Dr. Greg Maguire developed the concept of the Systems Therapeutic for Physiological Renormalization while he was a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley. Working and learning about biotechnology in a laboratory at Berkeley where two scientists, Dr. Don Glaser and Dr. Kary Mullis, had won Nobel Prizes and started the world’s first biotech company (Cetus Corp), Maguire’s attention would be drawn from basic biology to biotechnology. While at Berkeley, Dr. Maguire was also influenced by a colleague, Dr. James Allison, a professor of immunology who was working to renormalize the immune system in cancerous tissues. Learning how to reengage T-cells in the adaptive immune system to attack and kill cancer cells led to Dr. Allison’s being awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine. The current “checkpoint inhibitors” used to treat melanoma, for example, are a result of Dr. Allison’s work. This was very influential in Dr. Maguire’s approach to therapeutic development, and creating the concept of physiological renormalization. This way of thinking is in contradistinction to methodologies that, for example, knock-down the immune system such that one is now subject to infection, or hyperactivating the immune system to the point where the immune system attacks the self, destroying one’s own cells.

Maguire was later awarded a Fulbright Scholarship from the National Institutes of Health to more thoroughly develop the concepts of systems therapeutics while an associate professor in Japan. This was important because the scientific community in Japan traditionally places more value on a systems, non-reductionist, approach to healthcare and therapeutic development. In his non-reductionist approach, Maguire uses multiple molecules, instead of just one or a couple of molecules, to target multiple pathways underlying a disease or condition, not just one or a few pathways as used in previous therapeutic designs. The multiple molecules renormalize the multiple pathways and thus renormalize the physiology of the compromised tissue, such as the skin. Simply put, diseases and conditions of the skin have many unique abnormal pathways that underlie the condition, and each unique pathway must be renormalized using many molecules, each of which acts at one of the many abnormal pathways underlying the disease or condition. This new means of developing therapeutics has been accepted by the Medicinal Chemistry Section of the American Chemical Society, and has been published many times in peer reviewed, National Library of Medicine listed scientific journals. Dr. Maguire explains in his book, “Adult Stem Cell Released Molecules: A Paradigm Shift to Systems Therapeutics,” the origins and details of his approach to therapeutic development. One aspect of the Systems Therapeutics for Physiological Renormalization approach to skin care is the use of stem cell released molecules from adult stem cells derived from the skin. Dr. Maguire first developed this technology while a professor at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, and has demonstrated the safety and efficacy of this approach, detailed some of the mechanisms of action, and published clinical studies of how well this technology works for skin conditions. In this blog, Dr. Maguire will be discussing how to best care for skin based on an analysis of the science and technology currently available for skin care therapeutics. You will come to understand that, for example, the choice of stem cell type to derive the molecules is critical; that tissue specific stem cells, first described by Dr. Elly Tanaka at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, are critical to optimal healing, where skin derived stem cells (SDSCs) are used to treat the skin; and that some stem cell types, such as bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs) may be inflammatory and oncogenic because of recirculating inflammatory T-cells and cancer cells that interact with and negatively transform the BMSCs within the bone marrow. We shall see that stem cell released molecules from skin-derived stem cells are critical to optimal skin care, and that many other molecules in combination with stem cell released molecules provide optimal benefit to the skin, including for aged skin, wound healing, and various inflammatory skin conditions, including autoimmune conditions.