Nanotechnology & NanoMedicine | Andrew Hessel | Exponential Medicine 2015

[Music] [Music] this is kind of a new area for me because I don't normally speak specifically about nanotechnology because I describe myself as a biologist but yeah you'll see why it overlaps I am really really interested though in designer nanotechnology because right now nanotechnology is hard but to set a scale here let me just take you into the nano world this is the stuff we can see without magnification really quite easily but as we start to zoom in we quickly exceed the resolution of our eyes now we need microscopes and magnification you start to be able to see this larger cells the Paramecium the skin cells the human egg it goes down way deeper though much smaller cells bacteria mitochondria an organelle and then into the world of viruses now you're getting into the nanoscale and ultimately into the subcellular components that allow cellular life to work and operate this is an unfamiliar world to most people out of sight out of mind it is as hard to grasp for most people as data or the future in other invisible things when you see an image like this about nanotechnology it's just fantasy when you get down to the level of the molecules everything looks everything is dynamic everything is molecular there are no smooth lines this is an animation called cell pack it essentially gives a sense of what these molecules are doing down at that scale because they're so small just the ambient energy of heat makes everything move it's like Brownian motion everything is constantly dynamically interacting with each other another animation by Janet iwasa kind of shows some of the complexity of this this is just how me cells form to essentially make simple cell walls all of this has to be simulated and done with computers because the physics down at this scale are completely unlike any of the physics in everyday life it's completely unfamiliar and done it time scales that are bizarre to us so I kind of cheat you know Tom Knight a synthetic biologist at MIT says biology is the nanotechnology that works and it is we are all made from nanotechnology nanotechnology is the dominant force on this planet in living systems it's been that way for billions of years and the cool thing is all the nanotechnology uses cells so the foundation of all living things as you know but I look at cells just as a type of computing and manufacturing hardware that self-assembles and it has a programming language DNA and this is universal across all living things so if you're really interested in nanotechnology but want to do it digitally and do it in a way that scales and that you can share the code you really have to think about programming living cells to do the work and using DNA to do it so as daniel said i used to be with faculty full time at singularity university autodesk was one of the founding sponsors of singularity university was my introduction to the company apart from some friends that work with autodesk research in toronto autodesk makes software for designing most of the things in the real world around us it's actually a fairly old software company but I had no idea the range of things that it did it has over 8,000 employees and almost nothing in the world gets made today that isn't touched by the software in some way you just got a really great overview of 3d printing but manufacturing in all forms really takes some sort of specialized software for me in particular this was fascinating because I noticed that the company didn't have any design software for the two things that really interested me nanoscale systems and self-assembling living systems and I challenge them on it and they said hmm let's explore this and so in 2012 they formed a bio nano group now for the people who are not familiar with Autodesk in general the software is touches the world in a lot of different places most of the time it reaches us through movies and entertainment and advertizing because we make it possible for people to visualize things that simply don't exist yet or you can't get a holistic view just through through one individual things like airplanes have millions of parts that all have to come together seamlessly to make the final device it can only be done in software so I'm always learning on this job we're pushing the limits now with our pr9 facility we have fun it's filled with artists and today there's a really tight coupling between design and manufacturing because of what you just heard the printers are becoming extremely cheap and they're all digital and we're seeing a massive shift now from just professionals using digital design and manufacturing to basically everyone it's gone consumer it's gone to kids in school so we're kind of a bizarre software company because we actually have a functioning bio lab that we use for prototyping this was kind of a big deal when we set it up because it was just so strange for us but it's well outfitted and I have a team now they're pretty incredible it's about 20 people half of them are scientists with domain specialties and half of them are computer programmers that don't necessarily write all the code but they take the code that we that we've been developing for other areas of design and we port it and use it for bio nano applications the job of the group really is to take computer aided design and computer aided manufacturing in our experience in that area and move it into the bio nano domain which for the most part has been done by individuals or small groups or proprietary these in the very artisanal way so I look at it as really as just software and printers and if you look at it is you know these are some of the printers that are available to us today the 2d printer okay they write papers but actually you can lay down a lot of stuff in 2d printers you can now 2d print electronic circuits just with conductive ink so we're finding all new ways to use that we have a lot of areas in 3d printing some of which was discussed in the last talk so I won't go into the overlaps and bio printers for sure are really cool because cells are actually fairly large devices you can just print them and position them in space very easily now but the real nano printer that I use every day is the DNA synthesizer it is a printer that prints the DNA molecule chemical bit by chemical bit by chemical bits and strings it together to write code it's really the only printer that I'm interested in for the most part because it's really the only chemical printer you can have sitting on a desk that can do so many different things because it can reprogram the cell which is essentially a 3d printer for millions of chemicals all in one go anyone that's ever worked in a chemistry lab before knows it can be exciting sometimes because things tend to explode or catch on fire patta anyway the other area that i think is fascinating is robotic labs because if you really want to get Exponential's you got to get people out of the loop we're not exponential you know except growing from a baby to an adult perhaps but let's face it we work we can't go exponential that's that we work eight hours a day the DNA printer technology that we have today is not very good though I've been tracking this technology for 15 years when you could write a thousand base pairs of code you could make a gene you could make a single protein them or you might be able to make again some some peptides you just heard from Moderne therapeutics this is really powerful because if you can write short strings of information you can start to change the way cells behave when you get up into the 10000 base pair range you can actually start writing small genomes things like viruses that's a fair amount of code it's actually about 10 genes strung together so you can do a lot of metabolism and between 10k and 100k you do metabolic engineering and there's a lot of people working on that today reprogramming cells to do really useful things I think you'll hear some of that about in the next session but the reason why I stay clear from that right now is because I want to be able to digitally design and print and I want what I print to represent what I designed and right now we cannot design cells well enough that we actually know what we're going to get and everything beyond this bacteria yeast chromosomes eventually human genomes that'll come as DNA synthesis gets better and it will get better it's been growing exponentially so right now I'm focusing all of my attention on nanoparticles nanoparticles are what they sound like they're particles at a nano scale typically under a hundred nanometers my favorite one oh sorry to do that first of all since you can't see these things you don't really have a great sense of them and they're hard to manipulate we've been taking some of the art software tools for other industries and we've been bringing them down too so that they work with molecular systems this is software that's available today we've been opening it up and for the developing community it's not something that you're going to use at the moment but what it really what is really fascinating this is one of the most powerful molecular viewers available today and because we've got a lot of experience with the cloud etc etc you can do really high resolution models just over a web browser this is really kind of mind-blowing technology on the back end this is kind of an example of what it looks like here's a component from a virus you can blow the protein components apart it's kind of like a little molecular jigsaw puzzle that's kind of cool so I'm just exploding it now I'm going in and I'm saying show me the atomic resolution of that particular thing you can zoom right in to the specific molecule and again you can manipulate all of this as well and just giving you a quick visual tour when I pull back out now I want to assemble the whole virus particle so here I'm just going to click on that now it has to go and build the rest of the virus capsid from those components it takes a few seconds over a web page and I was just doing this in my hotel room but this is what you end up getting so now you have the full assembled virus capsid inside would be the viral DNA that actually has the full program again you can explode it out you can compress it back in you can cut it and slice it so you could actually look inside now we're starting to build the DNA visualization tool so you'll be able to see the DNA inside this virus capsid this is you can also take atomic coordinates as well get the distance between any two points and this particular viewer has all of the features that you need for VR support so you can go in using an oculus or any of these types of systems and an essentially multi-user support so you'd be able to do this with friends and colleagues around the world of course it's pretty easy to go in 3d print that model this is this is Daisy rosario from my comm who came up to interview me a few weeks ago but just holding a physical model of a virus in your hand makes that nanoparticle real because now you get a sense of how this thing what it looks like it's never unfamiliar again once you once you see a flu virus or in this case it's it's a bacteriophage it's just the virus that infects bacteria you never forget it your friends for life and of course you can have it sitting on your desk too but we can make the real virus using the same tools and technologies we send the digital DNA design file again it's just code on the computer to a company like gen9 this is a 3d print shop for DNA not the only one in the Bay Area there's another company called twist there's DNA 2.0 these are just printers they're like Kinkos for DNA they're really good and in a few weeks they'll print your d-- actually it's getting faster in about a week to two weeks they'll turn around they'll print your DNA and then you can actually turn it into the real particle and last year I made Autodesk's first synthetic organism this is just a growth plate a bacterial growth plate ecoli background but wherever you see a spot that's where a synthetically constructed genome for this phage infected an e coli cell and started the chain reaction of making more phage and killing more e.coli cells it only costs a thousand dollars to make this synthetic virus and it took about two weeks so nanoparticle engineering is already pretty cheap and powerful and it's only getting cheaper for the last year my team and I have been prototyping doing virus production and to end all digitally using work cells like this this is a company called transcript ik in Menlo Park it's created by a young CEO that just said I never want to work at a lab bench because it's too slow it's you you get bad data you forget things there's really bad reproducibility so they made a robotic lab it's all the same equipment you'd have in a lab but now there's a robot that does all of the routines and it works really well now it's the size of a shipping container but it's completely accessible online this is a cloud laboratory and if there's one thing you'll learn about Exponential's is things get smaller faster better cheaper so once you've got a robotic lab you know it's going to get smaller eventually this will be a box on your desk eventually it'll be a brick eventually it'll be a chip we were really pleased with our work on this in the fact that we were able to completely make these particles without a human hand touching it and we were able to do all the growth curves we were able to do the plaque assays was it easy will it scale in this form no but we've shown that digital paths are possible and now the software is what links it all together already I'm going now to applications my project for this year is to start working with veterinary oncologist to start making uncle it advises for dogs working with them to do the design and manufacturing the beautiful part about this is you're essentially 3d printing viruses that give cancer cells a cold and it's so cheap to do it you can do it for one dog at a time so I'm not the type who wants to go and fight with the FDA and I suppose we work for a software company I don't want to worry about you know I all I want to do is make things faster better cheaper but working with the dogs is a really good thing because the owners ultimately are the HMOs the payers and really I can tell you if you get a video of you working with dogs it gets a million hits I'm really thankful for Mike comment featuring some of this early stage work and I think it's going to be some of the most exciting work at the leading edge of oncology I think the dogs will lead the way for humans now I want to switch gears and talk about a non-biological nanoparticle this is DNA origami now it's using DNA again but as a structural material not a programming language and that's because we understand the physics of the DNA molecule really well and it's an information encoding polymer so we can change the information and this was from a 2006 paper by Paul Rothman who won a MacArthur Genius award but here you're he's using what's essentially he's taking a long string of DNA he's bending it and folding it in different ways and the happy face for me just works because if you can make a happy face out of DNA and and look at it with atomic force microscopy that doesn't scare anyone I can tell you even harmless viruses scare people but this does not scare anyone I like that and since then this technology has evolved extremely quickly now from using computer algorithms we can make virtually any 3d shape this is not my work this is a recent paper that just shows you can design almost any shape imaginable including a coke bottle apparently and Stanford Bunny and the computer will figure out the design it'll self assemble into that shape now these are not functional nanoparticles but we've already done collaborations with folks like Shawn Douglas who has has you have functionalized them so this is a clamshell nano robot and it really is a nano robot it has a little lock and key system and the purple things in the center are a cytotoxic protein but when it binds to the right receptor on a cell it opens up like a clamshell phone those proteins are now biologically active it kills a cell it works great in a dish other pharma companies are starting to develop this technology as a possible therapeutic but again the point I'm trying to make is it's just digitally designed and manufactured so it's kind of in the same line as Moderne therapeutics or you know 3d printed nano structures we've demonstrated we can do this even with a small team this was from a 20 year old 24 year old colleague of mine he said I'll just take the Autodesk logo do it in DNA and turned it around and imaged it a few weeks ago and you know again this is a hundred micrometers the logo self-assembled perfectly this was just done for a few hundred dollars worth of synthetic DNA this was the first time you can see all the a is in the upper corner this is amazing stuff and just as your kids today might be learning about 3d printing they'll be able to 3d print molecules this is not expensive and I recently learned and this is from a 2013 paper but now people are doing protein origami as well and the last time I checked protein origami was pretty much how all of biology gets made so this is going to advance quite quickly but where I think it gets really exciting really exciting is the intersection of nano electronics and biology because I can tell you biologists are not the folks that have been thinking and visualizing and being empathic with molecules very much they're just not we all tend to think about and focus on the things we see around us every day but the people I really do think about think at the nano scale and empathize with the nano scale well are the folks working in the electronics industry because they've been working at that scale every day for over a decade now now there is an intersection that really touches on my world and it's the latest generation of DNA sequencers this is a DNA nano core sequence or at least an illustration of how they work there is essentially a poor DNA single-stranded at poor and as it does that it disrupts the flow of current basically shown by the black dots here and electronics are so sensitive now you can actually read the difference of DNA bases in the changes in current flow this allows you to do really rapid really cheap long chain DNA sequencing this is the state-of-the-art in microfluidic chips in my field this is a chip that was published this last summer by the joint bioenergy Institute in Emeryville and it will essentially do genetic constructs on a chip I can tell you the technology here is laughable compared to a seven nanometer processor circuit so things have to change in biology we need much more investment to really start driving the field exponentially but that's starting to happen this is this is fab 8 Global Foundries one of the largest chip fabs in the world it was the biggest foreign investment on US soil I believe a few years back it's in upstate New York this is where some of the most sophisticated electronic chips in the world are manufactured but they realize they're at the end of Moore's law now basically in 2d they've kind of maxed it out they might space it out in 3d but you can only shrink a circuit so far and in fact below 5 nanometers only life knows how to position molecules with enough accuracy to build bottom-up so groups like global Global Foundries are starting to invest and learn about the mechanisms of life and as they do they'll start to make equipment like those nanopore sequencers they'll make sensors or they'll turn it around and they'll start making electronically controlled polymerizes to write DNA cheaper than you could ever imagine or use DNA as a storage medium on and on and on I think we are entering one of the most exciting and explosive growth periods in biology that anyone has ever seen it will take a decade for this to really hit the knee of the curve but the Exponential's are clear and the benefits to your field immense thank you one question so you have previous requests insane called pink army were you envisioning sort of programming viruses for a particular cancer therapies is that sort of blend in this area I think in ten years we'll be at the level of doing digital origami for precise viruses so you hit my core motivation I wanted I worked with Amgen for seven years and what I learned about what I learned from Amgen was that drug development was not an exponential so I looked for a way that I could make n of one medicines because when you make a medicine for one person you kind of wipe out the need for big clinical trials and that's where I saw the exponential possibilities pink army was the first open-source biotech company really focused on making an n of one cancer therapeutics what I learned though is we have to go build the tools and Autodesk has builds tools to help people design the world it was a great fit pink army still exists we'll probably it'll probably end up being an open source and crowdsourcing is evolved quite a bit since I first founded it but once these tools are out there and it's that they're happening every day they're going to they'll be available for everyone one of your great quotes is viruses are they apps for the body they are actually the apps for the ecosystem viruses are what allowed genetic code to move between species and through the world that's why we all use a standard genetic code thanks Andrew thank you just [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Singularity University Summits

Views: 51,469

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Keywords: singularity, singularity university, exponential medicine, medicine, health, innovation, wellness, nanotechnology, nanomedicine

Id: IDQBd9cVZAc

Length: 24min 55sec (1495 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2017