Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or ALS are often seen as something unstoppable. But instead of seeing them as essentially death sentences, they can certainly be treated. Thanks to nonstop tech innovation, these diseases can be dealt with not just in the brain itself but also in the immune system. Zach Gurick is joined by Dr. Ron Lane of HOPE-Neuron, who is pioneering a completely new approach to treating neurodegenerative diseases through a first-of-its-kind device design to reset the immune system and immune dysfunction at its source. He also opens up about his experiences as a caregiver, a father, and a husband who took care of his wife who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, which motivated him to devote himself to this groundbreaking medical endeavor.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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Healing Neurodegenerative Diseases In A Different Way With Dr. Ron Lane
Welcome back to Fully Alive. We are exploring, as we always do, ideas, innovations, and people that are helping us live healthier, more vibrant, and longer lives. This conversation is a powerful one. When most people think about diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or ALS, they think about something tragic, something unstoppable, and something with very few answers.
It is a diagnosis that often comes without warning and leaves families searching for hope in a space where historically there has not been much. What if we have been looking at it the wrong way? What if the key to treating neurodegenerative disease is not just in the brain itself, but in the immune system? My guest today is Dr. Ron Lane, and he is the chairman and CEO of a company called HOPE-Neuron Therapeutics.
He is pioneering a completely new approach to treating things like ALS. It is one that does not rely on traditional drugs, but instead uses a first-of-its-kind device designed to reset the immune system and immune dysfunction at its source. His work represents more than just a potential breakthrough for ALS or Alzheimer’s. It may open the door to an entirely new way of thinking about neurodegeneration, aging, and what it really means to extend our health span and our brain span.
This is a conversation about science, yes, but it is also one about courage, innovation, and what it looks like to bring real hope into one of the most challenging areas of medicine. This is coming from someone who has truly lived the story and the suffering of what this disease and diseases like this can do. You are going to hear his story as well, and where his passion comes from. Let us welcome Dr. Lane to the show.
Dr. Lane, thank you so much for being a guest. I am really excited to learn about this amazing breakthrough device and the amazing work that you are doing. I feel like it is going to have such an impact on countless thousands of lives. I am excited to share that with as many people as possible through this platform. Thank you for being here. I am excited to dive into this conversation.
Thank you for having me. When we get through this, you will understand that we have the fortune of being in the right place. We worked very hard to get here, but in the right place with something that has the potential of being very important and important to almost all people, health-wise. Thank you for having me.
The Touching Story OF Dr. Lane’s Wife
I know that this is a passion project of yours, and you shared with me earlier that there are times when you are awake in the middle of the night working and sleep for a couple of hours, and work some more, and sleep for a couple of hours, and work. I know that this is your life’s work and your legacy that you are going to be able to leave behind. I would love to just learn where that passion comes from. How did you get into this work? If you are willing, share some of the story that really led you to where you are today.
I am an open book. Ask me anything. First of all, let us define passion. Passion is a Greek term that means suffering. What am I suffering for? It is suffering in the best of senses. It is not suffering in a negative sense. It is suffering by choice at this time, at least in part by choice. My wife, to whom I was married for over 50 years, was a beautiful woman, a truly giving woman. In our world, where we are surrounded by narcissistic takers, she was a giver, and she would sit next to you and immediately want to know about you and not tell you about herself.
She was a feeler, and she would want to know, and she would do it in a feeling fashion, really trying to reach out in a very loving way to the person next to her, no matter who it was. That was my fortune of 50 years with this woman. Over time, that relationship grew as they tend to. When I first got married, I was really not terribly bright about what marriage meant. It was a continuing learning process, as probably all of you understand, until I got to the end.
My wife had a family history of Alzheimer’s. Her mother passed with it. Her father, for different reasons, had dementia. He did not have Alzheimer’s, but he lived into his 80s, and he had dementia. Alzheimer’s was in the background, and her mother had it. Her mother passed. We had a lot of experience with that. We took care of the mother. Actually, specifically, my daughter did. Her mother was a very loving and giving woman as well.
She had a wonderful father, but her mother was the one who had Alzheimer’s. As a consequence, Sandy was concerned about what her future might be genetically. We had conversations about that. Sandy was a courageous person, never a victim. She could not stand the idea of victimhood. We have what we have. We deal with it, our chin is up, and we are honest about it. That is who she was, and she had great courage.
Just wonderful courage as a woman, or as a human, but certainly as a woman. She was just God’s gift to me. I do not know how else to say it. As time passed, the reality of her genetics began to set in, and she began to slowly decline, and that became obvious. She was an artist. She did oils. She did a lot of things, but she did oils. We were living in a little art community in Natchez, Mississippi, a small community, and it was really focused on art. She was there. She was trained in Scottsdale, here in Arizona, and wonderfully trained.
She went to Natchez, and she was the best artist there. Besides that, she was beautiful, and everybody loved her. What is not to like? She would do her paintings, and they would sell before the paint dried. Everybody in the community would come in and tour the studio and watch it. She would go there in the morning and paint all day. She loved it. First time in her life that her husband had not been dragging her around the world, and I took her around the world a variety of times for reasons I will not bore you with.
She did not have kids. We were empty nesters. She had time to go to the studio and to paint. She had a gallery where she could hang the paintings, but as I said, they were usually gone before the oil dried. She was really enjoying that. As she began to decline, it was obvious. I had friends who could see it in her painting, and they were all concerned. I said, “It is okay. We know what is going on, and it is okay. It is life, and it is love. It is okay.”
We went through that. I have a loving daughter who owns and operates three care homes in Arizona. That is where Sandy and I got married back in 1968. Our children were raised there, etc. My daughter was very experienced in the caregiving profession. She knew more about this when I was going through it than I did. She called me up and said, “Dad, you cannot do this alone.” It took me at least 4, 5, 6 nanoseconds to say, “Yeah, you are right.” She says, “My husband and I want to remodel our house, and we would like to build a guest house in the back for you and Mom. Would you consider coming back?”
I get another 4 or 5 seconds, nanosecond. I say, “Okay.” We backed up. We moved to Phoenix, and we lived in this guest house, and that is actually where I am sitting right now. When they were building it, they were framing it, and I have a background going back to actually being in the construction business, development business. They were framing it, and they had two rooms. They had a bedroom and bath, and then they had a living room area, a living area with a little kitchen, and so forth, and I said, “No, I will take the wall out. We do not want anything dividing us. We are one. Take the wall out.”
They took it out, and it was a great thing that I did. We had a king bed, and my daughter wanted to put in one of those funky beds that go up and down. I said, “No. We have been in a king bed for 50 years. We are in it now.” We were there, and every night we were together, we would snuggle in bed, and it was just a continuation of a grand love affair that we had. She was declining. The further along she got, the more it was a reality. Candidly, the most precious time of my life was the last 4 or 5 years of her life, caring for her. That process was incredible.
It was such a blessing to me to be able to give to her in that fashion. I just cannot explain it. It was wonderful. She continued to decline. When she was young, she lost her leg to bone cancer. We actually met skiing in Utah. I literally ran over her, picked her up, dusted her off, and saw this beautiful girl and thought, “What do we have here?” Twenty days later, it was over a year and a half because she spent summers in Hawaii, and I spent summers working in Alaska. We were not together a lot. Over that year and a half, we were together for twenty days.
We got married, and it lasted 50-plus years. It was just marvelous. All I can say is that at the end of it she was failing. We have a lot of friends. We have a lot of friends in Phoenix, going back a number of years, back to 68, actually, when we were married. The word went out that Sandy was really declining. What happened was that I insisted that Sandy would stand up, turn around, and sit down in the chair. She was not able to wear a prosthetic leg at that point. It was too complicated to navigate. She would put her hands on the chair, stand up, turn around, and sit down. It was great.
It was important for her to get bone loading and the wonderful immunology that goes with that, the healing that goes with that. That is what I do. I know that stuff. She never complained. She got up, turned around, sit down. I had caregivers. They would come in and wheel her around in the wheelchair. I did all of her cooking. I called it formulating. I formulated her meals. I did all of that. I fixed it, put it on the table. They would wheel her up, put her in the front of it, she would eat, and she was able to eat most of the time until right towards the end, but she was able to eat on her own.
They would bring her around, put her on the couch that is right behind me now. She would sit there, and above me is a big six-foot television screen. I would put on an old I Love Lucy show or something like that. She would sit and watch it. I would sit between her and the TV screen that was above my head on the wall. I would work. My desk is right here in front of me at my feet. Now and then, she would tap me on the shoulder because I was right in front of her. She was behind me. She tapped me on the shoulder, pounded her hand on the couch, and said, “Come back.”
I would go back, sit next to her, and she would snuggle, and she would always ask about the kids. She was always other-focused and wanted to know about the kids. We got to the point where she was not able to do this. She was not able to stand up, turn around, or sit down. The caregivers had to pick her up, turn around, and put her in the chair. She just was not able. That continued, where she one day could not eat anymore. I would formulate the meal, fix it, put it on the table right next to me to my left, and she was not able to eat. Cannot swallow, cannot eat.
I called my daughter Tiffany. I said, “Tiffany, your mother is not eating. We are going to need to get an IV.” Tiffany very knowingly and lovingly said, “No, Dad, we do not do that. If she is not eating, that means it is time.” I swallowed it. I said, “I understand. This is the reality that has been here. I understand it.” I was going to say I am comfortable with it. I was, in the broadest sense of the word, and in the most loving way of putting it, that I know how. I said, “I get it.” We did not feed her. That went on for a week. Towards the end of that week, she became comatose.
She did not respond to anything. She was in bed. We left her in the bed. They have what is called a wedge. It is a foam rubber 45-degree angle that unfolds, and you put it in the bed. They lie back on it. She was lying there on that, not moving, not aware of anything, wholly comatose. Her head was down and was that way for two days. Again, the word went out, and all of our friends, many of our friends, over 25, maybe 30 friends and family came. They all loved Sandy. They came, and they were in the room with me, surrounding the bed. Sandy was there, wholly unresponsive. It was time for lunch. There was a little courtyard between the guest house and the main house.
We ordered lunch, and we were sitting out there with the door open. Could look through the open door to see Sandy in the bed as we are sitting outside around the tables having lunch. About that time, a friend of some 30 years, Sandy’s friend, and her husband came out, and they said they had a little boombox. They said, “We have a song here, a tape that Sandy and I girls,” and there were about six girls who met weekly, more or less, for years. I say more or less because they all traveled.
They could not do it all the time, but they met, and they recorded a song on this, and she wanted to know if she could play it for Sandy. Of course she can. I said, “Sandy is right in there. Take your little boombox in there, plug it in, and play it.” She did. I got up, went in, sat next to Sandy on the bed, and I took her hand. Sandy is motionless, not moving. There is just no visible life in her other than the fact that she was breathing. The rest of the people came in, and they were behind me. She is sitting there. They plug the tape in, and all of a sudden, the tape starts playing.
It was a song, Amazing Grace. It is playing, and I am holding her hand, and I am whispering to her. She is just the most beautiful thing in front of me. All of a sudden, her head is down, just focused to her left. Maybe it was right. I do not know what it was. Her head came up, and it was pointed out to nowhere. There was nothing out there. It is just that that was the direction of her head when it came up. This is the first time she had moved in days. It came up, and her eyes opened, and she looked out into space. There is nothing there. She turns her head around and sees me right in front of her.
Lights up like a Christmas tree with this enormously wonderful, gleeful smile. Mean, just the most beautiful thing. She had wonderful blue eyes, and she was looking right at me, and it was just the most precious sight I have ever seen. She is looking right at me, and I said, “Girl, where have you been? We missed you.” She was looking right at me and smiling so beautifully, and paused, did not say anything, just looked at me. I said, “Sandy, you are leaving us, are you not? You are saying goodbye, are you not?” She smiled, put her head down, and she was gone.
I have got to tell you, having kids is special. There are many special things in my life. This was the most precious moment of my life. Hold her hand and have her effectively say, “It has been a wonderful life and goodbye.” Why am I doing what I am doing? This is a long preamble to get to the point of a long explanation to your question of why I am doing this. Listen, I do not need to say I have been there. I have been there.
I have experienced Alzheimer’s. I have experienced the suffering of folks with a disease that is generally considered to be unmet and untreatable. I know that. My heart is there. Do not have to explain it to me. I do not need to read about it. I do not need to be told about it. I have lived it, and I know it. Back to your term, passion. I suffer with those who have the same situation, where they have a condition, or they have a loved one with a condition for which there is no treatment and therefore no hope. That is my background. That is my passion for Alzheimer’s.
The Complicatedness Of Neurodegenerative Diseases
Alzheimer’s is a complicated disease. It takes time. When you are in the science business, it costs money. Time costs money. It is not convenient when you have to sit and wait for a scientific answer. Alzheimer’s is a neurodegenerative disease, and other neurodegenerative diseases have a much more rapid progression timeline. Such as MS and Parkinson’s. There is a series of them. At the front of it is a disease called Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS. I had the relationship that I developed in Phoenix with the chap who was the head of the biology program, a researcher at an institution here called Barrow Neurological Institute.
Alzheimer’s is a complicated disease. It takes time and costs money. It is not convenient when you have to sit and wait for a scientific answer.
It is a famous, very wonderful institution. They have a clinic here that deals with ALS. I did not know anything about that. I called my friend up. He is a PhD researcher. I said, “Ron, we need a rare disease to do our testing because we technically use a device to enable us to process the patient’s blood that activates the healing process that we are using.” We take blood out, we process it, and we put it back into the patient. It is all closed loop. It is all sterile. Nobody touches the blood. We get through with the device. We do it one time.
We get through with the device. We throw it away. We do not throw the unit away, but we throw the kit. There is a better way to do it. We do not throw the device away. We throw the kit away. I said to my friend Ron, “We need a rare disease because under the rules, if we are dealing with a rare disease, we can get very rapid approval.” Specifically, we have to show that there is no harm. When we treat somebody, if they come out the other side, they are no worse off than they were going in. In other words, it is safe. We can go forward with it. We can go forward with it commercially.
I said, “We need a disease.” Ron came back to me with about 50 diseases. I never heard of them. There is a whole list of them. There are a lot of these bizarre names. I would look at them. Right in the middle was this thing, ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease. I said, “No, it cannot be,” because there was a threshold. It has to be fewer than 8,000 incidents a year. In other words, 8,000 people a year succumb to it. If it is more than that, you are not a rare disease by these rules.
With ALS, it is about 5,600. Obviously, it is below the threshold. It qualified. I said to Ron, “I cannot believe that it is, but if it is, it is.” I said, “Look, give me a couple of days here. I know where to look and how to look. Let me get into this. Be sure what we are doing absolutely does apply to it.” He agreed. I went about my business. Did not take me two days. I know exactly where to look, the questions to ask, and where to go.
Now you have a computer sitting by my feet with over 20,000 PDFs that I have downloaded and a lot more than that I reviewed, and I elected not to burden myself with. It did not take me long. I realized that it is the same mechanics involved with ALS that are at the end of the day with Alzheimer’s. Different diseases caused by different mutations. That is what causes the molecular mutations, and they are all different. That is why the diseases are different. The driver of the disease, all these diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, is basically the same.
My friend then said, “Ron, we have the number three ALS clinic at Barrow here in Phoenix in the world behind Mass General and Hopkins.” It is called the Gregory W. Fulton ALS Clinic. Gregory W. Fulton was the son of a wealthy local businessman, Ira Fulton, who is a wonderful man. Gregory W. Fulton succumbed to ALS. He was treated at Barrow, but he succumbed to it. His father, in his benevolence, turned around and gave Barrow a very large check to open a clinic in his son’s name to deal with the condition that his son had passed from.
It was here, and it was wonderfully staffed. It has got some great people. My friend Ron said, “Would you like to meet Ira Fulton, the benefactor, the one who gave the funds?” I said, “Yes, I would love to. Firstly, I would like to meet the head of the ALS program.” He said, “Okay.” He made an introduction, which was back in the days of COVID. I was going to go over there and meet with him. His name was Shafik Ladha. He is a wonderful Iraqi MD.
I was going to meet with him when I got over there, and the COVID police would not let me in their building. I had to come back, and we got on Zoom, and just as we are now, we talked, and we talked for an hour. That was our allocated time. I said, “We have to do more of this.” We literally did it the next day. He said, “Look, there is a restaurant across the street. There are no COVID police. We can go there, and we can sit and talk as long as we want to.”
We went over there, and we spent a good couple of hours. We did that several times, and long story short, out of that, we ended up doing a venture with Barrow and with the Gregory W. Fulton ALS Clinic, and we are there. They have agreed to do with us what is called an IRB, which is an Institutional Review Board, a clinical method. It means that it does not require FDA approval to do it, but it requires the institution where you are doing the work to monitor and review responsibly and report to the FDA annually on your findings.
Doing Clinical Tests On Transgenic Mice
We are set up today to do the IRB. Let me stop there and say we have already done testing in transgenic mice. What are transgenic mice? Transgenic mice mean that the genes for ALS, human genes, have been transferred to the mice. The genes are transgenic in the mice. These mice, lo and behold, die from ALS, human ALS. They do not die from mouse ALS because there is no such thing as a mouse getting ALS. These transgenic mice are given the ALS gene, and they die.
We have done that, and we have a wonderful relationship with a group at the Indiana University Med School and a wonderful neurologist there by the name of Dr. Yan Sheng Du. He is a wonderful man, a bright fellow, a hard worker. We have done testing up there. I know him on a contract basis. I hired him to do some work with our technology. He called me up and said, “Ron, we have got results, and they are wonderful results. This is really interesting. Can I join you?”
I said, “Yes, you can. I look around, and it is pretty lonely here. Come on, you will enjoy the water, come on in.” He did join me, and he has been great to work with. We have done work there with these mice, showing that we get these mice, they are in their cage, and mice love treadmills. They get up, and they run, run. You do not have to ask them to do it or motivate them. They just love to do it.
We put them in there, and there is a thing called a tread bar, which is similar to a treadmill. It is just a bar, and they get up on it, and they run, run. When they have ALS, they run up and fall, then they get back on it and run and fall. They get up and back up and run and fall, then they cannot get up on it anymore because they are in the process of dying. Guess what? We give them our treatment. They get up there, and they run, run, high five, they run.
With a big smile on their face. The key is that we have to treat them every two weeks. As long as we treat them every two weeks, they continue, and they do not die. There will be fewer. They do not die. There is a calculation that you can use, FDA-approved, to translate it from a mouse to a human. With that, you can estimate the probable. You do not know until you do the work, but the probable requirement for multiple treatments.
I can say that the calculation shows somewhere between every three and four months, we would have to treat the human. If it is consistent with the mouse, and I am not saying it will be, but I can tell you mechanistically, the same phenomenon that kills the mouse with ALS with no treatment, and that saves them, and that keeps them alive with treatment, those same mechanisms are very practical and usable in humans. They are the ones that kill the humans, cause their death, a better way of putting it.
Therefore, if you affect the pieces that scientifically signal in the cells, the chemistry within the cells. If you modify those, the patients will live. That is what the science says. Again, we need data. We are set up to do the IRB at Barrow to demonstrate the effectiveness of our treatment. We believe it will be effective and it will keep the patient alive.
The question is, how often do we have to treat the ALS patient to keep them alive for a long period of time? I do not know what the length is because we have not done the work yet, but a long period of time. All research costs money. That is just the reality of our world. We are in the process right now of raising money, and we are doing it through a public offering. We have a company that we have created.
The company is going to sell stock, and the stock will be held by individuals, and it will be used initially to do the work on Lou Gehrig’s disease and for the purpose of determining its effect on Lou Gehrig’s disease. We are going to be doing that. We do believe that it will be effective again. We think that, based on the mouse work, it will be effective. The question is, how often do we have to treat? We are in the process of Reg CF, which has the ability for us to raise funds from the public without the investor being an accredited investor.
That means the investor does not have to have a personal net worth of any significance. They can buy $500 worth of stock and own stock in our company that is treating ALS. There is a limit on it. It is, in a relative sense, with the SEC, it is an easy approach to raise funds. The limit on it is that one can only raise five million. Five million is five million more than we have today. It is not insignificant to us. It will allow us to do two things. It allows us to do the human trial, actually three things, but it allows us to do the human trial at Barrow, demonstrating that this works in humans.
It will allow us to do more animal work to get more robust data from the animals with greater numbers over longer periods of time, and so forth. Those are scientific questions. The clinical question we will ask at Barrow is with the IRB. That will be the absolute evidence of the effectiveness of this with those patients. Let me stop there and say this. Our goal is beyond that because this phenomenon that drives the mechanics again, the disease components of ALS, are very similar, as I have already mentioned, to other diseases, in particular, Alzheimer’s. Now I get back to my wife. That is our next step, but we do not have sufficient funds for that because it will be more expensive.
Our plan is to do a filing, and it is called a Regulation A. In that regulation, we are able to raise up to $75 million. $75 million will get us a long way down the road, demonstrating the effectiveness of this with Alzheimer’s. That is our game plan. The Reg CF is a proposition that will take us three to four months to effectively complete. That is our hope. We have an underwriter in New York who is all excited about this, who will take this, understands the uniqueness of what we’re doing here, and the potential reach of it.
They are all set up. They have all the documents for the SEC. They handle it. We do not have to worry about any of that. That is what the underwriter does. They will take that forward. With those funds, we will have not just dollars to address future research with the Reg CF with the ALS. We will have funds to take care of the lawyers, which you always have to do to set up the raising of the funds on the Reg A.
That will be set up, and we have a wonderful law firm we’ve been dealing with for decades. They are very excited about it. They are located in Miami. They will be managing the Reg A and the raising of the funds there. That Reg A again then gives us the capacity of taking this forward with Alzheimer’s and clinically with Alzheimer’s and potentially other diseases. That really is our focus. We do not want to go beyond that.
Let me just pause this and say that there is one example of our basic technology. I can give a technical term, but I do not want to get complicated here, but it is called immunogenics. It is more than immunogenics. It is called epigenetics. I am not going to go there. There is one example of a public company that was owned by Johnson & Johnson. They have sold it off. They sold it for a billion three a few years back.
They developed and got approval from the FDA for the use of the same technology that we are using in the treatment of lymphoma. Not ALS, lymphoma. What did I just say? The ultimate extension of this technology that we have, potentially now, I do not have the data, but we have another company that today is doing business using a very similar technology to what we have. Ours is better. It is different. With the reasons and the details as to why, but we are significantly better for the patient than their method.
Their method works, and they are using it in lymphoma, and they are doing $275 million a year in sales. They were just acquired by a Japanese firm. That firm is a billion and five in market cap. That specific use of our technology in the entity that is using that technology just came out with a market cap of a billion and a half dollars. That gives you an idea of where this could go. Our opportunity is even greater than that.
I cannot show you the data yet because we have not done it. A scientist is always bound by and defined by the data. I am just being straight up that the science says that we may well be able to get there, and that is what we will see. I do not have the data yet. Let me back up and say this. My interest in this and my passion in this relate to my wife’s experience, my wife’s suffering, and my blessing of being able to take care of her during her suffering and her passing.
In that, I fully understand. I have an absolutely experienced connection with those who are likewise suffering in the same manner. My heart is with them, and we believe that we have reason to give them hope. It will take some time. We are in a big rush, but it will still take some time. We believe that we will be able to impact that, most likely be able to impact that.
We are fully committed to that. I work very hard. That is a judgment call for somebody else. I am up normally every morning by at least four. I work. I now have a new regimen where I try to stop by one or two in the afternoon because I look in the mirror and say, “I am not a young buck anymore. You have got to be a little nicer to yourself.” I have always worked hard. I will tell you that this at this point is a life and exercise of joy. Talk about passion, but I am suffering in the best sense. I am suffering in the joy of being able to help others and knowing what I mean by that because I lived it.
That is so inspiring. Thank you for being so open and vulnerable and even allowing your emotion to show. I love how you describe the blessing of caring for your wife during that season and how meaningful that was. It is an inspiration for all of us who are married to strive for that kind of love and that kind of journey together. I love how you just phrased it, an exercise of joy. What a gift that you are giving to those of us who are tuning in to this, also who might be suffering something similar or may someday.
Hope HOPE-Neuron’s Technology Addresses Neurodegeneration
Thank you for the work you are doing. I want to just clarify a few things. I love that you have named the device and the company HOPE-Neuron. It makes a lot of sense from the story that you have told why it is called that now. Can we just back up and help people understand a little bit about how neurodegeneration takes place? What is actually happening within our bodies that is causing that? How is your technology actually changing that at the root?
The basic disease is this. There is an imbalance created. The whole physiology and immune system is based on balance. When things become unbalanced, we are subjected to the possibility in most cases, of having some degree of illness. What happens with these neurodegenerative diseases is that there are all these diseases caused by different mutations.
The whole physiology and immune system is based on balance. When things become unbalanced, we are subjected to the possibility, in most cases, of having some degree of illness.
Once you get the mutation, they become an autoimmune disease because the mutation is not normal. It becomes what is technically referred to as non-self. It is not normal. It is not normally what we would call the self. It is a foreigner. Our body knows what to do with the non-self. It attacks it, and it consumes it. That is what the immune system does. That process is called autoimmune. Auto, meaning self. Immune is the immune system attacks the foreign element. In this case, the mutation.
What we have is we have these mutations that are created that are non-self and are attacked by the body. However, that process of attacking gets out of hand. The immune cells that are attacking attack more broadly, neurons, which are brain cells. When they attack those, then the brain cells do not work anymore. Hence, neurodegeneration occurs due to the degeneration of the neurons, which are being attacked by the body’s own immune system.
That is the inherent disease. It is very complicated. There are a lot of pieces to it, a lot of science that wraps around what I just said. If you boil it down to its simplest sense, some scientists love to argue about everything, and that is their job, and they should, but I do not think there is a salient argument to say what I just said is not true.
These autoimmune diseases drive neurodegeneration. We counter that. We rebalance the body’s immune system. We bring normalcy back by balancing the immune system. That is what we do. The body has its own method. We do not use any drugs. We do not use chemicals. We do not inject anything foreign into the body of a patient. We take their blood out. We process it. It is a technical term, but we use mechanical transduction hyperoxia. What it causes is that the blood will then signal the body to heal itself. We do not heal the body. We do not use drugs.
We treat the blood in a fashion that it then responds with these healing factors. Let me say this. These healing factors are common. How common? You and I and all humans who are healthy on a daily basis, we do this 200 to 300 billion times a day. That is common. The system does that often. When you are ill, it does not work as well. What do we do? We process the blood, take it out, sterilize it, process it, and put it back, sterile.
The body then takes what we give it, which is a signal of 200 to 300 billion of these cells flooding back into the body that causes the healing that, if you were normal, you would have in the first instance. What we are doing is replicating healing through our system. No drugs, no chemicals. I will say this. Big Pharma and pharmaceutical companies do good things. I am not saying anything to the contrary. Big Pharma does basically one thing. They create pharmaceuticals. They create drugs. In our case, the answer was not drugs.
I reasoned that I am a Johnny-come-lately here. Drug companies have been working for two decades on this ALS, and they have not found a solution. I do not have $2 billion to spend as they have, and I do not want to spend the next twenty years doing it for a lot of reasons. I took a step back, and I said, “Why are people normal? What is going on? Can I tap into that?”
You and I have over a million years of humanoid evolution. Over a million years, if you want to get real technical, it goes all the way back to mammalian evolution, which is 300 million years. Let us not get way back there. A million years is okay. Over the last million years, there has been a development of this system that we have, our immune system.
In that, the system is communicated between the cells. They speak to each other. What are we saying here? I am saying that what we did was tap into how the cells are communicating with each other. I call myself a cell whisperer. I listen to the cells. We copied that, we now use that whispering back into the body, and the body then signals the healing. That is fundamentally what we are doing. We are using the body system. We did not create it.
We cannot make any claim of specialness for this. The process. If you are a believer, you can say the Almighty created it, and I happen to be that with that focus. I am not imposing that on anybody else. I can say this. The evolution of it, no matter what was the driver of the evolution, the evolution of that is that we end up with a marvelous system, and it gets out of whack, gets imbalanced. Our method of using the body to rebalance itself is basically what we are doing.
We are signaling the body to rebalance itself, and that is all we are doing. We get out of the way. We are gone. We are done. The body handles it all. The body does the healing. We do not do the healing. The body does. We just give it the signal that triggers it. We get out of the way, and the body knows what to do, how to do it, and the body does it all. No claim of greatness on our part, trust me. The body is doing it, not us.
That makes a lot of sense. The technology, and just to summarize, you are hooked up to your device, the blood comes out, it is all sterile, it is in a closed-loop system, you are processing it, and then putting it back in, like a therapeutic plasma exchange.
That is a good example, very similar, but it is all gravity. We tap in with an IV port. It flows out into a flask. The flask is low, so gravity takes it down to it. When we get the right quantity, we are talking plus or minus half a cup, so we are not talking a lot of blood.
Just a little bit, okay.
When we get that, we will then turn the port off. We do not disconnect anything. We just raise it up, elevate it, snap it into our device, and process it. We elevate it, and we open the port, and it flows back to the patient. When we are through, we disconnect all of that. We throw that piece away.
That takes about 30 minutes.
The processing takes about five minutes. Most of the time is for the blood to come out and the blood to go back because it is all gravity. It is not forced. We have to wait for gravity to take it out and for gravity to put it back. That is at least 20 minutes, 25 minutes of that 30-minute, 35-minute window.
I just commend you. We have to solve this disease. This is something that is everyone’s biggest fear as we age. Life expectancy has doubled over the last 120 years. Now we have all these chronic diseases. This is probably the scariest because you have lived through it. We have to solve it. I love that your solution is not simple, but it is not super complicated. You have created a method that makes it accessible.
It is naturally elegant. We are not creating elegance.
How Early Should You Prevent Neurodegenerative Diseases
You are just imitating the body’s natural healing process. Thank you for the work that you are doing. I am thinking about prevention, or how early in the process someone needs to catch this? If someone has more advanced Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, what do you see as possible in terms of reversing, slowing, or stopping that process?
One that would jump up for all of us. It is, in a simple sense, it is understandable that the earlier that we deal with this, the better. The more severe the condition becomes, the more severe the problem is, and the more difficult the problem. We want to do it early. The question is, how early? The old adage. It depends. Our genes do not change. The genes that allow the mutation in the first place are there. Does not mean the mutations are there, but the genes are there. Somewhere along the way, before there is clinical evidence of a problem, the mutations happen.
The disease starts. Unbeknownst to us all, unbeknownst to our physician, unbeknownst to us, and in great respect, not even detectable. The diagnostics that we have are not targeted at doing this. Knowing the sciences as I do, we could have diagnostics that would do this, but we do not have them now. A variety of reasons. I will not bore you with why that is not being done.
It would be feasible today. Absolutely feasible because the truth is, in our work with the mice, we are analyzing the elements in the blood that I am specifically speaking to. It is very complicated, but there are a lot of pieces there that point directly to the disease and the success of the treatment of the disease. Development of disease, how severe it is, etc.
I said before it is complicated, and it is, but how early does it start? It starts early. The real answer is simple, and I said it a minute ago. It starts before we are aware that we have it. We would not normally think about treating it. What should I do? I could tell you in the simplest sense what to do. This is an absolute universal truth. What we put in our mouth, or we do not put in our mouth. What we eat and whether we exercise or not, those two factors create health or allow disease.
What we eat and how we exercise are the two biggest factors that create health or allow disease into the body.
The old adage. Exercise and diet. If you want to be healthier, have a good diet and exercise. I am not proposing anything. I am just telling you what I do. I am very strong on fruits, vegetables, and nuts. I eat very little animal protein. I am not a vegetarian. I eat very little protein. Animal protein. People say, “Where do you get your protein if you do not eat animal protein?”
My answer is the same place the cow gets the beefsteak. The cow does not eat meat. The cow eats grass. The cow is a vegetarian. The cow’s body processes make it, and it is called endogenous. That is, the technical term, it creates its own protein, animal protein. We eat that T-bone steak, and that animal protein comes from grass. If we eat the grass, and I am not suggesting grass, but the concept of it, our body knows how to make it. There is a very complicated thing called the TCA cycle.
We make our own protein. We do not have to have animal stuff. In fact, I can tell you that there are certain compounds created in the body by any animal protein, including fish, that can be very deleterious, very disease-promoting. How do you counter that? I have already said. Eat right and so forth. I am a big believer in probiotics.
A huge believer in probiotics because it drives the biology within the healthy body, including causing regeneration of new neurons in the brain, in the hippocampus of the brain. For people who are a little longer in the tooth in their years, and you want to stay aware of their situation, regeneration is important. It is called cognition. That is important. All of this is like the old saying. All roads lead to Rome. Healthy living drives health. That is all I can say.
Healthy living drives health.
How To Invest In HOPE-Neuron And Its Clinical Trials
That is great. Thanks for sharing those practical things. If someone does want to become one of the investors or buy stock in your company at this point, I know it is a little bit early. Are you able to share what to look for when that does become available?
The company’s name is HOPE-Neuron. There is a website there. We may be changing it, but there is the website, HopeNeuron.com. That is in its infancy. We are not able to promote it yet because technically, some things have to happen with our underwriter that will take another few days or a couple of weeks to get there. Anyone can buy that stock in the public market.
That stock will be technically non-tradable initially, but it will then be convertible into our follow-on raising of capital called the Reg A, which will be tradable stock without restrictions on it. By getting in at this point, one gets a valuation that, presumably, hopefully is much lower and therefore less money than it will be a few months down the road when we do the Reg A. The Reg CF has a better price point than the Reg A.
If you had to project out into the future, how long do you think it will be until something like this is readily available to the general public? At what point can we say we could use this device?
That is the salient question. That is all fine and good, but when? I would hope that we are able to raise the capital for the Reg CF, and then that gives us the dollars to do the IRB at Barrow, the clinical trial at Barrow. The clinical trial is on ALS. I would hope to be able to raise that capital within the next 60 to 90 days.
I believe, based on the science that we have now, that we will have clinical evidence rapidly, meaning within weeks, demonstrating early on that this has effectiveness. The history of the FDA presently is that they are bending over backwards to approve new treatments for ALS. The problem they have had is that they have not had any treatments that worked. If we have, and they have approved, actually, there is an example of a company that they approved, which did not have effectiveness.
They had hope but no effectiveness. It turned out it did not work, and the company’s stock did not do very well. We already have data that it works. The other company did not have any animal data. We already have animal data showing that it works. I would hope that we will very rapidly, in humans, have that data. I believe that there is a reasonably good chance that with that human data that we will do at Barrow, at the Gregory W. Fulton ALS Clinic, with a successful trial there on the IRB, early on, we will have data that indicates that this is effective.
We plan to bring the FDA in for counsel at the very beginning, before we do anything. Have them review our protocols, have them give opinions, and we will be very open. We called it open label, but we will be very open with our data. They will have access to it. They will see it. They will be informed of it. If they have comments along the way, we will listen very carefully and respond.
We would hope that with our technology, with the positioning of it, with our beliefs, and a good, strong reason to believe scientifically that this will work by having the FDA involved in it early and responding along the way, that we can get the early FDA approval for this commercially. What does that all mean?
What it all means is I would hope that we would have this commercially approved and available to those in need and want within twelve months. There is another thing as well. There is a new concept approved by the administration called compassionate use. If we get down the road here, it could be that on a compassionate basis, we actually could begin treatment before that. I am not proposing that. I am not suggesting it.
I am not asking those who are suffering to inquire because we are not there yet, and we are not able to do that. We still have to build the equipment. We have the basis of the equipment, and we are using it in our animal work at Indiana University. We have a new version of that that our engineer in New Jersey has developed, and we will need that. It looks like I have exceeded my time with you.
Get In Touch With Dr. Lane And HOPE-Neuron
By way of wrapping up here, if people want to connect with you, the best place for now is HopeNeuron.com?
Yes. I am late. Let me give you my personal email.
Go for it.
Dr. Lane, this has been such a fascinating conversation. I love the different components of your own story. Your experience as a caregiver, your experience as a husband and a father, and thank you for sharing your wife’s story, and what an amazing gift she was to the world and continues to be to the world. May her legacy live on in the work that you are doing. May your legacy be such a blessing to so many lives. Thank you for devoting yourself to this work. I am very hopeful that it will be wildly successful and that within a year from now, from the time of this recording, people will begin receiving these treatments and having their lives changed. Thank you so much.
Thank you. I want to say this. Indeed, this is not about me. It is a joy for me to be able to be involved in this and to bring potential hope to others. I do understand that. I suffer with them. Passion.
Now it comes full circle back to the Greek word. Thank you, Dr. Lane, for being with us. HopeNeuron.com or RLane@HopeNeuron.com is how people can connect with you. We really appreciate you, and best wishes and best of luck to you on the journey ahead here.
The only caution I would make is please understand that you are more than welcome to reach out to me. I am a busy boy. It does not matter. Reach out to me. We do not have a treatment ready now. There are a lot of folks who want, but we are not in a position right now to address that want.
Thanks again for the great work, and thanks for being on with us. We really appreciate you, Dr. Lane.
Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
Bye now.
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Thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoy that conversation with Dr. Ron Lane. His company is once again called HOPE-Neuron. You can reach him at HopeNeuron.com or personally, RLane@HopeNeuron.com. As he mentioned, they are offering an IPO, or initial public offering, here soon. You can search the website there to find out more about that when the time comes. Hopefully, there is going to be the possibility of having these treatments within the next year or two.
At the time of this recording, that means sometime in mid to late 2027, this technology may be available for broad use. I hope you learned something about neurodegeneration, about the immune system, but also just something about life, love, and marriage. What a beautiful story that Dr. Lane had to share about his wife and his love for her, and also that of a caregiver, and how difficult that can be. A very inspiring story. I am inspired. I hope you are too. Go and live fully alive. Enjoy your day. Thanks so much for tuning in with us, and we will see you back here next time.