Biotechnology/Nanotechnology | Andrew Hessel | SingularityU Germany Summit 2017

[Applause] okay I'm going to start off by just apologizing because I find that people look at this bio nano stuff as really really spooky and scary and so I'm just going to say in advance I'm sorry that's my Canadian side you're not going to like all of this but it will be a great conversation starter moving forward the reason why so much of this is spooky is because it is unfamiliar to us now I want to give you a little taste of why it's unfamiliar we've always had the Stars we've always been able to see it as long as we've been human beings but looking down is really new it's only about four hundred years old that we started to make microscopes before that we had absolutely no idea there were things smaller than the naked eye could see and trust me it is a crazy world this is just a couple of drops of pond water under a microscope there are creatures there that you can barely imagine the oceans are filled with these creatures it is truly an alien world the microscopic now just to give you a sense of scale these are things you can see with your eye I love this visualization because you start to move in you start to see quickly go beyond the resolution of the human eye and start to go into the bigger cells like the amoeba which you might remember from biology the Paramecium some of the larger cells like the human egg then you start moving into the smaller scale this is a micron scale this is bacteria mitochondria that powers ourselves and now you start moving into the nanoscale the viruses and ultimately the sub cellular components that make up all living systems this is an alien world with alien physics we're not used to seeing it in our everyday lives why look at small things we build some of the biggest machines in the world to look at the smallest particles because they teach us about the universe that we live in we study the elements to give us a foundation in chemistry and geology that helps us better understand the solar system and the universe that we live in our local universe when you start moving into the micron scale and the nano scale you start to be able to work with new domains and physics that just don't really apply at any other scale this stuff is almost magic and I just want to point out here are some nano particles that we've been able to engineer over the last few years this is really the part about nanotechnology that I'll go into and that's about it but I also want to point out that these nanoscale particles between 1 and 100 nanometers is also where most of the subcellular components in living systems also fit cells are much larger you can see there on the mic on the micron scale but the components of cells are down at the same size of some of these nanoparticles we study these because they teach us about this the living world that we inhabit this is a living world and it's all powered by these systems so when you see an astronaut or someone looking into a microscope they're really doing the same thing they're exploring new frontiers and granted being an astronaut is a lot more exciting and that's because Rockets occasionally blow up that doesn't happen so much in biology labs we hope but it is really an active exploration and we are very early in these explorations both to space and into studying the small there's a lot of value to it because today as you know all of our computers are powered by nano technology the features on a semiconductor chip now are seven nanometers that's about three DNA strands stacked side-by-side it's hard to imagine the scale of that but the folks working in the semiconductor industry have been working at this level for over a decade we're starting to see nanoparticles come into play with things like quantum dots which were fascinating little particles that today are being used to make televisions as well as other types of diagnostics in fact nanotechnology is pretty much pervasive in the world Germany is a leader in it I've cording to the briefing documents that I had I am NOT an expert so I won't try and elaborate on that but just know that the nanoscale has always been important biologically nanoscale structures have been fascinating for a long time to a geckos foot has nano structures that allow it to stick to almost any surface through hydrogen bonding how does it make that and how does a living cell operate these are the most amazing machines to me because one makes two two make four and it does this all using elemental materials elemental this is nanotechnology and action doing things that are nanotechnologies the one we've been building can only dream of and this has been happening for billions of years on this planet now we know how it works sort of this is basic biology you take a human you pluck out a cell you pull out its genome there's its chromosomes you unravel the chromosomes you get a long string of DNA DNA is transcribed into our the working copy of the nucleic acids which ultimately are translated into proteins which build us and every living thing on this planet biology 101 in two seconds this is the reason why I love biology though biology is self-assembling nanotechnology with a built-in programming language no other nanotechnology has this this is really important now we didn't know about much about this code for a long time I remember before in the early 1980s just to read a few hundred bases of genetic code was enough to get your PhD but by 1990 the Human Genome Project had officially started up after about five or six years of behind-the-scenes wrangling and getting money in politics and this project catalyzed an amazing shift in genomics that continues to this day it went from doing DNA sequencing like this using x-ray film and radioactive isotopes and reading DNA code by hand to factories that turn out DNA 24/7 using robotic sequencers like these high seats made by Illumina a couple of weeks ago I spoke with the CEO of Illumina I said give me a little heads-up on what's coming and he said well we've got our new nova seek sequencers coming out this is essentially a smaller faster version of the current sequencers that he claims will be able to do a human genome for $100 you saw today or you heard earlier today just incredible advancement in DNA sequencing technology going from billions of dollars to now hundreds of dollars to do a human genome that's great but it also opens up reading the code of all living things this isn't just about humans and the technology continues to advance about a half billion dollars worth of investment went into making this little device the Oxford nanopore min ion sequencer this is actually a hybrid chip it's basically a cyborg it's part biological part semiconductor and it works simply by having a pour that allows DNA to go through and you read the electrical signals right off of it it costs $1,000 to buy this device and you throw away the chip inside and replace it this allows you to do DNA sequencing in the field it also allows you to do it in space just last year in the summer was the first time DNA had ever been sequenced on the space station we're still learning how to unlock the secrets of life through DNA code with our technologies this is just the start and as you heard earlier today now we're able to take a drop of blood and we're able not only to get a full genome we're also able to look for mutations cancer cells other infections parasites just from a single drop of blood now remember every baby that's born gets a heel prick and is tested for metabolic errors that could essentially kill them we've been doing this in North America I'm sure it's done here for over 60 years every baby gets a drop of blood how much longer will it be until we do a full genome sequencing on every baby DNA diagnostics are changing everything about medicine this company which was essentially spun out of Illumina the sequencing company is one of has raised it's only two years old it's raised over a billion dollars in financing and just a couple of weeks ago they announced a 120,000 person multicenter clinical trial to look for cancer markers in in blood that's remarkable companies doing clinical trials larger than any medical center could ever do and this is just the start why is this important well it's because we can't scale these things an MRI is great for finding cancer once it's a certain size a few millimeters but you can find a few hundred cells that have gone cancerous with DNA sequencing technology we've just started to tap into the power of this tool how do we integrate all that one of the companies at the forefront of this space health nucleus is starting to build avatars starting to collect this data and build a digital representation of the human being a full MRI scan microbiome scan genome scan consult and apparently about 20% of the people that go through this process which is very expensive 25,000 to 50,000 u.s. dollars about 20% of the people that go through it find some actionable medical need how quickly can we make this type of technology cheap and available for everyone well another company that I've been watching in China is trying to do that I carbon X is founded by the former head of BGI the Beijing genomics Institute that is really the world sequencing powerhouse so we can already see the convergence of DNA sequencing technology and artificial intelligence for analysis at a price point that's going to be very different than Health nucleus but I don't think that's the end of it either in fact a couple weeks ago I made a bet with this fellow this is Gary wolf he's one of the founders of something called the quantified self-movement people interested in measuring different aspects of themselves and I made a bet thousand bucks that within five years there will be a company that will offer free genome sequencing to everyone and will have at least a million members in their databases now if I said to you I will sequence your genome for free and give you all of this information for free and control over your data how many of you would get your genome sequenced right now about 45 percent maybe 40 now it's different if it was a younger audience it's 85% it's really the older the audience the fewer people are comfortable with this technology and that's because it is one of the most powerful datasets but today it's fragmented you're not even allowed to access it on your own in many states in the United States I don't know how it is in your country even now if you want to get your DNA sequence you often have to go through a doctor this is your code I tried to have my daughter sequenced she's 2 years old I can't get it done here is the most powerful predictive test in medicine and I cannot get my daughter sequenced in the United States this needs to change Gary would said no way there will be a company that does this in five years but I'm almost certain to win because if one doesn't appear screw it I'll go make it right now the problem is trying to aggregate all this data in a sense of it this is a five year old model of a bacterium called mycoplasma it was made by researchers at Stanford University and when it was published five years ago it was described as audacious because it collected all of this information about the bacterium's metabolism and put it into a MATLAB model and did some visualizations to kind of predict its metabolism this is still the most sophisticated model of a living organism we have to date that I can show you and it's pretty crude because this is what your kids are seeing as models with their video games running on Playstations or Xboxes these are completely simulated environments why can't we make a simulated cell that has this type of resolution and interaction and engagement we need to fundamentally rethink the way we're doing cell biology but that's reading an analysis of this information the really fun part and this is where you might find it spooky is when you start actually writing genetic code this is not genetic engineering as you thought about it in the past this is more like software engineering this is when you sit down and you go I want to make something here's my design how do I go and put it together using this incredible new tool of life and the code that powers it all and by the way if you guys work with computers you know how weird it is that how many languages you need to know how many protocols you need to have how many libraries you need to install with life there is one code and it's pretty much universal from bacteria all the way to us and everything in between and once you get a depth at it it's really simple to figure out let's just say that AI is going to make a massive difference here now in the last decade or so we've created a new branch to the Tree of Life called synthetic ax it's a horrible name let's just call it an intentional design and we only have three basic tools to start working in this medium one of them is evolution pretty straightforward the second one is editing making small changes to a large existing genome and the third one is actual design when you start from scratch and you build from the bottom up now I want to play this little video for you it's the only one only one I have with sound but this describes evolution because most people have no clue how evolution quickly it can work in these organisms so we ended a building was basically a petri dish except that it's 2 feet by 4 feet and the way we set it up is that there are nine bands at the base of each of these bands we put a normal petri dish stick agar with different amounts of antibiotic on the outside there's no antibiotic just in from that there's barely more than the Nicole I can survive inside of that there's ten times as much hundred times and then finally the middle band has a thousand times as much antibiotic and then across the top of it of course and thin agar that bacteria can move around it the background is black because I think in it and the bacteria appear as white [Music] first you see they spread in the area where there's no antibiotic up until the point they can no longer survive then a mutant appears on the right resistant to the antibiotic it spreads until it starts to compete with other mutants around it when these mutants hit the next boundary they to have to pause and develop new mutations to make it into ten times as much antibiotic then you see the different mutants repeat this at 100 and after about 11 days they finally make it into 1,000 times as much antibiotic as the wild-type can survive and so we can see by this process of accumulating successive mutations that bacteria which are normally sensitive to an antibiotic can evolve resistance to extremely high concentrations in a short period of time isn't that remarkable in just 11 days you can evolve to use but essentially an antibiotic as a food source now these are very fast-growing organisms but the principle works the same for all life it's incredibly flexible and adaptive and in fact the process of evolution can be accelerated by using technology such as mage which essentially automates and drives the process of evolution in an automated way this is again from the VESA Institute but you guaranteed if you don't know how to design something in life you can drive it to a certain target we're going to be doing this all over the world as we start to need organisms to meet new human requirements jumping ahead to editing you've probably heard a lot of CRISPR about CRISPR in the last five years this is a tool that just popped up out of nowhere and allows us to do gene editing genome editing really fast really cheap it's basically copy paste for DNA Lujan the yang at a Genesis is one of the leaders in this field she's been she's been editing the pig genome to remove endogenous viruses and to humanize the pig so that one day we can have an unlimited supply of organs they raise thirty eight million dollars recently they're moving ahead very quick with this work but CRISPR has also been used to selectively kill cancer cells there's a company in France I like called Elle ago Biosciences that uses it to kill microbes and we've also started the first human therapies with this technology but it's when you get to design that things get really interesting this is when you really start building intentional creatures today we have companies like twist based out of the san francisc where they print DNA they have essentially have a 3d printer for the DNA molecule so if you can design the genetic code you can just print it and then install it into a living organism the master of this is craig Venter he's been at the forefront of this field for longer than I can count last year he published the design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome this is a synthetic bacterial genome stripped down racing car version it's incredibly cool this is the organism it doesn't look like much it kind of looks like something that might come out of your nose on a Kleenex but it was built using engineering design build tests computer-aided design of the genome complete synthesis of the genome boot-up in a bacterial cell and even though this is a minimal bacterium and it was built from scratch a hundred and forty nine genes one third of the genome is still uncharacterized that's a hundred and forty-nine potential PhD projects to figure out what these genes do but this is the simplest living organism this is why we have so much problem understanding life we haven't done the basic homework on the very forefront of genomics is the synthesis of the yeast genome this was the cover of science if a few weeks ago March 10th talking about synthetic yeast chromosomes they're marching their way through them they'll be done by the end of the year yeast is important because we have factories like this this is the Tiger brewery they make yeast do some really awesome things like make beer amorous uses the same technology to make feedstocks for manufacturing this is plant they have in Brazil and a company in the Bay Area I like called bolt threads has taken genes from spiders and put them in yeast and now they can make spider sick silk in bulk okay you can buy a very expensive tie but soon you're going to be get to get this stuff in in vast quantities and of course you're going to see some very very interesting new beers coming in the future because you can take any gene from any organism on the planet and put it into yeast yeast is an incredible machine now today I work with Autodesk maybe you've heard of it maybe you haven't it's a 35 year old software company that makes design software design simulation visualization usually you use it for building cars and airplanes and buildings but we've had a bio nano team for the last few years by the way most of the people those video games I showed you are actually made with our software just about any special effect in any movie is made with our software it's a really cool company to work with because all we makes in one of the zeros and we help people create but we've been taking some of the things we've learned in things like 3d printing and modeling etc and we've been moving it to the molecular and it's been really fun so we've made molecule viewers here's just a screen shot of working with a large protein this is really hard work when you have millions of atoms and we've also built new genetic design tools that essentially allow you to mock up genomes very quickly make new libraries etc I'm not saying we're the best company in the space there's a lot of companies that have been here for a long time but we're learning fast and we bring some incredible capabilities in cloud computation visualization simulation to the table maybe one day our design software's for life will look a lot like this maybe not this is just an artist's conception but it's where I'd like to see things go now I use Autodesk tools for some to go after a problem that's been bugging me for a long time which is cancer like can't we cure this it's just an antibiotic problem kill that cell don't kill that one and we've been making progress we've things like targeted drugs now and we've got better detection that's great but you saw how quickly bacteria can develop resistance and we know cancer cells can get resistance too so we need to have a pipeline that produces a lot of new drugs to keep going after the resistant cells and here's the problem with drug development it's long and it's expensive it takes 10 to 15 years to make a new drug and it cost billions and even in late-stage there's an 80% failure rate this is like the worst process ever for manufacturing anything I hate it most people don't know that the total number of drugs made since the inception of the FDA is still like under 1600 drugs and the only thing exponential about this is the price the price goes up by a factor of 10 every 20 years consistently but now we're topping out at $100,000 a month for the latest treatment in other words it's just unsustainable so I've been working with autodesk to essentially prototype a 3d printer for personalized cancer medicines and when I say personalized I mean to one person like Zanna and Bastion we're talking about earlier today now this may sound crazy and I won't go into it but there are so many advantages when you make drugs for one person and I'll just you can look at these later but the thing I like about it is you don't need big manufacturing plants and it doesn't take long and expensive phase clinical trials all the approvals are done before you start so this shaves all the time and most of the money off of drug development it D risks it why haven't we done it before it's just the technology wasn't viable so it's still too crazy and too early to do this for human beings at scale so we started working with dogs we started prototyping and my partner in crime here is a brilliant veterinarian by the name of Bruce Smith he's a veterinary oncologist they're kind of unicorns there's only 300 of them in the United States and he's the only one that I'm aware of that has a PhD in molecular biology and is we made viruses to kill cancer cells he's a wonderful man and together we prototyped the synthetic production of something called canine adenovirus - it's a weak virus but it had never been synthesized from scratch it's the largest synthetic virus that's ever been made we did this last year it was successful we made synthetic DNA we booted it up in cell culture we validated it against the natural virus it's perfect the only reason why we haven't treated a dog yet is because it's such a weak virus the cancer cells it needs to grow on grow faster than the virus can infect them we're fixing that now but this is essentially a 3d printed cancer medicine and it's only going to get better as we start to iterate this this was the foundation of the company we just put together a few weeks ago to be able to drive this forward where each animal treated is essentially a whole drug development program run at a cost that's going to get very quickly the equivalent of an off-the-shelf drug my goal is to give better cancer treatment to dogs in the short term than people get and eventually to miniaturize and computerize this whole process and build it into a pen a drug company and a stick that you can just throw in your glove box in your medicine cabinet and just download that medicine as you need it as we were talking about this morning now this isn't just me and it's not just drugs this is an entire emerging industry of programmable nanotechnology since it started around 2000 it's really growing exponentially the number by any measurement number of papers number of participants I've had the great pleasure of working with students over the last decade at a program called I Jenna who started at MIT and based on us first the International robotics program and I absolutely love working with these kids these are kids that have never been in a lab before they've grown up digital and they do work that is PhD worthy by working in small teams and using these incredibly powerful genetic engineering tools that large pharma companies would have done anything for a couple of decades ago it's it's a real phase shift in biotechnology we're starting to see an industry blossom cbn sites tallied them up a few weeks ago over 60 different companies working in every area you can imagine biology touching food and drink consumer products healthcare industrial chemicals fuels platforms it's there was over 1.3 billion dollars invested in these companies by VCS last year alone some of my friends at MIT that helped get this stuff rolling went on and founded a company called ginkgo bio works it's one of the most successful it's all robotic another company a little more recent to zymogen they're focusing on materials again robots you do not want people doing liquid management if you can see the liquids that you're pipetting you've got a million times too much and these robotic labs are now going cloud this is a company called transcriptase it is a programmable laboratory in a shipping container eventually it'll get smaller it is so much fun doing this work because you can actually do state-of-the-art biotech from your living room so what's the bottleneck the bottleneck right now is DNA synthesis you saw a quickly sequencing dropped in price DNA synthesis has not had that acceleration yet it is it is decreasing exponentially in cost or depending on how you look at it increasing exponentially in price performance but it hasn't had that wicked acceleration that we saw with sequencing as next-generation technologies came about it's coming though very soon the more DNA you can write the longer you can write it the more interesting stuff you can make all the first-generation biotech industry was limited to making very small constructs mainly single proteins with synthetic biology you can start doing metabolic engineering now you can build pathways not just single proteins and what still science fiction is being able to do large genomes essentially write whole chromosomes or lots of chromosomes to build complex genomes like ours or the mouse this is I expected we would be investing more in this clearly necessary core technology after the first genome project wrapped up in 2003 but by 2012 nothing had happened and by 2015 still nothing had happened that's when I got pissed off and I shot my mouth off at a genome meeting and I said please can we can we just start a new genome project and get the world scientists focusing on building design tools and new synthesis technologies to go and address these important needs in genome engineering and the result was something called gene GP right genome project right as opposed to genome project read it used to be HDPE right Human Genome Project right but there was kind of a backlash but humans are part of it now I just want to say there's no synthetic babies here anyway I am really really fortunate that I have some of the most amazing cofounders of this project George church who was just recently voted to the x 100 most influential people the leader of the yeast genome project Geoff bucha and Nancy Kelly who has been a force of nature putting together big institutions like the New York genome Center our next meeting is just next week if any of you are interested in this stuff register now there's probably only a couple of spots left but this is where you need to be if you're interested in building genomes and again there will be no synthetic babies this is just being able to write large complex genomes and these meetings bring everyone together the Ephesus they bring together the scientists they bring together the policy folks they bring together the funders this is not about any single project you may have seen this last week it could get a little weird in the future if you don't want to go to New York go to Singapore sb7 synthetic biology 7 the first one was in 2003 is up and running in Singapore this summer this brings together some of the most amazing people in science and technology registration is still open do consider it here's what I know to my very core silicon has done great things for the world really great things and will continue to do great things but programming carbon-based computing systems is going to get even more exciting and the difference is it's because whatever we make when we program carbon we become the parents of that's a whole new level of responsibility and it means that we have to rethink just about everything that we're doing in biotech in finance in regulation in business it's all got to restart because this is such a powerful and universal technology you'll hear from Mark Goodman later today mark Goodman is one of my favorite people because he is so paranoid that the world is just going to blow up but when we get together we have a few shots while he doesn't drink but when I have a few shots weird things happen like articles about bio hacking and hacking the president I'm on some watch list somewhere but we really really need to think about biosecurity in a new way because right now the bio detection systems for most pathogens are it it's you and me showing up at a hospital bleeding out of an orifice I don't want that so to go see marks talk tonight seriously stay around don't go home so to kind of put a bow on all this life is fully reusable and sustainable technology as far as I know it's the only fully reusable and sustainable technology on this planet and damn it we got to get good at it like we really really do also life is just so damn cool go go google octopi and watch the incredible things these things do and just remember every single organism from the insects in your home to the animals in your fields to the kids sleeping upstairs are all built from the same machinery and we are unlocking the secrets of that machinery now honestly we're a little past our prime most of us in diving into this young but I remember when the genome first started being read it changed my life and it has been the foundation of my career for over 30 years I'm doing this synthetic biology stuff for my daughter while I was on an airplane yesterday she was in Disneyland but this is a kid who was born well she was engineered she was made in the lab in New York and born in California season bio coastal but the future is our kids and if we want to give them a world that is going to keep operating and meeting the needs of billions of people honestly I think we have to get really good at life technologies not to mention keep them healthier to their life I'm going to give you a reading list but just a whole take a picture buy all these books read everything you can about synthetic biology and bio nanotechnology and even a little bit of computing because if you don't know what an if-then-else statement then you're not going to feel real comfortable with some of the switches that were putting into these genetic organisms but just know that for whatever fear you have now whatever reservations you may have it's because you've never worked with this stuff before life is so natural life is typically made in our bedroom or in our gardens and not in the labs but life knows how to do life and there's safeguards and checksum built into this whole system all the way down you are just great tasty food to microbes everything wants to eat you we know how to do defense and now putting a digital layer of Defense on top of that as an investment we're talking will only increase our security it's going to be a really really interesting couple of decades because the genome project right is going to wrap up in 2026 which means that we're probably going to get large genomes for under a thousand dollars by them and the reason why I can say that without laughing is because every cell in your body all 50 trillion of them write a human genome every time a cell divides it's not about inventing the technology it's about learning how to harness what already exists on that note thank you for your attention there's time for a few questions here's one right down front I won't worry about hands up who just whoever speaks of it interesting concept to narrow down a clinical trial to development of an individualized medicine what force will drive the changes in the regulatory environment that's a great question I I think it will actually be fairly graceful because remember my so my I apologize my experiences largely in North America but the FDA was created to protect society from unscrupulous developers or or rushing a largely untested product into society when you do n of one medicine you know who you're making the medicine for and all the risk benefits is done in advance of even starting the drug development so you for cancer drugs you don't start working with someone that this has a tiny cancer that can be cut out or treated with a conventional therapy you start with Stage four people that have tried everything and the cancers come back and is riddled throughout their body and they have no hope those are the people that get recruited now granted we're trying to build up a corpus of knowledge by working with dogs first because even those people you know at end stage will will still want to see some data and assurances that the systems are working but I think the regulatory regimes aren't going to be a big burden block here and even if one area is a little more restrictive you're talking about taking a pill and a patient and putting them on a plane and either going to a country that is a little more permissive or just offshore where there's really no regulation or maybe space no regulation there yet so so there's I don't see that as a bottleneck I think it's just about learning how to work together and do new things in new ways and drug development because the Achilles heel is all the big drug companies still do one size fits all don't work as well as it should second offer clinical trials you and making it easy you mentioned the simulated sell and I think it's a great idea right but we know from some chemistry how difficult is when with this new compound or think about new or modifications and then we do it in like 1g level it takes like few minutes way at 3d level is a few days so speaking of cell it's way different League of complexity right because a lot of processes are going simultaneously so do you think we have enough fertilization power to do something oh yeah so I think we have to as a scientific community come together and build a virtual cell and make that the repository of all of our knowledge around cellular metabolism in the same way that everything we know about Earth get skinned on Googlers all the roads all the buildings all the features underwater you know I think we have the technology and capability to do that and I'm not saying that that virtual cell if poked and prodded will behave entirely the same as the real living cell but I think it will get really really close and then because we can do high-throughput robotic testing if we're working with model cells and then moving into single-cell testing you start generating a feedback loop with real living systems that can feed into that model and that accelerates the whole process so I think we get really good really fast when we just learn how to work together and aggregate our knowledge science is incredibly fractured companies we expect a fracture because they need IP and all that stuff but academics are really fractured two institutions are really fractured most genetic data can't move across state lines or out of countries and so we're finding that this is really hard to do so we need new paradigms as for testing higher organ systems we're getting really we're having a lot of fun with organoids today which are these little or like clusters of cells that we've been learning how to generate and these could be much better for testing complex systems and how a molecule will react I guess a minute I always the Doug succumb sorry he's done sorry I always the dog oh we have not done so we haven't been able to test on the dog yet because again the virus that we used was a vaccine version of the virus that grows incredibly slowly and only on cancer cells so the cancer cells grow really fast it dilutes out the virus so we're changing that in design number two but even then and we're fixing it we're doing another procedure to get a large enough batch of the virus to test the dog we've done all the laboratory testing the synthetic virus is exactly the same as the natural recombinant the recombinant version of the natural virus let me speak correctly but again we haven't been able to dose the dog now there's been a clinical trial done of the recombinant version of the natural virus that makes it specific to the cancer but it hasn't it's not it it does not significantly change the outcome for the animal when this is a bone cancer and the standard procedure is you you cut off the leg and then you do chemotherapy and they insert the virus between the surgical removal and the chemotherapy there's only been something like 13 animals done and they wasn't statistically significant in extending the lifetime but the cool thing is here we get to change the design of the drug every time we do this work and the more we can build in diagnostic data the more we can personalize it to the particular cancer so the main goal is just to be able to do drug development more and more personalized faster and cheaper and I'm absolutely confident that we're going to be able to do that over the next few years and really start showing greater improvement in the treatment of cancer in these dogs and more cancers not just not just the bone cancer one more question and then I think we wrap up sorry see me afterwards if you have any questions so either mosque is talking about euro link my question is do you think this will happen with implant or do you think there is a possibility that you basically can biologically program ourselves yourself in the future to connect with the Internet and so on that's a great question the most exciting area in general is the intersection of electronic devices with biological devices whether that's the nanopore sequencer whether it's a new type of DNA synthesizer whether it's a sensor or whether it's neural link that interface is becoming really important most people don't realize living cells are electrical machines too and you can you can receive signals to think of getting a EKG or an EEG but you can also inject signals that changes the behavior of the biology think more like electro shock but neural link is a really neat idea but DARPA has been thinking of programs for years as well where they want to see essentially a cell phone the size of a mitochondrion in every cell now I don't know how quickly we'll get there but imagine just you know you have a cell in your pancreas that calls you up or texts you and goes I think I'm going cancerous and you go well you should delete yourself you know because the Internet of Things can apply to the 50 trillion cells in our bodies - there's a movie out called Morgan I saw it on the plane it's kind of the realization of some of this technology granted in a weaponized human way but but you might want to watch it it's kind of cool but I really do believe that the interface of biology and semiconductors is really an exciting area and will continue to be fruitful for many many many engineering projects and PhDs and companies moving forward and on that note thank you so much [Applause]

Channel: Singularity University Summits

Views: 885,211

Rating: 4.6785526 out of 5

Keywords: biotech, nanotech, autodesk, singularity university, pink army cooperative, biotechnology

Id: XZfUJuSmBAs

Length: 49min 13sec (2953 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 08 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/TroutmasterJ]

I watched the video. I think he overhypes his own projects a little bit, but I didn't notice any issues with all the synthetic biology background information and examples. You may want to look more into "synthetic biology". He seemed to avoid using that phrase, but that's what the field is called.

I didn't quite understand what he meant by the personalized medicines and not needed to go through clinical trials/approvals though. That said, overall, not inaccurate, if only slightly sensational to sell it. That is, everything he talks about is happening and has enormous potential, but he's making bold predictions about some of it. Give it time, though, and little of what he said seems unrealistic to me.