Long Covid Research and Solutions with Keith C. Ellis, PhD

Here we are my friends for another edition of the wellness talk podcast. I'm George Bautista, your host and your wellness advocate. Wellness talks, the show that goes over the latest in health, healing, nutrition, and fitness. And today I'm going to be discussing a subject that I haven't really, uh, discussed on this show a lot. Actually, I probably did maybe one podcast on it, but it's a very important subject. And it's about a condition that a lot of people are facing. And I think that the medical community is really not addressing it as they should. And that is the condition of long COVID. And, uh, I know, you know, I know many people who still suffer from it and it can be a very debilitating condition, but today we're going to be discussing that subject with a guest. Our guest today is going to be Dr. Keith Ellis, PhD. And Dr. Ellis is not only one of the foremost experts on the subject of long COVID, he's done tremendous research on the subject. And he brings a wealth of knowledge to this program. So we're going to be discussing with Dr. Ellis, his research, his ongoing research on long COVID. We're going to discuss what are the symptoms as well as the mechanism of action that's going on and people were suffering from this. Uh, we're also going to discuss, uh, is the medical community missing it? Are they not paying as much attention to it as they should? And then the bigger question is going to be, are there natural approaches that you can use that can help to support you, uh, and help you manage it the best way you can. So we're going to discuss that today. So make sure you stay tuned for that. It's going to be a great discussion with Dr. Ellis. So of course go to georgebaptista.com make sure you check out all the articles, make sure you check out all the information that we, we put on there. We cite all our articles and you know, everything is referenced there for you guys to make sure you like share and subscribe. Because again, that's how we grow the show, right? That's how we get this information out there. Because at the end of the day, what we want to do is help people. You want to help people get healthy. We want to help people with the information. And then when we provide you with the information from whether it's myself or a guest, you guys can make the decision if this is something for you or not. And if it's not for you, what I always say, pass it along. Maybe your friend or your neighbor, someone in your family can use this information. Maybe it'll help them get better. Maybe it'll help them feel better. So that's kind of the goal of what we do here as always. Okay. So before we get to Dr. Ellis, we want to recognize our friends at wellness resources. So of course, we'd wellness wellness resources. They manufacture superior quality nutritional supplements that deliver the most affordable nutrients in optimal amounts to make a true difference in your health. 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So again, 25% off their immune supplements. So again, it's wellness resources at my vitamin resource.com. Check them out. My vitamin resource.com. All right, guys. So, uh, before we bring on Dr. Ellis, I want to just talk a little bit about his background. So Dr. Keith Ellis is a scientist and associate professor of medical chemistry and has recently been dedicating his time, energy and talents to helping people recover from long COVID. Dr. Ellis is using his knowledge, expertise, and experience in medicinal chemistry, pharmacology and natural products to research the biological mechanisms that cause long COVID and the potential therapeutic mechanisms that can help people recover. Dr. Ellis has also combined his scientific work with his interest in entrepreneurship to design and bring to market a custom formulated natural product supplement to help people recover. And I am very happy to have him on this program today. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Keith Ellis, Dr. Ellis, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here and have some good conversations. Absolutely. I appreciate you. And I'm really glad you reached out and, um, we were chatting a little bit before the show on, I haven't really talked about long COVID on this show a lot. Uh, I think I did one episode on it a while back, but you know, I, I really thought about it when you reached out and I said, you know what, this is, this is a great topic. Do people really need help with this? And, um, I know people personally who suffer from this. So I want to dive right into it. And the work that you're doing is absolutely fantastic. And I really, you know, I really appreciate, you know, how you're helping people out there. So I want to kind of really dive into it. So for those who are not familiar with you, um, kind of talk a little bit about your background first and then kind of how, how you got into the research that you're doing. Um, so I, I'm kind of a, I have an interesting background, not, not many that people really know about. So I'm an associate professor of medicinal chemistry. I'm a kind of a chemist by training, uh, organic chemist and then medicinal chemist and medicinal chemistry is the kind of the academic discipline that trains the scientists that go and do drug discovery in pharmaceutical industry. So I, I design molecules, design molecules that are supposed to have certain biological activities. We make them, we test them and we do iterative optimization, right? So, so that's really, um, for most of my career, I've done what I call early lead discovery, where we look at new molecular targets in disease States with new mechanisms of action and try to find new drugs is basically what I've done for, for most of, of my career. And I, so I'm a scientist, uh, professor. I teach a lot of students, uh, a full gamut of everything from chemistry to pharmacology, a lot of it in, in between. Great. Awesome. Awesome. So, I mean, obviously you're, you know, you've got a tremendous resume here. Um, and so what brings you specifically to the, uh, research that you're doing now, uh, to long COVID? Um, long COVID was, has been kind of an adventure. It's been a journey. And it's been, um, it, it, it didn't go the way I thought it was going to go. Like a lot of things in life these days is the pandemic. Right. So I originally started wanting to work on long COVID around early 20, 23, I kind of went into the scientific literature thinking I was going to start what would be a normal scientific project for me, a normal academic project, looking at long COVID, looking at what was known about the molecular mechanisms that cause it, those underlying mechanisms, um, looking for molecular targets, trying to get started because it was clear long COVID was a real problem. There was a lot of people suffering from it. There's not a lot of good options for them. They're not getting a lot of help. Even the physicians, especially back then in early 2023, didn't really know what to do with some, some of the long COVID people. They just didn't know how to help them. And I wanted to get that process started and do what I normally do, which is start the process of trying to develop and discover and develop new drugs. And I went into the scientific literature and I had an experience that was a first in my career. And there was just a lack of information for me to do what I want to do. Um, so most of the work that I've done in my career has been in oncology, a little bit on antibacterials. Um, so I went to the scientific literature. I said, okay, it's 2023 COVID's been around for a while, long COVID by then had been around for a while. There's been a lot of grant money going into this. There's been a lot of papers published, just huge amounts of science in the literature. So from my kind of chair in the scientific process in that ecosystem, right? I need certain information to be known before we can go and actually discover new drugs. And what I found when I went into the literature is there was a lot of data on long COVID, a lot of information, a lot of people studying it, but not in the, in a very focused way and not in the way we need to, in order to actually start the process of discovering new drugs. So, um, you know, people that worked on neuroinflammation were studying neuroinflammation in long COVID, but they were studying that as kind of its own process, not really looking at what causes, right. Where my job kind of in, in the scientific community is to come up with solutions. It's to say, okay, the disease is the problem. We figure out as much as we can about it. We look at it mechanistically and then we start creating solutions. Right. And I was actually kind of shocked that there wasn't more information that in people weren't doing more focused research on saying what is causing long COVID. And there wasn't more of a concerted effort because coming through COVID right in developing the vaccines, that was a very concerted effort to get to that. Sure. But then after that, there hasn't been much of a concerted effort to try to really find solutions for long COVID. Um, so I, I kind of took a step back for a minute and said, all right, well, the literature is not where quite where I want it to be. And I started asking questions, well, what do we know and where can we go from there with an eye towards actually trying to help people? Right. Because one of the big hallmarks right now of long COVID and from the people that I talked to that have it is they're not getting a lot of help. They're they're physicians. It's kind of a roll of the dice. A lot of them have found good physicians over time, but usually they're, they're going through a stream of doctors to try and figure out what's going on to try to understand their symptoms, to try to get a diagnosis. And a lot of times they're passed off from physician to physician and from specialist to specialist. So there, and there still isn't a ton of good solutions for them. So I wanted to do something that was going to actually help them because drug discovery takes a long time and it was not going to be moving forward anytime soon. Um, so I did go into literature with an eye towards looking for causative mechanisms and that was actually the starting point that I had anyway. And I found a great group of scientists that have come up with a hypothesis of what causes long COVID and that's the, the microclots hypothesis. So it's this hypothesis that viral proteins actually cause misfolding of proteins that, that are we normally use for clotting and that misfolding ends up resulting in the formation of microclots and that a lot of the symptoms of long COVID are kind of downstream of the microclots. So that was kind of the one causative mechanism in the literature. Um, and, and still one of the few, right, there's there, there are people that like to talk about mitochondrial dysregulation. There's a whole bunch of different aspects of long COVID that people talk about. But when you really sit down and say, okay, what's cause and what's effect, um, micro, the microclot hypothesis is still one of the very few causative mechanisms of causative hypotheses that people have put forward. So that's kind of where I started working in that area and starting to ask questions and starting to try to push things forward. Okay. Interesting. Do you think that the reason why long COVID hasn't really a lot of these scientists or doctors or whatever, not really, I mean, even after COVID, there was a, there was a point where people denied long COVID. There was a people where they were like that, that doesn't even exist. Do you think that there was a, there was a, there was this long period where so many people were denying it and then it's taking a while and still to this day, taking well for physicians to come around to the fact that it is a thing. Um, I think it's a couple aspects. I think so. The kind of normal people in the world, you say, Oh, I've got long COVID. And, and you know, some of this year says, no, you don't want COVID doesn't exist. That I think is a product of just the polarization of the culture. Sure. And, and, um, you know, people, once I put it against another, I think is what's developing that. And what is not making it any better and is actually making things really hard is the fact that when you go to a physician and they start running tests, the really bad thing about long COVID is it doesn't, it doesn't really show up on standard clinical laboratory testing, right? When you go to the doctor and they start running test after test after test, most long COVID patients pretty much look normal. Will things be maybe just outside the normal range? Sure. But for most people that happens with something, but there's no, there's no good biomarker for long COVID. There's no, no, um, clinical test reading that a physician can point to and say, okay, that, that means you have long COVID. So that made it very difficult for the physicians to deal with because they have somebody sitting in front of them that says, I'm tired. I've got brain fog. I've got cardiac symptoms. I've got neurological systems. I've got all this stuff going on. And the physicians can't see anything in the blood work or any of the laboratory testing that they're used to relying on. So depending on what's going on and, and, you know, I think the physicians kind of take a lot of grief in the long COVID community, but they're all over work, right? The healthcare system is very stressed. So the physicians are end up, well, what are they going to do? Well, I can, I can invest a lot of time and energy that they don't have and they don't have any tools to help these people in kind of a never ending cycle. They can do what they can for them and send them home. They can refer them to the next specialist that can maybe help them or, and unfortunately some of the doctors, I think just want it out of the situation. And that's where you get the stories of some of the physicians, you know, questioning whether, whether, um, it's psychosomatic, whether it's all in their head, whether they're really feeling bad when, and I'm sure there is some of that, but, but people know when they don't feel good. They know when they don't feel right. And I think that's, you know, a big part of long COVID is you're tired. You're, you can't think straight. You've definitely got stuff going on. You can't function, but you can't necessarily articulate why. And the doctors don't see it either in their testing. So everybody's kind of at a loss and I, it seems like everybody in the long COVID community has had to become their own patient advocates to get, get anywhere in the health system. So that's one of the reasons, like, I sympathize with that and one of the reasons I wanted to actually try and do something to help people with long COVID because the system's not, big pharma is not right. There's we don't have enough science to really do a lot of drug discovery and development right now. So big pharma is on the sidelines until that's ready. Academic science is still in that early nascent phase where they're doing a lot of work, but the work is still disjointed and isn't forming a clear picture. And there's, there's no one really pushing work in a specific direction to try to, to force progress in a faster way. And the medical establishments just try to keep up with everything. At this point that's become so challenging since the pandemic. So to a certain extent, it sounds horrible, but they almost have to triage. Right. And they have to, they have to help who they can help. And when they know they can't help somebody, they, they can't sit there and treat it like a puzzle that they're going to invest a ton of time and energy in, which, which leaves people with long COVID in a really bad position, which is why some people have to step up and help. Definitely agreed. Do you, so long COVID itself, we hear so much about the spike protein. Okay. And, and you know, how damaging that is. So my question to you is then, is it, or at least in the research, is it, is it the spike protein that's causing all these problems? And is it that the body is continuously dealing with inflammation from the spike protein for a long period of time? Is that really the gist of it or is there more? Yeah. So one of the reasons that I kind of am, was willing to buy into the microclot hypothesis is some of the scientists, some really nice experiments showing that if you make spike protein in the lab and then you put it in blood samples, it starts forming these abnormal microclots. And then they, they took that same test they had for looking at these abnormal microclots. They can make in a test tube with a blood sample. And they went and they looked at patient samples and, and were able to measure, visualize, and actually measure and detect microclots in a long COVID patients. So, you know, that kind of really kind of rigorous molecular level work is what I look for when I'm doing these kinds of things. And it's one of the few areas in long COVID where you're, you're seeing that, again, in a way where you're looking at, at causative mechanisms for the disease state. So that they did some nice, nice work on that. So, and they really did show, and there's actually another paper that just came out recently published. The preprint's been out for a few years. Really measuring and looking at molecular level detail of interaction of spike protein with the proteins that are involved in clotting and how that binding actually happens, what it looks like. Like we're beginning to actually get that kind of data to show, okay, yes, it is spike protein. Now spike protein does a bunch of different things in the body all over the place, right? It does cause inflammation of the endothelial lining of the blood vessels. It does have appear to have some cardio toxicity, right? Some, some toxicity to the heart. It, it appears to do a bunch of different things but it has been nailed down and it does appear to really directly cause these micro clots that then you can, when you look at the mechanisms and see how the micro clots behave, you can ascribe a lot of the downstream symptoms like the fatigue, the brain fog, a lot of the cardiac symptoms like the shortness of breath and the, the tachycardia and the, the, the uncontrolled, heartbeat, even the pots of this autonomia, you can, you can kind of sketch out pathways in the body where ultimately the micro clots are responsible for all of it. At least it's a reasonable hypothesis. Obviously it needs a lot of work to nail it down, but that also means that the micro clots are kind of that, that aspect where if you can deal with them, you can actually start clearing up symptoms instead of going system by system and dealing with the cardiac symptoms and the neurological system, right? If the micro clots really are causative of all those downstream effects, resolving them also resolves multiple symptoms across multiple physiologic systems. Interesting. Okay. Another thing I wanted to ask you, just on, on, on the spike protein and, you know, just in general, have you looked into, because I, we know that obviously, you know, a lot of people, you know, who got COVID also got vaccinated, that type of thing. Has there, is there, has you seen any distinction between somebody who gets long COVID symptoms from COVID or versus maybe gets a complication from the vaccine? Oh, I wish that data existed. Let me tell you. So most of the data that's out there is studying spike protein in the context of long COVID and the micro clots in that. And I actually, I reran the search not too long ago, just to check again. Okay. Cause I've been waiting for somebody to do those experiments to see, okay, can, can spike protein generated by the vaccine? Does that demonstrate the same type of micro clotting behavior? Nobody's reported. It's not, the data's just not in the literature. I think, is it a reasonable hypothesis? Sure. It actually, it absolutely is. And it's worth doing the experiment, but the, those are the type of experiments that I don't personally do in my lab and the investigators that do those types of experiments haven't published them yet. Oh, okay. Okay. Another thing you've talked about is platelet activation. And so talk a little bit about that in terms of you know, that, you know, in, in contrast to the micro clotting. So the platelet activation is kind of a contributing factor to the micro clot. So basically when, when, in, in your, your, the circulatory system, right. When you, when, when clotting gets kicked off, let's say you cut yourself, right. What happens is it initiates what's called a coagulation casket. Right. And it's a, it's like a collection of 10 to 14 different enzymes that all get activated kind of in a cascade to actually help you start clotting to actually stop the bleeding. Right. And it's a bunch of enzymes that then, that then go and act on other enzymes and ultimately the, the clot proteins actually start forming clots. In parallel with that platelets in blood are also activated as part of the clotting process. And when, when they're activated, they, they change shape. They change the other proteins that they bind to the complexes that they form. So when platelets are activated, they also contribute to that clotting effect. So what seems to happen in long COVID is the spike protein causes this misfolding that basically causes micro clot formation. That is unnatural. The coagulation cascade didn't get triggered, but you're starting to form clots. And then at the same time it leads to also platelet hyperactivation that contributes to the overall growth in size of the micro clots, the platelets, when they get activated, they get sticky, right? So they stick to the micro clots. They tie up other proteins and other signaling molecules. So you end up with this big kind of amorphous mass of a micro clot that is unnatural. That is driven both by coagulation like behavior that's unnatural. That's catalyzed by a spike protein plus platelet activation that has been turned on aberrantly to actually contributes to, to, in triggering and making the micro clots. So it's both mechanisms of clotting are involved in this, this micro clot formation that seems to be this causative mechanism in long COVID. Interesting. Okay. So if the one thing that I'm, I'm, you know, I've thought about just as a, just thinking, you know, obviously we have long, you know, long COVID. Now there's, we all, you know, we've all heard the theories where, where COVID came from, right. You know, could have been made the lab could have been in nature, you know, I mean, we have one side, we have the other side. Okay. Yeah. Why? My question is, okay. So the spike protein COVID and it's, it really does damage. Okay. Why don't we have something similar to long COVID in flu, for example. Okay. You know, versus, you know, if this came from nature, let's just, let's just hypothesize. Let's say it did. Why, why is it long COVID, but yet flu that has existed for how many forever? We don't get the long flu that we see in COVID. So if, if, okay. So this goes down to kind of structural level of the virus, right? The idea is the spike protein and its sequence, its primary sequence of amino acids, plus it's three dimensional structure are doing unique things. Now flu doesn't seem to do this. It doesn't have the proteins that do it. I actually haven't looked at that, even though I teach about flu, flu virus. I haven't looked at what the capsid proteins are for the two. I haven't compared those two. Okay. What's interesting is your, your point has come up in a different context because there are some other, what people are calling post-viral reactivation syndromes, right? And it's people that are suffering from long COVID like symptoms, especially the brain fog and the fatigue and some of the cardiac also the, the pots and the tachycardia that comes with changing position, right? People are suffering from that in diseases like chronic fatigue syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome in this post-viral reactivation syndrome that seems to happen with West Nile and with Lyme disease. So there actually do seem to be other viruses that do cause these kinds of similar post-viral syndromes where they have like similar symptoms on the, on the macro level. But when you drill down, we don't really totally understand what's going on at the molecular level of what's causing them. If, if you wanted to suggest that perhaps microclots is actually what's going on in all of them, you could easily see a protein from each of these different viruses causing catalyzing some kind of microclot formation. They're all going to be a little bit slightly different because the proteins are a different structure, right? Different, different amino acid sequence. But, but if they all cause microclots that behave similarly, even though they're, they're a different specific structure, then you could see where all of those types of similar symptoms could be coming from the similar effect from all of those. And I think that's the way most, a lot of people are starting to look at the science. The issue is that's like a grand unified hypothesis with all of those actually nailing that all down and showing that's what's going on is, is a heavy lift when it comes to doing research. Absolutely. Absolutely. And that's the thing. You have to have the time and attention, the manpower to do that research, the intention to do that research. And like you said, you know, sometimes, that's just kind of goes by the wayside, you know? And in general, these other ones like Lyme disease, West Nile, especially chronic fatigue syndrome, they've been chronically ignored and underfunded. Yes. So up until long COVID came around, they were getting like zero attention. So now people are actually starting to pay attention to them because of long COVID and everybody's starting to take a step back and say, well, well, you know, are these all similar? Is there something common going on here? And that is something that people are starting to look at. Are there people, are there specific people that are more susceptible to getting long COVID? So for, you know, like COVID for us, you know, was maybe a three to four day cold and it was gone and we didn't really have any, you know, but then obviously you have people who have, you know, conditions and stuff like that, preexisting conditions, that type of thing. But are you seeing, you know, are there specific people that are, that you would say would be more susceptible? There, there don't, there's don't, I haven't seen any specific like evidence-based studies that do the statistical analysis. I haven't seen any of that yet. But when you talk to long COVID people, there's, there's trends in the population that you, you really, you kind of can't ignore, right? Because you see them over and over again, they tend to bear out. So in terms of demographics, it seems to hit women more than men. From what I'm seeing in the long COVID patient populations, more like 70% female, 30% male. So there does seem to be some, some disparity there. And then the best common thread that I can see amongst people, it is whether you get long COVID and how bad your long COVID is depends on what was going on with your immune system when you got COVID or when you got the acute COVID infection that turned into long COVID. For instance, one of the, one of the surprising populations that I've seen, and it makes sense now in hindsight, is there's a lot of people that were in super good shape, kind of high performance athletes, marathon runners, triathletes, that population, there's a bunch of them that all have long COVID. And when you think about that, you're like, that's crazy. You're just like super healthy. You're, you, you watch your diet, you eat clean, like you're, you're in shape. How, how could you, how could that many people from that, that particular group be getting long COVID? But what I didn't realize until I started looking at this is people that are doing high performance athlete activities like that, that are pushing themselves. They are putting a lot of stress on their immune system and on their energy system. That's right. To the point where, and I didn't realize it's, I guess it's a well-known thing where a lot of these athletes, when they're training towards the end, they have to be careful because they'll start getting sick if they intensely train for too long. Yes. So I think the state of the immune system, what the state of your immune system is when you get the acute COVID infection kind of dictates is the biggest risk factor for getting long COVID I think. And the really bad part about that is the studies are showing basically you've got about a one in 10 chance of getting long COVID anytime you get an acute COVID infection, whether you've had COVID before or not. Interesting. Right. So the, the, the chances of getting long COVID don't decrease as you get, if you get COVID again, they, they actually probably increase. Right. Because there's chances that your, your immune system already isn't doing so well when you get it. So that's part of the, because the long COVID numbers are, are kind of scary. I know there's some reports that came out about a month or six weeks ago that as of the end of 2023, about 400 million people worldwide have had long COVID. Wow. Um, that's, uh, that's a lot of people. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. You know, that's interesting about the women versus men. I hadn't heard that. So that's, that's very interesting. I'd be interested to see if they dive more into that and why that would be. Well, now it's interesting. Cause when you think about that disparity, the thing that immediately also comes to mind is women are more at risk for autoimmune disease. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So it seems to follow that trend. Yeah. That's actually what I was thinking about too. You know, there's the hormones and there's, there's, you know, there's a lot, you know, that, uh, especially with, you know, that women deal with, you know, in terms of men, you know, guys don't even think about, you know what I mean? It's so true. But, um, the other thing I wanted to ask you was, is there a, is there once, I know we've talked about the symptoms like, you know, POTS and, and many of these things, is there one symptom that's kind of the more prevalent over all the others? So it's, it's a really, it's kind of a crapshoot at this point. I know there's a few kind of, I think WHO has a specific like definition of long COVID, but it's, it's, it's more of the type of thing we would associate, I think with a syndrome than a real disease state, right? So it's you, you're three to six months post acute COVID infection. You never fully recover. And then you, you seem to get better, but then you dip again and you develop different symptoms, right? And there, the way I look at it is there's kind of these core symptoms that everyone seems to get. And then there's a whole constellation of symptoms where some people get them and some people don't. And every long COVID patient kind of has a different constellation that that is from that larger list. So kind of the core symptoms are the, the fatigue, the brain fog, the kind of mental clarity issues and kind of some, some whether it, whether how bad it is is really the difference, but some cardiac involvement, shortness of breath, some, some type of maybe tachycardia, fast heart rate, or just being able to not regulate the heart rate real well when they're, when they're doing activity. So those seem to be kind of the core. And then beyond them, you get to, when people's cardiac symptoms get really bad, they cross over into that, into that pots, right? Where, where they get the severe tachycardia when they change position, like they stand up. Maybe they have muscle pain or, or muscle weakness along with some joint pain and weakness. Those are other common symptoms. You've got neurological symptoms like some neuropathy, especially in the extremities. And again, that kind of goes hand in hand with the brain fog and kind of, if you think of that as neuro inflammation, right? There's a, there's a whole constellation of symptoms around that. And that kind of also then feeds into the dysautonomia, right? Which is the best, the best definition I've heard of the dysautonomia is the, the difficulty in maintaining an upright posture. Like it's just hard to stand up and stay standing. Right. And it, that kind of rolls in all of these issues with the autonomic nervous system with the heart rate, the breathing, the circulation and everything else. So, and then you can throw in also whatever constellation of immune type symptoms, whether it's mass cell activation or auto antibodies, right? There's a whole host of symptoms that occur because of more of an immune response involvement that can become more like autoimmune. Right. And then there's also a lot of people will get GI irritation with the call gut dysbiosis or, and leaky gut like that can also be an issue. But again, not everybody seems to get everything right. Everybody seems to have a few things in common and then it's, it's kind of pick or choose depending on how each person's long COVID kind of manifests. Okay. You know, it's something I've found interesting. And I don't know if it has anything to do with it, but a lot of people I know, even healthy people who recently when they've gotten sick, they all had COVID maybe once or twice. A lot of them have told me that after they've gotten better, whether it was COVID or not, they've developed a long cough or cough longer than normal. And I, I, it was interesting because I, I mean, literally like three people I know that that happened to. And they were saying, that's weird. You know, I, yeah, I normally get a cough during, you know, when I get a cold, but it goes away pretty quick. But you were talking weeks and weeks of just having this dry cough and they feel fine after that, but it's still this cough that's lingering. So I started, you know, and I started to do a little research on it just to see if maybe the fact that people had COVID, the fact that COVID does, you know, does affect the lungs. You have the ACE2 receptor and all this type of stuff. Is it, could it be that that's affecting it? I was wondering if you heard anything about that. I think the lung, the, some of it, the cough is a lot of lung people long COVID do have some kind of cough, kind of that upper respiratory type issues. And my, I think that the thinking with that is if you have long COVID it's likely caused by what people call viral persistence, right? You're not completely clearing the virus, right? In order to have viral persistence, the virus is hanging out somewhere. So one of the places people talk about it hanging out is in the GI tract and people with gut dysbiosis likely have viral persistence in the GI tract. Another place is the lungs, right? The people that probably have the lung have the coughing, the upper respiratory issues are more likely to have some kind of viral persistence in the lungs where the immune system just can't, can't clear it. It's just, it's struggling. And that, that seems to be. And then, you know, other people are talking about the, the researchers that are working on neuro inflammation, there seems to be some indication that you can get viral reservoirs in the, the brain and in other CNS tissues. And of course, at that point the virus has crossed the barrier, right? You're, you're in a different compartment in the body though, where it's harder to clear things. So that also makes sense. And that also might also kind of explain why people's symptoms are kind of heterogeneous, right? Is it, do the symptoms manifest depending on where the viral persistences occur? Okay. So let's say somebody suspects they have lung COVID. You go to their doctor and we talked a little bit about it and how, depending on the doctor, depending on how they treat, what are, what are doctors using? You know, is there something specific across the board or is it different or what, what can people expect? I I've heard things across the board. I I've heard go home and rest. I've heard, I've heard some long COVID patients. Some of the doctors said, well, you just need to get out and exercise and, and, and you'll feel better. You'll feel better if you, if you move more, which of course is the worst thing for long COVID patients because they usually suffer from what's called post-exertional malaise or PDM where they have huge crashes if they overexert themselves. So the typical OTC remedies for, for normal, you know, cold and cough type stuff. Some people are using, if they, if they have more of a stronger immune system component, they're using antihistamines to try to knock down that mass cell activation. People are trying various supplements like natokinase and bromelain and, and, you know, run the gamut. All of which seem to help some people, some, none of which seem to, to really help, help most people or help really do well with people. Some people are trying, you know, nicotine patches, right. There, there's the line of thought with vagus nerve stimulation and there's naltrexone, right. There's a bunch of different things that, that people are trying, but all of them seem to be kind of, of, not quite papering over, but a lot of them are treating symptoms, right? A lot of them are not really designed to treat root causes and cause the mechanisms because we, we don't, we don't have a lot of that information yet. Right. And, and people are understandably trying anything they can get their hands on to feel better. And, and for some people, I think some of it works for a lot, for a lot of people. I would say for most people, it probably doesn't. Right. Because the long COVID community has very much taken it upon themselves to empower themselves to deal with this. If there was something that worked, everybody would know about it and they would be screaming from the rooftops, trying to tell everybody. And the fact that it is still so much of kind of a wild West of people trying things. And some things work for some people. Some, some things don't that it we're still, we're still in that very early stage where we don't have a ton to help people. And that's actually kind of, kind of where I went with things with looking at the microclot hypothesis. Absolutely. And I know you, you, you, looking at that, you, I know you looked at anticoagulants and you looked at a tumor and stuff. So talk a little bit about your research as far as going into turmeric and then kind of how that developed into the product that you use. Sure. So when I went into literature and the people that did came up with the microclot hypothesis, really good work. They actually took it a step further and they they did a small clinical study. It was like 90 patients that had long COVID and they tried a pharmaceutical anticoagulant cocktail. It's called triple anticoagulant therapy. It's three different, it's, it's one anticoagulant and two platelet activation inhibitors. Okay. But it's a pretty strong pharmaceutical cocktail, right? So, but they gave it to these 90 patients and the patients were on it for anywhere from two months to about six months, 80% of the long COVID patients recovered. And these particular scientists, they also looked at microclots before and after. Right. So all of the long COVID patients had microclots before they started when they were done, the 80% that recovered their microclots. Wow. So that told me, okay, that's, that's, that's the kind of thing I was looking for in the literature. Right. And that's good. Okay. And the issue is that there are actually several issues with triple anticoagulant therapy. One, it's a combination of three pharmaceutical anticoagulants. It's, it's not something to mess around with. It actually has a safety issues, right? There's a high risk of bleeding because you're on three anticoagulants at the same time. So it's there, there's a kind of a, it's a not insignificant safety issue with, with taking, right. It requires monitoring and a lot of that kind of stuff because of that physicians. And this was talking to the long COVID community. A lot of the physicians don't want to prescribe it, right. Because it's a, it's a safety risk. Sure. Number one. And number two, it was a small study and nobody's done, you know, randomized placebo controlled clinical trial. There's not enough evidence yet to prescribe it. Right. So I get that. From the, from the doctor's point of view, the safety issue, I get that. And then the other thing is a lot of people, these anticoagulants are really expensive and insurance wouldn't necessarily cover them for treating long COVID. So the people that were able to get it, they were going to a lot of these long COVID clinics that have been popping up. The issue is those clinics typically have long wait lists and you're paying out of pocket for them. And they're, they're really expensive. So when I, when I saw that situation, I said, okay, well, here's something mechanistically that makes sense to me. And it seems to work. What we really need is a version of triple anticoagulant therapy that is safer, that is more readily available, especially with hopefully OTC right over the counter without a prescription and is cheaper, right. That you're not going to have to pay thousands of dollars for. So I, I kind of did something. I, I revert, I inverted a process that we, I used for most of my career. When I first started out my career, I was using natural products as the starting point to develop new drugs. So I decided in this case, well, let's, let's just flip the script and I did it the other way. So I took the pharmaceutical triple anticoagulant therapy drugs and reverse engineered that through their mechanisms of action into a natural version of triple anticoagulant therapy that had safer ingredients, less potent, but safer. Right. And custom formulated a supplement that people could take on their own. They didn't need a doctor to prescribe it and it's reasonably priced so that they can try to take something for themselves. So one of the key ingredients in it, and again, so with, with both triple anticoagulant therapy and the supplement I developed, it's the combination of ingredients that's important, right? So you had three, three anticoagulants. One of them was a pixaban. That's a factor 10a inhibitor. The curcumin and turmeric happens to also have that same mechanism of action. It's a factor 10a inhibitor. That's where turmeric gets its anticoagulant activity, right? So that was, that was one replacement. The second component in the triple anticoagulant therapy was lotus aspirin. That's a COX-1 and COX-2 inhibitor. The natural version of that is white willow bark. So that was that substitution. And then the third one was actually the hardest one and it, the pharmaceutical drug was clopidogrel which is a platelet activation inhibitor. The mechanism of action is it's a P2Y1 and P2Y12 receptor inhibitor. And it took a little bit of digging, but I found the natural, the compound Dan Shen extract from traditional Chinese medicine. There's a really nice scientific reports paper showing that two components in that salmonellic acid A and B are P2Y1 and P2Y12 receptor inhibitors. So that was the third replacement. So that's how I formulated what I call kind of a natural version of the triple anticoagulant therapy. And that's what, that's, what's in there. There's, there's two other components. There's black pepper extract in there because it helps with the bioavailability of the turmeric, right? That's standard now with people taking turmeric. And then I threw in some beetroot extract because, because so one of the, one of the hypothesis behind microclots causing fatigue is it's sequestering red blood cells. They're sticking to the microclots. It's sorry. One of the hypotheses behind fatigue in, in long COVID is that the red blood cells are being sequestered and sticking to the microclot. So it's denying delivery of oxygen into tissues, right? So I decided to include some, some beetroot extract because the nitrates in there help with oxygen delivery to the tissues. And so it would, it would boost oxygenation of tissues for people kind of starting right away. And as they recover and hopefully as the microclots break up, then they're, they're recovering better. And the, it's helping the fatigue starting, starting right away. Very nice. Very nice. I mean, you really, you really put a lot of thought into, you know, exactly how to formulate that, which is great. Yeah. It was all like, if, if it, if it was going to be in there and had to have a mechanistic reason, right? Right. Everything that's in there is, you know, the organic high grade, high purity, whatever the highest we can, we can get. And we, everything's laboratory tested. It made under GMP conditions and, and all, all of that good stuff. And I wanted it very clean because as I was talking to people with long COVID, they had significant concerns of a lot of them have a lot of sensitivity to things. Now food supplements, everything. So I wanted everything super clean. It's in veggie caps that are, are okay for people that have like mast cell activation. They don't seem to bother them. So, yeah, I, there was, there was a lot of intention putting in to making it very clean and making sure that there wasn't anything extra in there. There's no fillers and stuff in there. The like the minimum that could go in there is what's in there. Right. Did you, I know you studied this. Did you look at the turmeric or the curcumin versus some other natural products that also are blood thinners? I did. And actually what I kind of started was I went and I made a huge list of all of the ones that are supposedly anticoagulants, right. And then I started looking one by one at mechanisms of action. And this is kind of, this is where this kind of, kind of dovetails with being a professor. So I teach in a natural products class that we teach. And you know, we, we have a textbook that we wrote for that class. And so I went to basically every source I could think of, every natural products book I have, and I've ever collected in my career, went to Google. I basically made a nice master list of, okay, here's everything that people talk about when they talk about anticoagulant natural products and herbal remedies. And then I started going one by one and said, okay, what, what is the actual mechanism? And where's the scientific data that shows that that's the mechanism, right? Because the important part was to match whatever the natural breeding is with the mechanism of action from the pharmaceutical. Right. And it wasn't going to help if it didn't have the right mechanism of action. So that's kind of how I went through and did that process of doing the design. And I can't remember, I narrowed it down to turmeric and I think one or two others in turmeric was kind of the most convenient. I thought it was going to be the most widely accepted and it, you know, it has antioxidant properties, has anti-inflammatory properties. I tried to also pick components that kind of gave you a bang for your buck in terms of some of these other properties, like anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. That's great. And turmeric, I mean, they, they're doing so much studying on turmeric now. I mean, there's thousands and thousands of stuff now out there on turmeric. So that, that's good. That's good. I like, I like to see that you did that. And then this is available, you can as a link on your website. Yep. Yeah. If you go there, um, the link for circuit guard, that's kind of what I named the product. Um, so just click on the button for that and it'll take you to the site where you can order it and learn more about it. Also on there, all this research I did, all I figuring this all out, I, I decided I wanted people with long COVID to be able to really look at it and study it and read it and decide for themselves, right. And make a good informed decision. So I published everything on a sub stack, which there's also a link for that there. And, um, you know, I've made videos on social media that are on, on YouTube and on, on Tik TOK, all of the links for basically everything are all, all on my website. So people can go there and it's, it's really easy to find it. Absolutely. And I would definitely recommend people as, you know, I, I, I was checking out a lot of your YouTube videos and, uh, you know, you've got some great information on there and you do it in like short little bits, which is nice. It's not, you know, it's not hours long. Like, so people can digest it really, you know, really well and refer back to it. So great information. You really dive into the research on that, which is, which is fantastic. And then for, for every one of the videos on YouTube and Tik TOK, there's pretty much a corresponding sub stack piece that has the literature references. When I started, that was like really important to me, right? Cause there's a lot of people on social media talking about stuff and it's like, cite your source. Right. So, so, and that's actually kind of the way I did it. The first thing I would do is I do all the research and I write the sub stack piece and make sure everything was referenced, everything was right. And then go and make the videos and do it, do it that way. Oh yeah. That's important. Absolutely. A hundred percent. You have to be able to look down and see the source and everything referenced and all that stuff. And you know, I talk about that a lot, you know, that's, that's important to me as well. So that's great. So people can check you out. Uh, it's Keith, see lsphd.com that's your website. And again, I would definitely recommend everybody check out, you know, your website, your YouTube videos, your, you know, everything you got, you got so much information there and check out the sub stack as well. Um, you know, first of all, I, I commend you for doing this research. You know, you're, you're helping a lot of people out there with what you're doing. There's so many people who are suffering right now. So I hope we can at least give them this information. Like you said, let them decide for themselves, but let, you know, do the research, check it out and see if it works for them, you know, and I know you're, you're experiencing some good, some good stuff with this product, right? Yeah. The, the people that have gotten it and tried it from my audience, they have really good results. A lot of them are saying it helps, it helps right away with the fatigue and the brain fog. They actually can be more active again and, and, and have a life, um, which is, which is nice because, uh, you know, a lot of the long COVID population, it being more female, a lot of these are moms with kids and those are the heartbreaking ones when they're not even functional. So I hear a lot of people that say, okay, it helps brain fog helps fatigue as they take it longer. It helps more of the cardiac symptoms. I've even had some people from my aunts tell me it helps with the dysautonomia, which I didn't expect. Right. That's, that means you're really actually fixing things beyond just kind of immediate things. That's, that's more of a widespread issue. And again, is it going to be a cure that works for everybody? No, it's not. But the, the, the harsh reality right now is there's not a whole lot coming down the pike anytime soon for long COVID from pharmaceutical industry or from really the medical establishment. Everything that's out there is what people have. Right. And all I really wanted was to develop something that was tailored to the molecular mechanisms that, that we know about for long COVID that could help people and that people could make their own decision to try and not have to think they had to beg a physician to give them a prescription for something. Cause that's, that's the kind of thing that really kind of bothers me as a person. Yeah. I'm right with you there. Let me tell you. So that's, that's great to hear. Fantastic. And again, you know, I commend you doing this research and great work. So, so keep at it. And it will definitely, you know, stay on top of what you're doing and love to, you know, the more research you get and more stuff comes, you know, comes about definitely have you come back on this show again and discuss that. I think I think everybody would benefit that. So Dr. Ellis, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So guys, thank you for, for tuning in. I hope you got a lot out of this. And again, I hope we can help a lot of those folks out there who are suffering with long COVID definitely check out Dr. Ellis's work. And again, you know, make those informed decisions because it's very, very important. All right, everyone. Thank you so much. Make sure you take care of yourselves. Make sure you take care of each other and as always control your health. Have a great week.