Dr. Eric and Christine Weiss: Exploring the Potential of Stem Cell Therapy in Enhancing the Lives of Individuals with Autism

Welcome to Why Not Me the World? Podcast hosted by
Tony Mantor, broadcasting from Music City, USA, Nashville, Tennessee. Join
us as our guests tell us their stories. Some will
make you laugh, some will make you cry. Real life
people who will inspire and show that you are not
alone in this world. Hopefully you gain more awareness, acceptance,
and a better understanding for autism around the world. Hi,
I'm Tony Mantor. Welcome to Why Not Me the World.
Today's guest has an autistic son. He and his wife
are helping their son with stem cell therapy and others
as well, So please welcome Doctor Eric Weiss and his
wife Christine. Welcome to the show.
Oh are you good to see you.
It's great to have you here. You've got so much
great information to give. If you could tell us a
little bit about your son and how you found out
that he's autistic.
Marsten is twenty eight right now. He was born in
nineteen ninety five. Back then, there wasn't an early diagnosis
or do you scale that they have right now even
a treatment player. So I would say we diagnosed in
the two of us at like twelve thirteen months because
we have an older son who was advanced, so I
could tell that he wasn't making his marks. I could
tell that he wasn't the same. I knew there was
something wrong. So it was if he was first, I
probably wouldn't have known, But he was second.
Well, that's understandable. Nineteen ninety five, autism wasn't as prevalent
as it is today. So once she went through the process,
you got him diagnosed, found out that he is autistic.
How did that affect your family?
It was devastating. It was devastating to both of us.
You know, I have a special needs sister who it
was an accident that she was That happened when she
was almost two. So I watched my parents go to
Boston Children's and our family go through that with my sister.
So I'm I'm the mother of a special needs child
and a sister, and I knew it was going to
be devastating to the other siblings and devastating to us.
Sure that makes sense completely.
You know.
The one thing that I thought was was difficult for me,
I think just as a man trying to fix it.
It's what we do.
And when your kid gets a diagnosis of leukemia, so
there's a playbook. You know, you meet with a pediatric oncologists,
a pediatric radiation on cologists, and there is a plan.
But when you get diagnosis of autism, there was no plan. Well,
you know, maybe speech therapy or look into it, do
some reading. But in nineteen ninety five, the internet was
in its infancy. Google was just starting to come on board,
So we did have to wander from Boston Children's to
Miami Children's to Philadelphia Children's Hospital until we kind of
developed our own plan. We made a list of what
his strengths and his weaknesses were. Chris was like a
research like an FBI investigator trying to find out, okay,
who's the best with visual perception problems, who's the best
with auditory processing problems? And we patched together a group
of experts and came up with a plan and it
worked out very well.
So as he was growing up, some of the things
that you was implementing to make different changes for him,
what did you see did it help and did you
see any big changes in the development with everything that
you had been doing.
I wouldn't say it was a big difference. I would
say it was a gradual difference. It's just very slow,
gradual uptake. You know, it wasn't He woke up the
next day and he could talk. It was a couple
of words, and then we worked on that. So it
was difficult, and as a mother, you want to go
to sleep and wake up and your child being miraculously healed. Well,
that's not how it is with autism. It's a long,
long journey. It's the long play.
Yeah, it can definitely be a tough journey for sure.
You know, early on, probably it knew that normal school,
they were just babysitting him. Then we just tried to say,
how are we going to get our son to live independently,
How are we going.
To get him to be able to interact with people.
We hired college kids home from the summer to take
them to the mall and show them how to order
ice cream, how to go to a movie, how to
leave a tip, how to go to a restaurant. We
just thought about it as strengths, weaknesses, how do we improve.
That's a great way to look at it. Everyone has
to look at all the options and see what is
best for their child. Now, autism is a spectrum. Everyone
acts and reacts to different things, completely opposite from another.
Did he have any issues with meltdowns while he's growing up.
No, he wasn't. He didn't have any behavioral problems. He's quiet.
He's very quiet, so he never had any meltdowns. Or
he's kind of in his own world more because in
a spectrum for him, he was the I want to
pull him out through the window. He was in his
own world. I knew he could understand what I was saying,
which was really interesting. Like I took these circles and
they were all different colors. I cut them on paper
and they were like two orange, too purple, too green,
and I threw them on the floor and I gave
him one of the circles and I said, match this
purple circle. And he wasn't talking. Maybe a few words
with this other purple circle. And he would put it
down and I pick it up and say purple, say purple,
and he would just look at me. It would just
stare at me. So I knew it was going in,
but it wasn't coming up.
No, they expressive lamage was terrible to the point, like
you said, not having meltdown. One time he came back
from I want to say it was daycare or something
he was in. We took a shirt off and he
had a series of bite marks all down with bat
and some.
Kid had bit him like six times. Wow. But he
had never cried or ran away.
It was like you didn't understand dance.
He did write, just he knew that he was being hurt.
He couldn't put it all together to to either verbalize
or hit the kid or or run away. It was
a sad day in our lives, and that happened.
Sure, that's the one thing that parents are always concerned about,
is the safety of their kids. So as he's grown
older and learned more, how his his verbal skills gained?
Is he communicating now the way that you hoped that
he would.
Yeah, he's amazing.
He's amazing.
He's amazing right now. And I talk about this in
the book. From a researcher, what are the new therapies?
Because there's some snake all salesman out there, and so
I usually will ask her to get me some research
papers so I can read and see if this is
something that's working. I was in Target and this woman
that I know came up to me and she said, oh, Chris,
she knew I had an axistic child. And she said,
my daughter in law, who had an autistic son, went
to Panama for stem cells. And I said, oh really,
and she said yeah, it was really good. In my brain,
I was like, Panama. I'm not going to send my
kid to Panama. My husband's in the medical field. I'm
not going to go to a fine country. Like in
my head, I was doing this whole like bad good,
bad good. And then I always had this theory, which
is probably silly, but to me it works. I'm always like, Okay, God,
if it's something I really need to pay attention to,
I need you to take it too by four and
hit me over the head.
Okay, I get that a little drastic, but I get it.
So I thought about it, and then I got home.
Our tech guy from the office sent me this podcast
on stem cells out of the blue. Like I literally
walked in the door, I saw I had a message.
I clicked on it and it was a whole thing
on neo reared and stem cells, and I went, oh,
my got Well, if that isn't the two by four,
I don't know what.
It is, that's definitely a sign.
So then I took a deep dive and I just
started researching yeah, it's very interesting.
Well, first of all, people get confused about stem cells.
There's embryonic stem cells, which you know, kind of came
up when Bush the Younger was the president and they
were taken from fetuses and people were all against them.
Fetal stem cells were designed to make a baby. Not
much has ever been done with fetle stem cells. They
can cause cancers and things like this, But about halfway
through the second trimester, the baby is really a formed person.
All it does is grow, and so it doesn't have
field stem cells anymore. It has adult stem cells. Adult
stem cells are designed to heal the body. When she
came to me and said what about stem cells, I said, well,
let me figure it out. And so I did a
literature search and the paper that really came to the
forefront was a paper from Duke. And I went to
Duke and it turned out that I knew some of
the people that wrote the paper.
I called him and I said, what's up with these
stem cells and autism?
And they said, you know, we're seeing some amazing stuff.
Kids from not talking to talking, kids just just completely
changing their life. And I go, okay, you signed my
kid up. They said, no, we're pediatricians. He's twenty two,
can't do it.
So what was your next step after that?
So then I called Panama and I do believe doctor
Rearan's a real life doctor.
He's very well trained, US trade smart guy.
He's over there just because of some of the things
we can't do here with the restrictions from the FBA,
and he seems, you know, some great.
Stuff, but he doesn't do kids below above eighteen.
That seems to be an issue, not with just stem cells,
but with everything here in the US that once a
kid hits eighteen, he ages out of the system. What
was your next step?
So I started looking into it. To make a long
story short, they did autopsy studies on kids with autism
and these kids had brain inflammation. So for the first
time we said, okay, we found something different about the
autistics brains. They have brain, they have inflammation in these
certain areas. Then the follow up was that they took
twenty five kids who were living and did spinal taps
on them and they had all these neuroinflammatory mediators in
their spinal fluid, which is what you would expect if
you had inflammation in the brain.
At the same time, this was happening.
We know people that suffered traumatic brain injury get inflammation,
and so the TBI people were looking for the magic
bullet on how to turn off brain inflammation and was
its steroids.
No, was it motri No. What they found out was
there was a specific cell on Biglecourt blood which can
turn off brain inflammation.
So what happened from there with the studies The guys.
From Duke said, the TBI guys just said, this mizincymal
stem cell has the ability to turn off brain inflammation.
Let's try it.
So what happened next?
They tried it, and they tried it in twenty nineteen
and sixty percent of the population got significantly better.
Wow, that's big numbers.
I mean crazy.
Stuff like MRIs before and after showing more connections, showing
less inflammation, their brain weights got more normal. Unfortunately, that
was published in twenty nineteen, followed by the pandemic. And
so there are some more studies that that Duke is
working on that should come out shortly. But that's what
kicked it off that there is very good, solid physiologic
data that the whole Court blood should help kids with autis.
Well, that's super interesting. My next question is where's the injection.
I have friends of mine that have used stem cell
therapy for Parkinson's and it's helped a little bit. I
have friends of mine that have had stem cells done
for their knee in because the injection goes in the
knee and starts rebuilding the knee. I've had another friend
of mine that actually had stem cell therapy done for
his hairline and it started growing hair. For autistic people,
how would that procedure be done?
Well?
These cells are great because they're kind of like heat
seek missiles and they seek out inflammation. So you just
get it's a simple IV. You start an IV, you
infuse them, and by their nature, they kind of get
hung up in the liver, the lung, and the spleen.
But starting at about the eighth or ninth day, they
start migrating to the brain and they have the ability
to cross the blood brain barrier and they go in
and not only turn off inflammation, but they turn on restoration.
And it's and it's the umbilical cord. So this is
medical waste. When you when you have a baby, they
usually throw the ambilbal cord away from medical waste, so
they save the ambilile cord. They draw out the blood
from the umbilical cord. Of course it goes off and
gets tested for a bunch of different diseases because we
want them to be pure when you give it to
someone else.
Sure, you tried this on your son, and what was
the results from this?
As a game changer for our son?
So what changes did you notice?
Right?
He had sort of asked questions. He to start calling
his cousins.
Right, he had stem cells? And then it doesn't happen
this quickly all the time.
So how long did this process take?
He got a stem cells and he slept like fourteen hours,
and I was a wreck because I thought this could
be bad, it could be good.
We were at a.
Hotel and he woke up. We went downstairs and he said,
where did you and dad? And you know, where did
you meet? Where did you and dad meet? I started
getting nursed and I thought, remember we met in the
lobby and he goes, no, no, no, Mom. And this
is a kid who talked for function. Where are we going? Never?
What are we doing tomorrow? You know, never personal conversation
about anything? And he said, no, Mom, when was the
first time you and dad met? Tell me about that,
and I mean it was mind blowing, Like I just
started I said, your brothers have never asked me that.
I just started crying and told him the story. And
we're sitting at breakfast and he's poured pancakes on his
syrup on his pancakes for his Whole Life gluten free pancakes.
And he looked at the pancakes and he said, mom,
where does syrup come from? Is it a recipe? And
I never heard him say the word or do they
make it like this? Does it come from nature like this?
And I was, oh my god, I said, well, I'm
from New England. Told how he would go and put
the pail on the tree and it was just it
was like someone took a veil and pulled it up
and he saw the world and different plight.
Wow, that's amazing. So what was the timeframe from the
very first injection to the time that you saw the
big change?
It was, we saw theself, but then we consistently like
that stuff was right right away, and then as he
went on it was more evident that he he had
critical thinking that he never had before, like he would
weigh decisions out and I never got a driver's right,
he got a driver's license. He he drives a car
right now, like he's been driving a car since he
was twenty two. I mean, he lives on his own
right now, and he has a job. I mean, these
are things that we never thought would ever happen to him,
and he continually makes progress. But we've given him stem
cells twice a year. We've been giving him stem si.
These cells are you in the fact that you would
think that they would set up. Everybody thinks, oh, if
I give a stem cell, it'll go to a brain
or make a new brain sell and that's why it's better.
But that's not how these stem cells work. As you know,
this is this is a product from somebody else, and
so it is a transplant, but you're not getting in
you know, suppressed. So it has a definite lifespan. So
if you look at their original Duke study, these kids
got a single doze and they continue to get better
for six months, and at six months they plateaued, but
they never went back down. And the games you saw
in six months were equivalent to what you usually see
in two years with intensive therapy. So it was about
a four x jump right in that time. And so
this is all new. There's never been a study where
they've given somebody else stem cells a second or a
third doze to see what happens.
We've done that with arts On. To make a long
story short, we were looking for someplace to get it done.
Can't blanket on his knee.
Thomas Lowe, former head of pediatric surgery for Saint You's
Children's Hospital. He was on faculty at University of Illinois,
Chicago and they had to study going on and so
Marten went up there and he showed me how to
do it. So I did it for my son and
we saw gat great progress. And then Chris said, it's
hard to do this. There's just not enough people doing
this right.
And I said, at the end of your life, are
you going to be happy? Are you going to be
okay with the fact that you've been given this opportunity
to help other people, especially moms like me and dads
like you, And you didn't take it up. You didn't
say I'm going to do this and I'm going to
help other people because I know I can do this.
I said, why don't we just cancel all of our
surgeries on Fridays and let's see if we can do
this to help other people.
I think that's a great idea. Helping is always good.
I don't want to stand in front of God. You
gave me this great thing, and you help my son,
but why didn't you help anybody else?
Sure, that makes sense and I really appreciate that you
think that way.
No, And to be honest, I can relate to other
parents because I am a parent.
Sure, And as I.
Tell people, this isn't my day job, right, I don't
have to make a lot of money doing this. I
just have to not lose money by the higher pa
and do some other stuff, get some equipment and things
like that.
Sure, are there any studies that show the results of
what this does.
The Duke study only sixty percent of the kids benefited.
There's some studies that are up to seventy percent of kids.
But like you said, it's a spectrum disorder. Some people
have chromosomal abnormality, some people have other stuff. But if
it looks like it's inflammation, it can really treat that.
I know some would like to have a higher rate
of success, but sixty to seventy percent is not bad
considering this is fairly new. Are there any studies that
have been done that help support this more.
There's actually an experimental animal model of autism where they
induce inflammation in these rats and the rats stop communicating,
they start repetitive behavior, they show antisocial behavior, and when
they get on bibble court blood human in builiting coork blood,
it actually reverses it. And so the big question now
that's facing kind of the researchers is we know it's safe.
Because a Bible Court blood is not new to medicine.
It's been given for sixty years.
Burd utemism and fomas and things like that, but it's
new to autism. There's now about eighty different diseases where
a Bible Court blood is the primary treatment. So we
know it's safe, and so now we're just trying to
figure out dosage administration, you know, things like that, and
who's a good candidate, who's not a good candidate. But
it's it's the newest thing and hopefully will really help.
A lot of kids.
That's a great thing that you just mentioned. Who's a
good candidate. What goes into determining who makes a good
candidate and who doesn't?
I ask questions, Well, if they have a chromosomal abnormality.
I tend to tell them that, you know, I never
like to say I'm not going to do it because
we know it's safe, we know it has the potential
to help. But if you look at all the studies
that are done, they usually excrew chromosomal abnormalities, they excrew,
you know.
Some other things.
I'm sure a lot has to go into it before
you actually decide that it's the best thing for them.
Do get a study where the vast majority of kids
of their study did not benefit. But when they separated
out kids with an IQ below sixty, those were the
people that did respond above or excuse me, especially sixty seventy.
So people above an IQ seventy, which an IQ seventy
is still pretty profoundly disabled, those as a group benefited.
So if they're very profoundly intellectually disabled, I would tell
them up front that they may be a non responder.
That's actually pretty interesting facts.
But my thing with that was, I think, you know,
I'm not a doctor. I think in things of common sense.
I went like, what about those children who are below,
Maybe they need more because they're more profound You're giving
the same dosage that a kid above them. Yet maybe
there's a problem with dosage and we don't really know
that yet.
Right maybe higher doses multiple doses because.
It's it's such, it's in its infancy, and if that
was my child, I would be thinking, well, yeah, maybe
he needs more if it's safe.
I think everything that you say makes sense. There's a
couple of things I think that needs to be addressed.
One is I've had a couple of friends of mine
they've done stem cell therapy. They've been very fortunate and
it worked very well for them. The thing that they
did tell me that is sad, but it's the truth,
is that it's very expensive, and of course insurance doesn't
cover it yet.
I think this will though within I would say five
to ten years, when all the research comes in, because
right now there's nothing else to treat it. But you're right,
I would say that not everybody can afford it, but
there's people who are paying more for therapies and things
like that.
I think an average number just.
For a kid I treat is about eighty four hundred dollars,
which is a lot of money, and I get it.
But when I took my kid to Chicago, it was
over twenty thousand dollars.
Yeah, I hope you're right, because unfortunately, anything in the
health related field is very expensive.
I'm trying, like I said, I've tried to offer it
the most cost effective.
Way that I know how. The problem is, is a
mother gives bird.
You've got forty eight hours to get the ambilical cord
and the umbilical cord blood to the lab or it
has to be processed and then frozen, and then you
wait for the genetic profile of the mother the baby
and all the blood work, HIV, all the hepatitis, cytyomegalovirus,
West Niles, ZINCA, everything that can be transmitted through blood
gets tested, and that takes weeks and weeks and weeks.
So then all of a sudden, the data comes in.
The mom could have anything from avenaral disease to tattoo.
Even tattoos get ruled out, but something called cytol megalovirus
which is kind of common, and then that has to
be thrown away, or even hepatitis which is somewhat common too.
So so only about one out of ten, two out
of ten are good to go, but they've invested all
their money in ten out of ten. Then have to
get rid of a because of pre existing illness, maybe
some type of genetic abnormality that runs in the family line,
things that you don't know about.
Sure, that makes sense, but that's why.
It's ones minus A.
Yeah, these are living cells going into you.
Yeah, that's understandable because anything that's on the front end
of medicine is always more expensive, and then as it
becomes more prevalent, cost goes down, insurances will get in
there and help out. So I get it. So let's
change gears here A little bit. Earlier on in this conversation,
you mentioned a book, So did you write a book
if you would tell us a little bit about that.
Actually, I like to say she wrote a book about it.
I wrote, I wrote a section on stem cell, three
chapters on stem cells.
But our son's name is Marsten.
It's called Educating Marston and it's a wonderful story fall plugus.
I think it's a great book.
But it summarizes her drive to make our child what
he is today. It is he perfect. No he's not perfect,
but he can live on his own, he can drive
a car, he has a job that people love him at.
He gets up every day, goes to work, and he's
never been happier, and she just summer up her life
in the book Things that work, Things that didn't.
Moms who have autistic children, we don't have a lot
of time. So in the back of the book, I
just have a reference chapter on everything, so you can
go to the back and look up auditory processing. I
would have you know too modest and the who I
went to, the website, the phone number, how it worked,
blah blah blah.
That sounds like really great information for me.
That's what I would have done. I would have time
to read and I get that. But you want the information,
it's there. And then the three chapters on stem cells.
We don't really advertise that we don't that we do
stem cells. It's a little group of moms that kind
of find you, but we like them to read just
the three chapters on stem cells, just so they have
a basic knowledge of what's going on.
Sure, that makes sense. There's a lot of information to digest,
especially when it's about your own sons or daughters.
It's not magic, but it lays out or I tried
to lay out the biologic basis, what do these selves do?
What do kids with autism have? How should they interact
to make the kid better? But I think that when
people read it, it makes sense that it should help,
and it looks like it does. Now there's probably fifteen
to twenty studies that have all been very positive outcome,
and like I said, and they're all running sixty seventy
percent of responders. Actually we went to do and we
sat down with them. They haven't even looked at their
non responders yet. They're still trying to figure out the
magic dose and things like that.
Well that shows it's just a lot of research to
be done. But that's really good stuff.
It's super cool. You know when we sat down with
them that the name of her department is cellular Cures.
You would have never thought five years ago or ten
years ago there would be a department called cellular Cures.
Well, science is growing in leaps and bounds, and that's
a very good thing.
Ohal Court blood will be the biggest thing in medicine.
Cintaybobs showing to grow meet cartilage if it helps back
pay all sorts of stuff.
Yeah, it's very interesting and it's definitely something that's here
to stay. And I think it's a good thing.
For me personally. I feel like I'm at the top
of this journey because when Marsden was diagnosed, it was
probably one in ten thousand, and now it's one in
thirty one in twenty five. And I just said, you
know what, I'm the beginning of this and I have
done this journey, and I feel like not everything works
for everybody, but I want to share this. It's such
a struggle and I wanted to write this book to
help people well personally.
I think that's a great thing to do, and I
also think that a lot of people are going to
benefit from the things that you've gone through and what
you're sharing with your book.
Even now, it's hard because you look at your child
and you dream about what they're going to be, who
they're going to marry, what their life's going to be.
But it's not going to be that. But I want
people to have hope that they can.
Be on their own sure, and hope is a great thing.
These are things that can help them on their journey and.
They can have a great, meaningful life.
Right Absolutely. I've had the pleasure of meeting several autistic
people that are out there living great lives and they
deserve it.
Now.
Unfortunately, I've met several people that will never be able
to be on their own and they're always going to
need some sort of care. So there's such a wide spectrum.
But I think it's great that you are out there
trying to help people, give them directions way to go,
because I think the biggest thing facing autism is people
just do not understand it.
And you know, we all want a purpose, and I
think that Marsten feels like he has a purpose when
he goes to work, just like anybody else. You know.
We've seen kids that come here who are nine years old,
not potty trained, not speaking, get one dose of stem
cells and the mom will call and go they got
potty trained in a week, and they're starting to interact
with their child, with their siblings and they're talking. I
mean that is miraculous to me. That's therapy of like
five years. It's amazing.
Wow.
Yeah, it's one more arrow in the quiver. But it
might difference because the more normal the brain gets, the
more the therapy will help. You can't lift two hundred
pounds until you can lift one hundred pounds, right.
I think it's great. Think what you're doing is awesome,
and hopefully the people that listen to this podcast will
gather some knowledge and find a way to help a
lot of people. The basic thing is just helping as
many as we can exactly.
You know, it's life is short, and we belong to
a club. We don't want to belong to parents of
an autistic child.
Now that we're in it, we're like, we are like
the members that are ready to.
Help right right in.
We have some knowledge because a lot of these kids
are six, seven, eight, and ten, and our kids twenty
eight now, sure, and so we lived it before some
of these parents were even born. So we have hopefully
we can help with that playbook like we talked about,
because there.
Is no playbook exactly. So if you could tell us
a little bit about your website and how people can
find you there.
Educating Marston and that's the name of the book. It's
on Amazon, you know everything.
That's great. I hope that a lot of people will
go to it and see that you've got some valuable
information in that. Now, speaking about valuable information, is there
any other information that you'd like to give out that
you think just might help someone.
It's run through Florida State Medical School, Florida State University
Medical School. Doctor Weathersby is the lead psychologist who's a
pioneer and early intervention and early diagnosis. I would highly
recommend that anybody who's who has a kid who's three
or four or two or do just go something's not right,
Just go on and don't tell you to take some
videos and interact with them and send it to them.
And it's a way to have seven or eight or
nine experts look at the video, look at it, give
you their thoughts in some ways to help your child.
That's just such great information. This is a conversation that
I will remember for a very long time. I really
appreciate you coming on and sharing all the information with us.
Thank you for our community you too, Thanks so much.
Thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule
listen to our show today. We hope that you enjoyed
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their story, send them to tonymantor dot com contact then
they can give us their information so one day they
may be a guest on our show. One more thing
we ask tell everyone everywhere about why not me?
The world?
The conversations we're having, and the inspiration our guests give
to everyone everywhere that you are not alone in this world.