Finally, some good news about cancer | Jimmy Lin | TEDxBaltimore

[Music] can I get a show of hands of how many of you in the audience have had a friend or loved one um been affected by cancer Afflicted with cancer so look around right a lot of people and I'm going to ask this and sometimes there are a lot of people some there any people here has struggled with cancer themselves or a cancer survivor in the audience wow give those few a round of applause so this is my friend um the Jolly Giant in this middle is my friend Chris um we were we went to college together and he's one of those good good guys you can always go to who'll cheer you up or help you anything that you want so I got a call from Chris I think about four years after we graduated he was in his sort of Jolly self Chris had a sort of a hesitation in his voice and you know where this is going Chris says said those three words that you would never want to hear I have cancer so when I heard those words I was sort of in shocked didn't know what to do um and and I think for for many of you who sort of experienced this is just sort of like let's try of sort of figure it out so us friends with Chris and his family walked with him um as he valiantly fought this this cancer for about four years going through chemotherapy going through stem cell trans plan and unfortunately about four years later he passed away at the young age of 27 and it had a big effect on me and and in addition I've I've had an aunt an uncle many family m members been affected by cancer so knowing that this is such a big problem I actually dedicated my life to cancer research um I've trained in like been lucky to train in some of the world's top universities could here in Baltimore I spent 10 years here at John's Hopkins getting my medical and graduate training MDD um I did some I was in St Louis Washington univers City there and currently um I do some work with the National Cancer Institute and helping them build their cancer um helping build their Clin genomics program in the cancer center and the the good news about cancer is that I'm bringing you news from the front that we are starting to win the war on cancer so today from the front lines I'm going to tell you some of the things that excite me the most that that makes me wake up in the morning um of some of the latest developments in cancer research um that hopefully will give you hope um as you sort of think about every hear about this sort of horrible disease so five things I want to highlight the first one is cracking the code for the first time in human history we now really know what is the background of in terms of the genetics of cancer in in the year 2000 a huge milestone as Humanity we were able to crack the human genome code for the first time and subsequent to that led by The resear Bert falene here at John Hopkins who I had the privilege of being on his team and him being our Mentor is worked tirelessly to take that code of the human genome and apply it to crack the Genome of cancer working with him and with other colleagues we sort of you know being able to see how do we sequence every single Gene in cancer compared to normal cells figure out the DNA differences between them and truly see what is the genetic face of this disease that we're trying to fight and after sort of two years we're able able to do our initial searches and our initial results that we published in 2006 is the first genomic landscape of cancer this is one picture of cancer if you look at all if every line was sort of the genes the mountains is where there's genes mutated at a very very high frequency within this specific cancer colal cancer and the thing that we saw is that cancer actually is very very different everybody's cancer is different so thus we need to be able to figure out a specific way to be able to Target those cancers you might have heard words such as personalized medicine or individualized medicine and this is the future of us being able to fight this disease so for the first time now initially we we did it with colov and breast cancer then we mapped the the the cancer genome um of pancreatic cancer um and a brain cancer called G blastoma and we now have a a global view of what's going on in in terms with the genetics I like to sort of see this is Imagine Christopher Columbus was sort of trying to sail and some somebody gave him a satellite map of North America right instead of like bumbling in the dark not knowing where to go now he knows exactly where to go and that is what cancers researchers now have billions of dollars have now been spent sequencing all the different types of cancer hundreds of cancers in the US and in the world and now we really have the genic face of cancer and sequencing technology has really been improving tremendously as well what we took us two three years to do can now be done in a week in machines you know half you know half the size and what's really exciting is there's machines now the size of a USB drive that's able to sequence DNA in real time um that's just coming out the labs so this is really exciting that now now for the first time we know the face of cancer and we know what's sort of been able to cause it and researchers are even able to detect these mutant DNA in the blood before you can before even grows before you can even see it on Imaging so be able to treat cancer before it even starts prevention this is how one of the most exciting things that we'll be able to beat this disease the second thing is what I call cancer snipers um it's traditional cancer therapy has been really um just sort of a carpet bombing and poisons many of some of you may know that initial cancer therapies was based on mustard gas they looked at results of mustard gas and and you know there was differential um sort of cell death and they decided to use that as cancer chemotherapy um and that's not the way to do it right and that's why what it does is it target cells are fastly dividing which cancer cells do more than others but it hurts the other cells that are also fastly dividing like our hair cells or GI cells so then you have these effects of you know these what you see of cancer patients losing their hair having nausey that's an effect of the drug and not of the cancer so how can we create Drugs That's able to attack the cancer and not the body and that that is sort of the focus of sort of cancer chemotherapy research for for the last sort of decade or so so here's one one little patient um here um she was um diagnosed with a disease like leukemia called CML at the age of six um and um and normally before you know any type of treatment this is actually sort of almost sort of death sentence um and and her disease here you see it's just really ugly these lukemia cells just sort of grow out of control um and so for her you know and this is research was done at sort of it was done at Oregon Health Sciences University they were able to figure out and there's a unique signature to this type of cancer it's called a Philadelphia chromosome the the details are less important but basically we know exactly what's going on there's a part of chromosome 9 chromosome 22 there's a switch ofo it creates a new Protein that's only present in the cancer cells so knowing that we can create drugs that attack this specific Philadelphia chromosome because this this type of protein markers is only available uh present in the cancers so this drug was one of the most exciting things that came out sort of while ago and and it was on the feature of sort of Time Magazine this drug called GAC um and amazing thing is she is not only doing well she's now going to college going to be a nurse so this is not just for for for for leukemia also for example for for lung cancer we have many targeted therapies for that so if a lung cancer um your genome can be now sequenced to figure out what's the profile genetic profile of your lung cancer and we can able to give specific drugs to be able to Target that so for example if you're like the patient here Molly have a have a mutation of the gene called egfr there's a special drug just for her to be able to do that or if you're like this patient here lizes who has another mutation in gene called ALK there's a special drug just for that again let less side side effects and more effective killing these cancer cells and these cancer snipers get really get me more more even more excited than American snipers the third area is what I call activating natural cures and when you hear natural cures you're thinking oh Jimmy are you telling me to eat more vegetables with antioxidants no I'm telling you things are much much cooler than that in your body you have cancer Killers which is your immune system cancer happens all the time in your body and your immune system normally gets rid of it and what happens in some cancers they're able to what's called immune checkpoint they turn off that immune system so if you see sort of picture here on the right there's there's the immune system actually actually killing the cancer you can see a shrink it on the other side um it is not shrinking because there's in that pathway um cancer is they you know immune system been turn off there's there's genes called ctla4 there's pd1 this is an area of very active research so if you're able to then turn off these Inhibitors basically turning on the immune system so it attacks these cancer cells you're able to leverage this amazing natural cancer cure inside your body and this is exactly what's been going on um whether it's drugs against ctla4 pd1 there's so many as many many companies working um on these drugs now and here's one example of what it's like this is for melanoma if you see um at at the very right there you know there's there's tumor everywhere and as they give drug the tumor literally melts away all over the body and and for the first time now melanoma is being able to treat it and it's it's a cure it's not you live a little bit longer it's a cure um this is an area of great excitement for for for scientists being able to use this method and this is one doctor here uh Dr Anthony Rebus at UCLA one of the pioneers of This research and Tom STS um studs here who has been cured of his melanoma um from from this special immune checkpoint inhibitor again again very very amazing exciting stuff in addition to that what if your immune system needs a little bit of help what I call supercharging your body and so sometimes your immune system may not recognize this um um and and this is one patient another patient this is little Emma um um she she actually fought end up fighting three cancers she had a cancer they fought it and it went away then it came back um and ultimately by the third time he came back they're like you know what we tried everything let's try this new way of doing it so what they did with a little Emma is that they took cells out of her body the immune cells the tea cells and basically trained it gave it special instructions so that it can recognize cancer cells that it's it's not already doing um and this is what it looks like on the on the cell membrane there are special um receptors that are able to detect this is called chimeric antigen receptor so it's able to train your immune system to be able to attack those cancer cells and look at this one year free free and again this is a cure right it's it now teaches your immune system to be able to recognize it so if it comes back your your body automat Al is able to fight that cancer and lastly um not only can you use your own body we can add extra stuff be able to do that and other researchers being able to what they do they genetic engineer viruses and bacteria to be able to fight cancer right it sounds very very cool U but but don't think no zombie apocalypse we're aware of that uh we're making sure that that doesn't happen um but viruses and bacteria is very cool to cure cancer uh so this is one the misos vacine me misos virus right and we have vaccines in it for in our bodies to be able to do that and this is one patient Stacy she has a cancer called multiple Myoma and this is her being treated at the Mayo Clinic um with this genetic engineered measles virus um and you sort of get the picture by now she's going to get cured of cancer uh so Stacey is now cured of cancer with a special and she's one of the first these are what's called antic viruses viruses is able to burst open um just the cancer cell and not the rest of the cell um and and I we have research one of my friends at Autodesk is designing synthetic viruses Andrew hessle there um to be able to custom 3D print special viruses for different cancers as they come um and it would be really really cool once you be able to do that not only viruses but also bacteria this is a bacteria called C noi it's sort of a flesh eating bacteria in in in in your feces and the dirt normally really really bad right but um what's been done actually again here at Hopkins part of the lab that we I worked on um is able to sort of genetic engineer that to make take away the the bad parts right but take advantage of the good parts so this bacteria is able to grow only in areas without oxygen um so cancer grows out of control and what it needs is to recruit blood vessels uh what's called angiogenesis so that it has oxygen if without oxygen it just dies right so but then it is usually low oxygen content and that's where the bacteria you put in it'll grow and it'll eat away the cancer and this is really cool to be able to take advantage of the special characteristic um of that bacteria so we part of sort of our work part of my work too we we sequence um this bacteria um back sort of um um and be able to really understand how this does and and start actually treating it doing some early clinical trials in humans and in dogs um and it's still very early but um I I wish I could show you another cute little girl being cured but I can show you a cute little dog uh dogs are now being cured of cancer and hopefully we'll be able to cure humans of cancer as well um using these an U these these bacteria um engineer bacteria that's only only five things there are many many more let me just sort of go quickly there's there's special dyes that you can look at cancer so that in surgery you can cut out the cancer um and not cut out the other parts um there's robot otics now for surgeons they can use robots to be able to do surgery um and ones that even if you've seen this movie Ender Game This is actually a real robot that they took in the movie in the future this is the this is the Raven 4 it's being Dev developed on the west coast so these open source robots be able to do surgery and what's good is you know you train them once they you don't have to train them again right surgeons as they get more experience get better these robots can just quickly become better than people this is still very very early um there's even ways that you sort of proton therapy to be able to do and there's just so much more um that that's really really exciting just last year alone 180,000 papers were published on cancer research um and this is the Golden Age of cancer and this is why I wake up the morning just really really excited about the future um of of us beating um this disease we put together small teams so some friends and I we have a small consultancy that we able to help individual patients be able to derive cure derive cures and create strategies and we're some seeing some really really amazing results and it's our hope and our dream that in our lifetimes in our lifetimes then cancer will be no longer disease that causes fear but will be one of those that you're like oh those three words I have cancer will'll be like oh okay then take a couple days off and come back on Monday that is my dream so so for those who who've had family and friends who fought cancer for especially those cancer survivors or ones fighting cancer now you're our heroes um and all that we do all the fighting is for you um thank you very much

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 192,917

Keywords: English, Technology, tedx talks, ted talks, ted, Medicine, ted talk, United States, tedx talk, TEDxTalks, Cancer, Health, tedx, ted x

Id: 4tarl95XP1M

Length: 17min 37sec (1057 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 05 2015