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

Can I raise my hand to know how many of you in the audience have had a friend or loved one who has been affected by

cancer

? Affected by

cancer

, so look around, a lot of people and I'm going to ask this and

some

times there are a lot of people,

some

of them, some people here have fought cancer or been a cancer survivor in the audience. Wow, give those few a round of applause, so this is my friend, the Jolly Giant in this middle is my friend Chris, where did we go? We went to college together and he's one of those

good

guys that you can always go to and encourage you or help you with whatever you want, so I got a call from Chris.

I think about four years after we graduated, he was in his kind of The jolly Chris had a kind of hesitation in his voice and you know where this is going, says Chris, he said those three words that you would never want to hear I have cancer, So when I heard those words I was a little shocked, right? I know what to do um and I think for a lot of you who experienced this it's like we were trying to figure it out so we and Chris's friends and his family walked with him um as he bravely fought through this. cancer for about four years going through chemotherapy going through a stem cell transfer plan and unfortunately about four years later he passed away at the young age of 27 and it had a huge effect on me and I also had an aunt An uncle, many members of my family have been affected by cancer, so knowing that this is such a big problem, I actually dedicated my life to cancer research.

I have trained as if I were lucky enough to train at some of the best universities in the world here in Baltimore. I spent 10 years here at John's Hopkins obtaining my medical and MDD graduate training. I did something. I was in the university town of St Louis Washington there and I am currently working with the National Cancer Institute and helping them develop their cancer. I helped build his clinic. genomics program at the cancer center and the

good

news

about cancer is that I bring you

news

from the front that we are starting to win the war against cancer, so today from the front I'm going to tell you some of the things that I'm most excited and get me up in the morning, some of the latest advances in cancer research, which I hope give you hope, as you think about every news story about this kind of horrible disease, so five things.

I want to highlight that the first is to decipher the code for the first time in the history of humanity. Now we really know what the background is in terms of the genetics of cancer. In the year 2000, a great milestone as humanity, we were able to decipher the code of the human genome for the first time and subsequently led by researcher Bert Falene here at John Hopkins, who I had the privilege of being on his team and being our mentor, He worked tirelessly to take that human genome code and apply it. to decipher the cancer genome working with him and other colleagues that you know, to be able to see how we sequence each gene in cancer compared to normal cells, to discover the DNA differences between them and to really see what the genetic face is. of this disease that we are trying to combat and after two years we can do our initial searches and our initial results that we published in 2006 is the first genomic overview of cancer, this is a picture of cancer if Look at everything if each line was a kind of genes, the mountains are where there are genes mutated at a very, very high frequency within this specific cancer, tail cancer, and what we saw is that the cancer is actually very, very different, each person's cancer is different, so so.

We need to be able to find a specific way to attack those cancers. You may have heard words like personalized medicine or individualized medicine and this is the future of us being able to fight this disease, so for the first time initially. We did it with colov and breast cancer, then we mapped the genome of pancreatic cancer and a brain cancer called G blastoma and now we have a global view of what is happening in terms of the genetics that I like to classify. Look, this is Imagine Christopher Columbus was trying to navigate and someone gave him a satellite map of North America, instead of fumbling around in the dark not knowing where to go, now he knows exactly where to go and that's what they do. cancer researchers.

Now billions of dollars have been spent sequencing all the different types of cancer, hundreds of cancers in the US and around the world, and now we really have the genetic face of cancer and the sequencing technology has really improved tremendously. , in addition to what it took us. two, three years to do it can now be done in a week on machines, you know, half, you know, half the size and what's really exciting is that there are now machines the size of a USB drive that can sequence DNA in time real, um, that's just coming out. laboratories, so it's really exciting that now, for the first time, we know the face of cancer and we know what can cause it and researchers can even detect this mutant DNA in the blood before it can grow.

You can even see it in Images so you can treat cancer before prevention even begins. This is one of the most exciting things we can do to beat this disease. The second thing is what I call cancer snipers. It is traditional cancer. The therapy has really been a kind of bombardment and poisons. Many of you may know that the initial cancer therapies were based on mustard gas, you looked at the results of mustard gas and you know that there was some kind of differential cell death and I decided to use that as cancer chemotherapy and that is not the way to do it. do it right and that's why what it does is the target cells divide rapidly, which cancer cells do more than others, but it harms the other cells that also divide rapidly like ours. hair cells or gastrointestinal cells, so you have these effects, you know, what you see in cancer patients who lose their hair and have nausea, that is an effect of the drug and not the cancer, so how can we create drugs that can attack cancer and not the body and that's the focus of cancer chemotherapy research for the last decade or so, here's a little patient, um, here, she was diagnosed with a leukemia-like disease called CML at the age of six um and um and normally before you know any kind of treatment this is actually almost a death sentence um and her disease here you see, it's really ugly these lucemic cells just grow out of control um and so for her you know, and This is research that was done at Oregon Health Sciences University, they were able to discover that there is a unique signature for this type of cancer, it's called the Philadelphia chromosome, the details are less important, but basically we know. exactly what is happening there is a part of chromosome 9 chromosome 22 there is a switch that creates a new protein that is only present in cancer cells so we know that we can create drugs that attack this specific Philadelphia chromosome because these types of protein markers it's only available, it's present in cancers, so this drug was one of the most exciting things that came out a while ago and it was in some kind of Time magazine, this drug is called GAC um and the surprising thing is that it doesn't He's just doing well.

Now she's going to college and she's going to be a nurse, so this is not just for leukemia, but also, for example, lung cancer, we have a lot of targeted therapies for that, so if you have lung cancer, now you can sequence your genome to find out what it is. the genetic profile of your lung cancer and we can give you specific medications to be able to attack it, so, for example, if you are like the patient here, Molly, you have a mutation of the gene called egfr, there is a special medication just for her to be able to do that or if you're like this patient here, Lizes, who has another mutation in the gene called ALK, there's a special medication just for that, again, it allows for fewer side effects and more effective removal of these cancer cells and these snipers. of cancer.

It really excites me more than American snipers. The third area is what I call activating natural cures and when you hear natural cures you think, oh Jimmy, are you telling me to eat more vegetables with antioxidants? No, I'm telling you things. they are much cooler than that in your body you have cancer Killers that 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 are capable of what is called point of immune control they turn off that immune system, so if you see kind of a picture here on the right, there is an immune system that actually kills cancer, you can see a reduction on the other side, um, it's not reducing because there is in that via, um, cancer.

You know the immune system has been turned off, there are genes called ctla4, there is pd1, this is a very active area of ​​research, so if you can turn off these inhibitors, you basically activate the immune system to attack these cancer cells. able to harness this amazing natural cancer cure within your body and this is exactly what has been happening, whether it is ctla4 pd1 drugs, there are so many companies working on these drugs now and here is an example of what this is for. melanoma, if you look to the far right, you know there are tumors everywhere and as they give drugs, the tumor literally melts throughout the body and for the first time, melanoma is now treatable and it's a cure.

It's not about living a little longer, it's a cure. This is an area of ​​great excitement for scientists who can use this method and this is a doctor here, Dr. Anthony Rebus from UCLA, one of the pioneers of this research and Tom. STS um studs here who have been cured of their melanoma um thanks to this special immune checkpoint inhibitor again, very, very surprising and exciting stuff besides that, what if your immune system needs a little help? What I call overloading your body and sometimes your immune system may not recognize this um um and this is a patient another patient this is little Emma um um she actually fought ended up fighting three cancers she had one cancer lo they fought and she left, then she came back um and

finally

by the third time she came back, they said you know, we tried everything, let's try this new way of doing it, so what they did with little Emma was they took cells from her body, immune cells, tea cells and basically trained, gave it special instructions so that it can recognize cancer cells that it is not already doing and this is what it looks like in the cell membrane there are special receptors that can detect this is called chimeric antigen receptor, then you are able to train your immune system to be able to attack those cancer cells and watch this one year free and again, this is a cure, now you teach your immune system to be able to recognize it, so if it comes back, your The body automaton Al is able to fight that cancer and lastly, not only can you use your own body, we can add additional things to be able to do that and other researchers can do what they do, they genetically engineer viruses and bacteria to be able to fight. cancer, right, it sounds very, very cool, but don't think that there is no zombie apocalypse, we are aware of that, we are making sure that doesn't happen, but viruses and bacteria are great at curing cancer, so this is One of the misos vaccinates me against the misos virus and we have vaccines in our bodies to be able to do that and this is a patient, Stacy, she has a cancer called multiple myoma and she is being treated at the Mayo Clinic with this. genetically engineered measles virus um and you already get the idea that she's going to be cured of cancer uh so Stacey is now cured of cancer with a special and she's one of the first that these are the so-called anti-cvirus viruses that can burst. um just the cancer cell and not the rest of the cell um and I have some research, one of my friends at Autodesk is designing synthetic viruses Andrew Hessle there um so we can 3D print special viruses customized for different cancers as they appear um and It would be really cool once you can do that not only viruses but also bacteria, this is a bacteria called C noi, it's a kind of flesh-eating bacteria that is found in feces and dirt is normally very, very bad, right , what's going on?

In fact, it has been done again here at Hopkins, part of the laboratory in which I worked is able to make a kind of genetic engineer that eliminates the bad parts but takes advantage of the good parts so that this bacteria can grow only in areas without oxygen, then the cancer grows out of control and what it needs is to recruit blood vessels, which is called angiogenesis so that it has oxygen, if without oxygen it simply dies, but generally it has a low oxygen content and that is where the bacteria If we put it, will grow and devour the cancer, and this is really coolto be able to take advantage of the special characteristic of that bacteria, so that's part of our job, part of my job too, we sequence, um. this bacteria, um, back, um, um, and being able to really understand how it works and start treating it by doing some initial clinical trials in humans and in dogs, and it's still very early, but I'd like to be able to show you another cute little one. . curing girl, but can I show you a cute little dog, uh, dogs are now curing from cancer and hopefully we can cure humans from cancer too, using these and these bacteria, bacteria engineering, that's just five things.

There are many many more let me just go quickly, there are special dyes that can observe the cancer so that in surgery the cancer can be removed and not cut off the other parts. Now there are robotic optics for surgeons, they can use robots to be able to perform surgery. um and those 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 Raven 4 it's being developed by a developer on the west coast so these code robots open You will be able to do surgery and the good thing is that you know that you train them once you don't have to train them again.

The right surgeons, as they gain more experience, get better. These robots can quickly become better than people. This is still very early. There are even ways you can do a kind of proton therapy and there's so much more that's really exciting. Last year alone there were 180,000 articles published on cancer research and this is the Golden Age of cancer and that's why I wake up in the morning very excited about the future of us beating this disease, we form small teams so Some friends and I have a small consultancy that we can help individual patients get cures, get cures and we create strategies and we are seeing some really amazing results and it is our hope and our dream that in our lifetimes, cancer will no longer be a disease that cause fear, but rather be one of those that you like, oh those. three words: I have cancer will be like oh okay then take a couple of days off and come back on Monday that's my dream so for those who have had family and friends who battled cancer, especially for those survivors or who fight cancer.

Cancer you are now our heroes um and everything we do, all the fights are for you um thank you very much