TED 2021

Read The Script:

You’re sitting in the doctor’s office waiting for test results. She comes in, sits down, and says: “You have Parkinson’s disease.” Your heart sinks, and you think about everything that will go wrong – you’ll be unable to walk, unable to feed yourself, your hands trembling, drooling, unable to swallow. But before you can speak, your doctor says, “Not to worry. We’ll put in an order for your cells today.” You come back a week later, and a surgeon implants brand-new neurons into your brain. You just received an on-demand functional cure for Parkinson’s made from YOUR cells. 

It sounds like science fiction, but in the future, we’ll all have the option to have our stem cells banked ahead of time ready to be used. Anytime you need new cells, like blood cells, muscle cells, or skin cells, they’d be generated from the bank. And because they’re 100% YOUR cells, your immune system is extremely unlikely to attack. Your body has no idea that these cells were actually made in a cell factory. 

All this is possible because of a breakthrough at the intersection of biology, laser physics, and machine learning. 

We’ll start with biology. The human body is a miracle: trillions of cells are working in synchronicity to produce insulin, pump blood, secrete dopamine, and let me see and speak to you. But as our bodies age, our cells age too. It’s why your skin starts to sag, the cartilage in your joints wears away, and your 5-mile run turns into a 20-minute walk. Yes, we’re all getting older. Our bodies are ticking time bombs.

But, stem cells could offer a solution because one stem cell can become almost any cell in your body. 

My grandma passed away from complications of diabetes in 2012. If the technology were available at the time, we could’ve used HER stem cells to create new pancreatic cells for a transplant, and it could’ve cured her. 

Unfortunately, stem cells are notoriously difficult to engineer. One fundamental problem is that the process of creating a stem cell bank involves taking an individual’s blood sample, and then using chemicals to revert those blood cells into stem cells. But during that chemical process, you don’t end up with a PERFECT pure stem cell culture. You get a messy plate full of cells going in different directions — towards eye cells, liver cells, or brain cells. All of those random cells MUST be removed. And until recently, the main way to remove them was BY HAND.

I remember the first time I visited the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, I watched a highly skilled scientist sitting at a bench, looking at cells by eye, and removing unwanted cells with a pipette tip. One by one. It’s a slow, tedious, and artisanal process. And that’s why creating a personal stem cell bank costs about $1 million dollars today.

Using a donor’s stem cells is much cheaper, but your immune system will most likely attack or reject the cells unless you take immunosuppressants. Which is not an option for many people, especially the elderly.

To avoid this problem, some scientists are banking stem cells from individuals with the most common genetic backgrounds. “For example, if we build a bank here in the US using the most common 100 cell lines, that bank could work for over 75% of Caucasians, but less than 50% of African Americans. My co-founder is Filipina-Mexican, and it’s not clear if she’d be covered by a donor bank. And regardless, if you could choose between using a stranger’s cells, or your own, wouldn’t you choose your own? Personalized stem cells are our OPPORTUNITY to create medicines that truly work for me, you, and EVERYONE. 

But to make the process of stem cell production affordable & scalable, we need to automate it. Different people have tried to solve this problem in different ways, but I decided to use… physics.

Since childhood, I’ve been a die-hard physics fan, gazing at the stars and dreaming about space travel. Thanks, Mom, for not thinking I was weird. My family moved around a lot, from Saudi Arabia to Bangladesh to Germany to Sri Lanka, so I had to learn new languages and cultures constantly. Physics became a universal language that I didn’t have to relearn with every move. When I started my Ph.D., I joined a laser physics lab because lasers are the coolest. BUT I decided to dabble in biology even though I hadn’t taken a biology class since 10th grade. I started using lasers to engineer cells and when I talked to biologists they were amazed by the idea. 

And here’s why: scientists are always looking for ways to make biology more precise. Sometimes cell culture can feel like cooking — you add some chemicals, stir it, heat it, see what happens, try it again. By contrast, lasers are so precise. You can target one individual cell among millions. At precise intervals – every minute, every hour, every six hours, you name it.

I realized that instead of doing the tedious process of stem cell culture by hand, we could use lasers to remove bad actors.

And to make it fully automated, we decided to use machine learning to identify those unwanted cells, aim lasers, and zap. Algorithms today are great at finding useful information in images, making this a perfect use case for machine learning. 

Here’s how it works: you take a blood sample, put it in a cassette, and use chemicals to revert those blood cells into stem cells, like always. Instead of having a human look for unwanted cells & remove them using a pipette, the machine identifies the unwanted cells and zaps them with a laser. As you can see, this entire process happens by machine. The computer decides when & how often to prune your cells for optimal results and it uses a robotic arm to run the process. After repeated pruning, you end up with a perfect culture of YOUR stem cells, a personalized bank, that we can store & use at any time.

In the future, we’ll have Stem Cell Farms with stacks and stacks of, hundreds, and then millions of cassettes, each cassette a stem cell bank for one specific person. Nurses will take a sample of the baby’s cord blood at birth and ship it off for cultivation. And for the rest of their life, their stem cell culture will be on file, banked, available for any medical need that may arise. If they develop heart disease, their doctor can order up heart cells. If they have hair loss, they can order up new hair. And it’s truly scalable because it’s entirely done by machine. 

One of the most immediate applications of this technology is for implants. Dr. Kapil Bharti at the National Eye Institute is running a breakthrough personalized stem cell-derived therapy trial in the US for blindness. As this process becomes cheaper, scientists can run more & more clinical trials at scale to develop NEW treatments that don’t exist today. What costs $1 million today could soon be less than $50,000, and then even cheaper with time.

But it gets even more interesting than that. Perhaps you have the word “longevity” in mind. That’s one possibility. In the future, we might use these stem cell banks to create new organs, new tissues, new skin, and new teeth.

This technology could also lead to a revolution in personalized pharmaceuticals. Right now, the process of prescribing & taking medicine is, to some degree, trial & error. You won’t know if a drug works for you until you put it in your body. But what if you had YOUR cells – eye cells, liver cells, kidney cells — on a chip. Like a miniature human replica of YOU. You could test a drug on those cells in the lab FIRST to see how they respond. If it works, you take the drug. If it doesn’t, pharmacists could order up custom medicines just for YOU. Any individual with any disease could find an effective cure just for them, at an accessible price.

This has been the hope & the dream of scientists for decades. With this technology, we could finally realize the full potential of stem cells: to make on-demand functional cures using YOUR cells. Cures that your body won’t reject. Cures that will truly work for everyone. The future of regenerative medicine is 100% personalized, and it’s a lot closer than you think.  

Thank you.

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