James Watson, MD

Dr. Watson is a board-certified Plastic Surgeon, formerly full time Associate Professor at UCLA Division of Plastic Surgery, which is the University where stem cells were first discovered in fat. In 2007, he left his full-time position at UCLA and co-founded University Stem Cell Center in Santa Monica, California, where he conducted the two of the first IRB-approved Phase I/II clinical trials in the US of autologous fat-derived stem cells for cosmetic and reconstructive surgery. These two clinical trials utilized fresh (not frozen) autologous adipose stem cells for enriched fat grafting and for intra-articular injections. Dr. Watson has co-founded a biotech company, Biostrux, designed to commercialize “point-of-care”, adipose-derived stem cells with a bioresorbable scaffold to do “in situ” tissue engineering utilizing autologous stem cells. Dr. Watson was successful in obtaining three Federally funded research grants from the DOD and NIH to develop the bioresorbable scaffold for Biostrux. More recently, Dr. Watson has re-focused his energy in exosome therapy and exosome research, as well as “next generation minimally invasive cosmetic surgery”. More recently, Dr. Watson has successfully completed two clinical trials in anti-aging therapies, utilizing Rapamycin and another clinical trial utilizing a triple cocktail of drugs and supplements that were shown to reverse epigenetic age in immune cells.

Dr. Watson still holds a clinical faculty position at UCLA and regularly teaches plastic surgery residents how to do cosmetic and reconstructive surgeries 2-4 days a month. He also maintains a busy private practice in Thousand Oaks, California. Dr. Watson has lectured extensively on the subject of stem cells and anti-aging around the world. He has authored or co-authored over 30 scientific articles and book chapters. He co-authors an online blog on aging called “AGINGSCIENCES™, Anti-Aging Firewalls™” that has 85,000 regular readers worldwide. Dr. James Watson speaks English and Thai, since he grew up in Bangkok and Phuket as a child for the first 12 years of his life.