The promise of research with stem cells
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0:01 - 0:04So, embryonic stem cells
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0:04 - 0:07are really incredible cells.
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0:07 - 0:10They are our body's own repair kits,
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0:10 - 0:13and they're pluripotent, which means they can morph into
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0:13 - 0:16all of the cells in our bodies.
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0:16 - 0:18Soon, we actually will be able to use stem cells
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0:18 - 0:21to replace cells that are damaged or diseased.
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0:21 - 0:24But that's not what I want to talk to you about,
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0:24 - 0:26because right now there are some really
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0:26 - 0:30extraordinary things that we are doing with stem cells
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0:30 - 0:32that are completely changing
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0:32 - 0:35the way we look and model disease,
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0:35 - 0:37our ability to understand why we get sick,
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0:37 - 0:40and even develop drugs.
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0:40 - 0:44I truly believe that stem cell research is going to allow
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0:44 - 0:49our children to look at Alzheimer's and diabetes
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0:49 - 0:53and other major diseases the way we view polio today,
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0:53 - 0:56which is as a preventable disease.
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0:56 - 0:59So here we have this incredible field, which has
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0:59 - 1:04enormous hope for humanity,
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1:04 - 1:07but much like IVF over 35 years ago,
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1:07 - 1:10until the birth of a healthy baby, Louise,
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1:10 - 1:15this field has been under siege politically and financially.
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1:15 - 1:19Critical research is being challenged instead of supported,
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1:19 - 1:23and we saw that it was really essential to have
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1:23 - 1:27private safe haven laboratories where this work
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1:27 - 1:30could be advanced without interference.
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1:30 - 1:32And so, in 2005,
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1:32 - 1:35we started the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory
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1:35 - 1:38so that we would have a small organization that could
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1:38 - 1:42do this work and support it.
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1:42 - 1:45What we saw very quickly is the world of both medical
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1:45 - 1:49research, but also developing drugs and treatments,
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1:49 - 1:52is dominated by, as you would expect, large organizations,
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1:52 - 1:55but in a new field, sometimes large organizations
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1:55 - 1:58really have trouble getting out of their own way,
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1:58 - 2:00and sometimes they can't ask the right questions,
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2:00 - 2:03and there is an enormous gap that's just gotten larger
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2:03 - 2:07between academic research on the one hand
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2:07 - 2:09and pharmaceutical companies and biotechs
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2:09 - 2:12that are responsible for delivering all of our drugs
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2:12 - 2:15and many of our treatments, and so we knew that
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2:15 - 2:19to really accelerate cures and therapies, we were going
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2:19 - 2:22to have to address this with two things:
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2:22 - 2:25new technologies and also a new research model.
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2:25 - 2:29Because if you don't close that gap, you really are
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2:29 - 2:30exactly where we are today.
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2:30 - 2:32And that's what I want to focus on.
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2:32 - 2:35We've spent the last couple of years pondering this,
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2:35 - 2:38making a list of the different things that we had to do,
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2:38 - 2:40and so we developed a new technology,
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2:40 - 2:42It's software and hardware,
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2:42 - 2:45that actually can generate thousands and thousands of
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2:45 - 2:48genetically diverse stem cell lines to create
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2:48 - 2:52a global array, essentially avatars of ourselves.
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2:52 - 2:56And we did this because we think that it's actually going
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2:56 - 2:59to allow us to realize the potential, the promise,
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2:59 - 3:02of all of the sequencing of the human genome,
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3:02 - 3:05but it's going to allow us, in doing that,
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3:05 - 3:10to actually do clinical trials in a dish with human cells,
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3:10 - 3:14not animal cells, to generate drugs and treatments
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3:14 - 3:17that are much more effective, much safer,
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3:17 - 3:20much faster, and at a much lower cost.
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3:20 - 3:23So let me put that in perspective for you
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3:23 - 3:24and give you some context.
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3:24 - 3:29This is an extremely new field.
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3:29 - 3:32In 1998, human embryonic stem cells
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3:32 - 3:35were first identified, and just nine years later,
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3:35 - 3:40a group of scientists in Japan were able to take skin cells
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3:40 - 3:43and reprogram them with very powerful viruses
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3:43 - 3:47to create a kind of pluripotent stem cell
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3:47 - 3:49called an induced pluripotent stem cell,
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3:49 - 3:52or what we refer to as an IPS cell.
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3:52 - 3:55This was really an extraordinary advance, because
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3:55 - 3:58although these cells are not human embryonic stem cells,
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3:58 - 4:00which still remain the gold standard,
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4:00 - 4:03they are terrific to use for modeling disease
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4:03 - 4:06and potentially for drug discovery.
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4:06 - 4:09So a few months later, in 2008, one of our scientists
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4:09 - 4:12built on that research. He took skin biopsies,
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4:12 - 4:14this time from people who had a disease,
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4:14 - 4:17ALS, or as you call it in the U.K., motor neuron disease.
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4:17 - 4:19He turned them into the IPS cells
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4:19 - 4:21that I've just told you about, and then he turned those
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4:21 - 4:24IPS cells into the motor neurons that actually
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4:24 - 4:26were dying in the disease.
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4:26 - 4:29So basically what he did was to take a healthy cell
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4:29 - 4:30and turn it into a sick cell,
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4:30 - 4:34and he recapitulated the disease over and over again
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4:34 - 4:37in the dish, and this was extraordinary,
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4:37 - 4:39because it was the first time that we had a model
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4:39 - 4:44of a disease from a living patient in living human cells.
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4:44 - 4:47And as he watched the disease unfold, he was able
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4:47 - 4:50to discover that actually the motor neurons were dying
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4:50 - 4:52in the disease in a different way than the field
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4:52 - 4:54had previously thought. There was another kind of cell
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4:54 - 4:57that actually was sending out a toxin
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4:57 - 4:59and contributing to the death of these motor neurons,
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4:59 - 5:00and you simply couldn't see it
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5:00 - 5:02until you had the human model.
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5:02 - 5:05So you could really say that
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5:05 - 5:09researchers trying to understand the cause of disease
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5:09 - 5:13without being able to have human stem cell models
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5:13 - 5:16were much like investigators trying to figure out
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5:16 - 5:19what had gone terribly wrong in a plane crash
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5:19 - 5:23without having a black box, or a flight recorder.
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5:23 - 5:26They could hypothesize about what had gone wrong,
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5:26 - 5:29but they really had no way of knowing what led
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5:29 - 5:31to the terrible events.
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5:31 - 5:35And stem cells really have given us the black box
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5:35 - 5:39for diseases, and it's an unprecedented window.
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5:39 - 5:42It really is extraordinary, because you can recapitulate
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5:42 - 5:46many, many diseases in a dish, you can see
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5:46 - 5:49what begins to go wrong in the cellular conversation
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5:49 - 5:51well before you would ever see
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5:51 - 5:54symptoms appear in a patient.
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5:54 - 5:57And this opens up the ability,
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5:57 - 5:59which hopefully will become something that
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5:59 - 6:02is routine in the near term,
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6:02 - 6:06of using human cells to test for drugs.
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6:06 - 6:12Right now, the way we test for drugs is pretty problematic.
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6:12 - 6:15To bring a successful drug to market, it takes, on average,
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6:15 - 6:1713 years — that's one drug —
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6:17 - 6:20with a sunk cost of 4 billion dollars,
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6:20 - 6:25and only one percent of the drugs that start down that road
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6:25 - 6:28are actually going to get there.
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6:28 - 6:30You can't imagine other businesses
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6:30 - 6:31that you would think of going into
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6:31 - 6:33that have these kind of numbers.
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6:33 - 6:35It's a terrible business model.
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6:35 - 6:39But it is really a worse social model because of
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6:39 - 6:42what's involved and the cost to all of us.
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6:42 - 6:46So the way we develop drugs now
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6:46 - 6:49is by testing promising compounds on --
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6:49 - 6:51We didn't have disease modeling with human cells,
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6:51 - 6:54so we'd been testing them on cells of mice
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6:54 - 6:58or other creatures or cells that we engineer,
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6:58 - 7:01but they don't have the characteristics of the diseases
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7:01 - 7:03that we're actually trying to cure.
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7:03 - 7:06You know, we're not mice, and you can't go into
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7:06 - 7:09a living person with an illness
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7:09 - 7:12and just pull out a few brain cells or cardiac cells
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7:12 - 7:14and then start fooling around in a lab to test
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7:14 - 7:18for, you know, a promising drug.
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7:18 - 7:21But what you can do with human stem cells, now,
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7:21 - 7:26is actually create avatars, and you can create the cells,
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7:26 - 7:28whether it's the live motor neurons
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7:28 - 7:31or the beating cardiac cells or liver cells
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7:31 - 7:35or other kinds of cells, and you can test for drugs,
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7:35 - 7:38promising compounds, on the actual cells
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7:38 - 7:41that you're trying to affect, and this is now,
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7:41 - 7:44and it's absolutely extraordinary,
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7:44 - 7:47and you're going to know at the beginning,
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7:47 - 7:51the very early stages of doing your assay development
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7:51 - 7:55and your testing, you're not going to have to wait 13 years
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7:55 - 7:58until you've brought a drug to market, only to find out
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7:58 - 8:03that actually it doesn't work, or even worse, harms people.
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8:03 - 8:07But it isn't really enough just to look at
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8:07 - 8:11the cells from a few people or a small group of people,
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8:11 - 8:13because we have to step back.
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8:13 - 8:15We've got to look at the big picture.
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8:15 - 8:18Look around this room. We are all different,
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8:18 - 8:20and a disease that I might have,
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8:20 - 8:23if I had Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease,
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8:23 - 8:27it probably would affect me differently than if
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8:27 - 8:29one of you had that disease,
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8:29 - 8:33and if we both had Parkinson's disease,
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8:33 - 8:35and we took the same medication,
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8:35 - 8:38but we had different genetic makeup,
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8:38 - 8:40we probably would have a different result,
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8:40 - 8:44and it could well be that a drug that worked wonderfully
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8:44 - 8:48for me was actually ineffective for you,
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8:48 - 8:52and similarly, it could be that a drug that is harmful for you
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8:52 - 8:57is safe for me, and, you know, this seems totally obvious,
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8:57 - 8:59but unfortunately it is not the way
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8:59 - 9:03that the pharmaceutical industry has been developing drugs
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9:03 - 9:07because, until now, it hasn't had the tools.
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9:07 - 9:09And so we need to move away
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9:09 - 9:12from this one-size-fits-all model.
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9:12 - 9:15The way we've been developing drugs is essentially
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9:15 - 9:16like going into a shoe store,
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9:16 - 9:19no one asks you what size you are, or
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9:19 - 9:21if you're going dancing or hiking.
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9:21 - 9:24They just say, "Well, you have feet, here are your shoes."
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9:24 - 9:27It doesn't work with shoes, and our bodies are
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9:27 - 9:31many times more complicated than just our feet.
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9:31 - 9:33So we really have to change this.
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9:33 - 9:38There was a very sad example of this in the last decade.
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9:38 - 9:41There's a wonderful drug, and a class of drugs actually,
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9:41 - 9:44but the particular drug was Vioxx, and
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9:44 - 9:48for people who were suffering from severe arthritis pain,
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9:48 - 9:52the drug was an absolute lifesaver,
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9:52 - 9:57but unfortunately, for another subset of those people,
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9:57 - 10:01they suffered pretty severe heart side effects,
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10:01 - 10:04and for a subset of those people, the side effects were
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10:04 - 10:08so severe, the cardiac side effects, that they were fatal.
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10:08 - 10:12But imagine a different scenario,
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10:12 - 10:16where we could have had an array, a genetically diverse array,
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10:16 - 10:20of cardiac cells, and we could have actually tested
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10:20 - 10:25that drug, Vioxx, in petri dishes, and figured out,
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10:25 - 10:29well, okay, people with this genetic type are going to have
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10:29 - 10:34cardiac side effects, people with these genetic subgroups
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10:34 - 10:39or genetic shoes sizes, about 25,000 of them,
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10:39 - 10:42are not going to have any problems.
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10:42 - 10:44The people for whom it was a lifesaver
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10:44 - 10:46could have still taken their medicine.
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10:46 - 10:50The people for whom it was a disaster, or fatal,
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10:50 - 10:52would never have been given it, and
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10:52 - 10:55you can imagine a very different outcome for the company,
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10:55 - 10:58who had to withdraw the drug.
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10:58 - 11:01So that is terrific,
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11:01 - 11:02and we thought, all right,
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11:02 - 11:05as we're trying to solve this problem,
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11:05 - 11:07clearly we have to think about genetics,
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11:07 - 11:10we have to think about human testing,
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11:10 - 11:12but there's a fundamental problem,
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11:12 - 11:15because right now, stem cell lines,
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11:15 - 11:16as extraordinary as they are,
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11:16 - 11:18and lines are just groups of cells,
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11:18 - 11:22they are made by hand, one at a time,
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11:22 - 11:25and it takes a couple of months.
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11:25 - 11:29This is not scalable, and also when you do things by hand,
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11:29 - 11:30even in the best laboratories,
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11:30 - 11:34you have variations in techniques,
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11:34 - 11:37and you need to know, if you're making a drug,
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11:37 - 11:39that the Aspirin you're going to take out of the bottle
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11:39 - 11:41on Monday is the same as the Aspirin
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11:41 - 11:43that's going to come out of the bottle on Wednesday.
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11:43 - 11:47So we looked at this, and we thought, okay,
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11:47 - 11:50artisanal is wonderful in, you know, your clothing
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11:50 - 11:53and your bread and crafts, but
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11:53 - 11:56artisanal really isn't going to work in stem cells,
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11:56 - 11:58so we have to deal with this.
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11:58 - 12:02But even with that, there still was another big hurdle,
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12:02 - 12:06and that actually brings us back to
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12:06 - 12:08the mapping of the human genome, because
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12:08 - 12:11we're all different.
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12:11 - 12:14We know from the sequencing of the human genome
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12:14 - 12:16that it's shown us all of the A's, C's, G's and T's
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12:16 - 12:19that make up our genetic code,
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12:19 - 12:23but that code, by itself, our DNA,
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12:23 - 12:28is like looking at the ones and zeroes of the computer code
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12:28 - 12:31without having a computer that can read it.
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12:31 - 12:34It's like having an app without having a smartphone.
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12:34 - 12:38We needed to have a way of bringing the biology
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12:38 - 12:40to that incredible data,
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12:40 - 12:43and the way to do that was to find
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12:43 - 12:46a stand-in, a biological stand-in,
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12:46 - 12:50that could contain all of the genetic information,
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12:50 - 12:52but have it be arrayed in such a way
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12:52 - 12:55as it could be read together
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12:55 - 12:58and actually create this incredible avatar.
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12:58 - 13:02We need to have stem cells from all the genetic sub-types
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13:02 - 13:05that represent who we are.
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13:05 - 13:08So this is what we've built.
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13:08 - 13:11It's an automated robotic technology.
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13:11 - 13:14It has the capacity to produce thousands and thousands
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13:14 - 13:18of stem cell lines. It's genetically arrayed.
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13:18 - 13:22It has massively parallel processing capability,
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13:22 - 13:25and it's going to change the way drugs are discovered,
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13:25 - 13:29we hope, and I think eventually what's going to happen
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13:29 - 13:31is that we're going to want to re-screen drugs,
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13:31 - 13:34on arrays like this, that already exist,
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13:34 - 13:36all of the drugs that currently exist,
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13:36 - 13:38and in the future, you're going to be taking drugs
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13:38 - 13:41and treatments that have been tested for side effects
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13:41 - 13:44on all of the relevant cells,
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13:44 - 13:47on brain cells and heart cells and liver cells.
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13:47 - 13:50It really has brought us to the threshold
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13:50 - 13:52of personalized medicine.
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13:52 - 13:57It's here now, and in our family,
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13:57 - 14:00my son has type 1 diabetes,
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14:00 - 14:02which is still an incurable disease,
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14:02 - 14:06and I lost my parents to heart disease and cancer,
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14:06 - 14:09but I think that my story probably sounds familiar to you,
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14:09 - 14:14because probably a version of it is your story.
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14:14 - 14:18At some point in our lives, all of us,
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14:18 - 14:20or people we care about, become patients,
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14:20 - 14:23and that's why I think that stem cell research
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14:23 - 14:26is incredibly important for all of us.
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14:26 - 14:30Thank you. (Applause)
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14:30 - 14:37(Applause)
- Title:
- The promise of research with stem cells
- Speaker:
- Susan Solomon
- Description:
-
Calling them "our bodies' own repair kits," Susan Solomon advocates research using lab-grown stem cells. By growing individual pluripotent stem cell lines, her team creates testbeds that could accelerate research into curing diseases -- and perhaps lead to individualized treatment, targeted not just to a particular disease but a particular person.
- Video Language:
- English
- Team:
- closed TED
- Project:
- TEDTalks
- Duration:
- 14:58
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for The promise of research with stem cells | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for The promise of research with stem cells | ||
Thu-Huong Ha approved English subtitles for The promise of research with stem cells | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for The promise of research with stem cells | ||
Thu-Huong Ha edited English subtitles for The promise of research with stem cells | ||
Morton Bast accepted English subtitles for The promise of research with stem cells | ||
Morton Bast edited English subtitles for The promise of research with stem cells | ||
Joseph Geni added a translation |