The Story of Bengal Bioscience “Cashmere”
The Amniotic Fluid Based Cosmetic Cream for Facial Rejuvenation
By Walter P. Drake
I would like to take you on the journey that led us to conclude that Amniotic Fluid based transdermal creams will revolutionize the cosmetics industry. I would like to explain what it is and why it is really the “Fountain of Youth”.
(1) Stem Cells Are The Body’s Repair Cells
The story begins back 20 years ago, when the world caught on to the fact that stem cells isolated from a person’s own bone marrow or blood could cure or control many of our most debilitating diseases. And I was there, in Bangkok in 2001, learning in amazement of the curing of blindness in a Thai patient using stem cells, and watching the progress in cardiac patients coming from America to receive stem cell cells sent to Israel to be multiplied for injection into their cardiac tissue yielding curative results. Many of us Americans overseas were amazed and delighted about these and other reports of success using stem cells. For example, here’s what David Granovsky, a leading stem cell patient advocate, describes as his experience in those exciting times:
“In 2004 I worked for the first commercial stem cell treatment facility in the world. [ed. note: presumably in Thailand] I watched them as they treated congestive heart failure patients who were tired of being stuck on transplant lists for hearts that might never materialize. I watched these patients brought in on wheelchairs with gray complexions and oxygen canisters. I then saw them come back later on their own power with smiles on their faces and a bounce in their step. These were people who were doubling their ejection fractions (vol of blood pumped out of their hearts) and people who went from Level 3 or 4 congestive heart failure down to Level one. This is the difference between the rest of their short lives in a bed waiting for a heart transplant at Level 3 or 4 AND playing tennis, making love to their spouses, chasing their grandchildren around at Level 2.”
As it became clear that stem cells can be harvested from a small sample of the patients blood, and then multiplied and given back to the patient with amazing results, the use of this New Medicine to cure and treat many diseases developed rapidly worldwide.
But not in the United States, where this treatment has been blocked for all these 20 years as the Embryonic Stem Cell Lobby has hogged all government funding for stem cell research to enable the creation of possible patentable cures. The Embryonic Stem Cell Scientists, who have promoted the use of stem cells collected from embryos rather than the use of adult stem cells from a patient’s own blood, and their partners in government, have blocked and very successfully subverted this New Medicine which is based on using the patient’s own stem cells. for therapy. While adult stem cells are widely used worldwide, there has never ever been a single cure or treatment modality using embryonic stem cells.
Over time, as the FDA blocked the use of adult stem cells from a patient’s blood (which have to be multiplied to have enough cells for a therapeutic effect), clinicians discovered even more powerful curative stem cells in a patient’s fatty tissue. A mini-liposuction of a small amount of abdominal fat yielded many times more stem cells than a patient’s blood sample or bone marrow, and many therapeutic treatments have been derived using this source wherein no multiplication of cells is needed. This fraction came to be known as the Stomal Vascular Fraction (SVF). So many other compounds, growth factors, and other stimulatory factors were found associated with the stem cells form fatty tissue, that the mixture came to be referred to as “liquid gold”, the curative powers were so great!
The Stem Cells They Don’t Want You To Have by famed US physician Christopher J. Centeno M.D. presents further history and deep details for those interested in the blocking of stem cell therapy in the US. But for our purposes, you only have to know one thing: Stem Cell Therapy works and is being currently used in facial rejuvenation where stem cells are injected into the face. You can head out to California today and obtain an expensive facial stem cell treatment.
(2) The Rise of Umbilical Cord Stem Cells as a New Source
In 2007, Neil H. Riordan, Ph.D. discovered that stem cells harvested from umbilical cords and placental tissues of newborns (which is discarded as the “afterbirth”) could be transplanted to any patient with no immune consequences. These cells were “immune-privileged”, unlike embryonic stem cells from embryos that are either always rejected or otherwise cause tumors. This was huge. These adult stem cells from cord blood and placental tissues are many times more robust in curative potential than say, stem cells harvested from an aged patient for use on that patient. Since these kinds of treatments were of course blocked in the US, he went to Panama and opened up what would become the world’s finest stem cell treatment center specializing in the use of umbilical cord stem cells: Panama Stem Cell Institute. Another component of birth material is Amniotic Fluid, the fluid the fetus floats around in, obtained from normal birth C-Sections. And stem cells floating around in amniotic fluid were well known by 2007 as well.
(3) The Importance of the Paired Mice Experiment
And Why Amniotic Fluid Based Cosmetic Creams Will Work
I am not sure at what point in my studies I came to the conclusion that it was not stem cells that were causing beneficial results, but rather the other associated goodies- stem cell activators, proteins, growth factors, cytokines, endothelial factors and the rest… Actually, all the goodies that make the Stromal Vascular Fraction from mini-liposuction so active, as compared to FDA approved bare “banked stem cells” which have no activity and which have never been shown effective for any treatment. No physician wants to use FDA approved product.
Anyway, by April 2016, I had stumbled upon the Paired Mice Experiment with a new troubling perception that serum factors, not the transfer of stem cells themselves, is what caused the beneficial effects of stem cell therapy. So what was the experiment and what does it have to do with amniotic fluid based cosmetics?
The Paired Mice experiments demonstrated that serum factors rather than transplanted stem cells caused enhanced muscle regeneration in aged mice. The way the experiment was done, an old mouse is surgically conjoined with a young mouse in such a way that their circulatory systems are mixed, and blood, plasma, and serum flows between them.
The researchers observed that after conjoining, the stem cells in the old mouse were activated to begin dividing again, and that muscle repair in the old mouse was enhanced and became similar to that of young mice.
By marking stem cells in the young mouse, the experiment further demonstrated that the improvement in the old mouse muscle repair was not due to stem cells from the young mouse, but rather due to circulating blood factors.
In addition, it was found that one could replicate the finding in vitro, by just adding plasma from young mice to stem cells of old mice in culture. Finally the ah-ha moment came in 2011 when the scientists demonstrated that they did not even have to attach the mice, they could just inject young plasma into the aged mouse, exclaiming: “We didn’t have to exchange the whole blood…[the plasma alone] acts like a drug.” References to the history and researchers can be found here: Aging Research: Blood to Blood
So it is all these other non-cellular compounds that are causing the beneficial effects, not just the stem cells themselves. Dr. Christopher Centeno of the Centeno-Schultz Orthopedic Clinic which treats patients with adult stem cells harvested from a pateint’s blood, believes that growth factors from the patient’s own platelets are required to better expand autologous stem cells for reimplantation to the patient, that is, it works better, even though the exact [non-cellular] factors are not identified.
“Recent evidence supports the model that stem cells in several tissues are largely retained in a quiescent state but can be coaxed back into the cell cycle in response to extracellular cues, even after prolonged periods of dormancy.” Sharpless NE, and DePinho RA, “How stem cells age and why this makes us grow old”, Nature 8:703 (2007).
(4) Amniotic Fluid as the Fountain of Youth
Amniotic Fluid (AF) is the fluid sorrounding the developing infant within the uterus. Like the stem cells harvested from AF for use in therapy, the amniotic fluid is also immune-privileged and can be injected into any patient with no immune consequence or bodily reaction. In fact, AF, is now readily available for use by physicians for therapy at a cost of about $1500 per 1 milliliter injectable solution. Currently, the main use is by orthopedic physicians for injection into joints for pain and as an added beneficial compound to aid recovery in joint surgeries.
An amazing “birth tissue” product, amniotic fluid is sterile and harvested at C-Section by the obstetrician yielding on average 150-300 milliliters (4-10 oz). It is kept frozen, and then, after centrifugation to remove any cells, it is filtered to sterilize and eliminate cellular debris from the final product. The end product shows that amniotic fluid has over 300 cytokines, meaning small molecules involved in the inflammatory response, cell proliferation, angiogeneisis, and epidermal growth factor, all of which contribute to the stimulation and activation of innate stem cell repair functions. “Cytokines” are generally considered a subclass of exozomes, complex small molecules also involved in stem cell stimulation and activation.
Amniotic Fluid is so much better than “young blood” needed for tissue repair as shown in the paired mice experiment. First of all, where are you going to find “young blood”, which theoretically means blood taken from a juvenile 16 years or younger. Moreover, keep in mind that the paired mice were genetically identical, so that blood sharing posed no problem. But you cannot take blood from a 13 year old and give it to somebody else…even with blood grouping and tissue typing the patient would never be safe. But Amniotic Fluid can be transplanted to anyone!
FDA Approved. It should be emphasized that Amniotic Fluid is FDA approved for general use in patients. Consequently, the packaging of AF into a cosmetic cream would pose few, if any, FDA issues. But of course, at $1500/ml just for the AF, that is not quite the price point we were looking for in raw material!!
(5) Cashmere Ingredients
So what is in our amniotic fluid cosmetic facial rejuvenating cream? Only a few ingredients: Amniotic Fluid, a penetrating cream, a stabilizer, and most likely Vitamin C as a preservative. Only a few ingredients, not 30-40 chemicals you find in your typical cosmetic cream. And we expect that our transdermal cream containing amniotic fluid will totally rejuvenate and restore facial glow and skin tone through the activation and stimulation of innate stem cells we already have in our faces that are sitting their and not doing anything. And that will only be the first of the many health benefits that will be obtained from this amazing product. We have already shown, in the bioidentical progesterone model, that the transdermal delivery of a biological compound is superior to oral pills and leads to a steady level of product in the blood stream.
We expect to obtain our amniotic fluid from healthy donors at a modest cost to the obstretician, and to process the product in our own certified lab.
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Bengal Bioscience Inc.
An Alternative Medicine Company
Bengal Bioscience 