Can Herbal Solutions Replace Triple Anticoagulants for Microclots in Long COVID? w/ Keith Ellis, PhD

Can Herbal Solutions Replace Triple Anticoagulants for Microclots in Long COVID? w/ Keith Ellis, PhD

00:00

Welcome back to the EnergyMD podcast. My name is Evan Hirsch, and we help you resolve your long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome so that you can get back to living your best life. If you've heard me speak before, you know I talk a lot about the toxic five that are at the root cause of everything. It's a combination of heavy metals, chemicals, molds, infections, and nervous system dysfunction. So I'm really excited because today we're gonna be talking with a scientist, an actual PhD who has studied long COVID.

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His name is Keith Ellis, and let's learn a little bit about him. So Dr. Keith Ellis is a scientist and associate professor of medicinal chemistry that is dedicating his time, energy, and talents to helping people recover from long COVID. He's using his knowledge, expertise, and experience in medicinal chemistry, pharmacology, and natural products to research the biological mechanisms that cause long COVID and the potential therapeutic mechanisms that can help people recover.

01:03

Combining the scientific work with his interest in entrepreneurship, he has designed and brought to market all custom formulated natural product supplement to help people recover from long COVID that we're going to go into today. And in 2023, he founded Science Driven Supplements and launched its first product, which is called CirqueGuard, a natural herbal supplement to help people recover from long COVID microclots. So Dr. Ellis and his supplement line are committed to creating custom formulated solutions for people with long COVID.

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that are safe, inexpensive, accessible for everyone without a doctor's prescription and available right now. In parallel with his long COVID research and work as founder of science-driven supplements, Dr. Ellis serves as an associate professor of medicinal chemistry, conducting academic research and early lead discovery in the oncology field and teaching organic and medicinal chemistry to graduate students, professional students, and undergraduates. Dr. Ellis, thanks so much for joining me today.

02:02

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, awesome. So it's so your field was in the oncology, right? So then how did how did all this stuff about long COVID happen? How did you start that research? Sure, sure. So I am so in medicinal chemistry, people come to it from a variety of backgrounds. OK, so my actual original training is as a purely as an organic chemist. And when I was in grad school, I did.

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total synthesis of natural products. So I very much come out of the natural products background and then moving into medicinal chemistry using those as starting points for lead discovery for new pharmaceutical drugs. That was kind of my path into medicinal chemistry. And coming to it more from the straight organic chemistry side, I think of myself as a little bit disease agnostic. And I treat all disease states

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mechanistically. Like I want to understand the mechanism of biological systems in a disease state because that's ultimately how you make drugs is you have to understand molecular level details of the disease state and then you can come up with new modulators to fix things and treat diseases. So when I started my career, I actually started out in antibacterials and oncology and kind of over the years when more into oncology and listen to antibacterials it came it became

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a less well-researched, less well-funded area in academia, and I kind of moved with the trend. And so that's what I'd been doing up until 2023. And I looked around, I met some people with long COVID, and I started talking to them because they were asking me questions because they knew I was a medicinal chemist. I teach at a school of pharmacy, right? So I teach pharmacy students and graduate students.

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They were asking me about various medications, remedies, both prescription and over the counter because I had both those backgrounds. And it was very clear from talking to all of them that there was not a whole lot out there to help people recover from long COVID. And it just, it kind of, it tweaked the radar, right? It was one of those like, you know, I wanted to see what's out there because, you know, it was 2023, long COVID had been around for a while. We seemed to have a handle.

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on how to treat acute COVID infections. see we're good at developing antivirals. We've been doing that for a long time. So the acute COVID infection and managing that and then getting drugs developed for that is a known path. But then long COVID started being a problem and nobody seemed to quite know what to do with it. So I went into literature to kind of say, take a look and say, well, let's get started on this. People are suffering. There's doesn't seem to be a lot of products out there to help them.

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at all. at that point, there were no, there were no products that were really designed based on biological mechanisms of long COVID to help them something specific that wasn't pre existing and used for other things before, before COVID. So that's, that's where I started the adventure and it went a very interesting direction. I tried to start a normal academic project, and then it spun into something that's completely not in very different

05:25

Nice. so how did, so it sounds like with the oncology and then the transition into antibacterials, it's kind of a lock and key mechanism or it's a, you're kind of, you know, destroying different parts of the bacteria. And so is that, well, I guess, so the next step was then you went to the literature and what did you find? So I went into the COVID literature and the long COVID literature the way I do

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for an antibacterial project or an oncology projects, I'm always looking for mechanisms and I'm looking for what we call molecular targets, right? We know if we want to really treat a disease, we have to find a specific protein or another biological molecule that either isn't behaving correctly, it's not functioning correctly and we have to correct that, or the fact that it's functioning in the disease state like cancer or an infection.

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we have to stop that protein from functioning to stop the disease, to stop the infection, to stop the tumor. So I went into the literature looking for that kind of information. It's what you and I would call pathophysiology, right? Looking for the detailed mechanisms of what's going on biologically with the disease state in the human body and what kind of mechanisms the disease affects and how long COVID affects the body.

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and causes it to do things it shouldn't. And then that lets you ask the question, well, how do we correct that? How do we change that? How do we actually treat the disease and restore people to health? So those were the initial questions. That was the initial approach I took. Going into literature. And I spent a long time in literature and I'm looking around and I kind of got to the end of it all. And I had kind of two reactions. One was kind of that reaction you get when you look at something, you're like, that's it. That's all.

07:20

That's all we got. Right. That was the first reaction. What was that? We didn't really have a whole lot, which was surprising because I knew how much money grant money, particularly in academia, how many papers were being published. Like a lot of work was being done. But looking at the entire body of literature, it's like, well, we're not really focusing on the important questions to do things quickly, to try to address the disease and actually help people. Right. Because developing a drug

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takes 10 to 15 years from when you start. That's kind of the accepted life cycle for what you need from the time you start developing a drug to the time it really can get handed to a patient and dispense the pharmacy. So that aspect of it, that there was a lack of urgency in the literature and somewhat of a lack of focus, kind of made me a little mad. It made me angry because, and this is where

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I guess spending so much time in oncology kind of influenced me. The push now in oncology when you're doing everything is absolutely push forward as fast as humanly possible to get things done. When you've got a new target, you want to move fast, you want to push it fast, you want to fail fast, but you also want to succeed fast. And there's a sense of urgency to really help people. And from what I saw in the literature,

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that was kind of lacking. were kind of doing things at the normal speed of science, right, pre-COVID, where it was going to take years to even accumulate the body of literature needed to actually start coming up with therapeutics to help people. And the couple of people I got to that had long COVID were really suffering, like, you know, really low energy. Some days could barely get out of bed, couldn't work, couldn't...

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couldn't spend time with their families, couldn't spend time with their kids. You know, we're really being robbed of having a life. And that's when I decided to kind of start asking some different questions with more of that urgency.

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And so what were the next steps? So I basically went back to literature. said, OK, we have a limited amount of scientific information right now about one COVID. We have to accept that. So I asked the question, which is an unusual question, I think, for an academic to ask, is, well, what can we do right now with the available information to move forward and actually help people sooner rather than later?

10:02

So I went back and looked through everything with just that different mindset, asking the different question. And that's what brought me to really some of the good investigations of biological mechanisms that have been done with long COVID, what is known about microclots and how they seem to be one of the root causes and really drive the long COVID disease state.

10:27

And those started offering microclots and that avenue started offering places where I thought we could make inroads and make them fairly quickly to really start helping people. So is that the main focus of the product and the those herbs that you found was really a focus on the microclots? Yeah, so I kind of did a deep dive on the whole microclot hypothesis, which is basically that in long COVID.

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One of the driving mechanisms of long COVID is you do have spike protein hanging around from viral reservoirs and that the body can't clear it because the immune system is not completely working correctly, right, to completely clear spike protein. And that spike protein causes misfolding of clotting proteins that results in these microclots. And then that the all of the or the majority of the symptoms of long COVID

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are downstream effects of microclots causing inflammation in the circulatory system, inflammation in the blood vessels, and then immune effects and having an impact on things like being able to get tissue oxygenation and delivery of oxygen by red blood cells. All that goes downstream from actually these microclots as a causative mechanism.

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I kind of did a deep dive on those. asked the questions I would typically ask, which again, I always approach problems as a chemist. So I like really kind of more rigorous levels of data that we tend to use in chemistry to say, okay, yeah, that's really what's going on. So the body of literature on microclots is actually very good. There are ways to detect them, but unfortunately there's no clinical tests for them.

12:19

Right? The only tests available are in a research laboratory. You've got to use a fluorescence microscope. They're not anything high through product that have been validated for clinical use. So, but you can detect them, and there have been studies done to show how they form and what's going on with them. And then there was some information in the literature on the team that put together the microclot hypothesis.

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did a small study with a group of patients with an experimental therapeutic. And that was kind of the jumping off point for thinking about really starting to help people, but with a little bit of a twist of moving away from pharmaceuticals and more back to natural compounds. Okay, so it seems like, so that research on mycoclots really revealed to you, okay, so this seems to be like a big deal now.

13:16

Was was Michael Klotz also a big deal with stars Kobe one?

13:23

Uh, it's curious. It's all right if you don't know the question, but i'm just you know i'm always curious about like what can we learn from previous? You know the viruses or saras cov1 and so um I I don't know that it was ever looked at in that context But there has been work shown that micro these micro clouds which again they're they're caused by the misfolding of fibrinogen, which is the main clotting protein and then they

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that misfolded protein is the real bad actor and it polymerizes and makes big sticky microclots that grab onto lots of things, including red blood cells and activate platelets. There's data in the literature about the role of microclots and that they're seen in things like take two diabetes and in ME-CFS and several other of those diseases we now think of as the viral reactivation.

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type diseases. So there's been work showing that they are observed in people with those disorders. But I don't know that anybody ever looked at SARS-CoV-1 with it. Yeah, that's fine. And so then, did you find, how did you formulate this? So then I guess what happened next? You have

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You have this understanding, you now are thinking, okay, microclots is a potential mechanism of action that we can go to disrupt this misfolding of the fibroidin protein. What do you do next? So the main investigators that were working on the microclot hypothesis, they ran a small clinical study. It was like 90 long COVID patients. And they gave them a therapeutic cocktail that's called triple anticoagulant therapy. So it's actually three anticoagulants together. And

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it was really nice work that they did and they got about an 80 % recovery rate from long COVID. like said, I'm a chemist, I like good data. They actually measured microclots in people before and after. And the people, everybody had microclots beforehand. And then the people that recovered their microclots were going. So that's the kind of evidence I like to see in those kinds of studies.

15:33

But there were, there's a couple issues with triple anticoagulant, pharmaceutical triple anticoagulant therapy. There's a couple issues with it. One is it hasn't got the best safety profile in the world. So it's three anticoagulants together. That's powerful. Usually physicians don't like to give you more than one anticoagulant at a time. And they're careful with those, right? Cause there's a significant safety risk of excess bleeding if you have any kind of bleed.

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there's a real safety concern with triple-ended coagulant therapy, which I think is completely valid. Because of that safety concern and because it's new and there's not a whole lot of data on it, the physicians were reluctant to prescribe it. So when I went to literature and I found this study and I found triple-ended coagulant therapy, I went to all the long COVID people and I was like, this problem's solved. Why aren't you guys just on this therapeutic and getting better? And what they told me is the physicians won't prescribe it.

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either because they really are worried about the safety concerns or they don't feel there's enough evidence-based research on it yet. There's not a clinical trial on it. All of which from the chair of the physician, I get, I understand that. So that was an obstacle. And then the third obstacle is one of the drugs in there, Pixaban, Eloquist, is really expensive. And even if they could get a script, the insurance companies wouldn't always cover it.

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So it would be an expensive out of pocket cost. For some people, even if they could get the prescription, because of course those drugs aren't approved for treatment of long COVID, that gets into all those insurance issues in that world. And then the last one I heard from just a couple of people that was novel and new to me was that even if they could get the prescription, even if they could get insurance to pay for it, sometimes the pharmacist would refuse to fill it the way they did with ivermectin during.

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So that was all of that together. I was like, well, okay. And looking at the data and what was in the scientific literature, the thought that I had was what we really need is a safe, over the counter, affordable version of triple in a coagulant therapy, which of course, if that's the bar you're trying to hit, just the over the counter means you're pivoting more into

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the natural products into the herbal remedies into the supplement space. So that was why I ended up going that direction because that seemed to be the best way to meet the need, especially in the immediate future, without taking 10 to 15 years to develop a new drug for long COVID. So that's what started that direction. then that was an interesting road that I went down that actually turned out to work pretty well.

18:25

Yeah, I'm excited to get more into that. You we include natural anticoagulant therapy in our program for long COVID, but we're doing fish oils and natto kinase, know, bromelain, lumbrachinase, some of these, which are fibrinolytic, so they digest fiber. But you're doing different ones. So you're doing ones that I'm not really familiar with. So pick us down that path. Why did you choose these products?

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I mentioned earlier, I was originally trained as a natural products chemist, right? And I started my career. The strategy in medicinal chemistry was always you start with a natural product and you use that to find the target and the mechanism and then you take it and you modify it and eventually it becomes the drug. You simplify it, you change the structure, you optimize it. But a lot of drugs that we have and still use in the clinic.

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are either natural products or they were inspired by a natural product as a starting point. And I teach that every year to the students still, right? So the thought process I had was, well, I know these pharmaceutical drugs help break down the microclots because there's this clinical data. And I know they have specific mechanisms of action. What if I reverse the process I normally do? And instead of starting with natural products to make a drug, what if I start with the pharmaceutical drugs and reverse engineer them into natural

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And that's basically what I did. And the way you reverse engineer them is through what we call the mechanisms of action of the drugs. So the mechanism of action is basically what's that molecular target? What's that protein in the body that that drug is binding to and in some way modulating the function of to act as an anticoagulant, right? So, and then, so I took that information for each drug and said, okay, well,

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let me go find a natural ingredient that has that same mechanism of action, that same biological target. It binds to the same protein in the body and inhibits it. But the natural products tend to be a little less potent, which is why they're safer, right? And they have a better profile. They came out of nature. So a lot of them are super safe. People have been taking them for a long time. So it made a lot of sense to do it that way. So

20:50

Turbulent coagulant therapy really has three components in it that are the anticoagulants. It's got a Pixaban, it's got low-dose aspirin, and it's got clopetogrel. So a Pixaban is what we call a factor 10A inhibitor. Factor 10A is one of the enzymes in what we call the coagulation cascade. It's one of the enzymes directly responsible for making blood clots when you cut yourself, right? So Pixaban's a factor 10A inhibitor. I went in the literature.

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said, okay, gonna, basically pulled every molecule, every natural product I could find, was supposedly an anticoagulant and started really drilling down into water mechanisms of action. Turns out that turmeric, the curcumin in turmeric is a factor 10A inhibitor. So that's what went into the formula. And I did that for basically all three of these. So pixaban is factor 10A inhibitor. We put, turmeric in the formula for that. Lodose aspirin, it's a,

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COX1 and 2 inhibitor, that's an enzyme involved in inflammation. And it also is involved in platelet hyperactivation, which is how that kind of interacts with the microclots. White willow bark extract is a natural COX1, 2 inhibitor. It's the kind of the natural version of aspirin, right? And then the third component of clopidogrel, that was the one that was a little more difficult.

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That's a P2Y1, P2Y12 receptor antagonist on platelets. And results in a lot of platelet hyperactivation that really drives coagulation. And it took a little doing, but I did find there's a component from traditional Chinese medicine called Danxin. It's got a couple of compounds in it that are natural products that are actually

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in a very recent, very well done scientific study, were shown to directly be inhibitors of PTY1 and PTY12. So the Dan Chen is the replacement for the clopidogrel. So I put all those together in there. Anybody that takes turmeric will normally see there's some black pepper extract or bioperine in there that helps with bioavailability.

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of the turmeric and the curcumin active ingredient to make sure it doesn't get metabolized too fast. So that's in there. And then I really wanted to do something to help people with fatigue because it's like the number one symptom. Everybody with long COVID really fights. So I put in some beetroot extract to help with tissue oxygenation and help drive better oxygen delivery from the tissues using nitric oxide generated from beetroot extract.

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So that's how I kind of put the whole thing together. So it was one of those, I added the absolute minimum of everything you had to replicate triple N-Aquaglant therapy plus one thing to help boost people's oxygenation and hopefully help with the fatigue. Nice. I love your thinking on this. And so obviously the natural products are weaker. Do you have a sense of to what degree?

24:09

you know, are the prescriptions 100 times stronger, 50 times stronger? Do you have a sense? So that's a complex question. The question is a sense in what system? So you can look at the biochemical IC50s and, you know, I'd have to go back and really check them. There's probably between 100 and thousand fold difference in the inhibition IC50s in like a biochemical.

24:38

assay, but really once you go in the body and you're dealing not only with kind of on target actual binding and inhibition numbers, what we would call pharmacodynamics, you're also dealing with the pharmacokinetic aspect of how well is it being absorbed? How fast is it being metabolized? All of those types of things. So it's really difficult to kind of one-to-one them like that without doing more of that kind of a clinical study.

25:08

to really understand that. they are less potent, but at the same time, what's unknown in kind of in any way in the literature is exactly how strong of an anticoagulant you need to break up microclots. Because actually what's going on with the microclots with using even with using triple anticoagulant therapy, whether it's pharmaceutical or the natural version.

25:38

is you are kind of throttling back the ability to form blood clots a little bit. And what that's doing is it's giving the body more time to naturally clear the microclots. So one of the interesting things with microclots is they are not processed and broken down as rapidly as a normal natural clot, right? Because they're in this unnatural conformation, they're an unnatural protein structure in the body.

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the normal proteins that break down clots and break them down quickly don't process the microclots and break them down as fast. So overall, what the triple anticoagulant therapy is doing is it's slowing down all of the coagulation on more global scale to give the body time and ability to clear the microclots more naturally. And I think that's...

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the rational, the mechanistic rationale for why that would work, again, whether it's pharmaceutical or natural. So what's, what's unknown and I don't know that we would ever really know it without doing the full on clinical study with a larger, with the large patient population is how much of slowing down that coagulation is enough to clear the microclots. Cripple anticoagulant therapy is probably way too much because you probably don't need to do it

27:04

do it that hardcore to get people better. But those are the only pharmaceuticals we have are the really strong anticoagulants. So the natural ingredients do seem to work. And I basically tell people to just be on them, to expect to be on them for longer, right? Because they're going to take a longer amount of time to help clear the microplots from the body.

27:28

So the idea is about making less clots. So there's the clots that are already there, the body is breaking them down, but it's constantly making more of these microclots. And so what your product is doing in these herbs, they're inhibiting the production of microclots. Exactly, yeah. And one of the really kind of bad things about microclots that there's data in the literature for is that they're...

27:54

So the spike protein is definitely the bad actor that initially forms the microclots, but there's data in literature that shows that they're like self-catalyzing. So one microclot can actually cause the creation of another one, even in the absence of spike protein. So it's, and that puts you in a situation where you can completely clear spike protein. But if you haven't actually addressed the microclots, they're not only going to stick around, they're potentially self-propagating.

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and it's going to continue to be a problem going forward, even if you've actually addressed any spike protein issues. So what do you think about the use of the natural fiber analytics like natokinase and lumbrokinase to digest the microclots? I have not seen a whole lot of data that those work that well on the microclots, right? They seem to work well for a lot of people, particularly for spike protein. And there's data in the literature.

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that those do work. So I think I would love to see some data on that, because I think it's a really interesting question. I tend to approach it from a very almost functional outcome point of view of if natokinase, limber kinase, bromelain, if all of those did as good a job as FiberLinux as they needed to, to both get rid of spike protein

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and break down micro clocks, people with long COVID would take all that and probably get better, or a majority of them would. And that doesn't seem to be what happens because we see that all of, any one of those or even all of them together helps some people some, helps some people not much, helps some people completely recover, right? So it appears to be multiple outcomes from just taking those.

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which is why I wanted to create something that was a different mechanism of action to use in parallel to help address the microclots specifically. Yeah, that makes sense. I just pulled up a study that I had read a while back on lumbril kinase and microclots. It looks like there was a Dr. David Cutrino at Mount Sinai.

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who had done some research on it to assess micro clot levels and symptom changes. And it looks like it was exhibiting some fibrinolytic activity that was enabling it to break down the fibrin-rich microclots. I just wonder about that combination of trying to digest those microclots at the same time as utilizing kind of like what you're talking about in terms of slowing down the production of new clotting.

30:45

Well, I actually think that's the ideal strategy, right? Is to do both at the same time, right? So if you can slow down new microclots from forming and then at the same time speed up and help the body by processing and breaking down the existing microclots faster, that's like the ideal situation I think to get better as quickly as possible.

31:08

Yeah, and think it's interesting clinically, you know, I see people take the triple antibiotic therapy or they're doing these natural things like we're talking about. And like you said, some people get better, some people it doesn't make a difference. Some people oftentimes get worse because some of these things are also operating as biofilm disruptors and they release other infections. And I really think, I mean, I talk about the toxic five, you know, where there's heavy metals, chemicals, molds and other infections that end up hijacking the immune system.

31:37

And consequently, you can get rid of all the clots in the world. But if there's still spike protein and there's other infections and there's toxins that are floating around the body that are not allowing the immune system to function correctly, I feel like sometimes the spike protein is the straw that breaks the camel's back. Consequently, know, the micro clots, you know, maybe half or, you know, 90 % of the whole picture for some people. And sometimes it might be a smaller picture. What do you think of that theory? No, I think that's absolutely because

32:07

because what I seem to have kind of observed in all the long COVID people that I've talked to, it's like something else almost had to be wrong beforehand in order to end up with long COVID, right? If you didn't have really any health issues beforehand, then you're likely gonna recover from COVID and not get long COVID. But if you look at the of the patient subpopulations in long COVID,

32:35

One of the ones that really shocked me when I really started seeing it a lot was there's a significant subpopulation along COVID people that were like high performance athletes before they got COVID. And the thinking there is that the high performance athlete lifestyle was hard on the immune system and kind of depleted the energetic system. And then they got COVID and

33:03

those systems already being under stress and depleted are kind of a contributing factor to them, making them vulnerable to get long COVID once the spike protein came into play. It's the same thing for people that had other kind of immune issues, especially auto, there's a lot of people long COVID that had an autoimmune disease beforehand where the immune system wasn't really functioning correctly, it was out of balance. And then,

33:32

getting COVID and bringing the spike protein in kind of shifted things. And it was like you said, the straw that broke the camel's back. I absolutely think heavy metals, molds, and other infections that people talk now about West Nile and any CFS and Lyme disease, all of those, think, make people much more vulnerable to the bad activities of the spike protein.

34:01

and I think contribute to a disproportionate amount of people with those types of issues having long COVID or long COVID like symptoms. Yeah, well said. I think that the other thing that I've noticed about the high performance athlete is that oftentimes they went back to exercise too soon. And I think that part of that might have been kind of like they're asking a lot of their mitochondria and

34:31

and the spike protein is in the mitochondria and then all of sudden it just starts replicating. It's using the DNA and the mitochondria just replicate like crazy. I don't know if that's the case, but it's been really interesting to see that. And I do agree. mean, a lot of people are like, I was fine before I got long COVID and oftentimes they weren't, or at least they had these things under the surface and they just didn't realize it. They're like, yeah, maybe I got a little bit of anxiety, a little bit of body pain. Maybe I'm a little bit tired, nothing that's out of the ordinary for the...

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average human these days, they just didn't realize that that was enough to kind of put them at risk. Do you see a lot of long COVID patients that have issues like anxiety and depression and those types of issues? We are, yeah. And there was one study of 265,000 people. They looked at an electronic medical record. And for those people, six months after they got COVID, 35 % of them had a new mental health diagnosis. Yeah.

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And then, that's one of the other interesting things about microclots and serotonin. So microclots lead to platelet hyperactivation. And one of the largest internal stores in the body of serotonin are platelets. So, and when you act hyperactivate platelets, they dump all their serotonin. And it actually prolonged platelet hyperactivation leads to serotonin depletion.

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which contributes to depression and anxiety and a lot of those other mental health type issues. there's, is, and this, these were the things that would, why when I looked at microclots, I was like, okay, there's, there's something here because it explains way too much. It's way too, too centrally tied a mechanism to not have at least some of this be absolutely going on and causing some of the clinical issues.

36:22

Well, and it probably harkens back to your oncology days, right? Because that's a hypercoagulable state. I mean, how many other conditions have microclots or significant hypercoagulation that is playing a big role in symptomatology? Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. Super cool. then, OK, so you create the formula. And then how do you test it? How do you get it out there? What kind of results have you seen?

36:47

So, you know, that was that was kind of an adventure and that led me more kind of into the entrepreneurial space, right? Because all of sudden it's like, well, OK, this is a supplement. Got to go make a supplement now. So we started a company and fortunately, this is one of the places where it was nice being a chemist and having that background because I was able to look at manufacturers and being like, OK, you guys are a good manufacturer. You're using good manufacturing practices. You're doing quality control. You're testing the ingredients like you're doing everything you're supposed to be doing, right?

37:17

So went through that whole process and got a batch of it made. And from the work that I had been doing, kind of publishing a lot of what I looked at on the micro clock hypothesis, I published a lot of it on Substack. And I made videos on kind of the written work on Substack that I put up on TikTok and on YouTube. And that helped me build a small audience of long COVID people.

37:46

that have long COVID and yeah, I kind of just released the product and I said, okay, I made it. Here it is. Here's what's in it. Here's why it should work. This is the best I got right now. This is the best science can do right now with what's in the literature. And I had some very nice people that did buy it and I had some people get real results very quickly. So there's a large number of people that have taken it and it helps with the fatigue.

38:16

It helps with the brain fog. It helps them actually get back to being functional in life. They tell me it helps with the joint pain and the headaches. I've even had people go as far as telling me it helps with the dysautonomia, which I consider one of the more advanced symptoms that I was like, I don't know. It's a natural product. I don't know if it's going to quite quite get there. But yeah, and I've got some stories from people in my audience where there's one woman.

38:45

Her video is the one that really hit me because she basically said in the video that she made that she could actually go back to being a parent to her kids again and being primary caregiver to her kids instead of spending most of her day in bed. So there have been people that are getting really good results with it. I'm one of those people, I try to always do things for the right reasons and I flat out tell people, I was like, in my ideal world,

39:15

you take it for like three to six months and then you stop taking it because you're better, right? Because the idea with the microclot hypothesis is if this is what's going on, once you clear the microclots, you should be better, right? And as long as you've also cleared all the spike protein and don't have viral reservoirs on board, then you should actually be able to fully recover from long COVID. So it's not something that's designed to...

39:44

be taken forever and turn long COVID into just a chronic condition. Nice. And so then what are the next steps in terms of clinical studies? What do you see as, it something that you're able to do from where you sit? Or is it the kind of thing you need to reach out to practitioners like me and do a trial or where you are with that? Honestly, need to, it's more trying to reach out to

40:12

to practitioners like you to do trials. I actually have a non-functional medical physician that I've talked to. She actually bought a whole bunch. She's doing the trial on herself and a couple members of her family. And she's actually doing all the testing and everything else to see what it really helps with. she's gonna share that with me and share that with her audience. And I looked briefly at the, had the thought of trying to really do a clinical trial.

40:42

It's a little daunting both from the regulatory point of view and from the cost point of view. It's kind of prohibitively expensive because I don't have any funding for this. I kind of done this all on my own. The company is struggling and trying to support itself so I can help people. And I'm happy to do any studies that I can but

41:10

Our medical system isn't really set up to do large scale trials on supplements without significant financial investment from somewhere. And that's really, it's one of the downsides of the system. And a lot of times people don't want to do trials on supplements anyway, right? Because like for this one in particular, there's no IP protection on it. I didn't, I didn't.

41:36

I didn't patent anything. I didn't really feel like there was anything to patent. So in more of the pharmaceutical space, everybody would look at it be like, well, there's no money in it. Why would I do it? Which is the attitude that also really makes me angry because it's the same reason that pharmaceutical industry is not eager to really help long COVID and do it with any kind of urgency.

42:04

And so how long are you finding that people need to take the product for in order to get results? Those who are getting results? Generally, people are taking it for three to six months. It kind of depends on how severe their long COVID is when they're starting. Obviously, the more severe it is, the longer they have to take it. And it helps if they do take it with natokinase, lumbar kinase, another of those types of fibrolidic compounds.

42:32

And it also depends on kind of what else they have going on health wise. Cause that's, that's one of the really bad things about long COVID is it seems to be putting people into this downward spiral where they have other things go wrong medically, um, that make it really hard to, to recover. But I would say most people are taking it, um, maybe closer to six months, but they're seeing real results and it's actually helping them be functional in their daily life in a way that other things aren't helping them. Nice.

43:02

And is it two capsules a day? It is, yeah. So one bottle is a 30 day supply. There's 60 capsules in the bottle. It's two a day. Now I will say when I first rolled it out, I had a lot of people ask me, how many can I take in a day if I want to get better faster? So I know there are people that have taken more than the recommended dose. I told people to be careful, but because of the capsule size and not wanting to make it too hard for people to take,

43:30

and balancing the multiple ingredients in it. If you look just at like the turmeric in there, there's like 400 milligrams of organic turmeric in the formula. You can go on Amazon and buy like 2000 milligram a day capsules of turmeric. So people can take multiple doses. I try to tell them not to take more than one or two multiples of the daily dose to get better faster. But yeah, the recommended is

43:58

two capsules a day, that's a 30 day supply to help people get better. Yeah, and they're natural products. So you know, the risk is obviously going to be less than the triple antibiotic therapy, but the mechanisms of action are still the same. But yeah, like you said, they're natural. And oftentimes, you know, inherently built into herbs are something to manage any sort of side effects that that might show up. That's great. Yeah, I think it's it'll be interesting to see. Hopefully you do get

44:27

some funding and are able to do some research to see what is the therapeutic dose. Is it capsules a day? Is it four capsules a day? Is it two, three times a day? That'll definitely be interesting to see. But yeah, I really appreciate the work that you've done on this. You've definitely educated me. It's definitely something that I'm going to start incorporating into our protocols to be like, okay, this is just another, it's kind of like another location, another mechanism of action that we can work on in order to be able to

44:57

help people get better. We just had a new 20 year old who joined our program who was on his college track team. And he's one of those stories of the high performance athlete who gets COVID and now he can't get out of bed and he can barely do his studies. So there's just so much need that's out there and I really appreciate the work that you've done. Well, and this is kind of another perspective I have from oncology. When we look at oncology, when somebody

45:25

goes in for cancer therapy, the majority of the time they're getting some kind of combination therapy. There's always a need for new additional drugs that have different mechanisms of action. So you can use multiple ones with different mechanisms of action to really make sure you get the job done. And I think we need to take the same approach with long COVID, especially in these times until we get something through.

45:53

the full drug discovery and development process that really has scientifically rigorously been shown, okay, here's a good target for long COVID and here's a good real pharmaceutical drug that's been developed specifically for it. But we're a long time away from that. So in the meantime, we need a lot of different tools to try to help people, especially ones that are new and different from each other. Yeah, and this might be a great question for you is, you know, I

46:24

I think that the challenge when you have a condition like this that has so many different causes, it kind of smacks the scientific method in the face. It's a little bit challenging to change one variable. How do you navigate that? know, it so that that that's a good question. So one of the issues with long COVID.

46:52

is that it crosses multiple organ systems in the body. Right. And I think this is why kind of, kind of the medical establishment has issues dealing with long COVID patients is because it's, it's siloed into organ systems for the most part. So you're seeing a different specialist for various things. Nobody gets the whole big picture. Right. So I think that's, that has really impacted the experience people with long COVID have getting medical treatment for.

47:23

So to change one variable at a time, unfortunately, the only way to actually really research it and investigate it that way is to do it the really expensive way, which is actually to do all of the research in the animal models. So because you're not gonna be, if you drill down, if you need an intact immune system and you need an intact circulatory and coagulation system,

47:53

and need to be able to look at the inflammation in all over the whole body, but especially in the circulatory system to see what if what you're doing is helping any or all of those things, that's going to be the only way to do it. Unfortunately, that's a really expensive way to have to do your discovery and development research. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I think that, um, yeah, I think, you know, clinically we're addressing

48:21

all the toxic five that I mentioned before in addition to the micro clots and the spike protein and whatnot. And that might be the best way to kind of to do some of these trials is trying your best to standardize all the, this multitude, this multiple approach addressing all these different aspects of the disease. So, but yeah, it is definitely a conundrum. And I,

48:50

Appreciate your thoughts on that. and even with long COVID clinically, like, you know, and I'm sure you guys have ways you stratify it, but it's a very heterogeneous disease state no matter what. So finding enough patients that have a similar presentation that you can actually group that way to do a study, I would think would also be challenging.

49:13

Yeah, well, I think that, you know, the symptom is based on where in the body the inflammation is taking place. Right. So my opinion is that if I remove the cause of the inflammation, which is, I believe, to be the toxic five plus now this might contain in the microclots, all of you know, that ends up decreasing the inflammation regardless of where it is in the body. So it's probably more looking at, OK, you know, your

49:39

your fatigue is, you know, at a two out of 10, if 10 is ideal energy. And then after you've done this for a number of months, then it's, you know, up to a eight out of 10 or something like that. So maybe gauging the different symptoms that people have, but yeah, it's really hard to put everybody with body pain, everybody with sleep issues, you know, kind of like into these different silos.

50:03

Wonderful. So is the best place to send people to the Keith CLS PhD.com? Yep, that's kind of my hub of where you can find all the information you need. There is a link there to go to my sub stack if you want to read about all the kind of scientific work that written more for a general audience that I did to really do the deep dive on microclots and design the formula.

50:32

There's links there to my social media where there's a lot of videos about that work and how I put the formula together. And there's also a link there to go to CirqueGuard.com, which is the best place to order it. If people are interested, they can order it on there straight from our website. There's also a button on there. You can go order it on Amazon. It's available on Amazon as of earlier this month. Excellent. Yeah. And I definitely want to talk to you about it, getting it in our online store as well. So absolutely.

51:01

Dr. Ellis, thanks so much for being with me today. I really appreciate you sharing your knowledge with us. Thanks for having me.