The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka
127. Dr. Mink Chawla: Blood Filter Seraph-100 Shows Promise To End Long COVID
Tue, 31 Dec 2024
In this episode, Chief Medical Officer at Exthera Medical and President of Stavro Medical Division, Dr. Mink Chawla, reveals the DARPA-backed breakthrough that's revolutionizing medicine: the Seraph-100 filter. This ingenious device packs the surface area of a football field into something the size of your thumb, creating the ultimate biological "honey trap" for everything from viruses to cancer cells. Is this the future of medicine we've been waiting for? For those interested in learning more about the Long Covid clinical trial, they should contact [email protected]. The Seraph-100 filter is made by Exthera Medical and the co-inventors of the filter are Robert Ward PhD and Keith McCrea PhD. References: Use of the Seraph® 100 Microbind® Affinity Blood Filter in an adolescent patient with disseminated adenoviral disease A Multicenter Evaluation of the Seraph 100 Microbind Affinity Blood Filter for the Treatment of Severe COVID-19 Interim analysis of the COSA (COVID-19 patients treated with the Seraph® 100 Microbind® Affinity filter) registry Seraph-100 hemoperfusion for management of severe COVID-19: Assessment of serum and plasma analytes pre- and post-filtration Hydrogen acts as a therapeutic antioxidant by selectively reducing cytotoxic oxygen radicals Interactions between heparin and SARS-CoV-2 spike glycoprotein RBD from omicron and other variants. Determining the efficacy of ExThera Seraph100 blood filtration in patients diagnosed with pancreatic cancer through the liquid biopsy First-In-Human Rapid Removal of Circulating Tumor Cells in Solid Metastatic Neoplasia by Microbind Affinity Blood Filter Connect with Dr. Mink Chawla: Website LinkedIn Facebook 00:00 Intro of Show 02:33 Dr. Mink Chawla’s Background 04:59 Creation of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration) 10:46 How Seraph 100 Filter and DARPA Technology Have Evolved 18:53 COVID, Removing Virus, and Inflammatory Mediators 19:56 Inflammation as Part of Our Defense System against Infection 24:08 Aging as an Immune-Overload 30:10 17-Year Old Who Had Kidney Transplant and Adenovirus Viremia 34:05 DNA is Retroviral 37:28 Long COVID and Biomarkers 44:09 How Does mRNA Vaccine Work? 51:07 FDA and Its International Harmonization Guidelines 52:42 T-Cell Exhaustion 57:13 Suffering from Long COVID 1:01:37 90% of Cancer Deaths Are From Metastasis 1:05:55 Implications for Longevity and Anti-Aging 1:09:21 Are Studies and Publications on Hydrogen Legit? 1:17:20 Power of Psychedelics 1:19:36 Extending Health Span and Clinical Trials 1:20:34 What Excites and Motivates Dr. Mink Chawla? 1:27:21 Final Question: What does it mean to you to be an “Ultimate Human?” BODY HEALTH - USE CODE “ULTIMATE20” FOR 20% OFF YOUR ORDER BAJA GOLD - 91 ESSENTIAL MINERALS PER PINCH! 10% OFF USE CODE "ULTIMATE10" EIGHT SLEEP - SAVE $350 ON THE POD 4 ULTRA WITH CODE “GARY” ELEVATE YOUR WORKOUTS WITH THE ULTIMATE HUMAN STRENGTH TRAINING EQUIPMENT COLD LIFE - BOOST RECOVERY & WELL-BEING WITH THE ULTIMATE HUMAN PLUNGE WHOOP - GET 1 FREE MONTH WHEN YOU JOIN! MASA CHIPS - GET 20% OFF YOUR FIRST $50+ ORDER PARKER PASTURES - GET PREMIUM GRASS-FED MEATS TODAY Connect with Gary Brecka: Website Instagram YouTube TikTok Facebook X.com LinkedIn The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka Podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical advice, and no doctor/patient relationship is formed. The use of information on this podcast or materials linked from this podcast is at the user’s own risk. The Content of this podcast is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Users should not disregard or delay in obtaining medical advice for any medical condition they may have and should seek the assistance of their health care professionals for any such conditions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Seraph-100 filter and how does it work?
We have certain biologic systems that have enormous redundancy, and inflammation is one of them. Everyone thinks, well, this is such a bad problem, but if you cannot inflame, you die from infection.
Roughly 40% of our DNA is viral, and that lots of pathogens that we catch, they're ones we always had, and when our immune system gets run down, they just rear their ugly head.
Your immune system is getting beaten up and over time it just degrades. And things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all these things which take out our loved ones begin to emerge. Prior to the age of antibiotics, cancer was rare. So cancer is a disease of success.
Sometimes it's a difficult concept for people to really realize that all cancer, regardless of its former origin, was a healthy cell at one time.
If you are a cancer survivor, they don't ever say this, but every morning they wake up and they ask themselves, is today the day my cancer comes back?
if we could filter out and just give the immune system a break.
I was asked to join this DARPA program in 2013. DARPA's singular and enduring mission is to prevent strategic surprise. We want to develop a filter that runs like a dialysis system. We want this device to remove current virus, current fungi, and the future unknown pathogen.
As a physician, scientist, researcher, where do you see this technology five years from today?
What I think is the next most important value proposition scientifically is...
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Chapter 2: What are the implications of the Seraph-100 in treating COVID-19?
So that was a great experience and extraordinary people, extraordinary clinicians and investigators. But the project that sort of led me down to my more dialysis driven days actually started at DARPA. So I sort of had this full academic life. And then I went on to work on this team to develop this drug. And now I'm sort of back into a dialysis.
Chapter 3: How does inflammation relate to our immune system?
I want you to talk about that sequence because it began with a contest, for lack of better words, or a request for proposal, whatever DARPA would call it, to really get ahead of of a pandemic that was coming that wasn't here yet to actually address this pathogen that was going to be in people's bloodstreams that wasn't in their bloodstreams now. Correct.
And again, I'm paraphrasing, that wasn't in their bloodstreams now and filter it out effectively with basically the fewest amount of side effects. That's exactly right.
And it was a wild, wild thing. So I was asked to join this DARPA program and
And for people that don't know what DARPA is.
Oh, thank you. So that's a really good point. So DARPA is the Advanced Research Projects Administration. It was developed after Sputnik. So some of your listeners will not know what Sputnik is. You and I are not going to talk about our age to discuss why we know Sputnik. If you're my age, you know Sputnik. So the Russians basically launched the satellite. The U.S. didn't see it coming.
We were completely surprised by it. DARPA was created in response. DARPA's singular and enduring mission is to prevent strategic surprise. So they get a solid budget and their job is to imagine and dream up what terribleness can come our way and to do projects and research to be prepared for it. So in 2013- We roll into a room. I'm relieved of my electronics.
You go in and a colonel gets up and says, in the future, there will be a pandemic. We will not be prepared. There will be no vaccine. There'll be no drugs. There'll be nothing. And while we're sorting it out, we want to develop a filter that runs like a dialysis system that removes pathogen. And I am looking at this guy.
But you don't know what the pathogen is.
Correct. And so he says, we want this device to remove current virus, current bacteria, current fungi, and the future unknown pathogen. Wow. And Doug Silverstein, who's a very good friend of mine who works at FDA, still works at FDA, was at the meeting with me. And I turned to Doug and I said, this is effing crazy. This will never happen. This is total science fiction. Yeah. But it's cool. Yeah.
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Chapter 4: What is the relationship between aging and immune overload?
That could be a whole separate podcast about that. And we won't do that. And the filter that actually worked to do all that was created. It was emergency use authorized in 2020, and it worked against COVID, and it worked as advertised, not surprisingly, initially largely deployed at our military facilities. So Walter Reed, BAMSE in San Antonio,
Eisenhower, Tripler, I mean, all our big centers, Bethesda Naval, et cetera. And it worked wonderfully. And we are now learning about all the other things this filter can take out, which is hugely important and valuable. But much of this has been serendipity. And I have said for a very long time that great technology teaches science.
And so we are letting this tech teach us, to be really honest, for much of the journey.
I mean, I think it's fascinating for me, like this, just this right now, present time in science, in aging, in mortality, in longevity, bio-optimization, whatever you want to call it. It's such an exciting time. I see, you know, there are a few big innovations, artificial intelligence, which manipulates 700 trillion independent variables and creates an actionable result.
Early detection, you know, we're now talking about, you know, at stage zero for cancers, where we talked about stage one, if you catch it early, and this is like pre-stage one. And so this combination of early detection, artificial intelligence, big data, I do feel like the regulatory market is woefully behind and is going to have a very difficult time keeping up with the pace of innovation.
I agree. Right? Because we've built a whole medical system on the backs of randomized clinical trials, which are five-year, eight-year, 10-year trials. And then animal studies, then controlled human trials, and then launch. And usually it's three, four, five, six, seven years before we- launch something, and then we go, oh, we made a mistake. And the failure rate's high.
Yeah, and the failure rate's high, and we're 20 years down the road. That's right. That's exactly right. And so the cycle, in my opinion, is just being vastly compressed. But I think it's fascinating. First of all, your background as an intensive care unit physician and also having a nephrology concentration because, or nephrology expertise because the kidney is the great filter of the body.
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Chapter 5: What are the potential benefits of the Seraph-100 for long COVID patients?
And it can be our best friend or our worst enemy depending on how healthy it is.
And so,
This is getting a window into your brain. You must have automatically been thinking filtration. How do I filter out the bad and still leave the good? That's right. So it can't just be size. That's right. Because size alone is going to take a lot of things out of our plasma and our bloodstream.
that yes, could be pathogenic, but by the time you get down to the size of a pathogen, a virus, well, now you've already eliminated platelets and red blood cells and all kinds of immune cells and natural killers. So you can't just, you know, when you think about this kind of filtration, It's got to be so multifactorial because it's not as simple as people think about air filtration.
Okay, the smaller I make the hole, first I catch cat hairs, and then I catch dust, and then I catch mites, and then I catch viruses. We can't do that in the blood. That's exactly right. And so how did this... technology evolve for you?
Yeah. So what's really interesting is that in medicine, since the development of antibiotics largely, we are allopathic physicians. So we go to a lot of training, usually around 10 years on average, you know, post-grad, four years of medical school residency. We are the most advanced drug pushers in the history of the world. We're very good at it. And we know how to dial in drugs.
But 98% of physicians, we add things. We give medication. We give things to you. There's only two specialties that remove. Surgeons and nephrologists. Wow. Right. Because we take things out. Now, surgeons do it with a knife. Right. And it makes sense. Like hack out a tumor. Good. We want that. That's fantastic. Take out a certain part of the brain that's infection tissue. Totally.
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Chapter 6: How do mRNA vaccines function in the body?
So nephrologists, since the advent of dialysis, which was in 1944, 45, we spent a lot of time thinking about how do I take things out of the body and leave the good stuff? And we have had a very long period of time of working with different materials that upset the blood less. Blood is not meant to interact with plastic. It does not like it. And in the early days of dialysis, we would wait...
to put people on dialysis because the membranes were bio-incompatible. So the blood would see this surface and it would hate it. It would get inflamed, complement, coagulation. Very bad things would begin to happen. White cells would get activated. They would become inflammatory. So you... had a very rough risk benefit equation.
So you're benefiting them by taking out their kidney toxins, but you're eating a lot of harm for that patient. And so it wasn't a great place to be. Around the 1980s, 1990s, in the dialysis world, we moved to new materials that were biocompatible and things began to get a lot better.
But all dialysis systems, apheresis systems, they, as you point out quite correctly, use size exclusion to do their job. So an air filter is a good example of size exclusion. A coffee filter, coffee grounds from coffee. Penne from pasta with a colander. These are all size exclusion devices. Right. This device, the Serif 100 that was developed in the DARPA program, used a very different idea.
And they used a concept called surface affinity. So instead of taking blood and saying, okay, big things go through, small things will take out. They use a different concept. So I want you to imagine all of us, you know, adult humans have about five liters of blood in our bodies. That's a gallon jug plus about 25% more, right? Okay. So you take out someone's blood. We would not do this.
This is very uncool. But you take all the blood out of someone's body and you pour it on a kitchen table that's at about a 5% incline.
Okay.
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Chapter 7: What role does the FDA play in medical innovations?
And you allow all that blood to roll across that surface. You collect it. put it back into the patient's body. That is conceptually what this procedure is. Now, the surface of this filter is made up of a very special surface. And that surface looks like a wheat field during harvest time. All these little projections sticking up.
Like the endothelium, like the glycocalyx.
Exactly. So this is identical to the inner lining of our blood vessels, the endothelial glycocalyx. And so it's very biocompatible because- This is what the blood just came from. It came from an endothelial glycocalyx area, and now it's seeing a glycocalyx, so it doesn't get upset. So this surface is very biocompatible.
Now, the initial insight was that Staph aureus, a very nasty bug that's on all of us, was attracted to this surface. This surface is made up of heparin. So for the medically literate folks, this is the same heparin that you use to treat someone with a blood clot, but it's not being used in the same way. It's on the surface. So heparin-coated devices, the heparin is laid down like latex.
In this surface, the heparin is projected up, so it looks just like our glycocalyx.
Wow.
So our glycol calyx is made of heparan sulfate, H-E-P-E-R-A-N. This is H-E-P-E-R-I-N, but structurally they're identical.
Wow.
So the initial DARPA program was, hey, it tends to attract... Bugs, pathogens. So let's use it. What we've come to understand is why so many pathogens attach to this. So it started with staph and gram-negative bugs like Klebsiella and Pseudomonas, and then COVID hit. And this device binds the COVID virus.
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Chapter 8: How can the Seraph-100 filter contribute to cancer treatment?
And I don't think that people really realize how much the immune system does on a daily basis that is not directly fighting the invaders. That's right. You know, just cleaning up our own senescent cells. Surveillance. Yeah, surveillance.
Surveillance is hard. Surveillance is a lot of work to go around and check everything every day and make sure everything is good and something is bad to pull it out and get rid of it.
Yeah. And so do you subscribe to this podcast? theory on aging that amongst other things, it is the immune system's inability or progressively weakening ability to defend itself on so many fronts. There's just so many things in our blood that it's got to worry about.
Oh, I think that's very right. And I think that a good example of this is prior to the age of antibiotics, cancer was rare. So cancer, not exclusively, but largely is a disease of success. You didn't live long enough to get cancer. Before the age of antibiotics, the average people's lives were like 40. And people would die with cancer, but they didn't die of cancer.
So the immune system can get overwhelmed by bacteria. But now with antibiotics, it has all these other responsibilities and clearing senescent cells, getting rid of precancerous cells. But now it is getting inundated with, at least in America, a major food problem. This ultra processed food thing is a disaster. I am very late to this.
Anyone who's watching this who knows me is like, mink is... This is the tasty... He would eat tasty cakes and Diet Coke on rounds. He's telling us. On rounds. No. In the ICU. Anyone who saw me on rounds at the GW ICU knew I would go through three or four Diet Cokes on rounds. I would be eating horrible food.
These are all bad habits we pick up in our, and I'm not defending any of it, but it's taken me a very long time.
too long frankly to come around to this insight but your immune system is getting beaten up and over time it just degrades right and that degradation is harmed by metabolic diseases diabetes you know all the stuff that comes with obesity it comes along with not being fit lack of muscle mass that heart so all these things which you are a huge proponent of oxidative stress
All these things wear against the immune system and the gaps and the defense begin to open up and things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all these things which take out our loved ones begin to emerge. And so I totally agree with this general thesis and I think there are concrete things we can do about it.
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