You have cancer.
Sadly, about 40 percent of us will hear those three words within our lifetime,
and half will not survive.
This means that two of five of your closest friends and relatives
will be diagnosed with some form of cancer,
and one will die.
Beyond the physical harships,
roughly one-third of cancer survivors here in the US
will go into debt from treatment.
And they're at least two-and-a-half times more likely to declare bankruptcy
than those without cancer.
This disease is pervasive.
It's emotionally drainging,
and for many,
financially destructive.
But a cancer diagnosis doesn't have to be a death sentence.
Finding cancer early,
closer its genesis,
is one of the critical factors to improving treatment options,
reducing its emotional impact
and minimizing financial burdens.
Most importantly,
finding cancer early --
which is one of the primary aims of my research --
greatly enhances your odds of survival.
If we just look at the case of breast cancer for example,
we find that those who are diagnosed and treated as Stage One
have a five-year survival rate of nearly 100 percent.
Odds that decrease to just 22 percent if treated at Stage Four.
And similar trends are found for cholorectal and ovarian cancer.
Now, we're all aware that an early diagnosis that is accurate
is critical for survival.
The problem is that many cancer diagnostic tools are invasive,
costly,
often inaccurate,
and they can take an agonizing amount of time to get the results back.
Still worse,
when it comes to some forms of cancer,
such as ovarian, liver or pancreatic cancer,
good screening methods simply don't exist,
meaning often people wait until physical symptoms surface,
which are themselves already indicators of late stage progression.
Like a tornado strike in an area without an early warning system,
there is no alarm to warn
for the danger is already at your doorstep ...
when your odds of survival are greatly reduced.
Having the convenience and accessibility of regular screening options
that are affordable, noninvasive and could provide results much sooner,
would provide us with a formidable weapon in the fight against cancer.
An early warning would allow us to get out ahead of the disease
instead of merely following in its relentless wake.
And this is exactly what I've been doing.
For the past three years,
I've been developing technologies
that could ultimately aid clinicians
with rapid, early-stage cancer diagnostics.
And I've been fueled by a deep scientific curiosity,
and a passion to change these statistics.
Last year however,
this fight became much more personal
when my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer.
It was an experience that added a strong and unexpected emotional dimension
to these efforts.
I know firsthand how life-altering treatment can be,
and I'm keenly aware of the emotional havoc
that cancer and wreak on a family,
which in our case included our two young daughters.
Because we found it early during a routine mamogram,
we were able to focus primarly on treatment options
for the localized tumor,
reaffirming to me how important an early diagnosis is.
Unlike other forms of cancer,
mamograms do offer an early stage screening option for breast cancer.
Still, not everyone has this done,
or they may develop cancer before the middle age recommendation
for having a mamogram.
So, there's still a lot of room for improvement,
even for cancers that do have screening options.
And of course,
considerable benefits for those that don't.
A key challenge then for cancer researchers
is to develop methods
that make regular screening for many types of cancers much more accessible.
Imagine a scenario where during your regular checkup,
your doctor can take a simple, noninvasive urine sample,
or other liquid biopsy,
and present you with the results before you even leave the doctor's office.
Such a technology could dramatically reduce the number of people
who slipped through the net of an early stage cancer diagnosis.
My research team of engineers and biochemists
is working on exactly this challenge.
We're working on ways to frequently activate an early stage cancer alarm
by enable regular screenings that would start when a person is healthy
so that action could be taken to stop cancer the moment it emerges,
and before it can progress beyond its infancy.
The silver bullet in this case are tiny [vesacilles],
little escape pods regularly shed by cells called [exosomes].
Exosomes are important biomarkers that provide an early warning system
for the development of cancer.
And because they're abundantly present in just about every bodily fluid,
including blood, urine and saliva,
they're extremely attractive for noninvasive, liquid biopsies.
There's just one problem.
And automated system for rapidly sorting these important biomarkers
is not currently available.
We've created a technology that we call "Nano DOD"
that is capable of precisely this.
Automated exome isolation
to aid rapid cancer diagnostics.
Exosomes are the newest early warning weapon if you will
to emerge on the liquid biopsy front.
And they're really, really small.
They measure just 30 to 150 nanometers in diameter.
This is so tiny
that you could fit about a million of them into a single red blood cell.
That's roughly the difference between a golf ball
and a fine grain piece of sand.
Once thought to be little bins for unwanted cellular waste,
it has been found that cells actually communicate
by producing and absorbing these exosomes
which contain surface receptors,
proteins
and other genetic material collected from their cell of origin.
When absorbed by a neighboring cell,
exosomes release their contents into the receiving cell,
and can set in motion fundamental changes in gene expression.