[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] A typical vaccine stimulates a person’s immune system, yet only a portion of the immune response actually targets the disease it’s designed to protect against. However, a new technology may be changing that dynamic.

He’s working on a product that could—if proven successful—transform our approach to treating and preventing Alzheimer’s. He and his team also have a product that has shown preliminary promise in phase 1 trials in treating Parkinson’s.

In this episode, he also reveals an incredible story: He and his team previously developed a peptide-based active immunotherapy vaccine candidate for COVID-19, and they successfully completed Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials. Institutional backing, however, favored Pfizer and Moderna. In 2022, Lou Reese’s team was invited to the White House “Summit on the Future of COVID‑19 Vaccines,” where they presented their candidate as an alternative to Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, which by then had been associated with serious side effects.

In the end, their product was never approved, and related content on YouTube was marked as misinformation.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Lou Reese, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Lou Reese:

Jan, it is my absolute honor. Grateful to be here.

Mr. Jekielek:

So you had a COVID-fighting product that you presented to the White House some years ago at a critical moment. And it’s quite a remarkable story. Tell me what happened.

Mr. Reese:

Yes, so we were honored and blessed to be invited to The White House Summit on the Future of COVID-19 Vaccines in the summer of 2022 by both Fauci and Biden. And it was just us and Pfizer for vaccine companies that had completed all trials. And it was remarkable. Fauci actually listed exactly the priorities of America because, by then, some of the safety concerns around pericarditis and myocarditis were becoming widely known that are associated with the mRNA vaccines, and they said we want something better, broader coverage, maybe even universal, safer, and cheaper.

So my wife and I got up on stage and said, you know, we have something that’s finished, it’s testing all phase three, the only company or country, including Pfizer, that ever tested against all three known platforms, which were the mRNA platform with Pfizer, the Sinovac platform, and lastly the AstraZeneca platform, which was an adenovirus vector. And now that was published last year in Lancet, demonstrating that it was the best and safest COVID vaccine that has been made. We were offering it for $10 a dose.

And then we had Pfizer come up on stage right after we announced that, and they said that they were going to do the same thing with the same vaccine, and they would have to adapt it every year for mutation. And unfortunately, the price had to double because it was post-peak pandemic.

And five days later, maybe unrelated, our chief scientific officer, Tom Monath, one of the developers of the smallpox vaccine, just a true man of history in the vaccinology world, and also the head of the CIA pandemic response, was labeled by YouTube as misinformation. So it was Tony Robbins, all of our other scientists, Peter Diamandis, who was on our board, and my wife and I. So it was interesting.

And then Pfizer got the contract, despite their saying, you know, we love this and we think this is amazing. So the end result is that, you know, Americans got something that was less safe, logistically challenging, less effective, and extremely more expensive. It was logistically challenging, because mRNA has to be stored at negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Ours could be literally shipped anywhere that a cold Coca-Cola could be shipped. So it was an eye-opening and sobering experience.

Mr. Jekielek:

What is the product exactly? How does it work?

Mr. Reese:

So it’s a peptide-based vaccine platform that was also combined with an RBD [receptor-binding domain] targeted component of the spike protein, non-self-replicating, no mRNA. and that’s why it was safer. It’s because it was designed for what it was meant for. It was designed to be safer. My wife would say it was designed to be the vaccine that we would give our kids.

Mr. Jekielek:

Except we knew that the kids didn’t need it.

Mr. Reese:

Well, we found out the kids didn’t need it along the way. It turns out that healthy immune systems, healthy eating, healthy habits, adequate vitamin D levels, and adequate zinc levels were actually really critical to this fight. And once we found that out, you know, my kids were never vaccinated. None of my three kids.

Mr. Jekielek:

Fascinating. Okay, so tell me a little bit about your background. So, you know, this is kind of a, this is a story I haven’t heard. I don’t know if many others have heard such a story on camera. Tell me a bit about your background, how you got that call, right, and ended up being the only company in the room besides Pfizer.

Mr. Reese:

So I was out of town in February of 2020 with a few friends and my wife. It was the only men’s trip I’ve ever taken, actually, to this day in my life. And I went with a few friends, and my wife was like, you really need to do this. You know, we’re taking a break anyway. So not her and I, but the company stuff was on a moment of hiatus. And she said, you should do this. It’s only five days. Just go up there. And while that happened, we could see the closures around the world happening with COVID.

By then, I had developed the world’s first antibody test, delivered over a million antibody tests to ground zero at Wuhan. We had already sequenced the entire virus and known that it was lab-made, and it was clearly engineered because that’s an impossible mutation. So we knew that then. We told everybody that we could. It was very clear in the scientific community if you had actually sequenced it. It was like a black-and-white moment, and that ended up.

Then I said, okay, my friends were panicking, their families were panicking, and so they went back to the hotel to pack, and I stayed out. I had this decision where you know my job has always been to eliminate suffering, and I said look I have to go do this and we have the vaccine, we have the antibody test, we can do this faster than anyone and it‘ll be safer than anyone. We can scale it up right away and it’ll be cheaper. So that’s what we did. We started a company that day when we got back to the hotel. My wife and I formed it on the phone. It was called COVAXX originally, and then became Vaxxinity.

Mr. Jekielek:

Why do you think you were the only company other than Pfizer that was in the room at the White House?

Mr. Reese:

I mean, do you want, I'll give you the truth. I think that we were used as a smokescreen so that they could continue lying to the American people and poisoning them and not get in trouble for it, ultimately robbing a huge amount of money by buying more expensive things. You realize the ultra-cold chain storage capacity in the entire world had to be built. Billions and billions of dollars. When’s the last time you bought a fridge that could go to negative 40 or a freezer? The answer is you can’t. So they had to build those from scratch, all of that infrastructure, all the political capital that had been put into it.

And in 2020, when the president brilliantly and universally was supported for Operation Warp Speed, myself included, over 90 percent of Americans, Democrats and Republicans. It was the most purple issue that has ever occurred. He was called and sent letters by most of the world leaders praising the fact that he wanted to use this as a bridge, which he’s articulated repeatedly, to get the world back to work and to get America back to work. And the data, the safety data, long-term safety data, did not come until he was out of office, and he was not privy to it.

The truth is that when the bridge was over, they continued to walk on it even though it was crumbling beneath their feet, and so the right thing should have been done, and it wasn’t. That administration knew, and they absolutely knew that that bridge was done. They absolutely knew about the safety; they absolutely knew about the cost because my wife and I physically were brought there to tell them about it. They knew that there was no need for spike protein replication. They knew that there was no need for mRNA. They knew that there was no need for annual adjustments to this. They knew that there was no need to pay 20 times more or 10 times more.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so I guess what you just, after this, you just switched gears.

Mr. Reese:

I didn’t really switch gears. I just continued on the other track. I said, you know, I’m not going to participate in that. My job is to stay clean, and I didn’t want to jump into the mud of lobbying and hiring former officials and all those other things that some of our competitors might have been willing to do. And I didn’t want to compromise on the low price. I wanted to make it accessible.

So then I said, okay, I’m going to learn from that and understand the system a little bit better. And I’m going to push forward with these drugs that we were already in development with before COVID. All of those trials obviously had to stop during COVID. You can’t have a bunch of elderly patients that are already immunocompromised in congregated areas to do trials. So we had paused them. And as soon as that was lifted, I went back full speed.

Mr. Jekielek:

So what I want to do now is I want to go way back. So how is it that you came to be working in biotech?

Mr. Reese:

So I was born into a family of relative privilege in Texas that lasted until I was eight. On the trip to the Christmas party, my dad and I were riding alone in his Mercedes diesel that was very old, named Teely, which I still have. He’s since deceased. I was the first person in the family that he told he had been indicted by the FBI for the savings and loans scandal, which he was not involved in. They had given him a choice, and it was looking like it was going to be fairly challenging. My mom didn’t even know, and I spent that night crying in a room with this dog that I didn’t know. They went to the party, and my dad was like, don’t tell your mom. Then he went to prison for almost five years in federal prison. So it was hard.

I was smuggling vitamins and warm hats and other things into the prison through the church and hollowed Bibles because they didn’t cavity search children. I visited him in Yankton, South Dakota. I visited him in Mansfield. I visited him in the maximum security facility in Leavenworth. I visited him in El Reno before it was shut for being inhumane. Some of the worst prisons on the planet. It was a really hard thing. My mom did her best to shield us from it, but there was a lot. My sisters and I went through a tremendous amount.

When he came out, my dad was a little rough around the edges. We were on a plane flying to someplace, and he said, you know, and I had my little Sony Discman to date myself on, and he said, son, and I took the headphones off, and he said, you know, you have to write a plan, and the thing about a plan is life will never go according to the plan. Then I put my Discman back on, and he said, well, what are you doing right now? Write the goddamn plan.

And like I said, he was a little rough around the edges. Huge guy, he was like six four, six five, could bench press 500 pounds. When he came to prison, he was pretty out there in terms of the extreme, and um, so I took the headphones off. I wrote my plan, and I decided that it should include family, where you want to live, philanthropy, friends, and what you want to do for work—all these things. So I wrote it down, and what it boiled down to, professionally, was the three largest areas of human impact. I was age 15, and I still have the plan.

The three largest areas of human impact were real estate, which is where we live, garner our resources, congregate, grow our food, and work. The next one was energy. Energy is everything from fusion to solar, to oil and gas, to bridge fuels, to all of the different categories. So it was very broad, and that’s what powers the first one. The last was health, and that’s a healthy planet, healthy people, healthy animals. Because without a healthy food stock, without healthy people, and without a healthy planet to sustain us, all of the other two are negligible.

So when I was about age 22, I developed the LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] criteria, which is. I built the first LEED multifamily project, which became LEED Complete. I did that in Basalt, Colorado, outside of Aspen; it was a 120-some-odd townhouse project. When I was at the World Green Building Congress—this was the beginning of bucking the largest industries—I was there, and Sandy was the president of it.

I said, let’s build. Why don’t we go straight to LEED Complete? Because right then, they were only doing LEED for warehouses and stuff. I said, 70 percent of the energy is in multifamily housing, 67 percent, but whatever. And I said, let’s do it. He was like, who’s going to fund it and build it? I was like, I already got the money, and I’m going to build it.

He asked, who’s going to be your lead certified architect? Betsy del Monte raised her hand and said, me. We built that project and created, in effect, the largest carbon footprint reduction of anyone ever with the associated outcome. I democratized and demonetized that right away. Then I went into landfill space.

Mr. Jekielek:

What does that mean, democratized and demonetized?

Mr. Reese:

It means that I gave it away for free because it was all about the impact. I had achieved the impact and had the model, and I gave the model away. And then I did that again with the Oshkosh Green Building Accords, which was a Walmart demolition in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. And I had realized and was very perturbed by the idea that I’m still 22 or 23, and I had realized that the plurality of landfill space in the United States is occupied by construction and demolition debris. Outrageous. And it’s all valuable, right? So I asked, what if I can do this and actually make people save money? What if I can make it cheaper and solve that?

And so in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, we laid out the platform and then did the demolition where we diverted over 95 percent of the volume by mass from the landfill, and we did it for one-third of the cost, including our fee, everything, one-third of the cost of the traditional construction demolition. And then I took that accord and shared it with every major group that you can imagine, every big box store, and every apartment builder. And today that’s had a tremendous impact on the landfill space. So then I democratized and demonetized that.

Then I was like, okay, that’s enough of real estate. I think I covered it. Now I’m going to go into energy. And I started Solar Fund in 2008, 2009. First, I started a solar integrator. I chose Hawaii. And the reason I chose Hawaii is that it has the largest energy cost in the country. Almost all of it was diesel-generated at the time. And so we started the integrator and then I fed that into the fund.

The reason that that mattered and matters was when I started, the cost of this was twofold, actually. The reason is when I first started it, we had 11 point something times the cost for solar for diesel-generated energy. And the issue, the disconnect was financing. So I partnered with the Bank of Hawaii, Patagonia, the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, and Gentry Homes.

And I did that specifically to keep as many people from losing their homes in the recession as possible. Right now, the estimate was that it was about a hundred thousand people. I’m not sure exactly the number because it was by family. The average family was four to five people, so I have to use the average. But at least 75 and maybe one hundred and twenty-five thousand. And the number one and number two cause of the fault on a mortgage. is divorce and lack of job, loss of job. And I couldn’t fix those because I didn’t know all these people.

But what I could fix was energy price fluctuation. And so, by wrapping the mortgages with Bank of Hawaii into the solar purchases, their overall bill was lower every month, no matter what, by $300 to $800, or $300 to $1,200, depending on the homes. And it dramatically altered the actuary around default for the Bank of Hawaii. And I sold that. And then I decided that it was time to do health.

So I was one of the founding investors in American Well, which became the largest telehealth deal. And that didn’t satisfy me because I wasn’t feeling the impact. And so then I decided to go direct. I took over, in effect with my wife, a not-for-profit research institution, and then built a team of scientists and started developing drugs.

The first one that was commercialized now vaccinates just over 25 percent of all the pigs in the world against a deadly disease known as foot and mouth disease. And then we developed the world’s first platform-based active immunotherapy medicine, and that was for immunocastration. So what that means is, think vaccine, but it’s not a vaccine that can target endogenous targets. So things that are wrong in your body, right? And so in this case, it would target LHRH [luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone], which is the precursor to androsterone and testosterone. And the proof was literally in the pudding.

I sat in a cave in Kansas with no cell phone reception and with one of the largest animal health companies in the world. And we looked at thousands of pictures of pigs with balls, without balls, with balls, without balls for hours to show the efficacy of the drug. You could physically see the balls disappear, the testes disappear within a very short period of time. So the physical manifestation was huge. Then I realized the implications for human health.  And then we went after the largest targets in the world. So we went after the most expensive and most feared disease in the country.

Mr. Jekielek:

You say you recognize the implications for human health. You’re saying that the methodology could be used for fixing other things than balls.

Mr. Reese:

Yes, sir. I was approached by a number of countries for this for immunocastration of sex offenders and all these other things and pedophiles, which I felt okay with but apparently is not right. So my feeling was that we shouldn’t do that; we did not. And then I chose to apply it for human indications that platform technology, and the first target that we’ve gone after was Alzheimer’s.

It’s the most expensive, most feared disease in the OECD [ Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development], the most expensive single line item in the U.S. budget. Estimates are that the true costs are over a trillion dollars a year now, and the cash costs for CMS [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] were $254 billion last year, and the documented cash and care costs were over $750 billion.

Mr. Reese:

So this is the single largest issue that I could tackle.

Mr. Jekielek:

So explain to me what active immunotherapy is exactly first. You said it’s kind of like a vaccine, but how does it work?

Mr. Reese:

So this is going to sound roundabout, but I’m going to answer it very directly. If we were having this conversation 700 years ago and I said, Jan, what is the most expensive thing in the world by weight? Smart people would say salt or gold. They'd both unfortunately be slightly wrong.

The [inaudible] is the oldest known printed book by man written by hand on animal skins. Less than one percent of the world before the printing press could read those books. They were the most expensive and valuable thing in the world because those same less than one percent had to write them by hand. There was no such thing as loaning a book. It did not exist. The vast majority of the world was illiterate.

A singular invention that was actually in retrospect quite simple, the printing press, lowered the cost overnight by 5,000-fold. And within one generation, 20 years then 30 years now, you had every person in the world—80 percent of them had seen a book in real life. Now they did not read them all, but this is pre-steamships, pre-Amazon, pre-Prime, pre-motors, right?

And yet within that period of time, 80 percent of the world had seen books and held them in their hands, even if they couldn’t read them. What we’re doing right now, less than one percent of the world has access to biologic drugs. Those are typically referred to as monoclonal antibodies. The reason is they’re made in giant bioreactors. They’re extremely expensive. There are batch failure issues, all these things, right?

But they are miracles. They do solve major problems that could not be solved before. And they do that in a roundabout way using humanized mice and vaccinating them for something, generating the antibodies, taking the antibodies out, and growing them in these giant vats. That’s a summary. It’s a little bit more complicated, but not much.

And if the immune system can be harvested in a safe way to make antibodies itself, then they’re yours. It’s personalized medicine. They’re safer. And not only that, but monoclonal implies one. My Latin is rusty, but I have it. And so one is the target. And if you do others, you have cross-reactivity issues.

The other problem is, because they’re foreign antibodies, you have something called anti-drug antibodies in your body that eat those up over a period of time, so they become less effective and the doses usually increase. So we figured out a way to turn the immune system on safely. Literally the safety profiles have so far been transparently published in all of the major journals across over 10 trials with multiple targets.

And the reason that we did that was that we said, what if we can gently turn on the immune system to only generate these antibodies? No off-site reactions. The typical vaccine, as an example, generates over 95 percent towards the toxoid carrier. That could be KLH [keyhole limpet hemocyanin], that could be any of the carriers, and less than 5 percent to the actual target.

Mr. Jekielek:

And just to summarize, basically, you’re saying when you do a typical vaccine, most of the antibodies created are not going to help.

Mr. Reese:

Virtually all are actively against the wrong thing. So in effect, think of it as riling up the immune system to get a minor response. What we do is actually, it’s much more like SEAL Team Six. We come in completely silently, and the outcome is, so the immune system is completely silent, and then we take out the bad guys. So we pick up Maduro, there’s no casualties, and we’re out. And so that’s what we designed, it was made for that, and that’s exactly what we see in the clinic and in patients.

And so in the future, and what I believe and what is true is that we can go where antibodies and monoclonals and biologics can’t go, which is we can do multiple targets at the same time, we can go after multiple targets of the same protein or the same hormone that’s causing autoimmune diseases. We can go after the thing that is causing Alzheimer’s in this case, which is the toxic oligomeric and fibrillar forms of A-beta. That’s the beginning of the decline.

Mr. Jekielek:

This is what people colloquially know as amyloid plaque, right?

Mr. Reese:

Actually, no. Plaque is a surrogate marker that can be measured easily by PET [positron emission tomography] scan. It turns out that there are a huge number of Alzheimer’s patients that do not have plaques. They only have, and this has been published by other people, not me, in Nature, I think at least twice, I think probably more by now to be honest, but the last time I checked it was twice, and it shows that the neurons actually are killed when the natural A-beta binds together, it becomes oligomeric once there’s more than one.

So oligomers are multifaceted. Once they stick together and then become fibrils, which are even more stuck together, those actually block the transmission between neurons along the synapse and stop the mitochondria flow, damage that, and then kill them. By the time the plaque is done, I tell people it’s very, like the plaque is laid down, which is just filtering to the bottom. It’s irrelevant. You can’t bring those neurons back.

It’s the equivalent of my four-year-old putting a rubber band around his finger for two days. It doesn’t matter how much blood you give it. It’s the equivalent of how I took care of plants during college. If you don’t water them for six months, you can give them an ocean of fresh water, and they won’t come back alive. So those neurons are dead. It’s like jackhammering up a bunch of things.

The reason that the side effects for going after the plaque are so horrendous in the existing drugs is that you have 17 to 34 percent rates of RAE, which is a fancy pharma-created word for brain swelling. These acronyms are really meant to hide severe safety concerns. The worst outcome is comas and ultimately not being able to come out of them.

Usually, what it does is create cognitive impairment in a variety of ways. So tired, anxious, all of these things that are actually characteristic symptoms of Alzheimer’s. And so that’s a challenging thing. All of the current approved therapies are monoclonal antibodies. The dilemma with those is that they’re expensive, difficult to administer, and have these side effects. And so it’s just not possible to use those in any way for prevention.

So I like to think of Alzheimer’s as a guy on steroids in a bar in Scottsdale, and then a little skinny guy reading Shakespeare at the bar. But you’re watching this. So you see it with your own eyes, and the little guy out of nowhere comes across and just pokes that big guy right in the chest.

Now, you and I are irrational people. We’re going to predict a cascade of events. The bartender will jump across the bar. The bouncer will come in. Eventually, the police will be there. Eventually, there'll be a judge and lawyers and all these things. That’s the downside of, that’s the cascade for Alzheimer’s.

But if you can just stop that little guy or stop the big guy from hitting him the first time and breaking his jaw after he pokes him, if you can just stop that, catch the fist and say, sorry, he’s out of control. We have to stop that. That’s the A-beta oligomers and fibrils, and that stops the entire cascade. So that’s the way I think about the cascade of how Alzheimer’s progresses.

And then at the late stages, after you have damaged areas of your brain and you’ve lost neurons and all these things, the tau protein comes in and isolates those areas for survival because that’s what our bodies are engineered for. So it isolates and walls off those areas. So it’s a secondary cause, and that’s the plaque.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, okay, let me go back to the fibrils. You said the fibrils are the problem. They’re actually stopping the neurons from communicating with each other and killing them ultimately. So the fibrils are the punch, not the guy who stops them. The guy who stops them is your drug.

Mr. Reese:

It’s the drug, yes.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. So, how does it work?

Mr. Reese:

We basically generate only those specific antibodies, and they actually change—it’s called antibody maturation—to match your personal version of those toxic oligomers and fibrils. So, this is a personalized medicine approach. It triggers your body to make those antibodies in quantity, and then it breaks up those fibrils and actually covers them with dendrites in the brain, which naturally alerts the immune system to clear them. Then, through sleep, the vascular walls on the sides of the brain, and your cerebral spinal fluid [CSF], you actually excrete those.

Mr. Jekielek:

So the existing monoclonals that are used have these side effects, and they’re pretty common; it’s not like an unusual side effect. What are the side effects of this drug?

Mr. Reese:

So far, it’s been extremely safe. You’re getting a shot in your arm. There’s something called injection site reactivity, which means, ow, there’s a needle in my arm. That’s all it means. But besides that, there haven’t really been huge documented side effects.

Mr. Jekielek:

So you’re in the process of doing the clinical trials. How far along is that?

Mr. Reese:

We’ve done three trials: a phase one, a phase two, and a long-term extension. We’re the only privately controlled asset for the prevention of Alzheimer’s, and it’s now ready for its phase three. My goal, my hope, is to work with this administration to do something truly historic.

We’ve committed to providing these for less than a thousand dollars a patient per year, which is less than one percent of the cost of any of the existing treatments. The ease and the machinations of how it’s administered are absolutely simple; the infrastructure is in place. As I said, they just have to be refrigerated. It’s a simple IM injection, just like a shot you would get at the clinic, at the doctor’s office, or by a nurse practitioner at a CVS drug store.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s almost hard to believe. I mean, there’s a lot of, let’s say, distrust in pharma among the population these days, right?

Mr. Reese:

Me too. This is a husband and wife that are deciding to try to make an impact on the world. That’s all it is when you boil it down. There’s an amazing team of people that work with us. I couldn’t do it without every single member of the team. But ultimately, what drives us is my wife and I and our absolute commitment to making an impact, eliminating suffering and the worst suffering.

My grandmother died of Alzheimer’s, and I remember her being very happy one day, usually there in an agitated state. She was in a wheelchair in a memory care facility in Palm Desert, and she said, I had the best day. She didn’t know my name, and she said, the best day I was skiing with the Shah. I was like, you’re in a wheelchair.

But what I didn’t realize was that my dad or my grandfather, during the war, was stationed in Persia, now Iran, and that’s where he met her. She was one of the three females on the base, and they fell in love, and that’s how I got here ultimately, I guess. My grandfather was like Milo in Catch-22, so he was literally that guy, and he couldn’t shoot a gun because he was not capable at all. They were like, “You can never touch a gun again, Walter.” That literally happened.

But he could play ping pong, and he could play tennis. And so the Shah wanted to play tennis. And so he would play tennis. During the war, they went skiing with his now wife, or then wife, girlfriend at the time, Betsy. They went skiing with the Shah in Switzerland. She was recalling that memory and believed she had lived it that day.

So it was all very true, but it was also very much not then. Having someone have the thing that makes us human—our minds, our ability to innovate, our ability to create and manifest all of that—robbed and turned into basically a doll that has to be taken care of is the most dehumanizing squelching of the light of consciousness that you can possibly imagine.

The number one cause of bankruptcy in this country, not that the money is the issue, is medical bankruptcy. The number one cause of medical bankruptcy is long-term memory care. When you have to make that decision to put your kid in college or pay for your mother’s home, you’re going to pay for the home. You rob multiple generations of their heritage, education, and values.

Mr. Jekielek:

And I mean, $1000-a-year is not a lot of money. Do you really think you can get it to that number?

Mr. Reese:

Yes, it will be less than $1000 a dose forever. That’s the commitment that my wife Mei Mei and I have made, and that’s what we are going to do.

Mr. Jekielek:

So Alzheimer’s isn’t the only disease that you’re looking at. You’re looking at HIV, and HIV is not something that is, you know, such a big issue anymore, it seems. Like it’s, there’s, I think there’s robust drugs. I mean, I’ve been watching television recently more often. I’ve almost never watched television in my life, but I’ve noticed there’s a lot of drug ads for HIV-related drugs, which is fascinating. I was like, how many people have HIV? Anyway, so clearly there’s, and they promise that it‘ll take care of it. And from what I understand, it’s just not such a big issue anymore. Like you can have it, you can be treated, you’ll be fine, but you’re still working on something. Why?

Mr. Reese:

Okay, so 5 percent of the new HIV infections go on to develop something called multi-drug resistance, which means the HIV virus mutates around every single known drug. And we’re the first and only drug, and this has been published in Nature, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, the first, all the big ones, the first ever drug that has blocked all known isotypes of HIV from mutation. It does not mutate around it. We block the receptor site, and we do that in a relatively safe way.

It is a monoclonal antibody because the FDA wouldn’t allow us to test an active immunotherapy for it because they were afraid that there would be some consequences. So we developed, with hundreds of millions of dollars of resources, we developed a monoclonal antibody at their behest decades ago starting. And that’s why we originally developed the monoclonal antibody because it’s not my favorite technology.

I think of it as old, and I think that the future is active immunotherapies, but we did it, and now that is actually ready for approval. And I say that, you know, the last administrations have been very focused on remembrance. They’ve been very focused on awareness on AIDS Awareness Day. They’ve spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make people aware that people are dying. And this administration actually takes action, and this is the period on the end of a 40-year story.

So we have historic prevention drugs now to stop transmission. Lenacapavir was recently approved and will soon be to the market. PrEP [Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis], this is basically PrEP but a long-term one. These work, but PrEP you have to take every day, and I don’t remember to tie my shoes every day. So that’s a very charged, in the medical space, they call that compliance risk. And so people are not compliant, and that’s the reason why it hasn’t actually ultimately worked.

So over 5 percent of HIV cases in the US go on to develop multi-drug resistance, over 8 percent in Europe, and over 10 percent in Africa. Having talked with the leading ministers of health and some of the people that are experts there, I believe the number is closer to 15 percent. That’s what they’ve told me, but I have not done a study in Africa to confirm it.

Last year, just to put it in perspective, 634,323 people were published around the world who have died of AIDS. So the answer is all of those people are forgotten. They’re lost. They’re not covered in the news. These are the forgotten. These are the vulnerable. And often it disproportionately affects children. Because if you’re the child of an IV drug user that has multidrug resistance, guess what you’re going to get? Multidrug resistant HIV. So these are newborn babies that are literally given, in effect, a death sentence. And this is why I’m doing it.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so you’ve been working with the NIH [National Institutes of Health] on this one, right?

Mr. Reese:

Absolutely. So we’ve been working with the head of the cure division for the NIH and the head of the virology department. We’ve been working with Dr. Tae-Wook Chun. He’s a collaborator and has published on a lot of our papers. And then recently, we’ve been working with Geri Donenburg, who’s the director of the NIH Office of AIDS Research.

Mr. Jekielek:

And that’s basically ready to deploy. I mean, that’s, is that what you told me?

Mr. Reese:

It’s in front of the FDA next week, or sorry, next month, the first week of February, and it’s poised for an accelerated approval. The reason for that is, as the FDA and the administration have said, they would like to grant accelerated approvals to unmet needs. This is a life or death unmet need. They want proven biomarkers, totally, totally understood. Viral load and CD4 count have been studied for the last 40 years since the discovery of HIV and the documentation of it. And then they also, ultimately, they want something that won’t have a risk of off-label use.

Now, let me explain that. When a doctor gives a prescription, the FDA is always worried that other doctors will prescribe that for people that don’t really need it. Right now, this is a weekly IV infusion. You have to go to a clinic and get an IV. This is only for people that are going to die imminently if they’re not on the drug. So far, we haven’t lost any of them, right? And these are people that are within months of dying. They’ve failed on every single treatment. And what we want to do is help those forgotten and vulnerable. Our job is really not to forget them.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay. And so this accelerated schedule, what is the situation with Alzheimer’s development? So you’re still, you’re entering a phase three trial from what it sounds like?

Mr. Reese:

Can I say one more thing about HIV? So Cana Life is the company that is focused on HIV. Cana is the site of the first miracle that Jesus performed, which is turning water into wine. This matters because these are people who will die otherwise. It is a miracle to save them. The researchers, the team, when we see this, people are crying on the Zoom calls, people are crying in the in-person meetings because it’s really a miracle.

And what I believe is that we have to set an example of light, right?  And so what we’ve committed to do and what we’re working with major countries in Africa, right now we’re choosing a partner between, and there are more, but Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Kenya, and a few others. And that’s going to be imminent.

Then we’re going to partner with the business Luminary in Africa, and they are going to own the majority of all of the brand, all the IP for Africa, all the distribution for Africa because I don’t want to participate in handouts. I want to actually partner there, and I want to do it so that Africans can take care of Africa and so that can be an empowerment, and hopefully other companies and all industries can follow that example.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s jump back to Alzheimer’s, okay? You’re, in my understanding, you’re basically at the beginning of your Phase 3.

Mr. Reese:

Yes, we have fast-track approval for treatment, and we’ve already applied for the fast-track and the FDA special voucher. This next fast track is for prevention. And so we already have, as I said, an open IND [Investigational New Drug] and fast track for treatment. But I want to skip that, and I want to go straight to preventing it. The numbers that have been provided by some of the best economists in the world. These are not my numbers, and I was shocked.

But we will at least save $20 trillion for the U.S. alone by 2050 and over 20 million American lives. Now, the reason that matters is that every one of those 20 million American lives affects, if you add it up, their family, their friends, their loved ones. It’s over half of the country’s population that will be directly impacted by what we’re doing.

Mr. Jekielek:

If I may, maybe the Phase 3 trial could not go right, right? It might not go well. It happens, right?

Mr. Reese:

Yes, absolutely. And if that happens, we would just transparently acknowledge that and continue to try to save the world. I mean, there’s no other like, you know, my dad used to say that fear turns man from a worthy adversary into prey. And I refuse to be prey.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so you’re also trying to foster some kind of development environment. If I understand, we talked about this a little bit offline. Explain to me what it is that you want to create here as part of this kind of MAHA approach of the current administration.

Mr. Reese:

So I believe that if we set this example with the largest unmet medical need in the country and in the OECD, the number one cost for healthcare, the most expensive disease, the most feared disease in the country is Alzheimer’s. It used to be cancer; now it’s Alzheimer’s. No one wants to get Alzheimer’s. And if we can go after that and set that example, we can show that you can do a direct negotiation with the government, cut out the PBMs, which are the pharmacy benefit managers, and cut out the insurance companies.

People are unaware of this, but over 60 percent, usually over 70 percent, of every dollar we spend on drugs doesn’t go to the drugs; it goes to the middlemen. That would be the equivalent of you buying a $100,000 house and paying the real estate broker $70,000. It’s insane, but those are the numbers and those are the facts.

And so I believe that if we can do this right now, and if we can set this example, this is going to unleash the innovation engine and the power of America, and it’s going to put us back as the leader in biotech. It’s going to put us back as the leader in health. I think the things that MAHA is doing with reversing the food pyramid, and I think that the things that we just did with the vaccine schedule announcements, these are the right things to do.

And if we do that and we do that in innovation, we will be dominant in that space, and we‘ll be the beacon of light that the rest of the world has to follow. We’ll eliminate untold suffering around the world. And any other drug developer can participate in this. All they have to do is be willing to sell it for really what it costs and not be about the money, but be about the patients.

Mr. Jekielek:

This has been an absolutely fascinating interview for me. Do you have perhaps a final thought as we finish?

Mr. Reese:

You know, a final thought. I think that what we have to do is, everybody says, how do you keep it straight? How do you know what you’re doing? And I say, it’s easy. If your goal is to walk on the path of light, the lit path, you don’t judge yourself if you step in mud on the edges in the gray; you just walk back into the path.

I’m walking that path, and I will stay in the light as long as I’m alive. That’s the goal, that’s the mission, and that’s the purpose. I think these are the three largest things that the administration could do to shift the balance in the biotech world and in the innovation world. I think they’re the largest things we can do to save money and eliminate suffering before it starts.

Mr. Jekielek:

And just three things, what are the three things again?

Mr. Reese:

I think we have in hand, this is not my quote, this is from our, not even our internal scientists, but external collaborators; this is the end of AIDS deaths. I think we should put a period on that 40-year sentence. That’s number one. In contrast to previous administrations, I think this one can solve it. And I think that this is an administration that acts, not talks, not remembers, not creates awareness, but solves the problems. So that’s number one.

Number two, I think we can prevent Alzheimer’s, save over $20 trillion, and over 20 million American lives by 2050. And I think that we can also, at the same time, eliminate suffering for over half of the population of the country by knowing, loving, and being the family of those people.

I think that the last one is that we have a universal solution that we’re willing to offer a platform for both the solution now to replace mRNA for COVID, but also to solve any future pandemics. It’s rapidly scalable. The technology is understood. The safety is understood. All the data has been published in so many journals. And so the idea is, you know, we want to solve and prepare the country to be stronger and healthier than ever.

Mr. Jekielek:

And this is the active immunotherapy platform that you’ve developed. You’re talking about here.

Mr. Reese:

So the active immunotherapy is Alzheimer’s. That’s targeting self-antigens. So Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, which was on the cover of Nature, is the first and only drug that’s reversed Parkinson’s in patients with statistical significance. It’s also sarcopenia, which is the number one cause of lack of healthspan, so that’s muscular wasting. It’s also a food allergy solution that will stop all allergies by eliminating IgE-bearing B cells, which is a very technical term, but basically, the thing that causes allergies; we stop that in the body forever. And so you can’t have allergies.

There are people that have a genetic mutation that have no IgE; there are no health consequences associated with that; they do fine. It turns out IgE, the allergic response, was not meant for ragweed, was not meant for asthma, was not meant for cockroach poop and dander, and all of these other things. Instead, it was actually developed for parasitic infection to keep people alive, and now we have great antivirals and antiparasitics that absolutely eliminate that as a threat. So there is no real reason to have the IgE-bearing cells.

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s fascinating. Where does that knowledge come from? How did they come to the idea that the body has IgE to deal with parasites and nothing else?

Mr. Reese:

Well, so the study of IgE with these mutated populations that have none, follows their morbidity and mortality. And so that information has come out, not of my own research, but out of just reading the literature.

Mr. Jekielek:

So they all die of parasitic infections?

Mr. Reese:

Well, no, they don’t because we have anti-parasitics, so they don’t die of anything earlier. That’s what our evolution was made to prevent and to create diarrhea, vomiting, all sorts of rejection mechanisms that would eliminate as many parasites as possible so your body could fight them. It turns out that right now we don’t need that for parasites.

And instead, what we activated, and it didn’t work that well, but it worked better than nothing. And so now it turns out that there are all these kids, like the reason that I developed, or we developed, the kind of anti-IgE-bearing B-cell active immunotherapy was actually really simple.

I had a number of parents and friends who had kids that couldn’t eat cake at birthday parties, couldn’t eat cookies, couldn’t eat this, couldn’t eat that, and they were suffering. And holding a four-year-old to that standard or a six-year-old to that standard that they themselves have to ask for everything that they eat, carrying an EpiPen around, all of those things, I just thought were totally inhumane. And so we developed this.

Mr. Jekielek:

So again, the thing you’re talking about, the third thing is active immunotherapy as a platform for a whole variety of different purposes.

Mr. Reese:

The third thing is a traditional synthetic peptide vaccine only for infectious diseases. So the pandemic responses, COVID, that’s a company called Vaccinity that has all infectious diseases. All of the active immunotherapy, including the potential to replace all biologic drugs with something like, as I described earlier, that no biologic drugs can do, that personalized approach to medicine, the active immunotherapy platform is in a company called Axiom, and then Cana Life is the HIV entity. All of them are controlled by my wife and me.

Mr. Jekielek:

And all of these are the platforms that you want to offer.

Mr. Reese:

So there are two different platforms. One is the active immunotherapy for all chronic diseases to replace biologic drugs. The other is the platform for all future pandemic responses, which are infectious diseases. So one is Axiom. The other is Vaxxinity.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, the skeptic might say there’s also probably good money to be made.

Mr. Reese:

You know, my goal has never been money. And, you know, I’ve been very fortunate to have had a number of exits and successes. My goal will never be money. My value system, when you talk to the kids, is really clear. You can see yourself clearly through the eyes of your children. And I’m here to help people. That’s it.

Mr. Jekielek:

I think I know what you’re saying when it comes to a product that can deal with any pandemic, I think there’s a lot of skepticism about vaccines and vaccine-like products as solutions to pandemics, especially in a situation where, you know, therapies and therapeutics were discounted as, you know, not working when, of course, we now know they are, you know, perfectly good at helping people. Can you, like, qualify for me what you mean by this is going to basically be a solution to any pandemic?

Mr. Reese:

So the platform for infectious disease could be applied to any future viral threat. So whether it’s human-made, the things that are actually, you know, smallpox eliminated a third of the world’s population. Those are things that are real pandemics, not souped-up colds and flu. The platform could make a new drug for that pandemic. There is no such thing as a pan-pandemic single drug. So each of these would have to be unique drugs. But as we’ve demonstrated, you know, we could get from zero to hundreds of millions or billions of doses in a matter of months.

So I can give you one example to articulate that: foot and mouth disease kills pigs, kills them, not every pig, but huge percentages of the herd. And there was a mutation not that long ago that was killing a lot of the pigs. And when that mutation happened, within six weeks, we made 300 million new doses of a new product targeting that exact mutation, and those pigs stopped dying. So these are things that can be scaled up rapidly. These are things that can be understood rapidly. And I’m just here to support security and stability and the prosperous capabilities of the country.

Mr. Jekielek:

What about long-term studies on these products? I mean, with pigs, they’re going to be slaughtered, they’re going to be eaten. Now, there might be some questions about if there’s anything going on in those pigs afterwards, right? But then for human beings, this is a whole different game.

Mr. Reese:

These are great questions and real concerns that a lot of people have. And the way that I see that is that we’ve developed and tested the safety over three years in the longest study that we did. And the answer is they’re safe and they’re reversible naturally. So these are not mRNA; they’re not self-replicating. So when you stop taking boosters, they go away. That was by design.

And so we make it so that if in the future there are any things that affect one person that has a strange mutation that we’ve never run across or known about, all they have to do is stop taking it. And then the antibody levels that are natural, made by their bodies, will naturally reduce. So again, my wife and I, my wife says it better than me, but we literally design these things so that they’re safe for our kids. And that’s the goal, that’s the mission.

One of the unique things about us is that we’re transparent. So I rely on the published data, I rely on the experts in the field, I rely on independent labs and independent results. And if there were ever anything that I was concerned about, there’s not a chance in hell that I would move that forward. So this is a goal of eliminating suffering, and you have to eliminate suffering by walking on that path of light, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Lou Reese, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Reese:

Jan, it’s an unbelievable pleasure to be here, and it’s such an honor, and I’m grateful for our time. Thank you.

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.