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So it was about four years ago, five years ago,

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I was sitting on a stage in Philadelphia, I think it was,

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with a bag similar to this.

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And I was pulling a molecule out of this bag.

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And I was saying, you don't know this molecule really well,

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but your body knows it extremely well.

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And I was thinking that your body hated it, at the time,

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because we are very immune to this. This is called alpha-gal epitope.

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And the fact that pig heart valves have lots of these on them

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is the reason that you can't transplant a pig heart valve into a person easily.

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Actually our body doesn't hate these.

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Our body loves these. It eats them.

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I mean, the cells in our immune system are always hungry.

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And if an antibody is stuck to one of these things

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on the cell, it means "that's food."

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Now, I was thinking about that and I said, you know, we've got this

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immune response to this ridiculous molecule

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that we don't make, and we see it a lot in other animals and stuff.

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But I said we can't get rid of it,

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because all the people who tried to transplant heart valves

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found out you can't get rid of that immunity.

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And I said, why don't you use that?

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What if I could stick this molecule,

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slap it onto a bacteria

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that was pathogenic to me, that had just invaded my lungs?

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I mean I could immediately tap into

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an immune response that was already there,

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where it was not going to take five or six days to develop it --

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it was going to immediately attack whatever this thing was on.

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It was kind of like the same thing that happens when you,

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like when you're getting stopped for a traffic ticket in L.A.,

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and the cop drops a bag of marijuana in the back of your car,

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and then charges you for possession of marijuana.

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It's like this very fast, very efficient way to get people off the street.

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(Laughter)

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So you can take a bacteria

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that really doesn't make these things at all,

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and if you could clamp these on it really well

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you have it taken off the street.

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And for certain bacteria

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we don't have really efficient ways to do that anymore.

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Our antibiotics are running out.

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And, I mean, the world apparently is running out too.

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So probably it doesn't matter 50 years from now --

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streptococcus and stuff like that will be rampant --

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because we won't be here. But if we are --

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(Laughter)

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we're going to need something to do with the bacteria.

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So I started working with this thing,

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with a bunch of collaborators.

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And trying to attach this to things that were

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themselves attached to certain specific target zones,

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bacteria that we don't like.

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And I feel now like George Bush.

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It's like "mission accomplished."

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So I might be doing something dumb, just like he was doing at the time.

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But basically what I was talking about there we've now gotten to work.

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And it's killing bacteria. It's eating them.

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This thing can be stuck, like that little green triangle up there,

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sort of symbolizing this right now.

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You can stick this to something called a DNA aptamer.

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And that DNA aptamer will attach specifically

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to a target that you have selected for it.

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So you can find a little feature on a bacterium that you don't like,

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like Staphylococcus -- I don't like it in particular,

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because it killed a professor friend of mine last year.

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It doesn't respond to antibiotics. So I don't like it.

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And I'm making an aptamer that will have this attached to it.

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That will know how to find Staph when it's in your body,

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and will alert your immune system to go after it.

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Here's what happened. See that line on the very top

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with the little dots?

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That's a bunch of mice that had been poisoned

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by our scientist friends down in Texas,

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at Brooks Air Base, with anthrax.

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And they had also been treated with a drug that we made

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that would attack anthrax in particular,

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and direct your immune system to it.

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You'll notice they all lived, the ones on the top line --

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that's a 100 percent survival rate.

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And they actually lived another 14 days,

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or 28 when we finally killed them,

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and took them apart and figured out what went wrong.

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Why did they not die?

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And they didn't die because they didn't have anthrax anymore.

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So we did it. Okay?

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(Applause)

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Mission accomplished!

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(Applause)