Tag Archives: anteage

AnteAge, Founded by a Physician Whose Medical License Was Revoked and is Now Owned by Private Equity, Invents Fake Technology

John Sanderson, whose medical license was revoked for sexual misconduct and repeated negligence, has sold his company, AnteAge, to a private equity company. Now that the PE company has taken over, their marketing people have invented a new word, “Biosome.” for what is called by scientists, a “liposome.”

How do we know the Private Equity guys who own AnteAge are using fake technology? Look at the staement from their website: “Currently the AnteAGE MD bottles do not mention the new Biosome ingredient. As part of our commitment to sustainability, we have chosen to utilize our existing inner packaging rather than generating waste unnecessarily. Please rest assured that your product does in fact have Biosomes included. Please reference the ingredient listing here. Reach out with questions or refer to anteage.com.”

Here’s the statment from their web:

How Do We Know They’re Faking It

If there were actually something new in the bottle, they would have to, by law, relable the product. In other words, because they have only changed their marketing hype, and not the product’s technology, they don’t need to make any changes to the bottle labeling – specifically the bottle’s listing of ingredients. The label and the ingredients remain the same and the only thing changing is what they call the product. There’s no validation in peer-reviewed literature or patent filings confirming a unique mechanism under the name “Biosome.” Rather, it’s just marketing hype, or as some would call it, BS.

So what’s in the bottle? Liposomes. Look at the ingredients on the bottles with the new, fake technology. The list includes “Phosphatidylcholine.” Guess what are made with Phosphatidylcholine. Answer – liposomes! So now AnteAge is calling liposome, you guessed it, Biosomes. This is Private Equity at work. Say anything, do anything, for profit.

Here’s the bottle saying “Biosomes”:

And here’s the bottle’s ingredient list for the “Serum”:

Serum Ingredients:
Water (Aqua), Human Bone Marrow Stem Cell Conditioned Media, Cetyl Ethylhexanoate, Niacinamide, Dimethyl Isosorbide, Polyacrylate-13, Glycerin, Hydrolyzed Myrtus Communis Leaf Extract, Butylene Glycol,
Carbomer, Polysorbate 20, Palmitoyl Tripeptide-1, Palmitoyl, Tetrapeptide-7, Polyisobutene, Benzyl Alcohol, Salicylic Acid, Sorbic Acid, Sorbitan Isostearate, Carnosine, Ilex Paraguariensis Leaf Extract, Maltodextrin,
Disodium EDTA, DOTAP, DSPC, DSPE, DSPE PEG, Sodium Chloride, Disodium Phosphate, Potassium Phosphate, Potassium Chloride, Phosphatidylcholine, Phosphatidylserine, Sphingomyelin, Cholesterol, Mannitol,
Trehalose, sh-Oligopeptide-33, sh-Polypeptide-58, sh-Polypeptide-5, sh-Polypeptide-2, sh-Polypeptide-67, sh-Polypeptide-66, sh-Polypeptide-10, sh-Polypeptide-3, sh-Polypeptide-62, sh-Polypeptide-14,
sh-Oligopeptide-2

Bottome line. Private equity is ruining many things and now they’re lying to the public about skin care ingredients.

If you’d like to read about the science of exosomes and liposomes, you can read my 30 page academic book chapter, peer-reviewed, that I published in 2016 with Elsevier, called “Exosomes: smart nanospheres for drug delivery naturally produced by stem cells.“

BareFacedTruth.com is a Blog from a Physician Who Lost His Medical License

Having committed malpractice and losing his medical license, John Sanderson started a company called AnteAge, selling potentially dangerous products to unsuspecting victims. Negligence, repeated negligence, and sexual misconduct with his patients was his contribution to medicine. Now he wants to sell you products for your skin. He also has someone write a blog for him that not only demonstrates his total incompetence yet again, but he projects on others what he does daily – namely lie and commit unethical acts.

Reference: https://www2.mbc.ca.gov/BreezePDL/document.aspx?path=%5cENF0003%5c16%5c&did=FSMB53N0.DID

Mr. Sanderson is a physician who attained a bachelor’s degree in medicine from Canada. This program is 5 years in college total, and the curriculum apparently doesn’t teach ethics or compassion for others.

John Sanderson, M.B.B.S. (bachelor’s degree in medicine) who lost his medical license for negligence and repeated negligence, and sexual misconduct with a female patient.

If you want to read about Mr. Sanderson’s exploits as a practicing physician, look him up here.

I’ve selected a few excerpts shown below:

Sanderson previously was a family practice physician with an undergraduate medical degree – a bachelor’s degree in medicine. Once Sanderson finished his Canadian undergraduate degree in medicine, and once he passed the medical board test in the US, regulations permitted him to use the designation “M.D.” Sanderson frequently finds himself in disputes with other companies, one of which apparently exposed that Sanderson committed domestic violence.

Sanderson was not trained as a dermatologist and was not board certified. He obviously has little to no understanding of the skin’s powerful immune system, and no idea of how bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells work in the body. Upon losing his medical license, he started a company to do further harm to people by having them use products that induce inflammation and potentially cancer. The other physicians who is part of AnteAge and the co-blogger with Mr. Sanderson, is George Taylor, a retired anesthesiologist. Like Sanderson, Taylor has no science background and no published scientific papers. So ignorant is this guy that he has a video saying that red blood cells have no signaling capacity. That they don’t have or react to cytokines. Sorry, George. They do. I’d hate to have this sleepy guy putting me to sleep on the operating table.

Trying to understand why a company would bring a proinflammatory, possibly pro-oncogenic product to the market, I looked closer at the company. Because John Sanderson is not a scientist, and has never listed that he has any scientific publication, only misleading blogs, I wondered how did he come to choose his technology. I discovered that Sanderson had enlisted fellow Canadian, Jonathan Lakey, Ph.D. as his scientific advisor. To no surprise, the man who had lost his medical license because of incompetence had hired a scientist, Jonathan Lakey, who had been fired from his university because of fraud.

A non-profit government organization in Canada fired Jonathan Lakey for the same reason:

Then Jonathan Lakey was charged with fraud and racketeering at one of the companies in which he was an officer:

Jonathan Lakey’s involvement with a number of other companies that are pump and dump schemes has made the news a number of times. Clearly, using a product on your skin from this dynamic fraudster-incompetence duo is a bad choice – they do not have anyone’s well being in mind.

There are other skin care companies led by physicians. I suggest if you’re interested in their products, go to the state medical board website in which they practice, and look at the current status of their medical license. For example, you can search physicians in California here, and in Colorado here. You may be surprised what you find. Simply type in their name, and you’re likely to find disiplinery actions and loss of license.

Safety and Efficacy Considerations of Stem Cell Technologies for Skin Care: : ADSCs preferred Over BMSCs

Mesenchymal Stem Cells and their Progenitor Cells (Fibroblasts) Derived from Skin are Superior to Bone Marrow Derived Mesenchymal Stem Cells

When addressing safety and efficacy concerns of stem cells, we must consider tissue-specific stem cells. Choosing the appropriate stem cell type to match the condition to be treated is critical not only to efficacy, but most importantly, safety of the therapeutic. Beyond the genetic and epigenetic factors that influence stem cell phenotype as embryonic stem cells differentiate into somatic stem cells, the immediate niche of the stem cell will have profound influence on the cell’s phenotype. Therefore, the appropriate use of adipose derived mesenchymal stem cells (ADSCs), and their related progenitor cells from the skin, fibroblasts, is optimal for skin care compared to bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs)

Let’s consider some of the problems BMSCs pose for developing skin care products. The complexity of the bone marrow (BM) niche can lead to many stem cell phenotypes, whether we consider hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) or bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells (BMSCs). Here I will discuss the properties of BMSCs, not HSCs. Because of the complexity, many BMSC phenotypes exist, including disease causing phenotypes that are varied and hard to distinguish – a part of the problem in using BMSC for therapeutic development. This complication, unlike that for ADSCS, includes recirculated cells, particularly recirculated cancer cells. Once a tumor cell disseminates into the BM, the cancer cell often displays phenotypic characteristics of BMSCs rendering cancer cells difficult to distinguish from BMSCs. BM is a site of BMSCs that may differentiate into HSCs and recirculating blood cells that may differentiate into BMSCs [see Cardenas et al; Tondreau et al]. BMSCs are also found outside of the niche in peripheral blood and home into sites of injury and cancer tissue where they are educated into becoming a pro-cancerous phenotype. Recirculated melanoma and myelogenous leukemia cells in BM interact with BMSCs to change the phenotype of the BMSC to one that is cancer promoting by enhancing their proliferation, migration, and invasion and altering the production of proteins involved in the regulation of the cell cycle. Indeed, melanoma tumor cells start to disseminate to BM during the initial steps of tumor development. In breast cancer patients, detection of recirculated cancer cells that disseminated in BM predicts recurrence of the cancer. Cancer cells can fuse with BMSCs and change their phenotype, or release exosomes to change the phenotype of BMSCs to cancer promoting. Indeed breast tumor cells fuse spontaneously with bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells. This fusion may facilitate the exchange of cellular material from the cancer cell to the BMSC rendering the fused cell more oncogenic. Further, others have found the same result of this fusion and exchange of cellular material, which has been found to increase metastasis. For example, Li et al found that human hepatocellular carcinoma cells with a low metastatic potential exhibit a significantly increased metastatic potential following fusion with BMSCs in vitro and in xenograft studies. This means that the BMSCs and their molecules/exosomes, having been conditioned by tumor cells, were found to increase the probability of cancer in human patients. The various phenotypes of BMSCs, including the cancerous phenotypes are difficult to distinguish. In contrast, even ADSCs derived from cancer patients have been found to be safe for therapeutic development.

One of many reasons why ADSCs are preferred compared to BMSCs is that ADSCs express a low level of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I molecules and do not express MHC class II and costimulatory molecules. Even the exosomes of BMSCs express MHC class II proteins. These problems in BMSCs are amplified when using donor, allogeneic BMSCs that have been replicated many times, essentially aging the cells, during expansion to develop the therapeutic. This is in contradistinction to ADSCs. Critically, when comparing experimental data of BMSCs to ADSCs from the same human donor, “ADSCs have a “younger” phenotype,” according to stem cell scientists. Indeed, Burrow et al found that BMSCs have, among other negative attributes compared to ADSCs, an increased level of senescence compared to matched ADSCs. Senescent cells develop the senescence-associated secretory phenotype (SASP), a pro-inflammatory set of molecules where the local tissue effects of a SASP or specific SASP components have been found to be involved in a wide variety of age-related pathologies in vivo such as hyperplastic diseases, including cancer. Whereas the use of BMSC transplants has a history of medical adverse events, including the induction of cancer in the recipient (Maguire, 2019), fat grafting, along with its constituent ADSCs, have a long history of safety in medical procedures dating back to 1893 when the German surgeon Gustav Neuber transplanted adipose tissue from the arm to the orbit of the eye in an autologous procedure to fill the depressed space resulting from a postinfectious scar. Fat grafting’s long history of being safe, regardless of the harvesting techniques used in patients, has been recently reviewed by physician-scientists at Baylor College of Medicine. Furthermore, physician-scientists at Stanford University School of Medicine have recently reviewed the safety and efficacy of using ADSCs to augment the outcomes of autologous fat transfers. Scientists have found that ADSCs and fat grafting for treating breast cancer-related lymphedema is safe and efficacious during a one year follow-on, where patient-reported outcomes improved significantly with time. In a randomized, comparator-controlled, single-blind, parallel-group, multicenter study in which patients with diabetic foot ulcers were recruited consecutively from four centers, ADSCs in a hydrogel was compared to hydrogel control. Complete wound closure was achieved for 73% in the treatment group and 47% in the control group at week 8. Complete wound closure was achieved for 82% in the treatment group and 53% in the control group at week 12. The Kaplan–Meier (a non-parametric statistic used for small samples or for data without a normal distribution) median times to complete closure were 28.5 and 63.0 days for the treatment group and the control group, respectively. Treatment of patients undergoing radiotherapy with adult ADSCs from lipoaspirate were followed for 31 months and patients with “otherwise untreatable patients exhibiting initial irreversible functional damage” were found to have systematic improvement or remission of symptoms in all of those evaluated. In animal models with a full thickness skin wound, administration of ADSCs, either intravenously, intramuscularly, or topically, accelerates wound healing, with more rapid reepithelialization and increased granulation tissue formation, and topically applied the ADSCs improved skin wound healing by reducing inflammation through the induction of macrophage polarization from a pro-inflammatory (M1) to a pro-repair (M2) phenotype.

All in all, companies using BMSCs to develop their skin care products demonstrates a profound ignorance of the related science. Incompetence, and a greedy, lazy approach to serving the skin care market is demonstrated by those using bone marrow stem cells to develop skin care products that potentially damage their clients.

Why Skin-Derived, Adipose Mesenchymal Stem Cell Released Molecules (NeoGenesis) Are Better Than Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cell Cytokines (AnteAge) for Post-Procedure Healing

What AnteAge Doesn’t Know and Therefore Doesn’t Tell You

Consider the stem cells used by AnteAge to make their products: Bone Marrow Mesenchymal Stem Cells (BMSCs) and the molecules they release prolong and enhance inflammation by increasing survival and function of neutrophils (Castella et al, 2011). Under hypoxic conditions, which induces the activation of TRL4, BMSCs secrete pro-inflammatory factors and decrease the polarization of macrophages from the M1 to M2 phenotype (Faulknor et al, 2017; Waterman et al, 2010). Therefore, BMSCs cultured in normal hypoxic conditions in the laboratory are secreting pro-inflammatory factors and when administered to wounded skin will induce inflammation by recruiting neutrophils and M1 type pro-inflammatory macrophages. When you put AnteAge on your skin, these are the pro-inflammatory molecules damging your skin. In contradistinction, consider the cells used by Neogenesis. The phenotype and stem cell released molecules (also called the secretome) from skin-derived adipose mesenchymal stem cells (AMSCs) are largely unaffected by prolonged hypoxia, not recruiting neutrophils (Kalinina et al, 2015), and the molecules released from AMSCs were found to better induce the effects of the anti-inflammatory M2 macrophage phenotype than the molecules released from BMSCs (Sukho et al, 2018). These results provide strong evidence that the molecules released from AMSC are more beneficial than those from BMSCs to induce appropriate wound healing processes through the shift from a pro-inflammatory state to an anti-inflammatory, pro-healing state.

These pro-inflammatory signals from BMSC cytokines are in addition to their likelihood of containing pro-oncogenic signals that are absent in AMSCs, that I have previously reviewed in multiple, peer-reviewed, National Library of Medicine journal articles (Maguire, 2019; 2021; 2022).

Why does AnteAge use these inflammatory and potentially oncogenic molecules in their products? The first clue comes from who founded the company and was its CEO for years, John Sanderson. A former physician who lost his medical license because of incompetence, repeated incompetence, and sexual misconduct with one of his patients.

Sanderson previously was a family practice physician with an undergraduate medical degree – a bachelor’s degree in medicine. Once Sanderson finished his Canadian undergraduate degree in medicine, once he passed the medical board test in the US, regulations permitted him to use the designation “M.D.” Sanderson frequently finds himself in disputes with other companies, one of which exposed that Sanderson committed domestic violence. He was not trained as a dermatologist and was not board certified. He obviously has little to no understanding of the skin’s powerful immune system, and no idea of how bone marrow mesenchymal stem cells work in the body. Upon losing his medical license, he started a company to do further harm to people by having them use products that induce inflammation and potentially cancer.

Trying to understand why a company would bring a proinflammatory, possibly pro-oncogenic product to the market, I looked closer at the company. Because John Sanderson is not a scientist, and has never listed that he has any scientific publication, only misleading blogs, I wondered how did he come to choose his technology. I discovered that Sanderson had enlisted fellow Canadian, Jonathan Lakey, Ph.D. as his scientific advisor. To no surprise, the man who had lost his medical license because of incompetence had hired a scientist, Jonathan Lakey, who had been fired from his university because of fraud.

A non-profit government organization in Canada fired Jonathan Lakey for the same reason:

Then Jonathan Lakey was charged with fraud and racketeering at one of the companies in which he was an officer:

Jonathan Lakey’s involvement with a number of other companies that are pump and dump schemes has made the news a number of times. Clearly, using a product on your skin from this dynamic fraudster-incompetence duo is a bad choice – they do not have anyone’s well being in mind.

There are other skin care companies led by physicians. I suggest if you’re interested in their products, go to the state medical board website in which they practice, and look at the current status of their medical license. For example, you can search physicians in California here, and in Colorado here. You may be surprised what you find. Simply type in their name, and you’re likely to find disiplinery actions and loss of license.

References

Castella M.A. et al (2011) Toll-like receptor-3-activated human mesenchymal stromal cells significantly prolong the survival and function of neutrophils. Stem Cells. 29:1001–1011.

Faulknor R.A. et al (2017) Hypoxia impairs mesenchymal stromal cell-induced macrophage M1 to M2. Technology. 2017;5:81–86. doi: 10.1142/S2339547817500042.

Kalinina N. et al. (2015) Characterization of secretomes provides evidence for adipose-derived mesenchymal stromal cells subtypes. Stem Cell Res. Ther. ;6:221.

Maguire G. Transplanted stem cells survive a long time: do they make you sick? J R Soc Med. 2019 Oct;112(10):412-414.

Maguire G. (2021) Stem cells part of the innate and adaptive immune systems as a therapeutic for Covid-19. Commun Integr Biol. 14(1):186-198.

Maguire G. (2022) Chronic inflammation induced by microneedling and the use of bone marrow stem cell cytokines. J Tissue Viability. 31(4):687-692.

Sukho P et al (2018) Human mesenchymal stromal cell sheets induce macrophages predominantly to an anti-inflammatory phenotype. Stem Cells Dev. 27:922–934.

Waterman R.S. et al (2010) A new mesenchymal stem cell (MSC) paradigm, polarization into a pro-inflammatory MSC1 or an immunosuppressive MSC2 phenotype. PLoS ONE. 5:e10088.