The Secretome: The Next Frontier in Regenerative Medicine with Dr. Drew Taylor of Acorn Biolabs
Skin Anarchy
Dr. Drew Taylor, CEO of Acorn Biolabs and a biomedical engineer with a unique background in professional baseball, demystifies regenerative aesthetics by
Key takeaways
- The secretome encompasses all bioactive molecules secreted by cells, not just exosomes, making it a more comprehensive therapeutic tool.
Main topics
- The science of the secretome
- Misconceptions about exosomes and stem cells
Notable quotes
"That entire secreted population of things is the secretome."
Conclusion
Dr. Taylor emphasizes the transformative potential of regenerative medicine,
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Hey guys, welcome back to Skin Anarchy. This is a very, very special episode because we're finally going to be diving into the world of secret tones. I know a lot of you are very confused in this whole regenerative aesthetic space and understanding, obviously, the terminologies, but more importantly, the actual biological impact that a lot of the really great products that are coming out have on the body. So without further ado, I'm so excited to introduce you guys, the CEO of Acorn Labs, Drew Taylor. Dr. Drew Taylor, welcome. Speaker 1 (0:28) I'm excited to be here. Thanks so much for having me on. Definitely been looking forward to this conversation. Speaker 2 (0:33) No, likewise. You know, I've gotten a lot of requests to interview you and, you know, rightfully because Acorn is truly making a name for itself and I can't wait to learn about the technology. You know, like I said in the intro, like, I feel like a lot of our listeners don't understand, you know, what is a secret zone? What is an exosome? Like all of these words have kind of popped up, I feel like in the last five years, especially in the beauty and aesthetic space and nobody really understands. So before we dive in, I'd love for you to walk us down memory lane. What made you you know, want to start a company. I know your background is in engineering, biomedical engineering. You know, if you kind of tell us a little bit about that. Speaker 1 (1:11) Yeah, well, I always wanted to go into medicine. My dad was a doctor. My mom was a nurse. So grew up around health care. And the other side of what I grew up with was baseball. So my dad actually played professional baseball and so totally followed in his footsteps. Went off to the University of Michigan, played baseball there and did an undergrad in biology. Worked hard and finished up that a little bit ahead of schedule. So I jumped into a master's program in molecular cell developmental biology, which was a great introduction to stem cells for me at that time. And then I finished up playing baseball there and applied to medical school. I was actually registered to stay in Michigan for med school. And I got an offer to play professional baseball from the Blue Jays, my hometown team. So that was pretty exciting for me, obviously. That's the dream. Speaker 2 (2:14) I Speaker 1 (2:15) did take a meeting with the dean and foolishly tried to convince them to let me stay. Speaker 1 (2:23) Let me stay registered and try to balance both. And anyway, when the lab first stopped, it was explained that that would have been a little bit too much. There's too much in-person required. And obviously, like seeing patients, you know better. It's just an impossible task to balance both those things. But I think he did really appreciate what I was trying to accomplish. And so he actually suggested I look into other programs to continue my education. very passionate about trying to do that. And so I ended up very quickly applying to PhD programs, ended up accepting an offer from University of Toronto. So I thought that made sense because I had signed up to JACE and I was able to do a PhD in biomedical engineering and play at the same time and worked it out with my professors that I would be gone for unfortunately a lot of the time because I was traveling around in the minor leagues, but it ended up being an amazing opportunity for me to pursue, continue to pursue both passions. And I would say that, you know, baseball ended up being a really big part of my life. You know, played for a few years in the minors, the Blue Jays and the Phillies, and loved every minute of it. Some arm injuries slowed down the progress there and led to my eventual end of my baseball career. But every baseball player at some point, you know, very few get to retire. Most are told that they can't do it anymore. And so for me, then, I was able to, you know. really leave that scenario being thankful for baseball, at the very least, of pushing me down this road of actually creating treatments, because that's exactly what I had done for my PhD. I was investigating opportunities to use stem cells in a patient's own cells to develop regenerative medicine strategies for connective tissues. And of course, that covers skin, hair, but then into orthopedics, tendons, ligaments, and cartilage and bone. Speaker 2 (4:15) Wow. That's interesting that you did such a reroute, but that's really exciting about baseball. I didn't know you had a baseball background. That's cool. Speaker 1 (4:22) Yeah, I definitely had an amazing experience with baseball, but in the end, looking back on it, I'm really grateful for it because I was going to head off to medical school, and that would have been an amazing opportunity, but I really do feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, and on the development side of regenerative medicine is where I'm most happy. Speaker 2 (4:44) Yeah, no, that's, I have so much respect for biomedical engineers because I've always like, I remember being in medical school and I had a few friends that were in biomedical engineering. It's just a blow. my mind, you know, how much like knowledge and just like innovation. Like I think a lot of these programs teach you how to become more, I don't know, think outside the box kind of in a lot of ways. And so, I don't know, I'm not surprised that you went into biomedical engineering because ACORN is so unique in what you guys are doing. So, yeah. Speaker 1 (5:11) Yeah. Biomed is a special program because it's very diverse. You've got like the people that are just, you know, basic engineers, right? Like that is their bread and butter. And then you've got people with biology and physics. chemistry backgrounds coming into the biomedical side from that. So he ends up having this very diverse class of people that had, you know, probably in my opinion right now, it's one of the most diverse, like postgraduate degrees where you have from, you know, people's bachelors being just across the board so differentiated. Yeah. And that provides a lot of collaboration. and coming at things with different perspectives. So I was really grateful to be able to do that program. Speaker 2 (5:53) That's really cool. Now, I want to actually dive into ACORN because I think that what you guys are doing, obviously, it's very cutting edge. And as you know, regenerative medicine, it's a vast, vast field, you know, and I think the applications are almost endless. But when I look at it, especially in aesthetics, more than anything, I see confusion. You know, and I see a lot of like questions not being answered. And I think that it would be great if we could start by maybe some definitions, you know, for our listeners. Because I know that, you know, for example, secretone, like what is a secretone? Why should people care about that versus like an exosome or any other term that's being thrown around right now? Speaker 1 (6:32) Yeah, I think there's a lot of terms being thrown out right now. And I would include stem cells in that as well, right? So I think the way that I think of... all cells in the human body is like a pyramid. And so at the very top of that pyramid, you have sperm meets egg, all of the potential in the world to become any different cell type. And that's exactly what happens during development. And so that cell at the top can decide to roll down any of those three faces. Speaker 2 (7:01) Once Speaker 1 (7:01) it's picked one of those faces, it can't go back up. naturally, right? So it's chosen a path. And so we've got those three germ layers in our body. And then from there, it continues to differentiate at the bottom of that pyramid. You have all of the finite end cell types that are doing a job in our body. It's a kidney cell, a liver cell, a skin cell, a hair follicular cell, all of these different cells. What people call stem cells is often a very broad word because halfway down that pyramid, we have adult stem cells that reside in pockets in our body that have the ability to become a multitude of different cell types. So they're multipotent cells. The only true pluripotent cell is that moment where sperm meets egg. And then we now have a technology called reprogramming that allows us to take one of those end cell types, you know, at the bottom part of the period or even halfway up and push it back up to the top of that pyramid. Speaker 2 (8:02) And Speaker 1 (8:02) when you do that and you reprogram that cell, it now gains the ability again to choose a different face and roll down that. And that was a Nobel Prize winning discovery. Speaker 1 (8:13) All of these cells around, and we call stem cells many different things, but being more specific about what those cells are, I think is important. And so what most of the excitement around connective tissue regeneration that is being leveraged today, and that work is really focused on mesenchymal or mesenchymal stem cells, MSCs. Now, these are like halfway up the mountain. They're on the mesoderm side of that pyramid. And essentially, they can become things like cartilage and bone, fat, right? They have that mesoderm capacity. And so those cells reside in a few different areas in our bodies. They're in our bone marrow. They're dispersed through our fat. And they're also at the root and the bulge region of our hair follicle. Speaker 2 (9:02) And Speaker 1 (9:03) so it's an amazing cell source that has really driven a tremendous amount of the potential we see in delivering value to patients. Speaker 2 (9:10) Now, Speaker 1 (9:11) thinking about how we can deliver on that value today, there's a number of strategies to try to create opportunities to capture the value in stem cells. Speaker 2 (9:20) One Speaker 1 (9:21) of those is to take exosomes, which are released by stem cells, released by all cells almost, but they're released in higher concentration of stem cells. Because when we think of, for instance, that MSC stem cell in an adult patient. Most people think they're patrolling around the bodies becoming different cell types. Speaker 2 (9:42) But Speaker 1 (9:43) the actual reality is in our bodies, what stem cells typically do is move around in general vicinities. They're not traveling super far unless they get into our circulatory system. But they're locally releasing molecules that are stimulating and promoting what the body needs from a production standpoint in the cells in that environment locally. Speaker 2 (10:07) And Speaker 1 (10:07) so, for instance, in the hair follicle, these MSCs really drive a lot of released molecules that then stimulate the dermal pathway, which is actually what produces the hair follicle, the hair shaft. Speaker 2 (10:20) And Speaker 1 (10:21) so they have a job where they're stimulating these other cells. Exosomes is one of the things that is released by these cells in high concentrations to deliver those signals. But it's important because... The exosome itself is not the signal. It's the contents of the exosome. It's like packaging. Speaker 2 (10:41) And so Speaker 1 (10:41) if you want to describe what stem cells are doing, they're like the Amazon prime truck driving through our neighborhood, releasing packages to homes or our cells as needed. And those packages are exosomes. And it's a little bit more elegant than that because essentially these exosomes have the ability not only to get to our front door, but they have the ability to actually get inside our