Everything you need to fight cancer is inside you | Elizabeth Wayne | TEDxGreensboro

[Music] what if I told you that everything you needed to fight cancer with already inside of you would you believe me now I know it sounds really cliche like something your parents would tell you but I mean it very genuinely as in using your own cells in your body to fight cancer for you and if you follow along with me Alex explain how that works I started this journey by thinking about the Stars I thought how do they produce energy how they shine light and as it turns out they produce light by smashing or squeezing the atoms inside of them together and they release light now the opposite process is actually where they split where the atoms split and this is actually what came of the atomic bombs now I thought this is really cool as an 11 year old and the science very just been announced and I knew what I was gonna do I wasn't gonna do it like a volcano made a baking soda or like make a battery turn something on and off that was already done that was done I was gonna make a nuclear reactor I was gonna design I know I know and I didn't tell my parents and so I spent the next three months at the local library reading all I could about modern physics and special relativity and the discovery of modern physics and then when I had exhausted all those resources I went to the Internet and so this was late 90s so I go to like ask G's and Yahoo how do you make a nuclear bomb where is the uranium-235 but Kurt like right now these critical mass equations so I can't imagine doing that now I think Homeland Security would have like been at the library like three minutes of the computer would explode and I would and to think of what people use internet for in their 11 year old 11 year olds now I'm happy to tell you I won first place in that science fair so I completely killed it and moving forward I actually decided to move on to something that was less explosive I went from looking outside for inspiration to looking inside because as it turns out physics isn't just useful for learning how to create bombs they're useful for creating images for visualizing what the inside of our body looks like I developed a new mantra seeing is believing and that had two purposes for me one is seeing myself as a scientist where the Normand of image of a scientist was not a black woman or a black person or a woman and the other one was not necessarily proving but reminding people that little girls like this grew up to be engineers also adorable and like innocent right there right right now all jokes aside the other thing that I wanted to do with the imaging was to actually be able to put a special lens an important biological question and there are a few things more personal than cancer according to the American Cancer Society facts and figures and your report 15 point five million Americans are currently either living with cancer or have had cancer in their past each year 600,000 people die from cancer that's something like 70 people every single hour if you look across all diseases cancer accounts for one in four deaths and it's only outpaced by heart disease cancer affects everyone young old rich or poor four packs of cigarettes a day are never smoked or drinking they're a day in their lives good health insurance are none at all so you can imagine why people think cancer is so confusing and it is cancer isn't actually just one disease it's based on a person's individual genetics epigenetics lifestyle diet wherever the list goes on so I decided that I wanted to actually figure out how to make this personal question mean something so I combine my love of imaging with a new quest how do we conquer cancer and I decided to do this in my PhD where I developed a project using an imaging technique called multi photon across Coupee where we can image deep into living tissue without ever cutting into it and so the plan was this I was gonna put cancer cells in the bloodstream and I was gonna watch them go through the bloodstream find out when they go into another organs such as the brain which is what you'll see in a second catch them and then see what they do when they get there sounds relatively straightforward right yeah so if this technology works the way it's supposed to you're gonna see the vessel so this is a living Mouse crane and if you look closely there look there there it was did you see it see that was the only one I saw so as it turns out this is really hard I'm trying to find a cell that's 10 microns in size and a field of view that's 3,000 times larger than that it's like one of those finding Waldo puzzles except Waldo is always moving around and when I looked back on it I basically spent half of my 20s in a dark Laser room looking into mouse brains looking for that one little cell so I felt like a failure I felt like I wasn't really able to answer or design good questions and I was really thinking what am I doing here but in those hundreds of hours of observation I saw something else that's far more valuable another type of cell that was in the brain and these are immune cells this is a microglia micro glair are the immune cells of the brain they're the most common cell population there and if you can tell they are always extending their little arms I like to think of it as dance parties in your brain and it's happening right now and it happens all the time and they're constantly looking for anything that could go wrong in your in your brain every four out four to six hours they've actually surveillance your brain at least once unless they find something then what happens well this is what happens this is a live image of a brain so you can see that something happened there and they're extending their processes the little limbs are saying something happened there let's investigate this is happening over the course of hours and so then I thought to myself this is what happens all over your body there are immune cells everywhere in every single organ and instead of using just my eyes to find the cancer cells we can use our immune system to do that for us scientists like me are taking advantage of this very principle fighting personal with the personal using your personal immune cells to fight for you I want to take a second here and also talk about what I mean by fighting personal with the personal we often personalize cancer as if it were a person and it had some sort of morality we wear a pink and we tell people you're fighting cancer get cancer in the butt right and that can be a really encouraging inspiring visual to help people get through the day they pray to day process of going through cancer treatment but there's another side to that where it can actually make people feel worse why me why the person I love that has cancer and how come I'm not fighting hard enough I'm trying I'm giving it everything I can and it's not working I don't like that type of narrative and so when I say personal I want you to understand that I mean using the cells inside of you and trying to get them to fight better for you I don't mean that anyone deserves to die from cancer or that cancer is about what anyone deserves ever now the next thing I want to talk about is what is this immune system that I'm talking about well it's a series of cells tissues and organs that are designed to protect your body think of it this way they have those lymphatic lymphatic vessels which are basically their own personalised highway so they can get to places of infection really quickly they have these little gas stations which are known as like the thymus are these other organs where they check in recharge collect information from other cells and they also have their own production system in your bone marrow where they're constantly making new cells we often talk about the immune system and two components the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system in the innate immune system everyone is born with this and it's just designed to recognize anything that is foreign and usually if they can they will eat them and get rid of them they will clear them away and they will also clear away anything that is dead and they will form a physical barrier between anything that's invading your body so think of when you have a cutter bruise and it starts to swell that is part of your innate immune system taking effect the adaptive immune restorative irises or things that have invaded your body and then keep some memory of that so that it ever comes back they know what to do and this is why you only get that chickenpox once or why vaccines are really helpful these cells also communicate with each other and together they are meant to recognize every insult that it could ever come across your body so you might be wondering at this point if immune cells are so good how come they all don't already recognize cancer and that's a fantastic question and that's something that scientists are still trying to figure out see I told you before that your immune system recognizes things that aren't supposed to be there but cancer cells are your own cells have gone rogue on the inside they're not foreign and if they were already dying we wouldn't have this problem anyway the other thing that happens is that cancer cells contribute to a tumor suppressive environment so even when the immune cells are able to recognize the cancer as being deadly they can't do anything about it because the tumor suppresses them I would think of it this way let's say you go out to dinner and there's always this friend who never brings their money and it's like oh I forgot can you get me this time and you finally how this speech and you say okay this time I'm gonna say something about it I'm not gonna pay for their dinner and you get to the restaurant and before you can get your speech out you've already had dinner maybe you've had a few drinks and you're having fun you pay for their meal and you give them the right for their taxi home that's what cancer does to your immune system completely overrides it it's horrible friend and so this is where it me no therapy comes in how do we get the immune system to recognize in a strong way what cancer cell what cancer cells are and fight against it there are two types of amino therapy one I'm calling active and massive active has what I've been talking about where we actually redress your immune cells to be able to recognize the cancer cells as being deadly and these have already led to clinical trials that were successful and even a first FDA approval of a drug in the last few years however these don't work for every single drug type and there are some challenges with that the research that I work on is more of a passive kind which is simply relying on the fact that immune cells migrate with high efficiency and quantity to places of disease such as cancer and using them as drug delivery personalized vehicles to deliver the drugs that we know work well but we cannot by other methods get them there on time and I look at this using one of my favorite immune cells because when you study so many you get to pick your favorite my favorite immune cells called the macrophage and they are fatally attracted to the tumor environment I say this because if you were to take out a tumor and you look at the individual cells almost half of them could be filled with macrophages they love going there so they're a great drug delivery vehicle but they're not just useful for what happens in outside of them they're useful for what happens inside fact if microglia had a social media page this is what I think about every day if they had a social media page I really think they'd have an Instagram because they love to eat everything and then tell you what it tasted like yeah they're that friend and so that is their job they are a professional eater they are designed to go around and to phagocytose things are not supposed to be there they also can either digest them completely or shuttle some of that information back out to other cells now what my research and my collaborators have learned is that if you intentionally deliver a drug they will also shuffle that back out to the surrounding cells so by combining the natural migrating trafficking activity of the microglia combined with their normal functional activity and protecting your I can make these two concepts synergistic to actually help you fight cancer in your own body while you're not even thinking about it if this sounds futuristic that's because it is because I am actually proposing a new way of drug delivery not just for cancer but for any disease that involves immune cells which are almost all of them Parkinson's heart attacks spinal cord injury diabetes the list goes on who would have thought that my crazy fascination with nuclear energy would have turned into a love of physics leading to money to make images to leave images of cancer and then making drugs to treat cancer I certainly wouldn't have thought that I've been studying cancer for the last eight years and in that time I've tried to take a very interdisciplinary approach to it I wanted to understand what it was going to take to really defeat cancer once and for all and I got to tell you treatments are just the tip of the iceberg it's going to take more than just finding that one drug that's going to cure everyone it's gonna take buy-in from the radiation oncologist and the surgeons it's gonna take buy-in from the universities and the pharmaceutical companies that are developing these drugs and then the FDA that approved the drugs and then the insurance companies that need to pay for these drugs it's gonna take listening to patients and hearing what they have to say it's going to take follow-up of the survivors letting them know that they are not that we still care about them and that we are listening to their concerns it's gonna take caring about the quality of life of that patient not just when they're in the treatment but when it's done it's not lost on me that the bear the therapies that I'm trying to make may not be accessible to everyone a single dose of immunotherapy could cost anywhere from seventy three thousand dollars to $200,000 and annually the u.s. spends forty two point two billion dollars in health care according to IMS Health and even now we still have disparities in treatment that can offer me based on where you of your gender and ethnicity and so I believe a tree a true cure to cancer it's gonna involve looking at the whole picture and not just the treatment but fear not I'm very hopeful for our future and that we can get that done I think that thinking about my career we often do a disservice when we talk about science breakthroughs as a story that's already been written as if there's nothing else to do we're still using our sense of wonder to explore new avenues to envision new ways to think of treatment and sometimes people expect us to have all the answers and while I have plenty of those ask my mother I have way more questions to answer and sometimes scientists rush through those questions we think we don't have time less six of the predictions let's do what we think will work and only what we think will work because we can't afford to waste that and when we do that we shut down wonder we dampen excitement and we stop progress but we must hold on to our sense of wonder we must let our mind and our ideas wander because when we do when we let our mind wander it will do wonderful things for our life and the lives of other people thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 63,181

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Cancer, Medicine

Id: B7baKqZxulM

Length: 17min 26sec (1046 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 07 2018