Following promising results in disease treatment, do these highly potent stem cells have universal regenerative potential?
Following our recent podcast episode exploring the potential of Dezawa MuseCells in regenerative medicine, today we dive deeper into the story, discovering the accidental origins of the technology and exploring its broader potential in longevity and preventive health.
Since their discovery in the 1960s, mesenchymal stem cells (derived from human bone marrow) have promised much but have generally fallen short of producing the kind of robust, reproducible regenerative outcomes many once hoped for. However, a key question remains: have MSC-based therapies been limited because the concept is wrong, or because the wrong cells have been used?
Longevity.Technology: While researchers have long suggested that much of the problem stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what conventional MSCs are actually capable of doing biologically, the discovery of a rare stress-enduring stem cell subpopulation is thought to have game-changing potential. We sat down with Dr Dominik Duscher, President and CEO of MuseCell Innovations, to explore the concept of a universal off-the-shelf regenerative biologic, and if Dezawa MuseCells can play a role in preserving tissue integrity during the aging process itself.
A plastic surgeon and regenerative medicine researcher by training, Duscher spent more than a decade attempting to optimize MSC therapies during his time at Stanford University and the University of Munich, publishing extensively on stem cell functionality, tissue regeneration and cellular engineering. What he ultimately found was not simply that MSCs underperformed, but that many of the assumptions underpinning the field may have been flawed from the beginning.
“Honestly, I think the overstating of MSC efficacy over the last 30 years has given the whole regenerative medicine industry a bad reputation,” says Duscher. “Clinics were giving IV infusions and telling people this would heal every kind of illness. And it just doesn’t. It can’t. Scientifically, it’s impossible.”
MSC therapies ‘make no sense’
While he acknowledges that some have experienced positive effects from MSC therapies, Duscher suggests that much of this is due to the “bystander effect”, whereby MSCs secrete exosomes or proteins that reduce inflammation and even repair neighboring damaged tissues.
“Cytokine release takes place systemically for a while because these cells will be hanging out in your lungs for a couple of days, maybe weeks, until the immune system clears them out, but that’s it,” he says. “But you could just give the secretome or exosome cocktails. Why bother giving a living substance with all the complexity and all the costs? It makes no sense in a system-wide application.”
In his post-doc studies at Stanford, Duscher studied MSC biology in various conditions, including diabetes and aging, where he observed a lack of regenerative functionality in the cells in these patients.
“What I learned was that MSCs were in trouble – they weren’t working well in these disease states,” he says. “So the next question was, how can we fix those problems? And that was the next 10 years of my life.”
For the best part of a decade, Duscher tried everything he could to make the MSCs work again – from using different scaffolding and harvesting methods to incubating them with a host of small molecules.
“I was really trying to give these cells their functionality back, or even enhance it, because maybe we could find a way to get what we actually wanted: a system-wide regenerative agent,” he explains. “But at the end of the day, I never found what I was looking for – I was never able to make the MSC into what I wanted it to be.”
Breakthrough made ‘by accident’
However, while Duscher was trying unsuccessfully to find answers to the decline in MSC functionality, on the other side of the world, Tohoku University Professor Mari Dezawa discovered what he had been searching for – entirely by accident.
“She was culturing MSCs and left the cells out of the incubator, and came in the next day and found some of the cells were still alive and adherent to the Petri dish,” says Duscher. “She analyzed those cells, and they turned out to be what we now call Dezawa MuseCells.”
Muse stands for “multilineage-differentiating stress-enduring” and describes a potent subpopulation of MSCs that appears to decline as we age and in certain disease states.
“My research had shown that MSCs were losing something in their homeostasis, in their subpopulation ecology, in the context of aging, but Professor Dezawa discovered what it was they were losing – Muse cells,” says Duscher. “What appears to be happening in aging and disease is that we start to lose this population of highly regenerative stem cells. We’re losing the A-team, the super troopers of our repair squad.”
Unlike conventional MSCs, Dezawa MuseCells appear to possess several characteristics that regenerative medicine has long pursued but struggled to achieve simultaneously, including targeted homing to injured tissue, pluripotent-like differentiation capacity and the ability to evade immune rejection.
“You really can make these cells off the shelf, ready for everyone to use,” says Duscher.
Promising clinical evidence
Initially, the work to develop Professor Dezawa’s discovery therapeutically was taken on by Japanese life sciences giant Mitsubishi, which explored the technology in multiple indications, from stroke and ALS to spinal cord injury.
“Mitsubishi conducted seven human trials using the cells as a therapeutic in medicine,” says Duscher. “For example, in stroke, a Phase 2 randomized controlled trial conducted in Japan showed tremendous improvement in subacute stroke recovery across the board on different scales and markers. These people are really getting better with treatment.”
In 2024, MuseCell Innovations acquired the rights to the intellectual property behind the technology, and the company is moving quickly to further demonstrate its potential in disease and beyond.
“We plan to move forward with stroke indication licensing as a therapeutic,” says Duscher, who says the company has 10 clinical trials in the pipeline. “We are also looking into other indications to move our IP portfolio forward – including orthopedic trials in the US, a cardiovascular metabolic study in Germany, and we have already submitted for a multi-indication trial in the UAE.”
Applications in longevity, prevention
Crucially, MCI is also extending its work beyond clinical indications into wider areas of health and wellbeing. The company has a division focused on athlete performance and the military, as well as programs for aesthetics. But the area that most excites Duscher is longevity and preventive health.
“It’s clear that Dezawa MuseCells are a distinct reparative stem cell population – they are found naturally in our bodies, and with the proprietary protocols from Professor Dezawa, we now have the opportunity to produce enriched preparations,” he says. “For longevity and preventive care, that creates a compelling hypothesis.”
In addition to treating late-stage diseases, MCI believes that its cells could potentially help maintain tissue integrity as damage accumulates with aging.
“They could potentially help keep organs and cells healthy and in homeostasis – to maintain the balance of cellular functionality,” says Duscher. “The evidence is strongest for these repair models in our clinical trials. Of course we still have to do healthy-aging trials, but when we look at the disease states that we have already treated, there is certainly the opportunity to translate this into biomarker assessments and functional endpoints that also provide longevity data.”
In some of the company’s early epigenetic studies, Duscher claims that multiple organ systems appear to benefit from treatment with the technology.
“They appear to be getting better, or younger, based on those markers – so we are already seeing potential rejuvenation signaling here,” he says. “We are looking forward to our partners launching more studies and collecting data together with us.”
Of course, Duscher acknowledges collecting data on essentially healthy patients is much more challenging than sick ones.
“In longevity, everybody wants to focus on patient treatment rather than scientific studies, understandably so, it’s hard to study longevity interventions in humans,” he says. “But I really see science as an integral part of MCI, whether in disease or longevity. We are already talking with a group in Los Angeles to do a trial on frailty and longevity, which is of course challenging, but we want to take on these challenges.”
Potential to help ‘100% of the population’
From a market timing perspective, MCI appears to be hitting a key inflection point. Following recent law changes in Florida and other states, the commercial landscape for emerging stem cell therapies is changing quickly.
“I just came back from two weeks in the United States, and it is amazing how much energy there is right now around regenerative medicine as a whole,” says Duscher. “Worldwide, we are already offering Dezawa MuseCells to patients in geographies where providers can legally use the product – Mexico, the Gulf region, and other regions that are opening up for these treatments. There is a lot of opportunity right now.”
Looking ahead, Duscher expects to see a continued shift in healthcare, with more and more people taking preventive care into their own hands.
“We are pushing very hard to win approvals for certain indications and get access to mainstream medicine,” he says. “But I would also love to see our cells being part of the longevity protocols of the future.”
“Everybody is aging – every woman, every man. If you find a way to help with that problem, you are helping 100% of the world’s population. There is no greater lever you can have as a scientist, medical practitioner, or company, than solving the challenge of cell function decline in aging.”
Watch the webinar: Unlocking Next Generation of Regenerative Medicine
The rapid evolution of geroscience means the gap between laboratory breakthrough and clinical reality is shrinking faster than ever. For those looking to understand how these highly resilient Dezawa Musecells are moving from foundational discovery into active practice, a deeper dive is on offer. A recent webinar explored the cellular mechanisms behind the platform, its distinct therapeutic potential in orthopaedic and tissue repair and the practical pathways for accessing validated products.
The webinar Unlocking Next Generation of Regenerative Medicine with Dezawa Musecells can be watched HERE.
