Webinar: Photobiomodulation with Vielight

Dr. Dale Bredesen was joined by Vielight’s Founder and CEO, Dr. Drew Lim, for a webinar discussing Vielight’s photobiomodulation technology designed to enhance cognition. Their patented transcranial-intranasal technology has been shown to improve cognitive ability and the brain’s cerebral blood flow. See Apollo Health’s partnership page with Vielight for more information.

We’ve included a complete recording of the session and a full transcript below for your convenience.

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Transcript:

Dr. Lew Lim: We’ve been playing around with it. And so, I was the first one to actually introduce intranasal, followed by modulation to the world. I own the patents for that. But there are good reasons for understanding that … [inaudible 00:00:15].

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Dr. Dale Bredesen: Very exciting. We’ve got a lot of people joining us here. So as people come on, let me just welcome everybody. Fantastic to have you here. I’m here with Dr. Lew Lim, who is just explaining to me that he had the first patents on photobiomodulation. Is that fair to say, Dr. Lim?

Dr. Lew Lim: I wouldn’t say the first patent of photobiomodulation in general, but intranasal.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Intranasal, okay.

Dr. Lew Lim: I don’t know, I lost count, like 30 of our patents in different places around the world, and the way we try to reach the brain through the nose, the way we pulse, the way we get feedback from the nose to the brain and various patents. Yeah.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Fantastic. There’s a tremendous interest, as you know, in photobiomodulation, and we’ve actually talked about this in the past as well. This has been helpful for people, and we’re going to hear more wonderful data today from Dr. Lim. This has been helpful for people with concussive injuries, traumatic injuries, helpful for people with cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease, vascular-related, and so forth and so on. And as Dr. Lim is going to show us today, even the different subtypes that we’ve described for Alzheimer’s disease where we see some people with where inflammation is a big issue, other people where it’s much more about glycotoxicity and insulin resistance, and others where it’s much more about vascular damage or trauma.

All of these are relevant for this exciting technology that Dr. Lim and his colleagues have developed. A lot of people have been very interested in Vielight, and we certainly hear from various groups, oh, here’s someone who started and is clearly doing better as part of an overall protocol. And we’re always, all of us are, interested in the same thing. What can we do for best outcomes? We’re really excited to have you here. Dr. Lim, thanks so much for joining us.

Dr. Lew Lim: Thank you very much. I was looking forward to this. In fact, Dr. Bredesen. I think we kind of got to know of each other but never got together. I think this is the first time we actually speak to each other live. Yeah. Pleasure to be here.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Yes. Long overdue.

Dr. Lew Lim: Yeah. So, if you like, I could look at how we can relate directly to your six types of Alzheimer’s. Would you like to do that?

Dr. Dale Bredesen: That would be great. Let’s do that because, again, we’re all interested, whether it’s family members, friends, ourselves, or whatever. How do we get the best outcomes? And, of course, for all of us, we’d like to be sharp and stay sharp until we’re one hundred. If you could, let’s go ahead, and I know you’ve got a couple of slides you could show. If you can, show us a little bit about how this relates and how your exciting technology has been useful for people who have various things that are contributing to cognitive compromise, from inflammation to insulin resistance and so forth and so on. So yeah, please go ahead.

Dr. Lew Lim: Well, let me start by saying some foundational things. First of all, light in the right to near-infrared spectrum, actually and beyond, penetrates a lot of substances, the longer penetrates more, but the issue is to get the right wavelength, so you get the brain or the body to respond. FM radio waves are also electromagnetic waves, but they don’t draw the same kind of response. So, with that understanding, we have devices that your position in your nose, in your head, in your [inaudible 00:03:51]. Let me just show you an example so you have some context here.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Sure.

Dr. Lew Lim: This is an example of how this is positioned, and the normal way of doing it is through the nose to reach the brain. For years we’ve been lacking data on, for example, how the nose reaches a brain. Now we have actually incredible imaging to prove it, but I will share how it relates. I really love your work and how it is comprehensively put together.

Dr. Lew Lim: (About) your six types of Alzheimer’s. Now, believe it or not, photobiomodulation research has been going on for many years. I’m just one of the many who have been doing it. Many universities and research institutions around the world have been doing it. And for each and every one of your types, inflammatory, atrophic, glycotoxic, toxic, vascular, traumatic, and photobiomodulation can possibly help. Did I go (get) this right, your six Alzheimer’s subtypes?

Dr. Dale Bredesen: That is correct, yes.

Dr. Lew Lim: Okay, great. Now, starting in inflammatory, so you and I understand that a lot of it’s attributed to inflammation, even to, we are researching long COVID now, even COVID. The great news was a few days ago, Health Canada cleared us for our clinical trial on COVID-19, demonstrating that the photobiomodulation, the way we do it there, is significantly quicker recovery, meeting the statistical significance. So that’s clear by Health Canada. FDA is still reviewing it. But this was on the COVID-19. Now we are going to go into long COVID. I can talk about it later, but let’s get back to inflammation and try to relate it to COVID too. So here, there’s evidence to show that photobiomodulation can reduce the cytokines. And this here, I mean … Oh, I lost it. Excuse me.

You can see on the left here that this came out with Stanford. It is just like literally last month. It showed that photobiomodulation downregulates poor inflammatory cytokines that are the ones you probably recognize it, IL-18, and does not regulate IL-10, which is the good guys. There are reviews being done, and it shows that this anti-inflammatory is found in quite a lot of different conditions, including neurodegenerative conditions. For many years, it has been based on animal studies. But while research and COVID-19 were coming out, we had, from my research, the first expression of improvements in a human study. But this relates to COVID-19, which is great, but it shows that photobiomodulation can reduce the pro-inflammatory cytokines, in this case, IL-6 and IL-8. It reduced IL-10 to some measure. But the ratio between IL-10 and IL-6 showed that actually, the increase in IL-10 was more. So that was on inflammation. And we talk about autoimmune disease, and here, I think you are also an expert in how it’s affecting the expression of beta-amyloid. And there’s good work actually going on at the University of Toronto headed by Professor Donald Weaver. Now his group has been on it for quite a while, and he’s proposing an Alzheimer’s disease is an autoimmune disease, really. You cannot look into the expression of beta-amyloid in isolation. So, when you have things like …

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Sure, I mean beta-amyloid, as you know, is really part of the innate immune system’s response.

Dr. Lew Lim: Right. So, infection, trauma, ischemia, depression, pollution, all that can cause a release of beta-amyloid, and okay, part of it, beta-amyloid, the amyloid protein, is a neuroprotective mechanism in the brain. But because according to this group, according to Weaver, because the membrane of the neurons has similar characteristics to the pathogens, you find that the beta-amyloid is also attacking the neurons, and then you cause a cascade. So I’m saying, okay, let’s see if we can reduce the expression of beta-amyloid. I know there’s controversy. There’s a lot of discussion (about) whether it is a valid symptom to go after. Now, photobiomodulation, as shown in one of the studies on autoimmune multiple sclerosis, that on animal that actually with photobiomodulation, it can actually help to reduce this cause and the symptoms of multiple sclerosis.

Now if we don’t see human (results), because actually, it’s really difficult to do human trials. I know Jerry and Lauren, who are the chief investigators driving yet to get to other color amyloids on the gamma treatment later. But here atrophic, now you want to bring to heal, and you want to have expressions of BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and other growth factors. So, this is actually a fairly strong piece of an area of research within photobiomodulation, and this study and the low left started about the pathway ERK/CREB that leads to the expression of brain-derived neurotrophic factors for that one to help.

Dr. Lew Lim: It’s atrophic.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: You tell the autoimmune disease. Okay.

Dr. Lew Lim: Yeah. I thought about atrophic. Delay atrophy, you want to express more of the atrophic factors like BDNF. You speak about quite a lot.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: BDNF is huge.

Dr. Lew Lim: Yeah. So now, this is a study that I was involved in on a traumatic brain injury case of a professional hockey player. He had problems. Clinically he improved. But what we did and imaging was done at UCSF by Professor Linda Chao. What we found with MRI was the regrowth of grey matter in the hippocampal area. Now, there are other works of photobiomodulation that show, actually, there seems to be in an animal study, particularly regrowth in the hippocampal area. So we found this in the human being is only one case, but in my mind, it’s very significant because, for the first time, we are showing that brain cells can regrow before biomodulation.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Very exciting.

Dr. Lew Lim: Yeah. And toxic. If you look at the research done in our field for biomodulation, it’s quite a lot of review work discussing how you need to have your glymphatic system how to drain away the unwanted deposit and debris away from your brain. So your brain lymphatic system should be healthy to do that. There is some theory, hypothesis, and all that to show that photobiomodulation can work.

And I would say they actually forgot to look at this particular study that was done with our device Neuro Gamma by, again, by veterans in San Francisco through UCSF. There were a couple of cases here in the case reports, but it shows that transcranial followed by modulation improve toxins in the brain, as happened in Gulf War illness. So, you go back to some history about the origin of Gulf War illness. It was the soldiers who fought in the Kuwait war in the late 90s came back with this problem, pain and lack of sleep and symptoms that you couldn’t explain. So it could be attributable to these toxins they were breathing it in their brain, but it seems that photobiomodulation is helping. At Boston, let me see. Here.

Okay, there was this here on the right. This left one is done at UCSF. The right one is the biggest study done at Boston University, the Boston VA. They did show improvement photobiomodulation on the brain with the gamma to, which in theory helped to remove these toxins in the brain. So here is some evidence. Now, so 40 Hz gamma is discussed a lot in photobiomodulation. There was quite a lot of actually work done, particularly by another group at USF by Professor Mucke, looking at the brain and the [inaudible 00:15:35] of memory was correlated with the presence of gamma. Then it’s some other studies and so on looking at the mechanism. But MIT did this huge, big study published in Nature. It was very significant. In an animal study, when they expose these animals, the mice to flickering lights at 40 Hz.

At that time, no one could explain why 40 Hz works. But it did; it reduced the level of beta-amyloid, as I mentioned earlier, in the brain. So, in some ways, it was clearing, but we actually looked at this earlier because we were studying EG expression to bring too. But again, Professor Linda Chao of UCSF says, “Okay, I want to do this of gamma 40 Hz.” And this was a study that she published, among other things. She actually studied eight patients in control, and four were given the active Neuro Gamma passing in 40 Hz. With fMRI, she’s also a professor of radiology. So she had access to the MRI scanners and so on. Now fMRI, if you look at it after 12 weeks, you can see the brain has degenerated among the usual care patients. But in those who were exposed to photobiomodulation, actually, there was improved connectivity in certain modes of the default mode network seated in the PCC, which is part of it. But just looking at the images, you can see that the expressions pretty much stayed the same or improved slightly.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Yeah. Good to see. So Dr. Lim, let me just interrupt for one moment here. Just a couple of basics because you’re going through some beautiful data here, and I want to make sure that everybody can appreciate some of the things. So number one, you mentioned the wavelength of light, and often, it’s said that photobiomodulation is dependent upon cytochrome c and its absorption of light. What is the wavelength that you’re typically using with Vielight, and how have you chosen that particular wavelength?

Dr. Lew Lim: Well thank you for asking because I’ve prepared a bunch of slides, so I can go back to some of those and show you. Now, here is a very well-used picture of what’s happening in the mechanisms of photobiomodulation.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Okay.

Dr. Lew Lim: On the left here, you can see this one is actually a little bit old, but at the time when Michael Hamblin published it in 2016, just not that long ago. Now, there are two groups of, and you can call the spread of wavelengths between 900 and 1064, which is longer than what we use. We generally use 810. The light goes and activates. Here is a light-gated ion channel. Actually, it goes direct. And on the picture on the right, you can see that also here, the 900 to 11 right here. This time it actually goes direct and activates. What happens is it activates by water, it gets absorbed by water and activates calcium signaling and the heat and light-gated ion channel to activate a brain. But with 810, which we use, it falls under this group that actually activates mitochondria.

When people talk about activating mitochondria, because for a long time now, there’s discussion, okay, we want to activate cytochrome c oxidase, which is in the last terminal of the electron transport chain. Then you get this, and you start activating transcription factors that help with BDNF and a bunch of other things. So here’s where I want to clarify. Using 810 versus the 1070 is another discussion. Either one is right or no wrong. It depends on what you want to activate here. Both activate a brain, but if you want to activate the mitochondria, ATP, and so on, 810 actually falls within that spread [inaudible 00:20:52].

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Right. All right. And then could you talk a little bit about it? Then you say if you want to activate mitochondria, you use 810. Okay, well, when do you use the 1070?

Dr. Lew Lim: Here’s where we still need to learn more because both seem to activate our brains. So I’ve been having discussions with my research team. We actually see literature and some of the work we are doing, 1070 does activate our brain, but do we switch over to 1070? Should we move to 1070? But there’s so much more clinical evidence that’s coming out of 810 over the years. Is 1070 wrong? I said no, it’s not wrong. Just that we haven’t done enough research. So, we are actually literally doing the research right now using [inaudible 00:21:47], but by my team-

Dr. Dale Bredesen: If someone were to buy Vielight today-

Dr. Lew Lim: Yeah.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: … number one, what’s the wavelength? I assume that they would buy gamma, and how often would you recommend that they do it, and for how long?

Dr. Lew Lim: All of our devices currently now for the brain use 810 nanometers. It doesn’t mean that we’ll stick to that forever. But at this moment in time, I would say that the body of clinical studies favor 810. And because 810, here is again based on the collection of literature, somebody like Michael Hamblin has said, okay, it looks like between 600 to 900, 1100 or sorry to 850 would be activating the mitochondria. But it looks like actually, for a long time, people like him and me didn’t think longer than that really works well. But the [inaudible 00:23:00] showing that brain does respond to 1070. So, we can’t dismiss it. But I would say the 1070 activates the water structure, the light and heat-gated ion channel that activate the brain better. It results in at much clinical. At the clinical level outcome, we don’t know yet.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Yeah, okay. But certainly, we come across again and again and again getting the appropriate activation of mitochondria is clearly an important thing for many neurodegenerative conditions. So this makes a lot of sense. And then, as you mentioned earlier, pulsing it, so you’re talking about gamma, which is what’s typically suggested for MCI for dementia. Something like 40 Hz, 40 per second, 40 pulses per second. And do you recommend that people do this every day? Do you recommend that they do it a few times a week? What is your suggestion, and for how long should they be doing it, and should it be once a day, twice a day? What do you recommend for the best outcomes at least? I understand that you’re still doing research, but for the best outcomes that you’re aware of currently.

Dr. Lew Lim: Here’s my general recommendation. We have seen people with various conditions respond to even to once a week, twice a week. They simply do well. And some sensitive people are saying, “You know what? I can’t even tolerate 20 minutes.” These are outliers, by the way. They’re not the general population.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Yeah. When you say they can’t tolerate it is it because of a headache or because of what?

Dr. Lew Lim: Well, obviously, these outliers are very sensitive. I’ve almost labeled them as supernatural because they’re so sensitive to the photons. But if they say just 10 minutes is enough for me about once or twice a week. But on the other side of the spectrum are subjects with atrophic brain. So, the brain is not so sensitive anymore, obviously because the number of brain cells have been reduced. Examples are Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases.

So, they’re not sensitive anymore. In fact, I won’t say just them. A lot of people can tolerate once a day, more than once a day, or twice a day. They’re not necessarily outliers. But I would say that for those with, say, Alzheimer’s disease, as you progress it gets less sensitive. They can tolerate more. So here, but in general, I would say in our clinical trials, this is what we propose. For those who have been tested to have MCI or Alzheimer’s, they can do it once a day. Give the seven-day rest. Because the way it works is you don’t want to overstimulate. You want to break the reset and be able to absorb more.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: And once a day for how long?

Dr. Lew Lim: It’s 20 minutes. It’s set for 20 minutes.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: 20 minutes. Got you.

Dr. Lew Lim: It stops automatically at 20 minutes.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: So once a day, 20 minutes, something like five or six times a week, but not seven times a week. Is that fair to say?

Dr. Lew Lim: Yeah. If you can tolerate seven days a week. So I’m trying to generalize so that we don’t have to make it so difficult to make a recommendation. Now if for other people, if you are healthy, you want to improve your brain. If you have, say you suffered a stroke, but you see a significant improvement, I would say when you see improvement, cut back.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Yes.

Dr. Lew Lim: In photobiomodulation, there is such a thing as the biphasic response. If too little doesn’t work, too much gets overstimulated, you produce too many free radicals, and your brain going to get rid of those things.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Yeah, good point. What about those of us who just like to be sharp? We’re not complaining about memory loss, but we’d like to be a little sharper in our day-to-day interactions. What do you recommend for us?

Dr. Lew Lim: Personally myself, I do once every two days with a Neuro. But I have other intranasal which they have less power than I do in between. But there’s no hard and fast road that works for me. I have done it every day. Nothing wrong with my brain, but those who have experienced it and some have come back with quite remarkable feedback. They feel that the memory, even though they’re healthy, I would say I’m in my 60s now, I would say that my brain is as sharp as when I was in my twenties or thirties. How do I know? Because I’ve done IQ tests myself.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Have you done tests on healthy volunteers and shown that you actually do see an improvement in cognition?

Dr. Lew Lim: Yeah, we actually plan to do that. We had an independent study done at the University of New Mexico by Vince Clark’s group. He was actually funded by the U.S. Military and saw if we could improve the mental performance of soldiers, and it was a small group. We found actually they actually improved in the stimulator response to threats and the response decision-making. So that small case, very hard to make a claim, but we want to do more. What we are doing right now is, on top of that, we want to see what happens to long-term meditators. The study is ongoing. I see some preliminary data. There’s one study going on at the University of Arizona in Tucson. There’s another study that is ongoing in Toronto, which we are collaborating with the Center of Addiction and Mental Health, which is part of the University of Toronto.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Yeah.

Dr. Lew Lim: Very, very interesting. Actually, it makes a difference. I wouldn’t have time to go to a lot of it today.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Sure. Well, look, we can discuss this again. I think we’ve got some fantastic questions here that have come across, and we’ve got dozens of them. So, since we’ve got your expertise right here, and we’re grateful for that, let’s go through some of these excellent questions. And I recognize the six types that you mentioned. You actually have data for all of these, which is fantastic. We greatly appreciate that. Again, we’re all interested in the same thing, which is the best outcome for everybody. There are a bunch of wonderful questions here. Here’s one from Nancy, who says, I have PPA, primary progressive aphasia. This, as you know, is one of the non-amnestic presentations of Alzheimer’s disease and is something that we typically find is associated with toxin exposure. And interestingly responds to detox as well as responds to EWOT and exercise with oxygen therapy. And so, she says, is the study of PPA with photobiomodulation of Vielight devices? If so, what does the study say? And have you looked at people who have primary progressive aphasia as a presentation of Alzheimer’s disease?

Dr. Lew Lim: There’s somebody I work with, Dr. Margaret Naeser of Boston University. She’s somewhat of an expert in primary progressive aphasia, actually but not necessarily linked to Alzheimer’s disease. But what she recommends is this, she used to be an expert in TMS, but she’s also photobiomodulation now. But she said just focus on treating the left side. Because aphasia is really due to a dysfunction of the left side of the brain. So, if you’re using the Neuro, I would shield the right side. So that’s a recommendation because once you discover for stroke, hemispheric stroke happens once, left or right side. Always say expose that part of the brain that has a lesion. He found that it is better than doing both sides. So, both sides, you get the brain talking to each other, left and right. So that could be a problem.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: And how is he shielding? What is he using to shield the other side?

Dr. Lew Lim: You can use aluminum foil. Just shield the modules. It works fine.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Okay, good point. This sounds like this could be something very helpful for Nancy to be shielding the right side and doing more on the left side. And then she goes on to say, what’s the frequency? I’m assuming that it would still be the gamma that you would recommend. Is that correct?

Dr. Lew Lim: Yeah, actually, in this case, I’ve recommended alpha, which passes at 10 Hz. Now there’s a lot of stuff that we are kind of discovering, 10 Hz, 40 Hz in all kinds of actually. But I’ll say that the body of research for stimulating healing goes back to an animal study done by Mike Hamblin at Harvard, going back a number of years, and he found that 10 Hz worked the best for traumatic brain injury where there are lesions in the brain. So let me just differentiate this. So here we’re talking about stimulating, say BDNF, growth factors in the brain, and we see that 10 Hz is stimulatory. It seems to work better. And gamma, based on a number of research including MIT, is suggesting that 40 Hz is activating processes of the brain, including activating a non-inflammatory [inaudible 00:33:04] to help remove the [inaudible 00:33:06] in the brain, which is a little bit different in the mechanisms. We stimulate a brain like a stroke. We found this to many brain injury as well. And we are recommending 10 Hz, generally speaking, for traumatic brain injury unless we’re talking about CTE, which is [inaudible 00:33:24].

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Okay, now, and this person obviously has PPA, which is not necessarily traumatic and probably not traumatic, but it is as you indicated, it is lateralizing. She goes on to say, how often do you do this? Is it best in morning or afternoon and evening? And do you like to do it every day or three or four? Now you, you’ve said before, probably do it five or six days a week. What about the time of day? Is there a preference there?

Dr. Lew Lim: No, not really. You can do it any time of the day, but taking control of Alzheimer, we often say, do it preferably when you are sleeping, you’re going to sleep, or taking a nap because it’s when the lymphatic system in your brain gets more activated, and it helps to emphasize on the emphatic drainage to remove like beta-amyloid.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Okay, so you are recommending the people actually do this while they’re sleeping, while they’re napping, or you mean right before they go to sleep?

Dr. Lew Lim: Okay, here is the gamma. You want to remove the unwanted deposits in your brain. So recognize that the drainage system in your brain is most active when you’re slumbering off or sleeping, then use it when you’re in this state. So that is for a neurodegenerative disease, but for alpha, for in her case, it doesn’t matter what time of the day.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: I see. Okay. All right. There’s one here from Sharon that says, has your device been studied on glaucoma patients needing to get more blood/oxygen to the optic nerve part of the brain? It’s interesting; this brings up, as you know, a whole field and a red light for age-related changes in the eye. And there are some nice studies out of the UK going improvement with age-related, not just glaucoma, but things like macular degeneration, especially with red light stimulation. Have you worked much with people with glaucoma?

Dr. Lew Lim: Oh, we haven’t, actually. We haven’t done much work on the eye, but I’ll just say, like you mentioned, for dry age-related macular degeneration, and that goes with the different part of the eye, red. They’ve been using 617 nanometers for red. Seems to work. I think they’ve got pretty good outcomes in clinical studies. Glaucoma, I don’t have much; at least, I don’t recall studies being done.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Got you. All right. And then Barbara is asking, let’s see, oh sorry, I missed one here, Patricia. Patricia’s saying, would it be possible for the doctor to discuss the use of photobiomodulation in the treatment of early-stage dry age-related macular degeneration? This is basically just what you’re talking about, and yes, I think this is going to be a field where you’re going to see more and more. From our work, we would recommend you do more than just that because you’ve got to think about oxygenation and mitochondrial function and how much blue light you’re exposed to and what altitude you’re living at, whether there are toxins on there, a lot of other things in this system’s biology approach. But clearly, it does look as if some red-light stimulation, and this, again, is a nice study coming out of the UK to support that idea.

And then Barbara asks, would infrared and near-infrared therapy helmet devices help in preventing cognitive decline or even stimulate mental acuity? Well, I think that’s exactly what you’re publishing. That’s exactly what you’re seeing. It looks like this is going to be for many, many people. This is going to be very helpful and obviously should be part of the overall protocol for everybody to get that stimulation. Now, you mentioned alpha as well as gamma. You mentioned alpha as part of healing. It seems like most of us really want both. We want some degree of healing, but we also want some degree of mitochondrial activation. Do you ever recommend going back and forth and doing one for a period of time and then switching and then going back?

Dr. Lew Lim: Yeah, we actually have the Neuro Duo, which comes with the alpha and gamma. So you can switch back and forth between 10 Hz and 40 Hz. Now, generally speaking, I would say that the 10 Hz actually works for a broader spectrum of conditions in our use of gamma for cases where there are instances where you have to clear the parts in the brain like tau or amyloid. So that happens in Alzheimer’s disease, CTE in repetitive traumatic brain injury, in Parkinson’s disease where you have the deposits of alpha-synuclein deposits. So, I say, where is neurodegeneration? You feel that your brain is kind of, you’re not functioning as well. It could be you need to get tested. So, I would say, generally, the gamma, and there’s a lot of talk about gamma. Meditators love gamma because gamma is when you get into a higher state of gamma and beyond. We are finding that some really, really interesting stuff.

Now here’s a quick mention, trying to understand all these different frequencies. We are also doing basic cell studies and see what happens if you pass different frequencies on living cells, on cancer cells. In real-time, you see how the cells are responding, and I say, at the moment, the indication seems to be like this, the alpha things will be stimulatory as you reach 40 Hz gamma. It seems to be switching over. And then, as you go to higher frequencies, that’s an inhibitory effect. It is still my kind of hypothesis and a bit speculative right now. We are still accumulating evidence, but it will give us an indication of how we are going to be better and offer better products to people with different conditions. So, they have different purposes of frequency, and it doesn’t matter.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Okay. The next one here is from Cliff. What’s the difference between this and photodynamic therapy? PDT plus laser watch. Can you talk a little bit about the differences between Vielight and photodynamic therapy?

Dr. Lew Lim: So photodynamic therapy is using, often red, one of the different colors to activate an activating protein, and quite a lot of research has been done in this area for cancer. So, you inject this substance into your body, and when you shine light and say on the tumor, it activates just agents, and it creates a blast of reactive oxygen species free radicals that will theoretically attack the tumors. So that is photodynamic therapy. I haven’t seen it done widely in other conditions. It’s still kind of very, it is unsettled. I think the problem with clinical trials is that they are very demanding, and when you introduce an agent into your body, you’ve got to exercise extra care and so on. It’s still ongoing. I think the interest has kind of simmered down a little bit. Watch laser is, my guess, similar to a shining laser. A laser diode onto your skin so it gets in your body. It’s different.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Yeah. All right. Then there’s one here from Bella who says, any data on subcortical dementia/cognitive decline. Of course, this is essentially a generic term for subcortical dementia. There are a number of things that can give you a subcortical dementia. So at least, I would recommend please get evaluated and find out what different processes are. The whole point here is that people have made these diagnoses as pathological diagnoses. Okay, it’s Alzheimer’s pathology, or it’s Lewy body pathology or it’s Parkinson’s associated dementia pathology, and so forth and so on. We are really now taking that next step to say, is this driven by a process that relates to a specific pathogen? What we call Alzheimer’s disease is really a chronic, largely innate immune encephalitis that, over time, is causing a loss of network function. You’re getting fewer and fewer synapses until the point that you have problems. And so, the photobiomodulation is part of an overall approach to improve the function of the synapses, to improve the number of synapses.

As Dr. Lim said, you’re actually increasing BDNF, which is important. So I would find out what’s causing subcortical dementia, whether you work with a neurologist, whether you work with someone that we’ve trained now over 2000 physicians, whatever. The next one here is from Alan asking, is it possible for photobiomodulation to be developed to stop the development of Alzheimer’s completely with regular usage until a cure is discovered and available. Well, as we’ve talked about, this, of course, is about what’s driving the process, and I think photobiomodulation has had wonderful effects, but it is not the only thing. If you have a specific infection that is driving this, you’re going to want to get rid of that infection as well. But clearly, the PBM has been very, very helpful. Dr. Lim, could you comment on people where they’ve had specific infections, or you mentioned the head trauma or specific drivers of the problem? Have you seen people where the photobiomodulation is all that’s needed, or do you recommend that they also look at what’s actually driving the process?

Dr. Lew Lim: Yeah, talking about head trauma, some of our most solid evidence is coming out of traumatic brain injury and what it does. We have an ongoing study at Boston University, and it’s been going on for a few years now. It is a randomized control study. We are waiting for that to come out. But before that, just literally maybe about a couple of months ago, the lab at Boston University led by Margaret Naeser actually published four cases of retired athletes. And the outcomes are really very significant. And these are athletes that are showing signs of CTE.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Right. Very common.

Dr. Lew Lim: Yeah. So, what we’re talking about, I can show you some of the slides here that I wanted to show you because in your … Can’t find it. Yeah. These are retired athletes. She had four cases, and now, I want to explain this. They went to her lab. Now, in the first week, they were treated with photobiomodulation. It was not our device, and it was a different device. It was for [inaudible 00:45:47]. They actually had the LED on the head. This picture is on the left. They actually had a stocking hold it in place for a week. Then, okay, clinical trial over, go back, you have shown improvements here, [inaudible 00:46:03] about executive function and inhibition, false alarm rate, immediate recall, total recall, and stuff. Then there is PTSD, depression, pain, the executive functioning. Now what’s happening is, okay, the one week they improve in the clinical outcomes. So these are all responses.

I would maybe go to this one on top of PTSD. Okay. Improved. But when the trial would go away and then they started reporting a reversal. And these are patients that have suspected CTE. It means that with the degenerative disease, you really have to just keep treating regularly. And then the lab suggested, okay, come back, and we give you a device. This is actually the Neuro Gamma, Neuro Gamma because degenerative, you want to get rid of the tau, and then they improved. This trend is very, very clear. It shows that photobiomodulation works, and this is for [inaudible 00:47:28], for CTE. So, there’s an example of TBI. Now I want to talk about a very significant body of studies coming up at the University of Utah. They’ve done extensive work using the Vielight devices to treat generally, at least with a training brain injury. Here’s one that they presented as a poster. So I’m okay to show it to you. Now, with symptoms like depression, and PTSD, you know how adjustment to one’s sleep and reaction time improve significantly. You will see more coming up. They did this more than a year ago, just taking time to write the manuscripts. You’ll see the averages being published hopefully in a few months. So it was PTSD. Now while we’re talking about this, I also want to say because there’s interest in Alzheimer’s disease, I want to say that the Vielight devices generally are low-risk general wellness devices under the category put up by FDA. So, we don’t make a medical claim. So I’m referring to all these into various evidence. But I’ll say that we have submitted to FDA for this big clinical trial we are doing in for severe Alzheimer’s disease. We are submitting one for mild. We are going to submit one for long COVID. So I say that I’m just referring to related evidence but not claiming yet until we have evidence.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: No, I understand. I think it’s worth pointing out, though, that you have people with depression where depression seems to be responding to photobiomodulation quite nicely. And I know something has been published on that just recently, as well as what you’re showing here. I think this is very important what you’re showing here with CTE. I know we’re running out of time here, so I want to take one more question here. There’s one here from Michael, and then we can send you. If it’s okay with you, let’s send you the questions because we’ve got about another 50 on here or so. Oh, actually, no, we’re up to 80.

So hey, probably more like another 75, lots and lots of questions, which is great. People have all sorts of questions about how to use this best. One of the points that Michael’s asking about here is the coverage of the brain. He says since you’re looking at fueling mitochondria, it seems surrounding the brain would be more beneficial, but there must be some reason for the choice. So could you talk a little bit about why the stimulation which is where the stimulation is? How did you choose that?

Dr. Lew Lim: Okay. It is a very interesting question. And I would say that when we developed this, I worked with some collaborators like Boston, and Harvard and said, okay, this is going back a few years; we want to hit the default mode network because it is like a template network of the brain. If it’s healthy, it helps settle a lot of conditions. So we’re looking at that, and about two, three years ago, we looked at the expression in EEG and see if we move this around, does it matter? The EEG shows that it matters because it seems to activate different parts of the network. And then where we did on meditators as well, we had this, and we moved it so. somewhere else, they didn’t experience the same thing. Now for that, it’s quite complicated, I would say. At that high frequency was activating the [inaudible 00:51:10] network. Now we have a reason to do that, but this is my chance to show what we found. Having said that, now, this is novel. We are collaborating with Baker Crest Hospital, which is part of the University of Toronto. They’re presenting this at a brain imaging conference this month in Montreal. So, I’m okay to share this with you. Now, this is actually positioning on the right laser real-time imaging and fMRI. So not many people can do this, but we’ve designed the device in such a way. On the right prefrontal on the right, you can see reactivation. Left, not so much. So it’s actually quite global.

And when we introduce a left intranasal combined with the right, the whole brain gets lit up. It shows that the nasal itself works. On the head, it works, but I don’t want to go into the details, but the power matters. You need quite significant, and you need; actually, I say here, 150 mW. So it’s not small numbers. We can do it. And you have this kind of expression in cerebral blood flow, [inaudible 00:52:45] into cerebral blood flow. This is the demonstration of cerebral blood flow in significant ways. Much more significant than what I’ve seen in the literature for magnetic stimulation or electrical stimulation.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Right. So that’s exciting. So that offers a wonderful way to stimulate blood flow. And you’ve already shown improvement, mitochondrial function, you’ve talked about healing, you’ve talked about trophic factors. It does appear that there are multiple mechanisms, and we appreciate your showing us these data. Very exciting. And we should probably have a follow-up to continue to talk about this, but I think we’re all looking at how do we translate this today into the best outcomes for people who are either at risk for cognitive decline or who are suffering some cognitive decline. So, this looks very, very promising. And again, lots of people already using it very successfully. We’re running out of time here. Have any final words you want to say before we wrap up here?

Dr. Lew Lim: Well, first of all, thank you. I want to thank everybody for their interest. I know we’ve not had a chance to kind of speak to everybody. We are a very research-oriented company, as you can tell. We are crazily, disproportionately interested in the research because I think we are only discovering a small percentage. We’re just opening the gate. We have at least 90 percent of more information to be, or more discoveries to be made. And I didn’t do this alone. We have a team of highly qualified researchers. Sometimes I think of seven PhDs and MDs in a small company. We have at least 30 or more collaborators around the world. And we are still going to new things like we are using fancy, maybe fancy to a lot of people like magnetic resident spectroscopy to understand what are the [inaudible 00:54:49] that are happening. But watch us; as we progress, we will tell people and share with people this new information. Hopefully, we make the world a better place.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Absolutely. Yeah. So more and more exciting things to come. We look forward to that. And we appreciate the fact that you’ve already developed things that are highly clinically useful. So, Dr. Lim, thank you so much for your many years of work and research, for your commitment, and for your continued development, and we look forward to talking to you again.

Dr. Lew Lim: Thank you. I want to thank you.

Dr. Dale Bredesen: Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you next time.