Sergei Paylian was only 14 years old when he was horrified by the death of his young, attractive neighbor in Tbilisi, Georgia. As was the local Soviet custom at the time, her open coffin was carried through the street to the sound of music as a shocked teenage Sergei looked on, confronted for the first time with the issue of his own mortality.

It sparked a lifelong obsession with aging – and how to reverse it.

Now, standing in his neat Florida laboratory that looks more like a dentist’s office, the 66-year-old scientist is explaining how a lifetime of research has culminated in a purified extract he calls bioquantines, 'combinatorial biologics' incorporating other species such as frogs and, in the future, sharks that he believes is the key to curing diseases – and even death.

When injected into humans, he claims, the bioquantines find their way to diseased or damaged cells and help restore them to a healthier state.

The company Dr Paylian founded, Bioquark, is part of a broader project called ReAnima – which is ‘exploring the potential of cutting edge biomedical technology for human neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation.’

He is on the international advisory board of ReAnima, which is already preparing to conduct experimental treatments in Latin America of ‘living cadavers,’ patients who have experienced complete and irreversible loss of brain function, or brain death. The procedure involves harvesting stem cells from the patient’s own blood and injecting them back into their body; injecting bioquantines into the patient’s spinal cord; and performing 15 days of laser and median nerve stimulation, monitoring the patients using MRI scans.

The initial goal is to re-start the body’s ability to, unaided, pump the heart and breathe; no one is expecting the treatment to immediately reanimate the patients so that they’re jumping off the bed - but the project aims to lay the groundwork for future, further developments that can enhance levels of consciousness and recovery.

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Dr Sergei Paylian, who lives in Tampa with his wife and children, has spent decades researching ways to reverse the aging process and treat diseases

Dr Sergei and his Russian wife, Tatyana, work to produce biological extract 'bioquantines' in the 600 sq ft laboratory of their company Bioquark, which he founded in 2007

The Bioquark lab includes three rooms for research, extract production and storage, as well as a reception area and bathroom

Planned trials in India were derailed last year by the Indian Council of Medical Research, and the project is still awaiting approval in Latin America - though Bioquark and ReAnima CEO Ira Pastor says many families have come forward to offer their relatives as subjects. He says the company has made five applications that 'go directly to the supreme court of the country where we are applying to use the protocol and are given for single cases - hence why we are applying for five of them at the same time, in anticipation of short-term patient flow.'

Their specific ideas of brain death regeneration tend to be laughed off by much of mainstream science; Dr Paylian’s face falls when he acknowledges that he has sent out articles hundreds of times but has been rarely published, and no one has congratulated what he considers to be a massive discovery that could change the way we view and treat disease.

Regenerative medicine and research based on other species is nothing new; Cody Smith, assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Notre Dame, explains how the scientific community for years has been studying other organisms to see if humans can learn to replicate their regenerative properties.

‘The idea is, if you can find what they do differently than the humans, then you can be able to somehow activate it or deactivate it in a human – and get it to regenerate like it does in the amphibian and other organisms.’

Smith, for example, works with zebra fish – as does Dr Paylian – in studying possibilities for peripheral nerve regeneration. He did not comment specifically on the Bioquark plans, given his unfamiliarity with the specifics of their science – and other universities contacted were reluctant to put forward anyone to speak directly about the ReAnima effort.

Another expert, however, has previously cast doubt on the project; Dr Charles Cox of the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, told science site Statnews.com last month that ‘it’s not the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, but I think the probability of that working is next to zero.’

It's not the craziest thing I've ever heard, but I think the probability of that working is next to zero - Dr Charles Cox, University of Texas

He added that their plan to reverse brain death ‘would technically be a miracle.’

‘I think the pope would technically call that a miracle,’ he said.

Dr Paylian, however, is hoping for a miracle, and says that reversing the effects of aging, disease and even death was always his ‘ultimate dream’– ever since the neighbor’s funeral that left such a mark on him.

‘I was so shocked,’ he says in heavily accented English as his smiling Russian wife – and lab assistant – nods along. ‘I said, “Jesus Christ, the time will come when everything will disappear. How come we have such a unique ability to think and simultaneously we have to die, somehow, in the future? Then I was scared, as a kid.

‘This is when I started to collect all this information about aging, because everybody dies – mosquito, human beings. It looks like some program is working, and the program is different between human beings, dogs, cockroaches, they all have different programs.

‘I was fascinated with this power of aging, I would say, because everything, all biological species, they eventually die – and especially it’s not fair to human beings. We have such a wide ability to think and create both in the arts and science and even, by the end of your life, then you are about 80 years old, you are still able to think clearly and do a lot of other beneficial work – but unfortunately aging takes its toll. So this was pretty much the big challenge.’

He adds: ‘I thought there should be some kind of mechanism which will allow us to somehow modify the aging process and somehow make it even reversible.’

While bioquantines are researched and made at this Florida facility in an office park just off a major highway, the trials on 'living cadavers' are set to take place in Latin America

Dr Paylian says his major goal is to help people and reverse ageing and disease since for thousands of years we have been 'a very sick civilization'

Dr Paylian poses with a shark used for his research; he says the 450 million-year-old species 'are masters of regeneration'

Bioquark CEO Ira Pastor came from a pharmaceutical background and went into business with Dr Paylian after reading his proposals online

He went on to study biophysics and molecular biology in the Soviet Union and found work at the Institute of Experimental Morphology in Tbilisi and the Institute of Gerontology in Kiev – but more mainstream science, he says, did not offer the answers he sought.

‘At some point, I split from everything,’ he says. ‘I remember one day, I came home, I just cleaned up the table; I just said, “No more” – because I have to work in that more … I don’t want to call it “dark” field of science, but a field of science which nobody’s stepping in.’

He says: ‘I was in search of the trigger who can convert, normalize cancer cells. I am against the use of strong drugs to kill cancer cells; I am against radiation, radiotherapy, even against surgery – because we don’t give the patient opportunities to understand what is going on with growing of cancer.’

says he prefers working with cancerous cells to try to get them to ‘go back’ to their pre-cancerous state ‘without any medicine, without anything.’

‘We discovered that cells, they have a memory of the past, memories of a healthy state – because the past is usually associated with the health, future with sickness and disease.’

Similarly to immunotherapy, he says: ‘I believe that reprogramming is the future of medical therapy’ – adding that there is an ‘ancient trigger’ which should be identifiable and able to revert cells to a normal, past state before sickness.

Controversial plan to carry out experimental treatments on 'living cadavers' Bioquark was founded in 2007 by Dr Sergei Paylian, who remains its chief scientific officer. Working from a lab in Tampa, Florida, he produces a purified extract called Bioquantine, which aims to incorporate biological material from other, regenerative species to treat human ailments and reverse the aging process. The peptide extract forms part of a project called ReAnima, which is ‘exploring the potential of cutting edge biomedical technology for human neuro-regeneration and neuro-reanimation.’ ReAnima is already preparing to conduct experimental treatments in Latin America of ‘living cadavers,’ patients who have experienced complete and irreversible loss of brain function, or brain death. The procedure involves harvesting stem cells from the patient’s own blood and injecting them back into their body; injecting bioquantines into the patient’s spinal cord; and performing 15 days of laser and median nerve stimulation, monitoring the patients using MRI scans. The initial goal is to re-start the body’s ability to, unaided, pump the heart and breathe; no one is expecting the treatment to immediately reanimate the patients so that they’re jumping off the bed - but the project aims to lay the groundwork for future, further developments that can enhance levels of consciousness and recovery. Advertisement

He continued his studies and work in Eastern Europe before immigrating to the US in 1990 because he wanted more ‘freedom of choice’.

‘From the very beginning, I was always depressed with the political situation in the Soviet Union,’ he says. ‘A human being could not express freely his thoughts, both in arts and in science, even.’

He worked in science in the US but became disheartened with the lack of enthusiasm and funding for his projects, eventually working on translating documents, instead.

‘I left science,’ says Dr Paylian, who has three children with wife Tatyana, while they also each have one child from previous relationships. He and his wife built a cabin in wooded, rural Wisconsin and enjoyed temporarily enjoyed a quiet life in nature.

‘I was translating interesting topics to deliver to Russian readers, plus it was a very nice place. We were collecting mushrooms in the woods. Then we drained all our savings. This was when it was very important I publish my ideas, [thinking] “Maybe this will work.”’

He posted his ideas about reprogramming therapy on a scientific website, looking for funding, but spent months fielding annoying phone calls from brokers who wanted money upfront to connect him with investors. He was cutting the lawn when he rudely answered what he thought was just another one of these opportunists – but turned out to be pharmaceutical entrepreneur Ira Pastor, now Bioquark’s CEO, who came on board.

Dr Paylian began conducting more research with better resources and currently works in a 600-square-foot lab in Tampa, just a few miles from his family home. It’s a nondescript space in a row of one-storey offices just off a major highway, neatly decorated and sparkling clean. Tanya sits behind the reception desk, where stickers advertise what credit cards the company accepts. In addition to using bioquantines for therapy practices, they’ve also incorporated them into cosmetic and dermatologic products which they sell.

There are no animals in the lab today, but it’s common for the space to host frogs, fish, even sharks – studying and utilizing their regenerative qualities – and mice on whom the bioquantines are tested. The lab encompasses three rooms of scientific equipment, as well as the waiting area and bathroom. It doesn’t look like the birthplace of Frankenstein-esque technology, and Dr Paylian – endearingly nervous about speaking on camera, as he fidgets with printouts of his research – laments the fact that his work has not been taken more seriously by the scientific community.

It is here where he researches and manufactures the allegedly rejuvenating bioquantines. They encompass purified, extracted biologic material from other species whose biology allows regeneration, with cells being returned through electrical stimulation to ‘primordial conditions,’ though Dr Paylian coyly won’t elaborate on his methods for achieving these. The research began with the South African species of Xenopus laevis frogs and expanded.

‘The zebra fish has amazing opportunity to rejuvenate even neural tissue; you cut a part of the brain, it regenerates; you cut a part of the heart, it regenerates,’ he says. ‘And then we also added sharks … they are masters of regeneration.

‘Sharks are a 450million-year-old species, one of the oldest species on this planet – and they remember things the way species don’t remember. This is why we took the shark material, especially as a blood component.’

Of utilizing other species to reprogram human cells, he says: ‘I understood that I stumbled on something unusual and magic and interesting, which attracted me immediately – and that I may hold the keys to the successful therapy. This was a major feeling I had, because if you hold in your hands a mechanism who may reverse pathological cells into the normal cells, this is something which tells you, if we can do with the cell, it means that we can do it with tissue, because tissue consists of cells.

‘We can do it with organs; if we can do it with organs, convert them in younger stages, we can actually rejuvenate human beings.’

He says injecting bioquantines has helped patients with everything from cerebral palsy to thyroid problems to kidney disease – though the reasons for their efficacy remain a mystery.

‘How bioquantine works, nobody knows, including us,’ he says. ‘We don’t know what is going on, how it works, how it modifies.

Bioquantines are trialed on mice - at much higher levels than human doses - in the Bioquark lab, where Dr Paylian also works with regenerative animals such as frogs and zebra fish

Dr Paylian says that, if science can reverse diseased cells to healthy cells, it can be done with tissue, which means the same can then be done with organs

‘Each tissue releases some kind of warning signals, saying that, “Hey, I don’t feel good, come here and help me.” Bioquantines read those signals, apparently … so bioquantine goes towards this area and interacts with certain molecules there, micromolecules, and this is the beginning of the process of the healing, we believe. But all this can be chased down in more, wider studies, which of course needs more funds to conduct them.’

All patient experiments have been conducted abroad, since the use of bioquantines on humans is not FDA-approved – and Dr Paylian says they don’t have enough funds to conduct the required research to get that approval.

‘We are more focused on production – which can help millions of people, including kids,’ he says. ‘Because our major goal is to help people right now, not to collect molecular biology data, results. Enough waiting, I would say, we deserve good health. Already many centuries we suffer, thousands of years human beings are suffering from many diseases. As of today, we have around 6,500 different types of diseases. We are a very sick civilization. This makes us sad, because we deserve much better health – and I think … reprogram-based bioquantine therapy can step in and activate and help people to be more healthy.’

When it comes to applying the reprogramming bioquantines to brain dead patients, he says: ‘At some point, I was very much engulfed in the ageing studies; I was thinking that, ok, if you end up with an already dead person … can you rewire him?

‘As of today, we know a person pronounced dead, then the brain is not responding. This is intermediate condition of the human that is between real death, and all the metabolism stops in your body, and real life, then you are in normal condition.

‘So this is some kind of sensitive threshold that you can still bring him back, trying to apply the bioquantines, stem cells.’

CEO Ira Pastor says that elements of the ReAnima project ‘have taken on a life of their own’ – without meaning to make a pun – detracting from the therapeutic reprogramming uses for the bioquantines. But he stands by the unorthodox project that he, Dr Paylian and their team are pursuing.

‘It is obviously something that’s never been done, yet I think we are on the right path,’ he says. ‘That’s not to say everyone loves us; they don’t.

‘If we can get you breathing independently and then your heart will be beating independently, you are alive. You are not awake, but you are in a coma now, and you are not in an irreversible coma – and that would be a major step.

‘Some people say, “That’s no good … it’s a poor quality of life.” And I say, well, number one, I can argue that being dead is probably a worse quality of life than being alive. But at the same point, the concept that we would stop now at this point is ludicrous. The goal is, there’s a continuum of consciousness. There’s brain death, or irreversible coma; one step after that is coma, and there are many stages of this; above coma is persistent vegetative state, and above that is your minimally conscious state – and above that, you are awake.

‘So our goal is to progress up that chain, but we have to do this stepwise. This is not magic, and no one’s going to jump up tomorrow, but this is a progression that normally happens in nature – and we have only one path to follow to move you up at that at this point.’