine months old.
Low-grade optic glioblastoma, which is not exactly fatal, but it is there, and it is like a spider web. It is completely spread over your brain. The poor kid was basically 90% blind. She had very bad vision and, of course, all these disabilities because of this disease. I was a very good friend of Tracy and helped the family. We were investing in our other business, and that is how we started NKore and got connected to Dr. Jewett.
Of course, our primary goal here was to help Sophie, to treat her with this tumor because Sophie had eight open brain surgeries, all sorts of clinical trials, and she failed basically everything. The tumor would not shrink. That was our primary target. When we started NKore in mid-2019, as you remember, six months later, COVID started. The company was actually shut down, which is a real shame because I believe that with that NK cell therapy, it would have been most beneficial for people who would have suffered from COVID.
In fact, now years later, we are treating many people who have long COVID, and typically 1 or 2 NK cell infusions are more than enough to completely get rid of it. I have many examples of friends who have now benefited from these therapies. Anyway, we were shut down pretty much for 2 or 3 years, and we cannot move anything. Finally, COVID opened up, and we were like, “What are we going to do?” The issue with NKore at that moment was that we probably needed to raise around $30 million to start clinical trials in the US. As you can imagine, that is not easy.
It is also highly dilutive for the cap tables. I said to my partners, who are all Americans by the way, “Guys, why do we not focus on getting clinical data offshore? It will be much cheaper and probably much faster too.” At that moment, funnily enough, MD Anderson, reaching out from the largest cancer hospital in the US in Houston, reached out and said, “Listen, guys, we know what you are doing. We think it is great.
We’re going to help you set up in an offshore facility in Cancun, Mexico, under the regulatory framework there to offer this therapy.” That must have been in 2023. At that moment, we had to put some more money into the business to get this started. That is where we started in Cancun in December 2023. We treated our first two patients. The first of which was this little girl, Sophie, our friend, who had her first infusion in December 2023.
She has been doing great pretty rapidly afterwards, and the tumor started shrinking a little bit. She is still, and we’re two years further now, not completely free of disease, but it has been very beneficial for her. I should mention the other patient, who is another dear friend of mine, Jamie, who was based in Florida. Jamie was 64 years old, suffering from non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It was stage three, and he would have been on checkpoint inhibitors for the rest of his life, which completely debilitated him. He was at that point sleeping sixteen hours a day and lying in bed another eight.
He said to me, “Diddy, I am alive, but I am not living.” Interestingly enough, everything Dr. Jewett predicted in this first sample test came out because she said you’re going to see high energy for the patient pretty much immediately after the infusion, a positive immunity response when we do his first blood test, and, of course, cancer reduction when we do the first biopsy or scans.
Jamie was infused in December 2023, the same evening he was sitting with us at dinner until midnight, full of energy. After three days, I actually shot this short video of him where he’s like, “I’m feeling different. I’m sleeping better. I haven’t been drinking coffee. For the first time in two years, my head is clear. I can think again.”
When I saw the video of this gentleman, he looked, sounded, and acted completely normal. When you described to me that he was in bed all day, every day, with no energy, this was not the man who was in the video. It was transformational.
He says, “I had back pain, nothing to do with my cancer,” because this stuff reduces inflammation. That’s what it does. I always say, our immune system specialist. Most diseases start with a compromised immune system. Let us just fix the immune system. That is what we are doing now. After two weeks, he had his first blood test. We saw his NK cells spike up. That is what you are expecting to see. Most importantly, on day 60, we did his first bone marrow biopsy.
Most diseases start with a compromise of the immune system. Therefore, fixing the immune system must be a top priority. Share on XYou have to understand that with hematological cancers like non-Hodgkin, your bone marrow is full of cancer cells. In his case, it was 20% pre-infusion. We reduced it by 75%, from 20% to 5%, within two months. He had a second infusion six months later in July that reduced it from 5% in his bone marrow to 0.1%. He is now very close to full remission. You cannot say, by the way, that someone is cured of cancer. You need five years. He is in partial remission.
He is very close to there. Probably, if he gets one more infusion, he will be fine. Those were the first two examples. By now, we have treated another eight people, and we are ready to scale this thing up. We are going to be treating another 70 people this year in Cancun. We are also filing an IND with the American FDA now, hopefully in Q2 of this year. We’re starting clinical trials, probably for hematological cancers.
With natural killer cells, you are going to expect a lot of success in hematological cancers. Why? It’s because these cells live in the blood. It is the low-hanging fruit. The reality is that Dr. Jewett, in her research, has very much focused on solid tumors and actually focused very much on pancreatic and glioblastoma. While we are seeing some initial successes, it is too early to say, but the reality is that we are going to be very much focusing on solid tumors as well.
As for NKore, we are ready to receive patients in Cancun. These are not cheap therapies. They are very expensive, but we are here to drive prices down as soon as we can. We need to reach some scale before we can do that. Down the line, these off-the-shelf NK cell therapies will be, in a few years from now, very cheap. If you look at the landscape of other NK cell companies, I must be honest, there are around fifteen platforms that we are following that are commercializing these therapies.
Most of them are failing in oncology, and this is mostly because of the durability of their cells. No one has managed to make these cells so strong that they can actually get rid of these tumors. The difference here, I always say, is that our partner, Dr. Jewett, is essentially the godmother of the NK cell. She opened the field of research, and she is very well known in this field. The reason why some of the other therapies are not working, to give you an example, is autologous NK cell therapy.
She always told me, “Diddy, I don’t believe in it.” “Why?” “The immune system of the patient is completely broken. These are terrible cells, especially if the patient has cancer. These cells have seen chemotherapy. They have seen radiotherapy. They are terrible cells to start off with. Just forget it. Besides that, these cells only live for two or three weeks. They can be someone else’s.”
What do we see in the clinical trials of the companies that are working on autologous NK therapies? We see life extension, no cures. They are all moving away from oncology into autoimmune disease. As for the allogeneic ones, most of the other companies are focusing on umbilical cord. Dr. Jewett always said, “I don’t really believe in it because these cells are not mature. They’re not activated.”
What do we see in their clinical trials of the companies commercializing these platforms? Same life extension, no cures, moving away from oncology into autoimmune disease. This is the story about NKore. Lastly, I should mention that last year, very unfortunately, we lost Dr. Jewett. She was suffering from deep pain from metastasis, and we knew that. In June, I woke up one day, and I opened my email, and the message was that she had a stroke and she passed.
It was absolutely awful for all of us. She was a dear friend and our business partner. The saddest thing is that she has been working on this therapy for 30 or 35 years. We are now so close to the finish line of bringing this out, and now she is not there to witness it. That’s really painful. Of course, we’re working actively with her. This was a very difficult event. It did not affect the company because the technology was transferred long ago, but it was hard.
What A Healthy Person Can Gain From A Cellular Therapy
It is very sad. I want to ask. A healthy man or woman comes to you and says, “I want to have a natural killer cell therapy treatment.” What do they stand to gain? I am not talking about being cancerous. I am talking about the preventative side. What are the benefits for a healthy person like me to take natural killer cell infusions on an annual basis? Let’s say one or two infusions as you prescribed, for a healthy person, what would one gain from that?
To give you an example, and then later we will start talking about why I am in Shanghai and what I am doing here. We are working mostly with stem cells, but also with natural killer cells. I have been in these natural killer cells for the last 6 or 7 years. I understand them pretty well. I am not a scientist or a doctor. I work with these incredible professors, and I am learning. I know a little bit about how to talk about it. When I come to Shanghai, we will talk about it more, but what I have done here myself is NK cell infusions. Why did I do that?
First of all, because I am very comfortable with these cells. I know people have been infusing these cells for years. Even though I think that NKore in Cancun and LA has the winning therapy, that is something I do not have access to myself. I do not want to take the place of a cancer patient who needs these cells much more than I do because I am a healthy individual. The reason I did it here in Shanghai is that here it is similar to off-the-shelf, not from fresh donors, but from the umbilical cord.
My partner here, Professor Sun, recommended it to me and said, “Diddy, if you can do it, just have it one, 2 or 3. It is very good for you.” First, I did my blood tests, and my immune function was actually good. My NK cells were fine. They were already at 21%. Overall, you test your immune function. I was good. After three NK cell infusions, which I took in January 2025, my immune function improved to excellent because these NK cells rebalance your whole immune system.
They get rid of your senescent cells. They get rid of your zombie cells. I am recommending this to all my friends. Just have one NK cell infusion because it is very beneficial and will give you a ton of energy. Regenerative medicine and longevity are all about preventative health. Just priming your immune system. At Celljevity, we actually talk about a seed and soil approach. The soil is the prime environment to have your immune function system working properly.
You do it with natural killer cells. They are the most important cells. Once your NK cells are working well, it starts regulating your T cells and your B cells. Everything falls into place. Dr. Jewett always said to me, “These are the generals of the army. They manage everything else.” It is the most important cell in our immune system. These cells are going mainstream.
One person who’s talking about it a lot is Patrick Soon-Shiong, the guy from Los Angeles who is also working on NK cell therapies. He speaks about it a lot in the media. He says it is the cell we’ve overlooked for the last 40 years. Dr. Jewett said the field just went into a different direction. Everybody went into studying T cells. She believes that NK cells will completely knock out T and CAR-T cell therapies in the next year.
I have done two infusions, and I had my blood tests before doing the infusions. To my surprise, my natural killer cell levels were actually very low without me even knowing. I have been seeing preventative medical doctors for quite a few years now. When I presented this information to them, they were like, “What is this?”
I asked them, “You have never actually assessed me on this. I have done this blood test to analyze my NK cells, and these are my levels. They are really low levels.” I am returning in April of this year for my next infusions. Before I do that, I will do the blood test to see what the impact of the original infusions is. It was very apparent that you think you’re at a healthy state, but you truly do not know unless you really assess it at a deep level.
It is something people do not monitor. No one is really speaking about it. More and more I am in this field, but people are speaking more about NKs, while people don’t really know. Doctors do not know so much about natural killer cells. That really shocked me.
That was what I realized.
I’d give you an example. Recently, I was speaking to a friend and an investor in my business who was suffering from cancer. We were on the phone with his oncologist in the Netherlands, who is a well-known guy. We advised my friend to maybe come for some natural killer cell infusions. His doctor is like, “It is very interesting, and I know these cells are going mainstream now, but I will never recommend them to my patients because they are not FDA-approved.”
I’m like, “We all know it is going to take 4 or 5 years before these cells are approved, but some people do not have that time.” The problem with doctors is that they are very dogmatic in their thinking. They are trained in a certain way, and everything outside that is just that they do not want to take the risk.
They would much rather prescribe their chemotherapies and their radiotherapies, which we all know are completely toxic and kill the immune system. I would never say I am against chemotherapy or radiotherapy. I would say, as in us at NKore, we think it is very beneficial sometimes, but it should be a combined therapy. The problem with chemo and radiotherapy is it kills your immune system completely. It kills your NK cells.
What often happens is you get rid of the cancer very efficiently, but you also get rid of all the NK cells. The vengeance comes a year later when you’re not protected because you do not have NK cell function. The cancer comes back with a vengeance. This is what we are very often seeing. People say you win the battle, but you lose the war.
Breaking Down The Benefits Of Stem Cell Therapy
That is the natural killer cell therapy chapter, which then led you into what I would call the frontier of science. You have tapped into something which I think can be described as a bit of science fiction. There has been a lot of talk about stem cell therapy globally for quite some years now, except you stumbled across another mad scientist professor who has taken things to a whole different level. That is with Celljevity and what you call Prometheus therapy. I want you to talk us through, and in full disclosure, I have begun the process of having Prometheus therapy.
I go back in April to actually receive my first infusions after the harvesting process. Why do you not start off with this professor and what she has discovered, and what you are pursuing with her? I want you to talk about the Prometheus therapy. What does it do? Where is it going? Finish off by being semi-finalists for the XPRIZE. Maybe talk about what the XPRIZE is. There is a lot of juice in there. How did you come across this professor?
I was speaking at a conference in London in 2024, and this guy came to me, and he said, “Diddy, amazing what you are doing with NKore. This is so cool. I need to put you in touch with another professor at UCLA who is doing something different, but similar cell therapies.”
Your original professor was also from UCLA, was she not?
Yes, I made them friends.
It is fascinating that they both came out of the same university.
It is divine serendipity. We were sitting there, and I had my first call with Professor Sun in July 2024. At my friend’s house in Marbella, we called her, and we had our first call, and I studied the information. We were basically chatting on Zoom for the next few months to the point that I said to my partners, “We need to fly to Shanghai because we can do a deal here. This is a real opportunity. We need to just sit down with her and structure something.” That was in November 2024. I came here, and I am now in Shanghai.
I used to go here fifteen years ago when I lived in Hong Kong, and I was never a big fan. The city was very polluted and just not great to visit, maybe for just a few days. I came back in November, and I have been back every month since for the last twelve. I absolutely love it. This is the city of the future. All the cars are electric. Now you can actually see the blue sky on a good day. The Chinese are winning in AI and in the field that I am in. They are winning with electric cars.
They are destroying our European industry. Also, in my space in biotech and regenerative medicine, all the leading cell and gene therapy companies are coming out of China at the moment. The Chinese government invested $2 trillion in healthcare in the last five years. Now, with Trump’s administration cutting a lot of research funding, this dispersion is only getting bigger because all these smart researchers are moving back to China. China is the big winner.
What you see is lots of opportunities here to look at these assets and actually bring them into the West. When we met Dr. Sun at that first dinner, I said to her, and then I will explain the therapy, it is amazing because this is her journey. She was originally from China. She did her PhD at Harvard. She was at UCLA for ten years from 2000 to 2010, where she was the director of the stem cell department and a full-time professor.
This is where she originally developed this technology, but then she wanted to test it on humans and could not in the US because of the restrictions around stem cells, so she moved back to Shanghai fifteen years ago. She has been back here all these years, furthering the technology, and now she is at a point where she wants to bring it back to the West to a global audience because she wants to be active everywhere. What is it that she has developed?
I am not sure if you are familiar with Yamanaka, but everybody is doing stem cells these days. Everybody is talking stem cells, and the reality is that stem cells often have a bad rep because there are many charlatans operating in this space. The genesis here is, really, what are stem cells? You and I consist of 37 trillion cells. The only cells that can regenerate and build new tissue are your stem cells. You are born with those. Only a few hundred million.
As you grow older, the cells responsible for regeneration and building of tissues will be depleted by around 80%. Share on XBy the time you are fully grown, when you are twenty years old, from there it is a steep line down. By the time you reach 80, 98% of your stem cells have depleted. You only have 1% or 2% left, and that last 2% is not so potent. That is where you go off the cliff. People die at 80, 90, 100. One of the things that stem cells do is they reduce inflammation. What is aging? Aging is inflammation.
People are using stem cells from the umbilical cord. Are we against it? No. Do we believe it works? Yes, there are some benefits. They stimulate your own stem cells to work a bit better. It reduces inflammation, it reduces inflammation, but in the end, it is not your own DNA. It cannot regenerate and build new tissue. Even if it is your own son’s umbilical cord, it is still not your own DNA. Maybe much better is autologous stem cell therapy. There are lots of people doing it.
Take some of your belly fat, like a liposuction, very painful, put it in a centrifuge, separating plasma from stroma, and then injecting platelet-rich plasma, PRP, into your knees for osteoarthritis. Again, lots of my friends are doing this. Temporary benefits, it works. When you are 50 years old, these cells are not so potent. After a year, the pain starts again. What we see really is the future of medicine is cellular reprogramming. Taking stem cells from an adult and reprogramming them back to a youthful state.
Taking the cells from the person themselves, do you mean, not from another adult, from you? Can you explain?
It’s very important. Where we take NK cells, it’s allogeneic, could be a donor, no problem, because they only live for a few weeks, and then they are replaced. For stem cells, we believe it has to be your own because it regenerates and rebuild new tissues. It has to be your DNA.
When you described taking it from your belly fat, is that not taking it from yourself?
You could do that, but the main difference here is the reprogramming. I can take your own stem cells. I can take yours today. You are 51, 52 today. These cells are not so potent. That is the issue. We’re trying to bring those cells back. The first person to pioneer this technology was Professor Yamanaka, a famous Japanese professor. He was the first to take adult stem cells and bring them back to an embryonic-like state.
When he took adult stem cells, where was he taking them from?
Behind the ear.
He pioneered that.
That is what most people are doing. Why behind the ear? It has never been exposed to the sun, so it is easier to rejuvenate. It is very topical, so it is very easy to remove, and it does not leave you any scarring. He did that, and that technology is called iPSC, induced Pluripotent Stem Cells. They gave him a Nobel Prize in 2012 for this technology. There is one big risk.
When you bring the cells back to an embryonic state, they are so young and prolific at expressing blastocysts. This is five and a half days post-fertilization. The cells are so prolific at expressing that they can actually induce cancer that is dormant in your system. Yes, Nobel Prize, but let us hold off. This is a dangerous technology.
Since then, everybody has been trying to see how to improve this technology. I believe that Professor Sun, my partner now, and I know she has done this successfully. She knows Yamanaka. They are all friends. What she is doing differently, and I had the therapy myself, as you know, and you are due to get your first infusion in April. This is what I’ve done. I took a small sample behind my ear, a biopsy, and five stitches. After twenty minutes, you go home.
She then works on these cells for three months through an epigenetic induction process. No DNA tinkering. This is very important. No changing the DNA. She expands, rejuvenates, and reprograms them back to your newborn state. She does not go all the way back to the embryonic state. In that newborn state, these cells are much further developed. They are not pluripotent.
They are multipotent, and they can express and become only four different things, blood vessels, fat cells, muscle tissue, cartilage, and bones. In short, and essentially, this, I believe, is the medical breakthrough here. She managed to switch off the oncogene. This technology does not lead to tumorigenesis anymore. She made it safe. How does she rejuvenate these cells?
She bathes them in a cocktail of small molecules. It is a three-stage process. They will go in the first cocktail for three weeks, and then they move to the second, and then they move to the third. When I came back, I did this in January last year. I came back three months later in April. There were 40 vials that she keeps on liquid nitrogen that were my stem cells.
Diddy, one day old. You took how many transfusions?
I have had two in April. I did another two in October, and I am due for another one in one hour. After this call, I will have my fifth.
That is a lot. You did two then two, and you are going to do one. Please describe. What have you observed? How do we know this is not smoke and mirrors? What does it do? How do you know that it has actually done anything?
First of all, what does it do? Explained by the doctor to me. This IV drip goes into your hand and then into your arm, and it follows your blood. It starts in the left ventricle of your heart. It then moves to your lungs, and it starts repairing. It moves to your liver and your spleen. These cells are highly intelligent, so they know where to home in on where they see disease or inflammation.
You are not having it for, “I have a really bad knee,” and injecting it into your knee.
You can also do that. If you have to target a certain area, you can do a direct injection in your knee. Let us say, for healthy people like you and me, it is just a systemic thing. You just do an IV drip. It circulates. If I have been smoking for 30 years, it will not get past my lungs. There is so much damage in my lungs that it needs to be repaired there. I’ll probably need a second infusion before it gets to my liver. If you do more infusions, the compounding effect is more.
Why am I doing this? Me being a healthy person, I am purely for cellular rejuvenation. What does that mean? We are testing customers, actually, because most of the people are healthy individuals. We are testing them for all these biomarkers. One of them that everybody in longevity is talking about, I do not think it’s the most relevant one, it’s the one thing that most people talk about, which is telomeres, telomere length. What are telomeres? Quick lesson in biology.
Telomeres are basically the protective caps sitting on top of your DNA. Every time your cell divides, these telomeres get shorter. You lose 1% to 2% of your telomeres every year. It is like the plastic tip on the tip of a shoelace that keeps the shoelace together. As we age, they get shorter and shorter. Can you slow down the decrease? Yes, by living healthy, doing lots of sports, and eating healthy. Can you lengthen telomeres? No, you cannot.
At some point, they’re becoming so short that your DNA starts unraveling, you get mutations, you get inflammation, you get autoimmunity, you get cancer, and you enter death. This is the first therapy in the world that in a safe and efficient manner, has proven to lengthen telomeres. What that means literally is basically reversing your biological age. That is why I am doing this. I am having six infusions in my first year that should reverse my biological clock by 10 to 15 years.
How do we test the biological clock?
By doing the telomere test and testing you for other biomarkers.
When I come there in April, you will take blood from me, and you’ll test my telomere length. Again in the future, I’ll just have a few infusions.
Basically, what you’re going to be expecting when you do your telomere test in April, when you are here, you will see that you are 51, or you are 45, or you are 55, who knows. We will do it again in six months or in one year after you have had your first couple of infusions. Same for me. I did my telomeres.
I was actually a little bit older than I am currently today, unfortunately, but it is what it is. I’m doing a telomere test, and the results are probably in six weeks. I am hoping to see this age reversal. In fact, Professor Sun and her partner, Jimmy, are 58 and 60 chronologically based on their passport, but their biological age is 31 and 30 years old. They have been doing this for the last five years.
Are you joking?
That is what this is. In that first dinner, we had last year in November, thirteen months ago, I said to her, “If you can do this and you have not been sick in the last five years.” She said, “During COVID, I had a runny nose for one day, but that is it. I never get sick.” I must say also, since I had those NK cell infusions last year, I have not been sick one day. If it stops all inflammation and you do not get sick, it basically means you increase your healthspan. In longevity, everybody is always talking about healthspan and lifespan.
This is not even so much about increasing lifespan. That is great. The problem we have, especially in our Western societies, is that people, for the last 10% or 20% of their lives, are in and out of the hospital. They have ailments. Back in the day, we used to live, and one day we just dropped dead. Now it is suffering for 10 or 20 years, and then you die. What this is very much about is not just increasing lifespan, but also increasing healthspan, getting old more healthily.
Real-Life Stories Of Cellular Therapy Success
How many transfusions can you have at any one time? As you said, you have the cells, you get 40 vials, and those 40 vials you can continue harvesting. Those 40 vials should be sufficient to last you twenty years if you do two a year, or how do you do it?
From those 40 vials, we can make another 40. This is a one-time thing.
How many transfusions should you do a year? You are heading for six that seems extreme. How many are you doing in a year?
I’m doing six. The reality is, and it sounds commercial, but the more you do, the quicker you rejuvenate. When you are 30 years old, you are fine. You would be happy to stay there. You do one or two a year just to maintain at that level. I said to her the other day, “How long can you stay there?” “As long as I keep infusing myself.” We have to see in 5 or 10 years, but that is the reality.
How many transfusions would I be doing in April?
You should do 2 or 3. If you are here for a week, you cannot do them back-to-back. If you do them on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, you lose some of the benefits. Typically, what we do is first give you an exosome infusion to prime the environment, and then we give you a stem cell infusion. Normally, the protocol would be Monday exosomes, Tuesday Prometheus, Wednesday exosomes, Thursday Prometheus. Most people do two on their first time, do two, some do three. In your first year, you do six, and then you slow down, and then you go to 1 or 2 years.
What is the XPRIZE?
I should probably also tell you, this is all great for longevity for healthy guys like you and me, but we are also targeting serious indications. When I said to Dr. Sun when I met her, “Is it true you’re already treated more than 1,000 people with this therapy? She said, “Yes.” I said, “What is the efficacy? Is it 50-50?” She says, “Diddy, what are you talking about? It is close to 100%. Everybody has a therapeutic benefit. Everybody stops disease progression.
Most people reverse and all of this without side effects or adverse reactions. It is your own DNA. It is your own cells. There is no rejection.” I said to my partners at the beginning, “Man, this sounds too good to be true.” As you said, this is like science fiction. We have done tons of due diligence. We have spoken to many of the patients. We started sending our own friends and started doing these therapies ourselves.
Give us some examples.
I can give you an example of my mother, who is 77 and suffering from asthma and all these pains. Old people suffer from osteoarthritis. We’re all getting this. Six hundred million people are suffering from osteoarthritis in some shape or form. It is the largest indication, which basically means your cartilage is wearing out and you are having pain in your knees, pain in your back, or pain in your shoulder. In her case, that is something she suffers from. I brought her to Shanghai in June last year.
She basically had initially just her NK cell infusion. That one infusion transformed her life. It was funny because we were over at the Ritz and she had her infusion, and the same day, I made a 15,000-step walk through Shanghai. She was full of energy, walking in front of me. I was like, “This is a different person.” The next morning, I woke up next to her, and I said to her, “Did you sleep well?” She said, “No, not really. I was awake until 5:00 AM because I am full of energy. I only slept three hours, but this is the first time in ten years I’ve woken up, and my head is clear.”
Just like my friend, everyone has the same experience. The more you are immunocompromised, the more transformational the benefits and the more direct. I brought her back to Hong Kong, where she stayed with my brother, who’s also your friend, for three weeks. He calls me after a few days, and he says, “Diddy, this is a different mother than was here the last three weeks. She is running up Hong Kong Peak.” That is what this is.
The more you are immunocompromised, the more transformational benefits you will experience in cellular therapy. Share on XAnother example is our friend Neil Bush. Neil is a good friend of mine. He is also on our board. His father was the president of the US, as was his brother. Neil is a big China fan. He makes ten trips a year to China. I am seeing him for lunch tomorrow. I said to him, “Neil, you should experience this.” Neil is very active in China. He brings amazing Chinese technologies into the West.
He is active in Beijing, fostering some of these bilateral relationships that are very much under pressure at the moment. I said to him, “Neil, you should come and have this therapy.” “Diddy, we love to meet the doctor, but not directly doing the therapy, but let’s meet her.” He met her the week after he came back to have the therapy. I should share with you the testimonial where she literally says.
I think I’ve seen this this way because he is a tennis player. He was saying that his shoulder is terrible and he cannot play tennis anymore. He did the treatment, and he is back on the tennis court.
He said he won a tournament. This stuff works. Getting back to serious indications. Again, those thousand people treated, she said 800 are for longevity, like I will not say 800 of them are just healthy people like yourself, but 200 of these are people with serious indications. Like, “What are you focusing on?” It’s a very simple osteoarthritis. I did a study, she says, “We’ve injected 80 people in both knees, one with the Prometheus therapy, one with the placebo.
In the Prometheus knee, we see within three months cartilage regeneration of 37% on average. In the placebo knee, still 10% because some travels through your blood and still homes in to get there.” Alzheimer’s disease, terrible condition. There is nothing for Alzheimer’s. There are companies in phase three clinical trials. What do they do? They slow down progression, but they come with heavy side effects. She stops progression and reverses. What does this mean?
If you come to us with stage four Alzheimer’s, you are gone. She can stop the progression. Some people get a little bit better, but they do not go back to normal. Too many neurons are gone, and you cannot regenerate neurons with stem cells. If you come early in the disease, right after diagnosis, and we can stop progression right there, this is an amazing therapy. Eighty people are now treated, 37 of which in a study.
ALS, a terrible condition, motor neuron disease, Lou Gehrig’s disease, typically has a life expectancy of two or three years. This is an absolutely awful disease. We have treated eight people. We stopped progression, and we reversed. We had one woman who was in a wheelchair, 39 years old, with a two-year life expectancy. She is now 45, six years later, walking on crutches, still improving every day.
Not perfectly cured, but improving. She had more than a hundred infusions of Prometheus in the last six years. We have longitudinal data and safety data. Just now, in November, we got approval from the Chinese FDA to start clinical trials for ALS. We will probably in Q2 of this year in China. We are also filing an IND with the American FDA this month, in January, hoping to get it approved.
Ushering A New Era Of Preventive Medicine And Longevity Science
Radical stuff. You have found yourself at the edge of longevity science. It is one of the biggest trending themes in the world today. It is coming to the mass market, but people want to be. You can just see that the trends of people’s behaviors are changing radically. People want to be healthier, feel better, think more clearly, and have more energy. This is becoming highly prioritized in one’s life. You are starting by focusing on people who have problems across all these diseases, but ultimately, this is preventative medicine for people who are not ill but are thinking about protecting themselves in the future.
Exactly that. As you say, there is this paradigm shift in healthcare where we’re moving away from toxic therapies and band-aid solutions we have been sold for more than 80 years. This is the time of real healing. I like what is happening in the US. We are not getting into politics now, but as for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he is pretty radical, but to drive radical change, you need radical people. He actually speaks her language. He hates processed food, and he is doing a lot about it, which is great. This is one of the prime problems in the US.
We are moving away from toxic therapies and band-aid solutions sold to us for more than 80 years. Now is the time for real healing. Share on XHe is not a huge fan of Big Pharma. He loves holistic therapies, he loves stem cells, and he wants to deregulate the FDA. The momentum is there for things to really change. The US has Montana and Florida as the first two states with what I think is called Right to Try. This is one of the first locations we are going to be looking at to branch out to offer these therapies. People are much more aware. I also see the generation below us. They do not drink alcohol.
That is another interesting trend. Alcohol trends are going down, and zero-alcohol products are amazing.
We grew up in finance and drinking, especially in Holland, the UK, and Australia, is very much part of our culture. It is just messed up. That is probably the only regret I have in my life, that I have been drinking too much for at least 25 years, from 16 to 40. I was like, “This is not great,” and I switched overnight or stopped. Sometimes I drink a glass, but I stopped drinking. The generation below is completely different people.
Answering Rapid-Fire Questions
That is exactly right. Diddy, fascinating. I am very excited for your journey and where it is going, and the incredible impact you are going to have on many people, both healthy and unhealthy people. I really appreciate you giving us the time. I know you have to go off to your next transfusion, but before we go, I’ve got to ask you a few questions that I ask all my guests. Who would you like to say sorry to, given the chance?
That has to be my dad, who unfortunately is not with us anymore because he passed ten years ago. It is a shame because I would have liked him to witness what I am doing right now. It would have made him very proud. Unfortunately, I cannot.
What are you proud of being or doing in your life?
Building things, whether it is building these companies, bringing these therapies to market, or democratizing healthcare. It is just wonderful work. I feel blessed to work with these incredible scientists who are like angels. I feel privileged that I met them. That is, of course, what I am proud of, and that is what keeps me going every day.
When did you receive kindness while needing it most and expecting it least?
I receive kindness every day. Over time, you realize that small gestures actually matter the most. That is what keeps me grounded.
What did your mother or father teach you that you frequently remind yourself of?
To be kind. Not as a weakness, but as a strength. Be kind to others, and you will receive kindness. That is something that it’s nature for me.
Finally, what is your superpower now that you are full of exosomes, Prometheus, and natural killer cells?
It is resilience. I know how to absorb setbacks. I am always ready to pivot. I am always super positive. I like challenges, and I just do not give up. Where sometimes other people cannot do it, I am like, “No,” I set big goals, and I just get there.
Diddy, thank you. I appreciate it and look forward to catching up when we are in Shanghai together.
Good to see you, my friend.
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About Diederik Van der Reijt
Serial biotech entrepreneur and investor founded Celljevity (cellular rejuvenation) and co-founded NKore Biotherapeutics (immunotherapies). Leveraging his background in trading and venture capital, he aims to scale science-backed innovations and democratize access to breakthrough cellular therapies.
