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

What if I told you that

everything

you

need

to

fight

cancer

is already inside you? Would you believe me now? I know it sounds very cliché, like something your parents would tell you, but I mean it, like you use your own cells in your body. to

fight

cancer

for you and if you follow me, Alex explains how it works. I started this journey thinking about the stars. I thought about how they produce energy, how they emit light and it turns out that they produce light when you crush or squeeze them. The atoms inside them come together and release light.

Now the opposite process is actually where they split, where atoms split and this is actually what came out of the atomic bombs. I thought this was really cool when I was 11 and science was just beginning. I announced and knew what I was going to do. I wasn't going to do it like a volcano that makes baking soda or like making a battery turn on and off something that was already done that was done. I was going to make a nuclear reactor. design I know, I know and I didn't tell my parents so I spent the next three months at the local library reading

everything

I could about modern physics and special relativity and the discovery of modern physics and then when I exhausted all those resources I went on the Internet and this was the late '90s, so I asked G and Yahoo how do you make a nuclear bomb, where is the uranium-235, but Kurt likes these critical mass equations now, so I can't imagine doing that.

Now I think Homeland Security would have liked to be in the library like three minutes of the computer would explode and I would, and think about what people use the Internet for with their 11-year-old kids. Now I'm happy to tell you that I won. first place in that science fair, so I totally killed it and moving on, decided to move on to something that was less explosive. I went from looking outside for inspiration to looking inside because it turns out that physics isn't just useful for learning how. to create bombs are useful for creating images to visualize what the inside of our body looks like.

I developed a new seeing-is-believing mantra and that had two purposes for me, one is to see myself as a scientist, where the Normand of a scientist's image was not a black woman or a black person or a woman and the other was not I wasn't necessarily demonstrating but reminding people that girls like this grew up to be adorable and innocent engineers right there right now all jokes aside the other thing I wanted to do with the images was be able to place a special lens on a biological question. important and there are some things more personal than cancer, according to facts and figures from the American Cancer Society and their report, there are currently 15.5 million Americans.

Whether living with cancer or have had cancer in the past Every year, 600,000 people die from cancer, which is equivalent to about 70 people every hour if you look at all diseases, cancer accounts for one in four deaths and is second only to for heart disease. Cancer affects all young people. rich or poor old people four packs of cigarettes a day never smoke or drink is one day in their lives good health insurance is not good at all so you can imagine why people think cancer is so confusing and in reality cancer is not It's just a disease it's based on a person's individual genetics, epigenetics, lifestyle, diet, wherever the list goes, so I decided I really wanted to figure out how to make this personal question mean something, so I combine my love for images with a new search, 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 through Coupee, where we can get deep images of living tissue without even cutting it, so the plan was this: I was going to place cells cancerous. the bloodstream and I was going to watch them go through the bloodstream, find out when they enter other organs like 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 simple, right? Yeah, so if this technology works the way it's supposed to, you'll see the ship, so this is a living mouse crane and if you look closely, look there, there it was, did you see it, that was the only one I saw, So it turns out this is really difficult.

I'm trying to find a cell that is 10 microns in size and has a field of view that is 3000 times larger. It's like one of those Waldo puzzles, except Waldo is always moving and when he looks back. I basically spent half my 20s in a dark laser room looking at mouse brains looking for that little cell, so I felt like a failure. I felt like I wasn't really able to answer or craft good questions and I was really thinking. What am I doing here, but in those hundreds of hours of observing I saw something else that is much more valuable?

Another type of cell that was in the brain and these are immune cells. This is a microglia. Microglair are the brain's immune cells. You're the most common cellular population there and if you notice that they're 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's happening all the time and they're constantly looking for anything. that could go wrong in your brain every four to four to six hours they've actually monitored 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 something happened there and they are spreading their processes the little limbs are saying something happened there let's investigate, this is happening over the course of hours and then I thought to myself, this is what happens throughout your body, there are immune cells everywhere. each organ and instead of just using 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 same principle by fighting personal with 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 the personal. We often personalize cancer as if it were a person and had some kind of morality. We wear pink and tell people that you are fighting cancer. getting butt cancer right and that can be a really encouraging inspirational image to help people get through the daily process of undergoing cancer treatment, but there's another side to that that can actually make people feel worse , why me, why the person I love who has cancer and how come I'm not fighting enough?

I'm trying, I'm giving everything I can and it's not working. I don't like that kind of narrative, so when I say personal, I love you. To understand that I mean using the cells inside you and trying to make them fight better for you. I don't mean that anyone deserves to die of cancer or that cancer is what anyone deserves. The next thing I want to talk about is now. What is this immune system I'm talking about? Well, it is a series of cells, tissues and organs that are designed to protect your body. Think about it this way, they have these lymphatic vessels that are basically their own personalized highway so they can get to the infection sites very quickly, they have these little filling stations that are known as the thymus, they are these other organs where they check for recharge, they collect information from other cells and they also have their own production system in the bone marrow where they are. 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 we are all born with this and it is designed to recognize anything that is foreign and usually If they can, they will.

Eat them and get rid of them, they will eliminate them and also eliminate anything that is dead and form a physical barrier between whatever is invading your body, so think about when you get a bruise from a cutter and it starts to swell. it's part of your innate immune system that takes effect on the adaptive immune restorative iris or things that have invaded your body and then they keep some memory of it so that it ever comes back, they know what to do and that's why you only get chickenpox one once o Why are vaccines really useful?

These cells also communicate with each other and together they are meant to recognize every insult that may come your way, so right now you might be wondering if immune cells are so good, why don't they all do it? You already recognize cancer and that's a fantastic question and that's something that scientists are still trying to figure out. Look, I told you before that your immune system recognizes things that aren't supposed to be there, but cancer cells are your own cells that have gone rogue. inside they are not strangers 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 immune cells are able to recognize the cancer as deadly. They can't do anything about it because the tumor suppresses them. I would think about it this way, let's say you go out to dinner and there's always that one friend who never brings his money and it's like, oh, I forgot, can you call me this time? Finally you hear this speech and you say "Okay, this time I'm going to say something about it" I'm not going to pay for your dinner and you get to the restaurant and before you can give your speech you've already had dinner maybe I've had a few drinks and you're having fun , you pay for their meal and give them the right to take a taxi home.

That's what cancer does to your immune system, it completely overrides it, it's horrible, man, and this is where there's no therapy. comes in How do we get the immune system to robustly recognize what cancer cell what cancer cells are and fight them? There are two types of aminotherapy, one I call active and massive active has what I've been talking about. where we actually repair your immune cells so that they can recognize cancer cells as deadly and this has already led to clinical trials that were successful and even the first approval of a drug by the FDA in recent years, however, these do not They work for each type of drug and there are some challenges regarding that, the research I work on is rather passive, which is simply based on the fact that immune cells migrate with high efficiency and quantity to disease sites such as the cancer and use them as personalized drug delivery vehicles to deliver the drugs that we know work well but we can't through other methods get them on time and I look at this using one of my favorite immune cells because when you study so many you can choose your favorite, my favorite. immune cells called macrophages and are fatally attracted to the tumor environment.

I say this because if you removed a tumor and looked at the individual cells, almost half of them could be full of macrophages, they love to go there, so they're a great drug delivery vehicle, but they're not just useful for what's going on outside. of them, they are useful for what happens inside in 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 would have an Instagram because they love to eat everything and then tell you what it tastes like.

Yes, they are that friend and that is their job. They are professional eaters. They are designed to walk around and swallow things. They are not supposed to be there, they can also digest them completely or transfer some of that information to other cells. Now, what my research and my collaborators have learned is that if you intentionally give a drug, they will also transfer it to the cells. surrounding cells, so by combining the natural migratory traffic activity of microglia combined with its normal functional activity and protecting it, I can make these two concepts synergistic to help you fight cancer in your own body without even thinking about it.

It sounds futuristic because I am actually proposing a new way of drug delivery not only 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 for physics that would lead me to earn money to make images, leave images of cancer and then make drugs to treat cancer. You certainly wouldn't have thought that I have been studying cancer for the last eight years and in that time I have tried to take a very interdisciplinary approach.

I wanted to understand what it took to truly defeat cancer once and for all and I have to tell you that treatments are just the tip of the iceberg. It will take more than finding a drug that cures everyone: it will take the support of the radiation oncologist and the surgeons, it will take the support of the universities and the pharmaceutical companies that aredeveloping these drugs and then the FDA that approved the drugs and then the insurance companies that have to pay for these drugs, it will be necessary to listen to the patients and hear what they have to say, it will be necessary to follow up with the survivors to let them know that they are not yet. worry about them and listen to their concerns, it will be necessary to worry about the quality of life of that patient, not only when they are in the treatment but also when it is finished, it is not lost on me that they support the therapies that I am Trying to do that they may not be accessible to everyone, a single dose of immunotherapy could cost between seventy-three thousand dollars and $200,000, and annually the US spends forty-two point two billion dollars on healthcare according to IMS Health and even now we still have disparities in the treatment they can offer me depending on their gender and ethnicity, so I believe that a tree is a true cure for cancer, it will involve looking at the Big Picture and not just the treatment, but fear not.

I am very hopeful for our future and that we can achieve this. I think thinking about my career often does us a disservice when we talk about scientific advances as a story that has already been written. As if there is nothing else to do, we are still using our sense of wonder to explore new avenues and imagine new ways of thinking about treatment and sometimes people expect us to have all the answers and even though I have many, just ask my mother. There are many more questions to answer, and sometimes scientists rush to answer those questions.

We think we don't have time minus 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 turn off the wonder, we turn off the emotion 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 us. life and the lives of other people thank you