Dr Andrew Greenland: 0:02

So hello, welcome back to Voices in Health and Wellness, the show where we sit down with pioneering clinic owners, practitioners and innovators shaping the future of patient care. I'm your host, dr Andrew Greenland, and today I'm joined by Nico Seedsman, founder of Odin Stem Cells, a leading edge regenerative medicine clinic redefining how we approach healing and recovery. Nico blends a unique blend of clinical rigor and entrepreneurial drive to a field that's often more hype than substance. At Odin, he and his team are working to make stem cell therapies more accessible, effective and evidence-based, while navigating one of the most rapidly evolving landscapes in healthcare. So thank you very much for joining us, nico. Perhaps we could start First of all, actually, where are you calling from? Just for the benefit of our audience.

Nico Seedsman: 0:48

I'm in Paris today for one more day here, wonderful.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 0:52

So perhaps you could just tell us a little about how you got into this space and what your role is at Odin.

Nico Seedsman: 1:00

Yeah, so I served in the military 13 years. I did three years in the Navy, originally in electrical engineering, and then I switched over to the Army and joined the SAS for eight and a half years and during you know, for anyone who's aware of the military, it was a pretty demanding job, to say the least. For anyone who's aware of the military, they were a pretty demanding job, to say the least, and I ran myself completely into the ground doing my duty. And that includes physical injuries. So broken right leg foot ankle, both knees had worn through, left inguinal hernia, significant lower back damage, significant neck damage, both my shoulders had worn through. I had tinnitus, say, hearing loss, all the symptoms that come with having cry fatigue and then getting fibromyalgia and then from fibromyalgia I went to major anxiety, then major depression and then full-blown pdsd and then eventually I got all the way to completely autoimmune.

Nico Seedsman: 2:08

I picked up multiple viruses in the jungle at this time that were active. The specialists had named you know I was still had active in my body the whole Epstein bar Ross, river fever, dengue fever and a bunch of others. He said we actually have names for them. I don't know where he he got them, but they're all. They're all active. Um, I've riddled with parasites from my body. You can see them around my eyes.

Nico Seedsman: 2:30

My nervous system had shut down after season. My nervous system had shut down, it was twitching. I couldn't keep my eyes open, naturally, um, and it all came to a head to with with autoimmune, or I just went full autoimmune. I just was no longer healing, it was just permanently sick and, uh, you could see it was getting pretty dark and one of the doctors let loose that you that I was on my edge. Um, I think they weren't supposed to say that, that they would to basically tell me that. You know, they got basically indirectly told me you've got a couple of months left to live, uh, at sort of best here, um, and I think they were maybe doing me a favor, but, um, but you know, it definitely was a struggle.

Nico Seedsman: 3:11

So I got close to death and I'd serendipitously heard several podcasts talking about stem cells and then I met, more serendipitously, a, a owner of a clinic in colombia. He got me in you know, very expensive, this was in 2019 to do stem cells and immediately, like they said, look, your health is so compromised that we can't actually give you the full dosage in one hit. We actually have to do it every three months to capitalize the success. But we don't want your body to think it can do things it can't do. So they staged it in like trenches every three months and I went in for my first and nothing changed. Now the technology is better. You'll start to get some results due to exosomes we can talk about that a bit later, start getting results earlier.

Nico Seedsman: 4:11

But with the stem cells I was doing I wasn't expecting to get any real noticeable difference for three months at least. So I took it and then I kept getting worse. Things were pretty dire and then on the three-month mark, right on the nose, I just started feeling better. It started stabilizing and then I did stabilize and then I got to the point where I had completely stabilized and got to my second treatment and then got to my third and I was just hoping not to die. But by after about six months I was at about 40 and say after a year I was at about 70 of my general health back again, and I'm talking I was below five, like if it was a telephone battery. It was definitely in the red um, red um. And eventually after that period, over the next, you know, let's say, from day one it was probably about a year and a half I got close to 100, pretty close, and the crazy thing that happened was my knees regenerated too and I only took ivs and I did um intrathecal and my shoulders regenerated and my back and neck issues and my hearing and all these things started coming back. So when I was done and you know this, this was the real test was when I got covered, because before I would have definitely been the person that was in hospital and probably for sure dead. But I got COVID. This all happened just before it and when I got it I'm like well, you know, good luck, let's see how this goes. And I did it, and still alive to tell the tale.

Nico Seedsman: 6:01

So after this I said, right, well, veterans don't have access to this and this is pretty bullshit because it is quite, it's quite sad when you see how veterans are taken care of. So I created a foundation. I spoke in front of rooms of billionaires and I could get everyone to cry, essentially, and just telling the journey, and they didn't. I couldn't get donations out of them. It was very hard. They didn't understand the medicine and that was the problem education, awareness. So I kept trying and trying to find different angles to do things and to help, and then I just settled into just raising awareness as much as I could, because I'm like, right, we're going to start with a bit of an education.

Nico Seedsman: 6:47

And eventually one of my best mates, tech founder, and I had my advice and went to the clinic I recommended and he got a successful treatment of his knees and his wrist and he could play tennis again.

Nico Seedsman: 7:00

He'd lost the ability to play tennis and he's like walking up a hill with me in patagonia. It was like, oh wow, you know, you're like, so I did this and this. And you know what, if I want to start a stem cell company, what if I want you with me? It's the face, the brand and you run it and I'm like, okay, let me, let me think on this. Um, and I did. I thought on it for a while and, uh, I came back after a couple of weeks and said, all right, let's do it on the provision that veterans get help. Land goal is actually to get this into veterans affairs and the serving military across five eyes, starting in the united states, because everyone else follows them, and I knew the best way to do this at this point was to treat everyone, treat civilians, create a business, make it make a successful brand name until the toothpaste is so far out of the tube that you can't put it back in. And that is essentially where it started, and now it's grown significantly from there.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 7:55

Wow. So where are we now with Odin then?

Nico Seedsman: 8:00

So now, pending a few changes, I'm a very as you can imagine, I'm a rather focused controlled aggression would be the military term driven person with command and the direction that I am heading with the company and essentially what we're doing is we're building out the entire ecosystem to fulfill the desires of every patient, and the center of that is having a team that are all integrity-based, right and that there has been key right now. What we found with the doctors and clinics are really good. They're really good at doing what they're doing and what they learn to do in in their schooling, and that that's great. We don't need to reinvent the wheel there. But what they were having problems with is getting education out there and finding finding applicable patients that are, that are, that are correct for it, and going through the process to get them aligned to come to their clinic. So we took over that. Now we're successfully doing that across the United States and we should have the framework very soon with a partnership to be able to do it for the most part in home in most of America if they don't, you know, know low-level injections and IVs and therefore that'll make access to it much easier, like it's one thing to try to have someone find a way to finance this themselves and we'll get to that in a second.

Nico Seedsman: 9:26

It's an it's it's. It's a struggle there. However, it's a bigger struggle for them to then go hey, I've got a to pay for this. Now I've got to take a week off, work and travel and pay for the travel expenses and I'm losing. I'm losing money from traveling and I'm losing, and I'm also losing money from not working, so it increases. It's like. It's like insult, injury, um. So getting them done at their home, um, soon enough, will be the next thing we're building out as part of our entire network. And then, thirdly, as part of the brand awareness, we're also going to be finding ourselves basically providing consumer finance at an interest rate that's like fair and integrity based. I don't like in America that there's a lot of gouging on interest. I think it's absurd and I also think people who regenerate are more likely to pay back their debts. You know, it's really hard to get surgery six times and have a non-functioning shoulder at the end of it and still not be able to go back to the workshop or whatever you know as a boilermaker or whatever it is the, the workshop or whatever that you know you're as a boiler maker or whatever it is. So, um, you know giving try to provide this one-stop shop framework for all people to come to us, um, whether you want, whether you want, treatment at home. We're also going to be looking at providing stem cells to the clinics as well as an education material to the doctors so they know what they're working with and how to use it. They know how to explain it to, so they know what they're working with and how to use it. They know how to explain it to a patient of what they're actually going to be going through. So they're going to be having a very imminently, probably within this month, going to have the ability to provide that educational material and provide those cells to the clinics and the doctors, and we're also going to be having the financing, as well as this in-home treatment.

Nico Seedsman: 11:18

Now, the center of gravity of when I built this company was what I wanted, because I put my family through this, I put myself through it, I put a lot of veterans through it and veterans that I know and have served with, and really what I wanted to do was I'm like, right, if this is me going through it, what that I know and have served with, and really what I wanted to do was I'm like, right, if this is me going through it, what did I care about? And it really came down to three things. It's having the most experienced doctors. That that was a big thing to me having the safest, most experienced doctors, because they did have an in a situation in Colombia when I did it 2019, where it wasn't catastrophic but it was definitely negligent and I've left in in a pretty bad way, in a bad condition, just alone.

Nico Seedsman: 11:57

Um, so safety, then efficacy we have no loyalty to any laboratory, so if we find better cells, we will switch to those cells and the patient will be notified.

Nico Seedsman: 12:07

We're like, hey, this is the expense here and the reason you're doing it is because we have got the best sales. And it's like you know, if you want less quality sales and by all means go abroad where they've been replicated or you know they'll be cheaper, but you're getting more compromised sales and then cost. We're not these guys in Latin America have. It's all coming to an end now with the legalization in the United States, the complete, basically, what's coming to be a complete, open legalization of every state. It is, you know, they've been gouging before, for sure, and that didn't sit well with me when I saw the numbers and I understand running medicine is, you know, I'm the CEO, so I get it. I get it, but I believe there's a margin of integrity and then there's a pretty obvious level of gouging. And so having these things and having all our team members orientated around the same level of integrity and wanting to change the world and regenerate and heal people like myself as as being key to the development of our entire brand and enterprise, Amazing, amazing story.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 13:28

So what does a typical day look like for you? At the clinic or behind the scenes? I'm not quite sure where you are, but obviously you've got a lot of business development going on. You're developing ecosystems. I don't know how much you are in the sort of the business side of things or actually on the ground.

Nico Seedsman: 13:40

No, I generally don't get on the ground as such. I do occasionally because there's clinics all over the US that work with us. So it's like it's just too much to be. You can't be everywhere. I've really got to be just strapped into a computer somewhere for some, from when everyone wakes up on the east coast to the united states, until whenever they're done with questions or I have don't have tasks or whatever for everyone. So it's pretty. It's it's pretty intense, but what I do like to do is I do like to jump on the phone at the lowest level, with the potential patients that are that have requested to have a chat with someone who's been through similar conditions.

Nico Seedsman: 14:19

And since I take a lot of conditions, it's not a stretch for them to have a chat with me. And I really do like to have my finger on the pulse there, be able to see the pain in their eyes. And, like you know, I've also got to keep my language very strategic about what I say, that that stem cells can do and etc. Um, we're under strict guidelines there, um, which should open up, you know, naturally over time. But in the meantime, you know it's like, hey, you're gonna have to read between the lines because we're under strict legal provisions here. Um, just give them a little bit of hope. You know, people just want some hope, like they're. They're struggling, they've been a failed medical system has kind of left them for dead for a long period of time. And and these new, um, these new technologies, regenerative medicine that's coming through, and and other forms of medicine which you're, you're, you're hosting a bunch of them on your on your show, it's, it is definitely very it's a promising time to be alive for hope.

Nico Seedsman: 15:16

But the other side of this is the average person doesn't watch this kind of media right as much. It's not something they're just sort of leaning into. So it becomes how do we educate people? How do we make it aware of this is available? How do we make them comfortable? How do we make it aware of this is available? How do we, how do we make them comfortable? How do we make them feel confident in it? How do we give them some hope that life won't just be this suffering existence until death, which is where I was, you know. I can see that. I see the despair in them and I feel it.

Nico Seedsman: 15:48

Um, you know, and the doctors we have doing the treatments, we just select guys that just have a great reputation for the way they interact with people and handle them and care about them and take care of them, and then all the members of the team between, just you know, really do care. I've got one guy out, our top advocate. He prays for every, every single member, every single person that goes through, every patient praying for recovery Every single day. He prays for every single member, every single person that goes through every patient praying for recovery every single day. He prays for them. You wouldn't know unless you asked him, but he's a very godly man and he truly cares and that's been. The success at this point is finding people who doctors inclusive, truly, really care.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 16:31

Amazing. So you're in a fascinating niche. Um, what major shifts are you seeing right now in this space? You know the regenerative medicine space because obviously it's fast-paced. But what are you noticing?

Nico Seedsman: 16:43

I'm I'm noticing um more of a legal framework in the united states. Before it wasn't. It wasn't illegal, but it was in this gray area of medicine in the US where it was acceptable, provided that the patient was notified of the parameters of experimental medicine. Now it's becoming legal, state by state, where it's just full legality rejected by the full scope of medicine. So that's happening, yeah. So that's become really interesting.

Nico Seedsman: 17:13

Then the exosomes came out in the last, probably about three years ago now, maybe three to four, and now that's become as part of the treatment. You just wouldn't do stem cells anymore without the exosomes. Exosomes are like saying the particle to the atom, the atom being the stem cells and the exosomes being the particle, and they're able to pierce the blood-brain barrier. So you don't need to do, you do them together and the exosomes will, you know, come in the billions and they'll go to work immediately and aggressively, like from basically day one, and that, coupled with the stem cells, kind of allows this gradual incline of healing. And then, when the stem cells catch up, at about the three-month mark, say two to three, it then facilitates like this kind of exponential growth on their care, say care plan, their overall care, and that there has become one of the biggest successes. And then they've also, you know, america making it illegal to use replicated cells has meant that there's been a better success rate and standard of treatment in the United States. And some laboratories the one we work with they have just they, they decided to stop, um, stop this profit, excessive profiteering, and be like you know what. We're actually just going to offer a non-replicated, extremely large volumes of cells so that people can get a full treatment that they would otherwise get in latin america, but without replication. Non-replicated, extremely large volumes of cells so that people can get a full treatment that they would otherwise get in Latin America, but without replication.

Nico Seedsman: 18:59

And every time you replicate, they get like bunched together and they get mutations and all these things. And you just know that if something's been replicated three times, yeah, it's okay, but beyond that, up to 27 times some of the clinics do you just know that it's like watering down the, the, the cell. So what's actually happened is it's um, it's, it's created a higher concentration of cell and and exosome and definitely far more success with those two together. That's what's been the most exciting, especially for I went to 2019. I'd replicated cells and I had them in you know what, six years ago now, and the research and development you know was just kind of where it was. So be it.

Nico Seedsman: 19:48

And now I, now, if I was to go do that treatment, I, the success would be, you know, I would say I would expect somewhere, you know, like maybe three to seven x with the same amount of cells, inclusive of exosomes. So it's, you know, it's, that's exciting for me, right? Because we quantify our success as a company on people healed. Um, yeah, we're're just like, well, that's what internally, that's what excites us. It's like who met their primary goal, so we met 100% of their top three goals. And that's how we quantify what we're doing works and how we measure success.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 20:31

Brilliant. So, on that note, what's working really well for you in Odin right now? I guess your success rate is something which you're very proud of. But as a business, what are the things that work really well?

Nico Seedsman: 20:44

I would say from a business perspective, because we're not this big entity, this corporate level entity and and I'm a very tactical person, like tactical leadership as well as strategical I've got this fine balance with the team where I'm able to empower them to make initiative-based decisions, to move at the speed that we need to move to essentially become the biggest brand, ideally in the stem cell market in the United States.

Nico Seedsman: 21:27

We've had a very good head start at this. One of the partners is an extremely successful tech founder who's from marketing and markets all the biggest brands in the world, biggest corporations. He's really good at that. And the other partner is a medical doctor and he's brought on a whole bunch of the expertise as it involves medical operations, but he's also extremely business savvy and somehow the three of us have created this immensely successful model to be able to just weave in and out of each other, to go in these directions and divide and conquer. It allows us to be in a complete confidence in them to do that which really allows us to exponentially grow and outperform ourselves every month. So that's been a win for us on a business level.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 22:23

Great and on the flip side, what's frustrating or harder than you expected as you kind of grow your operation it's.

Nico Seedsman: 22:36

It takes people longer to decide that they wish to proceed to get care, which means there's a lot of touch points, there's a lot of hand holding, there's a lot of extra education and there's a lot of work involved for the advocates, who basically hold their hand through the entire process and thereafter as well. So just check in with them and collect, you know, just so we have some internal data on success, like collect their data and just how they're tracking. It's definitely requires more manpower there than you would. You would ideally really want to want to manage, but it's the. It's the. It's what duty requires, right? It's truly, you know, as I call it to truly give it an f? Um like legitimately about someone's outcome and their success, then you can't water it down. So it's been a bit more challenging and slower in that realm than you would otherwise want to.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 23:43

What do you think is behind that? What's causing this long decision-making process? What's the driver for that?

Nico Seedsman: 23:50

Education. It's really education. It's education in quite a large number that they've got to come up with because it's not covered in any form. So they've got to work out how to get together the finances. So that's a thing, but it also is like okay, education. I need to make sure I understand exactly what I'm doing and where I'm committing these resources to in order to pursue this success and what their success looks like to them and how that, the likelihood of that, their affordability, how much they can actually afford.

Nico Seedsman: 24:24

One thing that we did was I didn't ever want to deny anyone the opportunity to get help. I found a lot of the Latin American clinics would be like hey, here's your price, good luck, let us know if you can do it. But I wanted to present people with three plans. We now do up to four, sometimes five, depending on the person, so they can choose what they can afford to the degree of promising results. And that there, you know, gives someone the opportunity to decide.

Nico Seedsman: 24:58

You know what they can afford and what's in their wheelhouse and you know how. Do they want to dip their toes. Do they want to dive in? Can they afford to dive in? And it's usually a bit of a dance for these guys so that there takes a little bit of time for them to really sit with. Like it's, you know, we probably, it probably would be easier if we just went hey, here's the number of good luck, but it's, I don't think it's it's fair, you know, when you're playing with people who are just miserable in many ways, so that there has definitely been a factor to slow people down.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 25:37

Okay, Are there any specific metrics or outcomes that you track? I think you kind of implied that sort of client success stories was one, but are there any other things that you track from a clinical, operational perspective? We definitely do.

Nico Seedsman: 25:53

One of our big rounds of clients are diabetes. I won't share the information here because we're under some pretty strict legal provisions on that. But and then I talked to this like we've got some. We've got a handful of major lawyers in this field that we go to and drop whatever we have to to make sure that we're compliant with everything. One of them the other day was completely blown away. He goes you're the worst people I've ever actually heard of collecting data to help your patients and like to see what you can tweak to do it better and perform. They're like no one else is there, just selling um. So that that actually felt good.

Nico Seedsman: 26:34

So we're collecting a lot of data, especially on diabetes, and we we correlate quite a lot of um. I would definitely say success um on those um, but we are again. We're not allowed. We're not allowed to release that publicly. We can discuss it verbally with the patient on the phone. We're not allowed to write it down and send it to anyone. It's just again, we're. We've got some.

Nico Seedsman: 26:58

The lawyers are like we'll just keep you very much safe. So you know. So we're like okay, it is what it is, but it's like I, I do like to. The whole team likes to see that and hear that and feel that they're. A lot of the people are very have been um let down by a medical system in in in many ways. And it's not, it's not all, it's just it's you know, we're dealing with america as well, which often is, you know, like there can be a very blurry line between business and medicine in america. Um, very blurry, and you know they've just felt let down in many ways with the, with the system. So they're more motivated than ever by actually helping people and less by money, which is, you know, which is good.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 27:46

So them being able to see the data as well, internally the huge motivator for the team so, looking ahead, where do you want to see odin in the next sort of six to twelve months?

Nico Seedsman: 27:57

I know you're talking about developing your ecosystem, but where do we see this going the ecosystem, um, I basically want it to be a one-stop shop. You come to odin, whether you're a patient, whether you're a, whether you need finance regenerative medicine, whether you're a clinic and you want to start treating stem cells inside your clinic, um, and and providing there's an option to your patients, and and that's it. That's that's what I said I want. I want us to be the brand that you can come to and know these guys have done all the filtering and what we say we mean, and that we're integrity-based and we'll do everything in our power to help. And that's who we are as a brand and what we want to become. We want us to become that name that you can just come to for stem cells, whatever the problem be.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 28:52

And if you could wave magic rond and solve one major challenge that you're dealing with today, what would that be?

Nico Seedsman: 29:03

Speed. I'm not a person who likes to smooth this fast, but I'm not a person who likes to. You know it's supposed to move this fast, but I'm not a person who likes to sit on things too long, in the sense that there has to be a decision made and we have to move forward, and I do that, but I can't compel the third parties to do that as fast as I like to move. You know I've got my SAS speed and, don't get me wrong, I taper it because I'm working with civilians now, but I wish I could crack that wand out and just expedite things, you know, faster with all parties involved got it okay.

Dr Andrew Greenland: 29:57

thank you so much for your time this this afternoon morning, afternoon, wherever you are in the world, and this has been a really interesting conversation. It's interesting how many um people I'm speaking to that's started with a personal journey, that's created something really special, and I think you've done that with your organization and what you achieve, what your ethos is Really interesting to hear about it and where this is going. So again, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it. You're so welcome Andrew. Thanks, matt, thank you.