What Is MMPr?
A thousand years of trial and error, a recipe nearly lost, and a chemist who finally worked out why it did what it did.
Bark, and the ashes of bark
The origins of MMPr begin probably a thousand or more years ago in North America, with a North Central tribe of Native Americans. Long before modern medicine, healers in North America worked with only the plants around them: mosses, lichens, roots and leaves. Through generations of trial and error they kept what worked for wounds that would not heal and discarded what did not.
Over generations the solutions grew more intricate, tested one against another, until they held an encyclopedic knowledge of what worked best, handed from one generation to the next.
Not leaves, not berries, not roots, but bark. And not the bark itself, or a powdered poultice, or a simple extract, but an extract of the bark’s ashes.
From one specific tree, found only in North America. Which is why we believe it took a long, long time to develop.
A recipe that travelled
The remedy passed to settlers in the Ohio Valley and travelled west along the Oregon Trail. From there it kept moving through New World folklore, north central to west to southeast to northeast.
No one knew how it worked, only that it did, and the knowledge was slowly being lost in the march of western medicine.
Until the 1950s, when a missionary doctor found his western medicine failing him in his Caribbean jungle clinics. Nothing worked. He had all but despaired of his scientific training when he remembered a folktale from his childhood, about a bark extract that healed all manner of wounds.
He travelled back to his childhood home and asked the old folk around town, and was finally referred to a healer in the mountain backwoods who still remembered the formulation. He gave him the recipe. It worked.
He still did not know how or why. He founded a pharmaceutical company to pursue it, and the clinical trials bankrupted him.
Another company inherited the technology and narrowed the focus to chronic wounds. They still did not know how it worked. They were still peeling bark from that one species of tree, found only in America.
Where Dr. Monroe comes in
Dr. MonroeHe was brought in to find a more efficient route to the extract, whether through more common plants or a simpler manufacturing process, and to secure approval under the more plant-extract-friendly European CE regulatory system. He did both.
He also identified the active ingredients, reformulated them into something purer and more consistent, took that formulation through FDA clearance, and worked out exactly how it did what it had been doing for a thousand years.
That knowledge became MMPr – first named PHI, later marketed as K-Channel Technology – newer, simpler, and now found in every one of his topical products.
So how does it work?
It comes down to inflammation, and to one of inflammation’s consequences.
Inflammation is one of the first steps in the body’s repair system, and a key part of how the body protects and restores itself. Chemical messengers recruit specialised cells that attack bacteria, warm the tissue, and release oxidising compounds. Then a second set of messengers calls in enzymes that dissolve damaged tissue so it can be cleared away before new tissue grows in its place.
Those enzymes are the complication. In dissolving tissue, they also stimulate more inflammation. Known as MMPs, or matrix metalloproteinases, they normally rise sharply, do their work, and fall back to low background levels, ready for the next occasion.
When they stay high, they keep dissolving tissue. Not only damaged tissue. Any tissue.
There are 28 types of MMP, each with its own preferred tissue. Which means it is not a matter of stopping one, or two, or three. And they cannot simply be shut off, because the body needs them to repair itself. The task is to moderate the excess while leaving the necessary work intact.
And now, MMPr. Which is what makes Dr. Monroe’s different: alongside CBD, the formulation supports the body’s own balance through two separate pathways, without interrupting the normal repair process.
Our cells talk to their environment, and to each other, mostly through receptors on the cell membrane. Think of them as the cell’s mail slots: a message arrives, and the cell is told what to do next.
In that sense CBD is simple. It copies an internal message network called the endocannabinoid system, present in all mammals, which the body already runs on its own. The cannabinoids in the hemp plant are close enough in shape to the body’s own messengers to fit the same two receptors, CB1 and CB2.
- 1988CB1 receptor identified
- 1992Anandamide, the first endocannabinoid
- 1993CB2 receptor identified
- 19952-AG, the second
All of which is recent. The system was mapped only in the last few decades, and of the 144 cannabinoids identified in the plant so far, CBD and THC are simply the two most common. Published research describes the endocannabinoid system as involved in most, if not all, aspects of mammalian physiology.
CB1 and CB2 sit on cells throughout the body. There is no separate brain receptor and no separate immune receptor – both types appear nearly everywhere, in different proportions at different times. Which is part of why a topical applied to one place can do useful work there.
CBD works through receptors the body already has. MMPr works on the enzymes those signals set loose. Neither substitutes for the other.
One practical note, since it is the most common source of confusion: hemp seed oil contains no CBD. A label advertising milligrams of hemp oil is not telling you how much CBD is inside, and frequently the answer is none. Our topicals use pure CBD isolate, with no THC.
Why we can offer it now
The ingredients in MMPr are Generally Recognized As Safe and highly hypoallergenic, which is why they can be included in a cosmeceutical product so long as we make no medical claims.
In time we will seek regulatory approval for specific conditions. Until then, we offer MMPr as it is and let it speak for itself.
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Descriptions of Dr. Monroe’s research history refer to pre-clinical studies and do not describe the effects of Dr. Monroe’s consumer products. Historical accounts describe traditional preparations and are provided for context only; they do not describe the effects of Dr. Monroe’s products.
