Lyme disease (and co-infections) can be tough to treat. The Lyme spirochete, Borrelia burgdorferi, has adopted loads of devilishly clever cloaking devices – from thriving in biofilm to existing in pleomorphic forms – to ensure survival despite aggressive treatment.
Enter botanical therapy. With or without concurrent antibiotics, botanical combinations are an essential component of the FxMed clinician’s toolkit.
Dr. Rachel Fresco is a pioneer in the creation of botanical combinations that may effectively kill dangerous pathogens and enhance the power of antibiotics, the founder and president of Bio-Botanical Research, and creator of their signature product Biocidin.
In New Frontiers podcast number 39, Dr. Fresco walks through the history and background of her company and the flagship product Biocidin. Today, Dr. Fresco returns to discuss the recently published study looking at the efficacy of two forms of Biocidin (classic and liposomal) against B. burgdorferi in vitro.
As always, Dr. Fresco updates us on all of the scientific research – clinical and bench – going on at Bio-Botanical, and invites you, the clinician, to participate in data gathering should you be inclined to do so.
Listen, like, comment, share, and let us know what you think, and we, of course, appreciate your time with New Frontiers!
In this podcast, you’ll hear:
- How Biocidin can be used in bacterial, viral, and parasitic infections
- How Biocidin can be useful for addressing mold exposure
- How the broad spectrum composition of Biocidin makes it particularly powerful in breaking down biofilms
- How the liposomal formulation of Biocidin is uniquely positioned to address hard-to-treat infections like Lyme disease
- About the first-of-its-kind research on the effectiveness of Biocidin
- How Biocidin can be used in combination with antibiotics to fight hard-to-treat infections and to reduce the need for more antibiotics
- How research has begun to reveal that Biocidin may work in the body more like a modulator or an adaptogenic compound
Dr. KF SPONSORED CONTENT
I am eternally grateful to our sponsors who, by blogging, podcasting, and advertising with us, enable me and my team to devote energy and time to writing, research, and education. All the companies who sponsor us are those I trust for myself, my patients, and my fellow practitioners. Please check out their websites! – DrKF
Dr. Rachel Fresco, L.Ac., Ph.D., is the founder and CEO of Bio-Botanical Research Inc. Her company has been delivering innovative botanical formulas to healthcare professionals since 1989. These cutting-edge formulations are utilized as key support in the most challenging clinical presentations to address concerns relating to GI health, Lyme disease, Autism Spectrum Disorders, as well as oral care and systemic infections. The flagship formula Biocidin® is recommended by noted authors, clinics and laboratories worldwide. University research and clinical trials on Biocidin® include, multiple pathogen biofilms, Lyme, sIgA modulation, SIBO, GI pathogens, mycotoxins, and oral and periodontal health. Dr. Fresco lectures at medical conferences in the US and internationally, in addition to appearing on podcasts and online summits relating to health and wellness. She “walks the talk,” empowering and inspiring others to lead healthy and organic lifestyles, and modeling a new paradigm of corporate culture.
Email: questions@biocidin.com
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Hi everybody, welcome to New Frontiers in Functional Medicine, where we are interviewing the best minds in functional medicine and today is no exception. I am thrilled to be with Dr. Rachel Fresco again. I want to encourage you to circle back if you enjoy what you hear today and listen to my conversation with Rachel last year in podcast number 39, let me give you her background and you’ll understand why I think you’ll enjoy both of these conversations today. Dr. Fresco is the founder and President of Bio-Botanical Research, that is the company that designed Biocidin and has since put out a suite of really beautiful products. So in our first conversation, we went through Biocidin and why we love it. It’s one of the workhorse botanical combinations, anti-microbial botanical combinations I use here, a lot of my colleagues do as well. But they’ve got a whole suite of really pretty creatively designed products.
Dr. Fresco has been in the industry for 30 years, specifically creating botanical formulas used as nutritional support by health professionals in challenging clinical presentations. Her focus has been on concerns relating to infection and the digestive and immune systems. University based research on her formulas include studies on Lyme disease, biofilms, and immune response. Formal clinical trials using the formulas are ongoing examining activity against SIBO, H. Pylori, dental infections, candida, and more. Many authors, physicians, laboratories recommend the broad spectrum formulations such as Biocidin, Olivirex, GI detox that she developed along with her team of scientists and formulators.
Rachel, welcome again to New Frontiers. It’s great to have you.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Thank you Kara, it’s good to be here again.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah and so folks, just again want to say that we’ve got a good, juicy foundational conversation, podcast 39, we’ll link to it in the show notes for this podcast. I also have a couple of really nice blogs written by Rachel and her team. And we’ll pop those in the show notes as well. One of the cool things about Bio-Botanical Research, Rachel’s company, is they’re really committed to data gathering. They’ve got a lot of industry, excuse me, a lot of University studies happening. They gather clinical data from clinician researchers using the product and Dr. Fresco and her team are just always out there kind of pushing the paradigm forward in terms of gathering data. And so, today we’re really celebrating the 12 -2018, the December 28th, 2018 publication of effectively killing borrelia, burgdorferi, in vitro with novel herbal compounds. So that’s the most recent publication using Biocidin and then we’re going to swing over there and spend the lion’s share of this time on that.
But before I do, I just want to clarify, so Rachel one of the questions that we have here since we’ve got some of your content on our site, people are pinging us. And always they’re asking us about the Biocodin formula. The two formulas, you’ve got the original Biocidin formula, it’s like this workhorse product that we’re using in the practice all of the time. And you also have a liposomal, or LSF formula. So before we jump into our conversation, just distinguish, actually give me a snapshot of Biocidin for anybody who hasn’t heard of it and then just distinguish those two preparations and how we might use them.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Okay, so Biocidin is sort of the broadest spectrum botanical combination that I could put together. It, as nutritional support practitioners use it in bacterial, viral, parasitic, and basically any situation including mold, where there’s a pathogenic organism at play. The design of the formula includes things from categories of berberine-containing compounds as well as essential oils, like oregano and lavender and others, as well as a little bit of support for the immune system. There’s antiparasitic specific herbs in there and antioxidant things. And so that’s what’s interesting about the formula is that because it has such a broad spectrum of ingredients, and particularly has effectiveness against biofilms, that’s why you can use it for so many different things.
So the regular Biocidin liquid, we think of typically in using for the GI tract because you’re going to take that orally, you’re going to swallow it, and it’s going to be the one that you might use, say for intestinal issues and dysbiosis. The liposomal form of the Biocidin is exactly the same formula that we sent to Quick Silver Scientific and Dr. Chris Shade figured out a way to put our Biocidin into a liposomal. So now it can go directly into the bloodstream from the oral cavities so that’s where you get an advantage where you have pathogens outside the GI tract.
And my thought at the time of creating it was, I wonder if this would be more effective than the regular Biocidin for issues like Lyme, because you have intracellular pathogens and so the liposomes can, you know, penetrate through the cell membrane and get to those and also the fats and the liposomes will have an affinity for the nervous system tissue. And that’s where a lot of times the Lyme is hiding. So that’s kind of the difference. But that being said, I have personally used the liposomal for GI problems for myself. I came back from Peru with a parasite and I decided as an experiment to try just using the liposomal and not use the regular and see if enough was going to get to my stomach right away that it was going to work. So I used the liposomal Biocidin and the GI detox for five days at a pretty high dose because I had pretty acute symptoms, and then my symptoms were gone and I sent in my stool for test and I didn’t have anything.
So I’m convinced that, push comes to shove, you probably could use the liposomal for anything as well. It’s a little bit more expensive, so if that’s an issue and you don’t need the liposomal effect just go with the regular one. But other than that they’re kind of interchangeable in some ways.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay, that’s good to know. And folks, we do have a white paper on Biocidin and that’s at podcast 39 but I’m thinking we’ll probably just pull some of those links over to this podcast. So if you go into the show notes you’ll find just a cornucopia of information on Biocidin and the other suite of products that Rachel and her team has created.
Okay, so Rachel, I guess, so you’ve got this study that just came out of the journal, General Medicine: Open Access in December of 2018 and looking at both of the preparations. So talk to me about the study.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: So this was really interesting. I met Leana Gilbert, who’s one of the research coordinators for the ILADS, International Lyme Disease Society. And she had approached me at one of the ILADS meetings a few years back and said you know, we have tested all these different botanical compounds that are on the market that people are claiming might be useful for Lyme, but she said yours is the only one we tested that actually had an effect that we could see in the in vitro study that we did, like a preliminary study. I’m like, ‘Wow that’s great,’ and she goes well how would you like to do like a really large study on this. And when she told me the price I just about fell over, you know. It was a huge chunk, we had never undertaken anything like that.
But I thought about it and I thought, you know what I just want to know. I want to know will this really work in the way that we think it might and so she and her team at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, they have like a huge Lyme research department there and they have all the North American strains of borrelia as well as all the European strains. So they can do…
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Is that why, I’m just so curious, why it was so expensive if it was in vitro. Was it because they used a bunch of different strains, and like what? What bumped up the price?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: I think so, and I think you have to pay like a research person for a whole year. And they did every experiment three times. So you know, really a thorough study. So they repeated each experiment three times and they did a lot of different experiments so they started out with like minimum inhibitory concentration as well as, and so they did that three times. And then minimum bactericidal, so like the death rate and how long it… they culture it after that up to a month, I think, to see if it stays dead.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: So it’s the difference between bacteriostatic and bacteriocidal, correct?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Exactly. They did both. Bactertiostatic and bacteriocidal and then they looked at the biofilm killing ability, or breaking ability. And then they also looked at efflux pump inhibition, which is the mechanism by which antibiotic resistance happens. So they did studies on efflux pump and that’s what’s going to show you where the intracellular penetration is. Like the efflux pump typically, in the borrelia will just spit out whatever anti-pathogens or antibiotics that you’re bringing to it. But with the Biocidin on board it shut down that mechanism so the concentration in the cell can become higher.
So that boded well, also for combining this with antibiotics for people who need that. So she did that study and she also did a crossover study with antibiotics, so looking at…
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: a lot….
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah, which, would the Biocidin help things like ceftriaxone or doxycycline to work better. So yeah, I agree, there was a lot but we were happy to be able to do it and as the, each parts of the experiments were going on she was sending me updates and then she came here to California because she was having a meeting with iGenics. And she came here and she actually presented to me in person the entire research project and the results at that time, and then she said that they were going to, you know, put it forward for publication. So it’s exciting that it finally got published and I think that this is helpful, you know, it’s in vitro, it’s basically impossible to do this type of study with Lyme these days because the testing methods just haven’t been consistent enough, wouldn’t you say?
Like, getting before and after tests from the different companies that are doing Lyme testing has been difficult. Although she did develop this new Tickplex test and, and the Tickplex test is more sensitive than other Lyme tests and also covers the co-infections as well. So now we’re starting clinical trials using that Tickplex test before and after with patients so that we can get more markers.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Alright well I want to, I just want to move through this in kind of an orderly fashion so we can really look at this study carefully. I remember you had mentioned this to me, you’ve got a lot of research irons in the fire and you mentioned this to me last time and I’m so excited that it’s now published and I look forward to seeing all of these other investments that you’ve made in research. You know those studies come, continue to come, to fruition and I really want to commend you Rachel for making the investment. You know it’s a big deal and I, I just think it’s really important for industry to jump in and do that. You know, put money where their mouth is.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: I agree.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah, we’re trying to move, you know integrative and functional medicine forward and we’re not going to do that without being evidence based.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s right.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: I asked them, like how many of these other companies that are selling products that are designed for Lyme, you know have done this kind of research. And she said none. And I think, you know for me it is worth the investment, and my company’s not just about profit, it’s about making a difference. So as long as we can pay the bills, I’m happy to do the research.
And so the new projects we have going forward are really exciting too and new lab collaborations I’ll tell you about those maybe when we finish…
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Let me just make a note of that. Okay so first of all let’s talk about, well, we’ve got a lot to talk about. What about the pleomorphic form? So we know Borrelia lives, you know, is able to survive in a bunch of different stages. And they actually looked at pleomorphic forms in the study. And so I guess it seems to me that that was just upping the challenge of this research study that they undertook. I can see why it was such a big deal as you’ve outlined all the areas that they looked at, and they also included pleomorphic forms. So just speak a little bit about that and what they saw and what they did and all the background.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: So basically, the pleomorphic forms that they looked at were the spirochete itself. And then what happens when the spirochete goes into the round body forms, some people call that a cyst, Leana says it’s not really a cyst because it doesn’t have the same kind of cell walls as a cyst so she calls it a round body. So when it goes into the round body it becomes like a persister type. And that is a lot more impervious to antibiotics that other things.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It’s like in a dormant phase when it’s in the round body correct? But it can survive?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah, it can survive. So the spirochete basically is swimming along and in the presence of a threat, like an antibiotic, it will oftentimes curl up into a little ball and like sort of stick there. And then it can stay in that form or as long as it wants until it decides to come out again and start becoming active and reproducing.
So the round body is one of the things that makes Lyme disease hard to treat, because when you give antibiotics sometimes you’re causing these round bodies to form. So it’s a push and pull, you’re killing off some of the spirochetes but you’re getting these round bodies. So she looked at what happens when the Biocidin comes in contact with the spirochete. And what she found that was interesting was that the Biocidin was able to kill the spirochete but did not cause it to move into that round body form.
It also actually killed the round bodies themselves. So she was really shocked, yeah, so it was like, wow, here’s a substance that could actually go after the Lyme in its persister form. So she tested against the spirochetes, the round bodies, and then the biofilms, which I think every one is familiar with that concept. So she’s looking at the Lyme in its biofilm form as well. And then there’s this sort of in between stage between the round body and the biofilm that’s like a bleb stage.
So she kind of had four different stages that she had outlined to test against.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Jeez, that’s pretty extraordinary.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: That was what was exciting was that it was working on all the different stages, at least in vitro. I mean, we know from clinical reports that patients are feeling better and that their symptoms have improved and there’s been a lot of positive talk about that. Dr. Horowitz basically told me he gives it to every patient.
And I think he mentioned that a lot of times in his most recent book as well.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: But he uses it, I’m assuming, with antibiotics?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah, and you know his protocols are very antibiotic centered, and which for some people may be completely necessary and probably is. Some people who have developed an intolerance to the antibiotics, then maybe particularly looking for something that could be antimicrobial that’s not an antibiotic. But it seems that the use of the Biocidin with antibiotics is helpful because it’s breaking the biofilms, so it’s making the antibiotics be able to reach those areas of pathogens and it’s increasing the intercellular concentration. So potentially you could use less antibiotics.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Right.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: And get the same effect if you have something that’s shutting down that efflux pump on board. And so that’s what we found in the antibiotic crossover part of the study, was that in the presence of Biocidin the drug ceftriaxone could be used at like an eighth of the amount to get the same kill rate. Of course this is in vitro and we need to have more doctors give us feedback of using this clinically. But that voted well at least, that potentially you could use less. With doxycycline it didn’t seem to make a difference. It didn’t hurt the doxycycline, it didn’t make it on Borrelia.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, that’s right. And with the Biocidin present as well. Can you extrapolate the dosing that Gilbert used in these studies to what would be used in vivo in humans?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: I don’t think you can extrapolate it, because it’s like doing a sensitivity study in a hospital for looking for which antibiotic to use. It doesn’t really, the amount that they’re using in a petri dish doesn’t really relate to the body. But it was good to know that in some cases only like, one to 25 in dilution, that’s pretty diluted right?
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: …was needed, that I think that one to 25 in the biofilms, so like oh that was interesting. And so it kind of varied from one to ten…
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And that specifically was, that specifically was the liposomal, correct?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: I think both of them.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Both of them were effective there?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah, both of them were effective. The one that really significantly showed better effectiveness was on the intracellular penetration and that’s where the liposomal Biocidin was like twice as effective as regular Biocidin. But regular Biocidin was twice as effective as the control. So even regular Biocidin was helping. But the liposomal even more so.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay. Alright. Isn’t that interesting? Alright, so then just remind me what you would consider to be, and what you hear from clinicians using Biocidin, how they’re dosing it in their Lyme patients?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: So with Lyme as you know, there can be big die off happening. And it depends on where people are in their treatment and how sensitive they are, but we recommend any new patient starting out on Biocidin, they may want to start with the regular Biocidin before moving up to the liposomal if they’re very sensitive and they’re known for reacting. Because the liposomal is going to hit harder and quicker. That being said, the liposomal a lot of times we’ll say take one pump and put it in about five ounces of water, and then basically each teaspoon of that water is going to be equivalent to about one drop of Biocidin, so maybe you’re only going to take one teaspoon that first time and see how you react and if you’re okay take another teaspoon of the water. At the point that you could drink that whole five ounces without having any horrible die off, you could start to take it directly orally and move up to another pump a day.
So you just have to go per the person’s tolerance. There’s really no one way to do it. Some people can move up very quickly on using it and take multiple pumps of liposomal Biocidin at a time without any huge reaction and other people are like on the floor after the slightest amount of it. So that’s why we have the GI detox on board, because if someone is having a big die off reaction using a binder will help calm that down, it’ll help mop of the toxins that are dying off.
You know because not just Lyme may be present, but this person may also have a lot of dysbiosis that you’re killing off, too.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, absolutely. And tell me what’s in the GI detox and why you’re recommending it like that.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: The GI detox has zeolite clay as well as MMST silica, so the MMST silica really helps bind things like metals. And it makes this formula good for xenobiotic things as well that could be in the system that you may be detoxing. And then we’ve got the pectin in there from apple and the humic, fulvic acid as well.
So the formula basically, and of course the activated charcoal. So and I think we put a little bit of aloe in there as well to provide a little bit more moistening for the gut and to help, people a lot of times will get constipated with binders. Although this formula is less constipating than like something like bentonite could be.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Dr. Rachel Fresco: So what we always recommend, with the GI detox that you take it with a large glass of water, and of course normally it’s taken away from any other supplements or food, like an hour or so after the Biocidin. But if someone’s in the middle of a bad die off reaction, you can just take it right then and there and that will help put a stop to it.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay, perfect. Okay, so I just want to run through this, you’re recommending people, so people can start with the classic Biocidin formula, the non-liposomal formula, if in particular if you’re concerned about a die off. And they’re both liquid so they’re super easy to microdose. In my patients, I use the classic formula a lot because we do a lot of gut stuff here. And I’ll have folks just start with a drop. Some folks, I would say most of my patients I can increase pretty quickly. And then I’ll go up to ten drops TID for different gut issues. And sometimes people, I’ll let people just kind of increase as they determine they can tolerate exposure to the Biocidin. But that’s the classic and that’s in gut issues. So if we’re really concerned about die off we could start with the classic in our Lyme patients, but the liposomal formula really seems to be the stronger, perhaps the more potent intervention in this study that was just published which incidentally will be on the website bares out what you were thinking all along Rachel, which is pretty amazing.
And then you’re recommending one drop into five ounces of water, or excuse me one pump into five ounces of water and then take just a teaspoon to establish how you can tolerate it. If you have a die off though, grab the GI detox and take that immediately help just sop up the endotoxins and all the debris. Generally speaking though, you’re recommending GI detox in an hour or a couple of hours away from the liposomal Biocidin to just keep things moving along, is that correct? Did I get that?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Well, like the Biocidin products are typically taken before meals, like a half an hour before a meal. And so now you’ve eaten, so you need to wait until there’s not food in your stomach before taking the GI detox. If you’re trying to target the toxins and not mop up things in your food.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, okay.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: That’s why. But like if you’ve taken the liposomal, you can take Biocidin any time of the day it doesn’t really matter, but we just made it, we tried to make it easy for people to include in their daily routine by saying lets go it a half an hour before meals and then that gives you time in between meals to do the GI detox. And then the pro flora 4R is the new spore forming probiotic with the anti-inflammatory pharmaceutical quercetin added, and I like that for pretty much everyone, Lyme patients or people with gut issues because that quercetin is really calming things down in the gut and elsewhere in the body so if you have pain, inflammation, mast cell response, allergies, having that quercetin on board is going to help no matter what. And the spore forming probiotics have been shown to really help modulate the flora and the immune system in the gut.
So that one can be taken any time of the day. I find it convenient for myself just to take it at bedtime but you can take it anytime. And so the protocol that when we put it together in the whole kit, what I would typically want to recommend for a person who has chronic Lyme is do the comprehensive program which is a two month kit and so it gives you enough of all of the formulas to get you through two months and the reason we added Olivirex, the olive leave combination, to that protocol was a lot of times when people are tested who have Lyme, they have reactivated viral components to their problem now. So something about having Lyme, maybe it’s the stress on your immune system or whatever, but these people will show EBV, CMV, herpes family viruses, so having some additional antiviral support is helpful. So we start off with just the Biocidin so we don’t want to overwhelm them, right.
So we start with the Biocidin, and once they’re doing well on that and they’ve been doing that with the GI detox they could at any time put the pro flora in and then if they want to address viral issues as well then they add in the Olivirex at the same time as the Biocidin of the day. So it makes it easy for them to do.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay good. Alright. Terrific. Listen, I wanted to just circle back to biofilm and ask you, you talked about at the beginning the various botanicals and their indications, but what botanicals in the Biocidin product have been shown active against biofilm? Which are the strong ones?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Well you know it’s kind of interesting so many of them do, it’s almost like without even knowing it, when I created the Biocidin formula, I created like a biofilm super formula because years went by, you know like 20 something years after making the Biocidin that the research online on pub med came out about biofilms so if you look at like the plant tannin category, like the walnut for example. That’s shown to inhibit efflux pumps and things like the essential oil components all break the lipid coating of the biofilms and stop them from adhering.
And things like garlic inhibit quorum sensing. It stops the formation of biofilm. And so then the OPC category also stops the swarming motility, or the movement or growth of the biofilms. So there’s so many different ingredients, almost every single ingredient in Biocidin works against biofilms. I don’t know if there’s one that’s any more notable than any other, but the overall combination together just hits all those different areas. And I think that’s why, yeah, it’s really cool. And the University of Binghamton was the first study that we did on biofilms, and what was interesting that is if you look at the death curve of the biofilm in the University of Binghamton study, and the death curve in Dr.Gilbert’s study online, it was exactly the same type of death curve. It’s like wow, that’s really good. This is backing up this other research that this is the way that the Biocidin is working on the biofilms within pretty much 24 hours they’re wiped out. And then they both did the 28-day cultures and none of them came back.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Wow, isn’t that fascinating?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: It is.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: It’s just, I guess I’m not entirely clear on why concurrent antibiotics with the kind of research that’s coming out, except that this is in vitro and you still, you know you’re still going to have to demonstrate this in vivo. Are there any animal studies in the pipeline?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: No, I don’t do animal studies. Other than give my own dogs Biocidin, and horses, in fact we have a whole barn right now of horses that got exposed to some weird virus. A horse had been shipped from the east coast and it arrived and two days later it had a 105 fever, and we were like ice-packing it and giving it Biocidin and giving it all of Olivirex and then one by one, several other horses in the barn came down with it and the Biocidin and the Olivirex is all we used, and we were able to make the horses comfortable with something like banamine, which basically stops them from colicing and using the antimicrobials to address the virus. Because the vets didn’t have anything that would really work anyway on viruses.
So yeah, but like doing testing on rats or things like that, it’s just ethically, I’m an animal lover so I’m against animal testing. But I do have a study right now in conjunction with Armin Labs. And Armin Labs is the lab that is applying the Tickplex test and Armin Schwartzback is just a wonderful human being, I think he’s helping so many people with Lyme and helping so many doctors understand the research. And so they’re providing us the tests at their cost so that we can do more clinical studies. So if there are doctors listening, you have a practice where they’re seeing a lot of Lyme patients and want to participate, just get in touch with me and I’ll put you through to our research coordinator Angela Chilcot and she’s helping set up the study.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: That’s wonderful. Allright, and we can include in the show notes your contact information, okay? Let me just make a note. Allright, I want to talk to you about co-infections. You kind of swept over that in the beginning, but obviously there are multiple tick-borne infections and you know, are you recommending this protocol for co-infections, I mean comment on that.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Well, unfortunately we haven’t had any in vitro testing yet on the co-infections but the physician reports on babesia and bartonella have been good. We had a babesia patient with like, unrelenting gut pain—sorry I’m losing my voice—she had unrelenting gut pain and after using the Biocidin and olivirex she was basically able to go back to work. So the feedback has been good and I would love to see some testing. I think that it may be possible for us to do some bartonella testing through Galaxy Labs. I’ve talked to Dr. Mozayeni about this in the past and he said that he thinks they may be more open to doing it now. So then we’ll proceed with that.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: But as I said, anybody who’s listening if you have any way to do this, come and contact us. And also because the Tickplex test covers all the co-infections, we’re going to see that as part of our Lyme study anyway. So we’re going to see what’s happening with these patients that are testing positive for co-infections.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay, so you’re inviting clinicians to reach out to you who want to be doing some clinical research with their patient population and they’ll be using the bio botanical protocol, can they use that with their other interventions?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: I think so, because I don’t think its fair to patients, I don’t want to use patients as guinea pigs. Whatever the doctor thinks is appropriate for that patient and we’ll just write it up. This is just a way for other clinicians to look at what other clinicians have done and what’s working for them. So whether that’s including other things or not.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Okay.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: But I have another, yeah, she had such bad neurological Lyme, she was in a wheelchair and she had done many types of interventions including IV ozone and the high vitamin C protocol, and she still had gotten a lot better but she still had tachycardia and inability to really be mobile.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: What was, you cut off at the very beginning…what was the issue? What was her infection, was it Lyme, co-infection?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: She had like neurological symptoms of Lyme. She had been in a wheelchair, and she said after getting on the liposomal Biocidin within six weeks, almost 100% of her symptoms resolved and that she was functional and not having any of the symptoms that she had had. So that was, if you do have patients that have neurological signs, that would be a good one to test out with the liposomal Biocidin. The good news is these products can’t hurt anyone anyway. So if there’s potential but it can help, it’s worth trying. You know, we can’t make any claims or any guarantees to anyone, these are nutritional supplements, but we can say, hey, there has been at least some positive feedback on these areas. And I know that for chronic Lyme patients, neurological problems is a big deal.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah it is, and I just really again want to, I’m just so psyched about the amount of commitment and effort you guys are making to getting your stuff in in vitro research, in the University setting, and you know kind of holding the branch down for clinicians out there to have access to your products, access to Armin testing, which I think has a good and growing reputation in our space. Now, but where is, where is all this content housed? How do clinicians actually access these case reports and you know the studies and so forth?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: The physicians can contact us and when they set up a professional account with us then several things happen. They get access to our distributor in the Netherlands, Dr. Aaron Hass, he’s a big Lyme researcher and autism researcher himself, and he’s the president of the Orthomolecular Society in the Netherlands. So he’s set up a website with a lot more clinical information than we can share in the US. And so we give you access to his site and the password to get in there and also our team of doctors. We have several naturopaths and MDs on staff who do clinical training and answer questions. And so they will kind of handhold physicians into learning to use these things in their practice.
So we have good support for practitioners who need more information, and then you can download from that site in the Netherlands all of the white papers, the research papers, and you can look at, he has a chart, like a head-to-toe chart that shows different aspects of use of Biocidin because, you know, it can be basically used for anything from head to toe, whether its a sinus infection or a UTI or anywhere in between, the body, you can apply this. Some of those practitioner feedback of how they’ve used it is on that site.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: And we covered a lot of that on our first podcast, so the very broad indications like intra nasal Biocidin, and looking at marcons and just chronic sinusitis, allergic sinusitis, infectious, you know just the whole, I think we discussed UTIs, but yeah, go ahead.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Yeah, so I was going to say all that is there as well as on your podcast and we’ve gotten even some more lab tests back recently using the Great Plains new mycotoxin test, we were able to find one little kid, poor thing, had horrible sinus issues and his mold markers were off the charts on that test. And after the treatment with the Biocidin intra nasally as well as orally, it showed zero. He was cleared. And all of his symptoms were gone.
So things like that, we keep trying to add to our clinical training slides that we go over with doctors. So we basically do like a half an hour, go through each of the products and how they’re used and some of the before and after labs we’ve seen.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Yeah, and I want to say, because you’re talking about using it for so many different indications, to the skeptic, they’re going to be saying you know, what is this, a panacea? And just be dubious. But I just, I want to remind folks the power of multiple botanical combinations. I guess I would say that and I would also say again, the fact that you’re committed to in vitro research at the University setting, and then gathering the spotty of clinical research as well. It can, botanicals, antimicrobial botanicals have a very, very long history for broad spectrum indication. You know, just being effective at addressing microbes and are involved in a lot of different phenotypic presentations.
Listen, and we’re just kind of coming to the end out our time, and you were just mentioning a couple of other studies I wanted to swing back and ping you on. One of them in particular you mentioned looking at secretory IGA at the University of Louisiana, so what the heck is that about?
Dr. Rachel Fresco: So that was exciting, Dr. [David] Bellar at the University of Louisiana reached out to me because he is an advisor to the Olympic team, and he deals also with a lot of elite sports athletes in the NFL and university athletes. And he was faced with the problem of athletes and marathon runners and people like that, their secretory IGA is suppressed and they get upper respiratory tract infections. And so he wanted to know would Biocidin be helpful with that.
And so he proposed a study, which thankfully wasn’t so expensive, and he did a placebo control study with like 23 athletes. And they would measure their SIGA after exertion, and it would be suppressed, and then they would give them the Biocidin in the throat spray form. You know, ten minutes after exertion and then another 60 minutes later. What they found was a 66% increase in the SIGA, so that means the immune system was really responding a lot better. So he published that study and it just got published in November. So I will send you a copy of that one as well. So that is interesting because Dr. Haz in the Netherlands had done studies on SIGA in the gut, and he had seen in patients whose SIGA was low and had come up. But also that patients that were over reactive, that their SIGA was too high, it came down.
So it seems like the Biocidin formula could be maybe considered to be a modulator, an adaptogenic in it’s effect. So, but I’m excited about the throat spray and for that reason, we all know how much we love it during cold and flu season and we keep it in our briefcases and so forth. I keep it by my bed at night, and if you wake up in the middle of the night with a little sore throat you just spray it and in the morning a lot of times you wake up and it’s gone.
And then the other study that we’re doing right now is on the oral microbiome, so we did a pilot study, and we found that there are like 35 different pathogens in a patient’s root canal cavitation including HPV, including amoebas, and including a whole host of really nasty antibiotic resistant bacteria. And when swishing with the liposomal Biocidin they were able to reduce the pathogen load in a short period of time, like four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks that they were tested back at. Down to like only three organisms, and most of those were normal oral bacteria. So now we’re going to do a larger study and hopefully publish on oral DNA pathogens.
And so the liposomal Biocidin was basically, I turned it into an oral-specific product by adding clove, myrrh, COQ10, and quercetin to it and that way it’s really, really focused on the periodontal disease and the oral cavity. And so we put the Biocidin in a toothpaste and so those products are called dentalcidin. And getting rave reviews from dentists, and so I’m looking forward to getting something published on that front.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Jeez, that’s really exciting. Dr. Fresco, thank you so much for joining me again on new frontiers, thrilled to hear about this research, I look forward to you coming back in 2020 with another stack of papers and lots of inspiration to share with us.
Dr. Rachel Fresco: Thank you for having me, Kara.
Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: Absolutely. Oh, incidentally folks, please leave a review on iTunes if you’re enjoying what you’re hearing from New Frontiers. All right, have a great day, thanks so much for joining us.