Brianna Stubbs: What was science fiction is close to becoming reality. Restoring sight, repairing tissue, reviving cells, organs, and maybe even our minds.

Eric Verdin: I’m Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute.

Brianna Stubbs: And I’m Brianna Stubbs, a scientist here at the Buck.

Eric Verdin: On this podcast, we dive deep into geroscience, studying the intersection of aging and disease with some of the brightest scientific stars on the planet.

Brianna Stubbs: Join us because… 

Eric Verdin: We’re not getting any younger… yet. 

Brianna Stubbs: Eric, how are you doing?

Eric Verdin: I’m doing well, how are you?

Brianna Stubbs: I’m doing really well. I am actually super excited to discuss with you my podcast interview I did a few weeks back with Hanadie Yousef, who at the time was the CEO of Juvena. But actually, since we recorded the interview at the big JP Morgan Health Conference that happened in early 2026 in San Francisco, Juvena announced a $35 million raise and also that Dr. Yusuf would be moving away from being CEO to being a board director and executive advisor. Which I think is super, super exciting for her, but it’s fun that she and I spoke right before that announcement happened, so it sort of puts the conversation in a different light.

Eric Verdin: Fantastic. So that’s a pretty big raise in our field. What was this all about?

Brianna Stubbs: So Juvena have a partnership with Eli Lilly. They’re focusing on developing drugs for muscle wasting and muscle regeneration. And I think it’s super timely what with GLP-1 drugs putting muscle mass at threat. So she and I have a really interesting conversation about how important muscle is for aging and how they use AI and also the cellular secretome—so all of the stuff that cells release—in order to look for drugs that can be used to target muscle health and aging. So it’s a super, super fascinating interview made all the more pertinent by this big announcement I think that Juvena just made. So I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Eric Verdin: This is a really crucial area of aging research, the whole idea of sarcopenia, whether it occurs as a function of aging or as a function of some of the medicines, as you mentioned GLP agonists. I think a lot of effort in the field in trying to understand this, so I’m excited to listen to this.

Brianna Stubbs: Thank you very much for taking time to join us today. So, aging is exploding, AI is exploding, and you’re kind of sitting at the intersection of all of those things. So for you, what do you think is the most exciting thing that you’re working on in the longevity space right now?

Hanadie Yousef: At Juvena, you know, we’ve been at this for the last eight years where we are so passionate about unraveling the complexity of secretomes, in particular proteins secreted by human stem cells and really identifying and leveraging the latest in quantitative proteomics and AI to actually map those proteins—sometimes thousands of understudied or not really well understood proteins—to different tissues in which they exhibit their natural capacity to promote tissue regeneration and repair. So we’re building this map of regenerative protein biology, oftentimes finding proteins that can really target homeostatic mechanisms involved in tissue health and regeneration that are actually dysregulated during aging. And so for us, you know, we think we’re at the cusp of some, you know, really kind of revolutionary ways in which we can actually establish medicines that promote longer healthspan, extend healthspan, and ultimately also reverse a lot of the hallmarks of aging and unhealthy aging to keep people healthier, to help them live their lives to the fullest for as long as possible, to create so many more centenarians, right, and give everyone that opportunity to actually get into those older decades of life, you know, living life to the fullest.

Brianna Stubbs: How long would you like to live yourself?

Hanadie Yousef: You know, ultimately for me, I would actually love to live as long as possible so long as I, you know, have my mental acuity, right, my ability to move. I love running, I love hiking, I love exercise, I love games, I love traveling, right. So, you know, as long as I’m able to kind of have those capacities and not live in pain, you know, I wouldn’t mind living until I was 200, right, maybe even longer. But the unfortunate reality for human beings today is that so many of us will enter, even starting from our 40s, right—and my dad and a lot of my family members are kind of examples of that—right, you get into these later decades and while you have that capacity and zest for life, you know, your body’s just not keeping up with you. You start getting things like diabetes, metabolic impairment, heart disease, cardiovascular, neurological, strokes, cancer. And so, you know, ultimately I think I care more about, you know, helping my loved ones than even myself, right, but it’s really making sure that those around me and humanity really has that chance to make a huge impact. And I feel like we’re actually at that cusp with the latest technological advances, tools like AI as well as our understanding of the biology of aging.

Brianna Stubbs: Let’s go into that a little bit more. You mentioned you’ve been working on Juvena for eight years. Tell me a bit about how it started, where was the field then, what has been the biggest kind of like growth areas in the last eight years?

Hanadie Yousef: Great questions, Brianna. I’d say first, you know, what got me into it, this was actually in my early 20s—I’m 38 now—so we’re talking like when I was like 21 and just started my PhD at Berkeley. I just feel so lucky and fortunate that I coincidentally met Irina Conboy and Mike Conboy and decided to take their class in bioengineering called stem cells and directed organogenesis where it was really then that I just fell in love with the concept that, and realization for the first time ever, that not only are we unraveling and understanding more and more the mechanisms underlying the biology of aging and why our tissues decline in function—in particular our own body stem cells as we age—but we can actually target a lot of those mechanisms and pathways to reverse the process, promote tissue regeneration, repair, really from that regenerative angle. And as well as just, oh my gosh, like we can actually tackle the largest unmet medical needs and potentially avert a potential future catastrophe given that we have an aging global population where more and more people are living with multiple comorbidities that are also costing the economy a fortune to manage. And the current sick care system is just not going to keep up with what we really need, which is a true health care system. So that’s what got me into it. I’d say then in the last eight years since, you know, then I went through ten years of a PhD at Berkeley, a postdoc at Stanford, kept unraveling a lot of discoveries which we can talk about. But once we launched Juvena over the last eight years, what I’ve seen is first, it was so exciting this idea of how can we leverage these also technological revolutions that have been happening in AI, from the deep neural networks we’re using to, you know, more recently generative AI techniques that’s just so rapidly I feel like transforming how we could actually apply that to improving one of the most costly industries out there, right, which is the cost of drug discovery development and just the sheer amount of failures and billions of dollars unfortunately that are spent on really exciting ideas that don’t make it through sort of clinical development or ultimately lead to benefits when being tested in people. We’re starting to get this idea and excitement around longevity.

Brianna Stubbs: There’s so much talk about how AI can get us to drugs faster, and you talked about neural networks and machine learning, all of those things. Can you for, you know, a smart layperson, explain for us how it works in drug development and how it’s speeding things up?

Hanadie Yousef: Yeah, sure. The way that we really leverage that at Juvena is really we look at AI and machine learning as a toolkit, right, a toolkit where we can integrate different types of algorithms, models, and tools to help every stage of the process. From the in-silico library that we build by leveraging quantitative proteomics and looking at different types of regenerative and non-regenerative secretomes to identify a library of over 2,000 proteins that are enriched for therapeutic potential through to the large language models that are being leveraged and different types of models for in-silico rank ordering and actually taking so much multi-omics data and information and features of these proteins to use as data points to actually predict and map which proteins might be working for different tissue types through to then different types of deep learning models that we use where we can train them so that they can help predict measurements—or just measure measurements really much more efficiently and in an unbiased way from let’s say animal behavior, you know, experimental models.

Brianna Stubbs: So you mentioned when you were introducing Juvena a little at the start, the secretome. So what is a secretome and why is it interesting?

Hanadie Yousef: Our kind of thinking around the secretome actually did stem from early work that I began doing as a second year graduate student at UC Berkeley with Irina and Mike Conboy once I co-joined their labs and the lab of Dave Schaffer as an NSF graduate fellow where I was really ultimately interested in measuring changes in protein signaling that occur systemically in blood circulation as well as locally in tissue microenvironments such as muscle and brain in particular that led to a loss of what’s known as tissue homeostasis and the onset of degenerative symptoms that ultimately manifest as debilitating diseases such as sarcopenia or dementia or neurodegenerative diseases. And showing that we can actually modulate those protein signal transduction cascades to send the right types of protein signals to stem cells in our body to actually instruct them to repair, regenerate, restore homeostasis, to really improve that tissue restoration and function. Ultimately we were leveraging aged animals as a model, aged mice where mice that are for example two years old are like folks in their 60s, 70s. The older the mice get, the more they also start, just like people, to get symptoms associated with cognitive decline as well as a decline of things like hippocampal neurogenesis, new neuron formation, as well as increase in inflammation, activation of immune cells such as microglia in the brain or macrophage activation systemically. And you also get muscle wasting and loss of muscle regeneration. So if you get injured when you’re older in mice just like in people, you get more fibrosis in an acute injury setting. You also just get that decline of lean mass and decline of things like grip strength, walking speed test, or in cognitive tests in the brain, like the Barnes test or other sort of tests that will test hippocampal-based memory formation and cognitive function. And in these models, there was clearly an age-related decline where then we, on the one hand I had projects and I’ve published multiple papers that show that we can modulate pathways with things like antibodies if they’re upregulated and inhibitive or with injecting secreted proteins that are agonistic to help restore and enhance things like hippocampal neurogenesis and cognitive function in the brain or literally enhance muscle regeneration where you get less fibrosis and then in these experiments around function, you get stronger grip strength, you get greater endurance on treadmill performance, you get literally greater aurora force measurements. So we really established that as a good model to understand protein signaling. And then where the secretome came in was actually another project that we began working on during my third year of grad school where we were like okay we know that there are secreted proteins that can modulate these protein signaling pathways that are dysregulated. We know there’s changes in proteins that happen systemically in blood circulation. We know that from the parabiosis studies, right, where young blood can help rejuvenate aged function and even more potently aged blood is actually quite inhibitory so there are circulating factors and proteins that are responsible. So we just had the simple question, can we actually take the most regenerative niche out there, which is the embryonic stem cell niche, the embryonic niche where you take for example proteins secreted by human embryonic stem cells and they as a secretome have the capacity to signal to different cells to generate every cell in the body, to generate an entire human being? And our basically hypothesis was maybe these could actually be highly regenerative for aged and degenerating tissues. So then Irina, Mike and I remember at the time really began doing together all of us experiments where we showed that we can purify sub-fractions of human embryonic stem cell secretome, we proved that it was proteins and not RNAs, nucleic acids or exosomes that were really responsible for this behavior and we showed that we could take those proteins and whether we added it into like an injured muscle tissue or even in various types of in-vitro models such as for example an Alzheimer’s disease model where we take immature human cortical neurons and in the face of A-beta they’re apoptosing, we were able to show in models like that that we can actually promote survival and prevent cell death. We would show in the aged context that we can enhance muscle regeneration, myogenesis, and repair muscle and prevent fibrosis. And then what we did when we launched Juvena, my co-founder and I, Jeremy—who’s a quantitative proteomics and machine learning expert who I just had the incredible serendipitous fortune of being introduced to in 2017 when I was a postdoc at Stanford and really thinking about Juvena, building the model and looking for a quantitative proteomics expert co-founder, very specific expertise—when he and I sort of paired up and then our technically our third employee because I was the first employee, Jeremy my co-founder was the second, our third employee Taka who had just spent also six years in Helen Blau’s lab at Stanford, the three of us basically in 2018 paired up and one of the first things we did was continue to really study these secretomes and identify them to build our first generation library at Juvena. So then at Juvena we also showed that we can enhance for example cartilage regeneration if we look at and took chondrocyte precursors isolated from human osteoarthritic knees and we really built and decided to focus on muscle as one of the first indications in therapeutic areas where we said let’s build this platform, let’s begin building this in-silico and compounding database of regenerative protein biology linking different proteins and stem cell secretomes to diseases, but let’s have an ultra-focus on muscle in order to identify and engineer candidates that can potentially treat the largest indication out there that is such a good hallmark of aging that really manifests as aging which is the disease of sarcopenia, right, age-related muscle wasting and frailty. Where also the thought was if we can target muscle we can actually and rejuvenate muscle we could potentially truly promote healthspan and target multiple organ systems and multiple comorbidities. I’ll stop there because that’s a lot of information.

Brianna Stubbs: No, no, I mean I have like a dozen questions after that. You mentioned you’re a runner and I’m a lifelong athlete myself and here at the Buck we’re also really interested in how important muscle is because muscle releases all of these good things and exercise also, you know, helps brain, helps heart—if you can keep good muscle function then you really open up the door to keep many, many other systems of the body healthy. So I definitely agree with your approach. It sounds like again to try and just distill down, you have stem cells, IPS stem cells, and you measure the things that those stem cells release—there are thousands and thousands of things that these stem cells release—and you’re trying to figure out what’s in the stem cell soup and then what can we use it for to target other tissues in the body.

Hanadie Yousef: Exactly. And then identify those proteins, validate them, and then actually engineer them as biologics that can fuel a pipeline of tissue restorative therapies for different types of diseases.

Brianna Stubbs: It’s using what nature’s already doing, these stem cells are already releasing all of this good stuff but kind of yeah so leveraging natural biology and then as you said if there’s something that you could tweak and improve using AI then maybe it’s more potent, activating these beneficial rejuvenation pathways in the body. Before we talk about muscle more, I feel like the idea of rejuvenation in the past has been kind of like sci-fi, you know, like growing extra limbs or I know people are working now to regrow whole organs, regrow livers and there’s obviously organ shortages and there’s lots of reasons why that would be good. I mean what’s the most common question you get about rejuvenation? Are people afraid of the idea of rejuvenation at all? It’s a semi-sci-fi topic.

Hanadie Yousef: I think there’s varying reactions based on how open people are and where they’re also at in their lives. I would say in terms of rejuvenation there’s already a lot of that buy-in and adoption in for example the cosmetic space, right. Women and men, right, get older, they want to get, you know, men maybe sometimes even women hair transplants, right, Botox to prevent wrinkles, skin creams, different serums, you know, things. So I’d actually say that there’s always been—it’s actually such a lucrative industry in the beauty industry—such a passion for keeping your skin young, looking more youthful, being young longer, rejuvenating your hair, your skin, you know, this and that where I actually think now we’re just kind of, you know, giving that a whole new level, right. Now instead of it just being not scientifically proven, you know, here are scientifically proven approaches and you know we can think about things externally but we’re also looking internally. And in when it comes to muscle, I think there’s actually more of an appreciation for protein-based therapies in muscle because of this also increasing fad, right, and kind of cultural shift towards people really appreciating actually, you know, body composition, muscle health, you know, muscle health, you know, there’s definitely the passion athletes but also the folks that just want to go to the gym and you know keep their muscle their health longer. So I find people actually to be quite open for the most part at least on Juvena’s approach but sometimes there is a lot of snake oil out there. So then there’s sometimes the skepticism if you’re someone that’s obsessed with wanting to find aging remedies and then getting disappointed that there’s not that much other that really actually works today.

Brianna Stubbs: I think that same sentiment applies into a lot of people who work in like aging or anti-aging research and I feel like if you call it anti-aging you get more lumped in with, you know, snake oil people so there’s interesting just like uses of language in this space around how people perceive you and it’s a challenge across science right now to do science communication effectively so that people, you know, know where to get good information and can sort of sort out the snake oil from the real science. But that’s why we do things like this podcast.

Hanadie Yousef: Agreed.

Brianna Stubbs: So let’s talk a bit more about muscle. Another reason why now is such a great moment to be thinking about muscle and aging is that we have this big new uncontrolled slightly uncontrolled experiment with GLP-1s and weight loss drugs which you know I think are great for a whole load of reasons and controlling the obesity epidemic in the US is obviously super important for people who can’t go and run marathons perhaps like myself. But there’s questions around how these drugs affect muscle mass and I know this is something that you’ve been thinking about a lot so perhaps give a bit more context why you think this is important and how you’re all addressing it at Juvena.

Hanadie Yousef: Yeah Brianna, great question. I’m glad you know we turned to this topic. I’d say you know first what when we had the excitement and advent around the GLP-1, GLP agonist, these incretin treatments that have really, you know, changed the game right in the last few years. There’s actually been first, on the first and foremost, there’s been this positive shift where it’s one of the first times ever you know that the public is actually seeing you can treat metabolic disease potentially, you can treat unhealthy aging, you can actually develop medicines that are applicable to a huge swath of society in a way that makes people feel better, you know, have better rejuvenated metabolism and actually ultimately treat multiple potential comorbidities. You get better liver function, it’s now being potentially used for fatty liver, diabetes, for all sorts of ailments.

Brianna Stubbs: It feels like every week there’s a new thing that these drugs are potentially going to do for us, right?

Hanadie Yousef: And on the positive, this has actually really opened the doors for companies like Juvena and many others that have you know really we were kind of ahead of the game in the sense that we believed in the ability of these type of therapies to be game changing.

Brianna Stubbs: It’s because we’re treating aging, right? We’re looking at the fundamental biology that underpins changes across the whole body.

Hanadie Yousef: So I would say that this success has been ultimately positive because then it’s caused companies like Lilly, Novo and many others now to start wanting to actually leverage look at other chronic diseases that previously there’s still zero FDA-approved you know things on the market and so they’re opening their eyes more and it’s turned a huge focus and growing interest now in the area of targeting muscle for improved muscle health, improved body composition, improved weight loss quality because as you alluded to Brianna there is you know evidence that again to this day it’s contradictory there needs to be more studies also we’re in like you said this big big giant experiment of actually people being now for years on the incretin so we actually need to be looking carefully and really taking those measurements but there is ultimately like we it’s well known now that when you lose weight through a starvation induced mechanism where you’re reducing caloric intake you’re going to have that weight’s not going to just be fat, you’re also going to get muscle loss. There is you know maybe evidence that the incretins themselves are causing accelerated muscle loss but that’s not 100% confirmed.

Brianna Stubbs: It depends on the drug as well because there’s new variants that you know or combinations perhaps that will mitigate that.

Hanadie Yousef: Exactly. But ultimately it has then turned the attention to the need to ideally not only have folks you know lose fat and improve metabolism but actually have unique approaches where they’re doing so in a way that preserves muscle mass so that if there’s weight regain and weight loss you know you don’t start changing body composition drastically where unfortunately it’s quick the body’s really quick to lose—like you start eating less you’re going to start losing muscle right while in and drastically sometimes—but then when you gain the weight back if let’s say you get off incretins and you start ingesting those calories again the fat is the quickest to come back. So unfortunately if you do rounds of this that’s when that’s where I think we’re start to see over the next few years if that truly will have a detrimental impact in terms of people’s quality of life in the long term and so I think there is a growing need and appreciation to to treat muscle so that you can take these therapies go on and off and have durable weight loss as well as improved metabolism of your muscle and function of your muscle because that retention of muscle is also as we know especially Juvena knows crucial right to long-term healthspan, lifespan, and preventing and ameliorating a lot of comorbidities. So I think there’s you know that’s really exciting and an area that is an unmet need that hopefully Juvena will be able to solve in partnership with some of the leaders in the space.

Brianna Stubbs: That’s such an exciting opportunity. So where when do we expect to see it hit the shelves, where are you at with your development pipeline?

Hanadie Yousef: So our most advanced asset is a fusion protein. It’s the first drug that’s came out of the platform and that is taking the lead in the pipeline that’s currently in phase one study. It’s a fusion protein that is derived from human IGF-2, insulin-like growth factor 2, which we discovered is one of the potent ingredients in human embryonic stem cell secretome that is well known to drive muscle development and we really show is quite potent in enhancing muscle regeneration and repair and improving survival plus metabolism and glycolytic activity even of existing fibers in the context of degenerative diseases such as myotonic dystrophy type 1, the first disease indication we’re developing it towards, but also even larger indications like age-related muscle wasting and other types of atrophy related indications. So with that we and we’ve engineered it to be a fusion where it’s subcutaneously administered just like insulin for diabetes is but this is now our insulin for muscle but instead of it being daily it’s we think it’s going to be weekly and that’s what we’re testing based on the PK studies in primates and humanized mice and now literally in people and the results we’re getting. So we’re in phase one SAD and MAD in healthy volunteers and we’re planning to early POC studies, one in an atrophy model with with people that will be in a cast where it’s crazy actually how quickly you lose muscle mass. I don’t know if you’ve ever broken a bone but I broke my ankle once and to this that was in 2018 and to this day my right leg is skinnier than my left like you lose that mass so quickly. So it’ll be a great kind of model to to see if we can actually prevent that loss of of mass in in an acute fashion, the improvement of strength and preservation and then we’ll also go into a small population of of people living with myotonic dystrophy type 1 that are really suffering from muscle wasting and and we’ll have hopefully that data in you know in the year to come.

Brianna Stubbs: I really love the limb immobilization casting as a model because it’s a great way to get an IRB to agree to something that’s going to like cause that much muscle loss that quickly. Although apparently you can’t do those studies in older people because it’s so hard to be able to retrain them. It’s always in young people so super interesting model but so in limb immobilization, in some small disease populations, but in what 5, 10, 15 years do you think that you know you’re going to hit 50, you’re going to go to the doctor and you’re going to start to see you’re losing muscle and everyone starts going on this in the same way that so many people are on statins?

Hanadie Yousef: Literally. That’s that’s exactly what we what I predict if of course we can you know get through the early hurdles of clinical development, prove the mechanism of action, show the potential to rejuvenate muscle in a clinical human population setting. I think what we really envision for a drug like JUV-161 is it truly is in our minds an insulin for muscle where it enhances muscle insulin sensitivity ultimately leading to better blood glucose regulation as well as it improves metabolism, the the energetics, the function of and quality of the muscle, it promotes new muscle formation. I predict it would be something that could actually work for—I would love to take it in my 50s. When I get to 50 I would love to take JUV-161 if it was on the market and available. It’s the type of drug that I think everyone’s going to want because of the way it makes you feel and the way it basically tackles one of the key pathways that is downregulated in a lot of people as we get older and in dystrophies and a lot of muscle disease which is AKT signaling. So if we can modestly restore that elevated in a way that’s you know controlled, dose-dependent, safe—and we are very safe you know with this drug within the dose we’re using and everything—that can actually restore homeostasis in many ways or to you know get us towards that muscle homeostatic restoration that leads to better health.

Brianna Stubbs: As you’re talking I’m almost, you know, have you ever, has anyone ever sort of suggested or did you ever think about suggesting that this drug could be like an exercise mimetic? Because you know I think—and that’s a whole other hot button topic whether whether one can mimic all of the effects of exercise with the drug—but you’re talking about insulin sensitivity and glucose control and it’s so you know have you thought about that and why did you decide not to position it like that?

Hanadie Yousef: With exercise just like you said right it’s going to be a complex system where there’s so many exerkines, myokines being secreted, being modulated. IGF-2 and you know other types of growth factors and hormones are definitely upregulated and stimulated in these contexts. And you know in many ways our collaboration with Lilly is also looking at other types of factors that can modulate muscle metabolism, energy expenditure potentially, these type of mechanisms that are associated with exercise. So I do feel like that is where you know we’re headed towards identifying things that can promote muscle in a way that you know some some people it’s not their fault right they you know might be you know immobilized you know have just had a surgery you know already be at that point of frailty where it’s hard to get those steps in. So if we can actually mimic that that’s going to be game changing. And I do feel like we’re headed there but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that IGF-2 JUV-161 candidate is an exercise mimetic we haven’t proved that so you know I wouldn’t I wouldn’t want to make that claim I’m a very data-driven person.

Brianna Stubbs: It’d also be very interesting in you know to do studies where you pair exercise training with drugs like this to see if there could be like a synergistic effect. So many cool questions that we can answer but also so many lives that this is going to impact. You said you hope that in your 50s you’d be able to you know take a drug that you helped created and I think there’s something really special when someone worked on something in their PhD and postdoc and has now built a company out of it—your story’s like hugely inspiring. So I really hope that you have the chance to be taking your own drug to protect your muscle mass in the future because that would just be, you know, they they should make a movie about it, it’s very cool. So thank you very much for your time.

Hanadie Yousef: I can’t wait to get there. I really appreciate that Brianna, good luck to you and thank you for the opportunity to share my story, share more about Juvena and look forward to connecting and seeing you at the next conference.

Brianna Stubbs: Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe, share and give us a five star review on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

Eric Verdin: We’re not getting any younger yet is produced by Vital Mine Media. The Buck Institute’s very own Robin Snyder is the executive producer. Wellington Bowler is right next to us here directing the recording and the esteemed Sharif Ezzat weaves the show together for you.

Brianna Stubbs: If you’re listening to this podcast you know that there has never been a more exciting time in research on aging. Discoveries in the labs are moving into the clinic to help us all live better longer. The Buck Institute depends on the support of people like you to carry on our breakthrough research. Please visit us at buckinstitute.org to learn more and to donate.

Speaker: This episode was sponsored by Ashton Thomas Private Wealth, where discipline shapes vision and vision builds legacy. Learn more at ashtonthomaspw.com. Investment advisory services are provided by Ashton Thomas Private Wealth LLC and Ashton Thomas Securities LLC, SEC registered investment advisors. Securities are offered through Ashton Thomas Securities LLC, a registered broker dealer and member of FINRA SIPC.