Wellbeing International Foundation backs cell-free regenerative therapy aimed at restoring the body’s repair language.
For years, regenerative medicine was obsessed with the hardware-store approach – the idea that if a part is worn out, you simply swap it. New cells for old tissue, fresh grafts for failing organs. It seemed an easy win, but there was a persistent, slightly awkward truth that kept popping up in clinical trials: the transplanted cells often didn’t survive more than a few days, but the patients kept getting better. It’s a quiet subversion of everything we thought we knew, but perhaps it suggests the real ‘engine’ of healing wasn’t the cells themselves, but the molecular whispers they left behind – a transient flare of signals that shocked the body’s own repair machinery back to life before vanishing back into the bloodstream.
It is this pivot that sits at the center of Wellbeing International Foundation’s approach. Rather than introducing living cells, the organization is developing what it terms Cell-Free Therapy – autologous, blood-derived signaling preparations designed to modulate tissue behavior rather than replace it. The core idea here is as elegant as it is ambitious: that aging and chronic disease aren’t always failures of structure, but failures of communication. We aren’t necessarily looking at a pile of missing bricks; we’re looking at a crew misreading the blueprints. In a longevity landscape currently obsessed with ‘resilience’ and immune tuning, the appeal of shifting from replacement to recruitment is massive. But in a field that has historically promised much and delivered sporadically, the evidentiary burden remains just as heavy as the biological promise.
Longevity.Technology: Regenerative medicine is having a quiet identity crisis – and it is a useful one. The industry spent a decade selling the idea of cells as physical replacements, only to find that many of the most consistent clinical effects seem to arrive without the cells sticking around, as if the real medicine was not the bricklayer but the foreman with the blueprint; cue the current rush toward “cell-free” approaches built on signaling factors, extracellular vesicles and the biochemical choreography that tells tissues when to calm down, clean up and rebuild. For longevity medicine, that shift is both enticing and treacherous: enticing because aging looks increasingly like a systems failure of coordination – immune tone, inflammatory set-points, repair fidelity, vascular resilience – treacherous because “systemic” therapies tend to invite systemic claims, particularly when the brain and blood–brain barrier get dragged into the marketing copy. The adult conversation, then, is not whether signaling matters (it does) but how you prove what is in the vial, how you standardize potency from one patient to the next, what endpoints count as more than a good week and a glowing testimonial, where regulation draws the line between PRP-adjacent practice and something closer to a drug and, crucially, which aging phenotypes are plausibly modifiable by messaging alone and which simply require new tissue. To explore what this pivot looks like in the clinic – and what it might mean for healthier aging at scale – we sat down with Dr Andrew McCombe, Medical Director at Wellbeing International Foundation.
From replacement to signaling
“What first led our team to focus on healing signals rather than stem cells came directly from what we were seeing in practice as well as in the literature,” McCombe says. During early stem cell research, improvements were visible even when labelled cells could no longer be located. “In simple terms, the benefit was still there, but the cells themselves were not.”
That observation shifted the model. Rather than acting as “building blocks that stayed and became new tissue”, the cells appeared to function “much like a foreman who gives instructions and then leaves the site.” As evidence accumulated that stem cells exert influence through “the release of signalling factors and extracellular vesicles”, the focus moved to “the healing messages themselves… rather than the cells that produce them.”
Repair language and the biology of aging
From a geroscience perspective, McCombe draws a distinction between signalling dysfunction and structural exhaustion. “The strongest and most consistent effects are seen in chronic inflammation, immune mis-coordination, and impaired repair messaging,” he says. Aging tissues often retain viable cells, but “the signals that coordinate repair, vascular growth, and immune resolution become distorted or persistently switched ‘on’.”
Cell-Free Therapy, he argues, appears effective at “dampening chronic inflammatory signalling (‘inflammaging’), restoring pro-repair cues, and improving blood vessel signalling that underpins recovery.” What remains resistant are cases of “irreversible structural loss or advanced fibrosis” – because “where the ‘hardware’ is gone, signalling alone is not enough.”
Systemic effects and the brain
“A systemic, circulating therapy changes the framing from ‘fix this one brain structure’ to ‘improve the biological conditions the brain depends on,’” McCombe explains. In cognitive aging, the practical levers are “reducing persistent inflammatory signalling, improving micro-circulation, and restoring healthier communication between immune cells, blood vessels, and the support cells around neurons.”
He cautions against simplistic narratives. “A lot of cognitive decline is not just neuron loss; it’s a noisy, inflamed, under-supplied environment where the brain can’t use the capacity it still has.” The emphasis is resilience: “better recovery after stressors, more stable function, and improved ‘headroom’ for rehabilitation, sleep, and training,” rather than promising a direct “cognitive boost.”
Regulation, safety and credibility
“The biggest regulatory and ethical challenges ahead are consistency, clarity, and claims discipline,” McCombe says. If secretome-based products are to gain credibility, regulators will expect “tight definitions of what the therapy contains, how it is prepared, how potency and quality are measured, and how safety events are recorded and reported.”
He is particularly alert to the risks of accelerated longevity marketing. “Broad ‘age reversal’ narratives can easily outrun the evidence,” especially when early-stage findings are used to imply guaranteed outcomes. Even if positioning closer to PRP reduces certain complexities, it “does not remove the need for rigorous process control… and transparent communication about uncertainty.” Ultimately, “the credibility test will be whether clinics can show reproducible preparation, honest endpoints, and long-term follow-up rather than just impressive stories.”
From elite recovery to population aging
“I don’t see this as destined to remain niche, but it won’t become a broad preventive tool by default – it has to earn that role,” McCombe says. The more realistic path is targeted use for common age-related vulnerabilities: “slower wound healing, loss of muscle and mobility, prolonged recovery from illness or injury, and vulnerability of brain function to inflammation and vascular decline.”
Scaling would require “standardised protocols, clearer patient selection… and outcomes that are measurable and meaningful to everyday aging – walking capacity, recovery time, function scores, cognitive function in real-life tasks, and durability of effect.” Economically, it depends on “reproducible manufacturing… and evidence strong enough to justify either reimbursement or a clear consumer value proposition.”
For this to move beyond niche clinics, the economics will need to evolve – standardized manufacturing rather than artisanal processing, cost compression rather than premium positioning, and evidence strong enough to satisfy payers or persuade consumers.
McCombe is cautiously optimistic. “If those pieces come together, it becomes part of a broader resilience toolkit alongside rehabilitation, exercise, sleep and metabolic health; if they don’t, it stays as an expensive option for motivated early adopters.”
