WEBVTT

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So I am a pediatric cancer doctor

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and stem-cell researcher at Stanford University

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where my clinical focus has been bone marrow transplantation.

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Now, inspired by Jill Bolte Taylor last year,

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I didn't bring a human brain,

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but I did bring a liter of bone marrow.

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And bone marrow is actually what we use

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to save the lives of tens of thousands of patients,

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most of whom have advanced malignancies like leukemia and lymphoma

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and some other diseases.

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So, a few years ago, I'm doing my transplant fellowship at Stanford.

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I'm in the operating room. We have Bob here,

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who is a volunteer donor.

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We're sending his marrow across the country to save the life

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of a child with leukemia.

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So actually how do we harvest this bone marrow?

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Well we have a whole O.R. team, general anesthesia, nurses,

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and another doctor across from me.

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Bob's on the table, and we take this sort of small needle,

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you know, not too big.

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And the way we do this is we basically

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place this through the soft tissue,

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and kind of punch it into the hard bone,

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into the tuchus -- that's a technical term --

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and aspirate about 10 mls of bone marrow out,

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each time, with a syringe.

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And hand it off to the nurse. She squirts it into a tin.

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Hands it back to me. And we do that again and again.

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About 200 times usually.

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And by the end of this my arm is sore, I've got a callus on my hand,

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let alone Bob,

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whose rear end looks something more like this,

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like Swiss cheese.

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So I'm thinking, you know, this procedure hasn't changed in about 40 years.

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And there is probably a better way to do this.

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So I thought of a minimally invasive approach,

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and a new device that we call the Marrow Miner.

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This is it.

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And the Marrow Miner, the way it works is shown here.

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Our standard see-through patient.

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Instead of entering the bone dozens of times,

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we enter just once, into the front of the hip or the back of the hip.

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And we have a flexible, powered catheter

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with a special wire loop tip that stays inside the crunchy part of the marrow

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and follows the contours of the hip, as it moves around.

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So it enables you to very rapidly aspirate,

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or suck out, rich bone marrow very quickly through one hole.

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We can do multiple passes through that same entry.

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No robots required.

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And, so, very quickly, Bob can just get one puncture, local anesthesia,

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and do this harvest as an outpatient.

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So I did a few prototypes. I got a small little grant at Stanford.

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And played around with this a little bit.

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And our team members developed this technology.

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And eventually we got two large animals, and pig studies.

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And we found, to our surprise, that we not only got bone marrow out,

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but we got 10 times the stem cell activity

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in the marrow from the Marrow Miner, compared to the normal device.

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This device was just FDA approved in the last year.

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Here is a live patient. You can see it following the flexible curves around.

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There will be two passes here, in the same patient, from the same hole.

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This was done under local anesthesia, as an outpatient.

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And we got, again, about three to six times more stem cells

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than the standard approach done on the same patient.

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So why should you care? Bone marrow is a very rich source of adult stem cells.

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You all know about embryonic stem cells.

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They've got great potential but haven't yet entered clinical trials.

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Adult stem cells are throughout our body,

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including the blood-forming stem cells in our bone marrow,

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which we've been using as a form of stem-cell therapy

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for over 40 years.

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In the last decade there's been an explosion of use

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of bone marrow stem cells to treat the patient's other diseases

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such as heart disease, vascular disease,

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orthopedics, tissue engineering,

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even in neurology to treat Parkinson's

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and diabetes.

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We've just come out, we're commercializing, this year,

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generation 2.0 of the Marrow Miner.

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The hope is that this gets more stem cells out,

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which translates to better outcomes.

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It may encourage more people to sign up to be

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potential live-saving bone marrow donors.

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It may even enable you to bank

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your own marrow stem cells, when you're younger and healthier,

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to use in the future should you need it.

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And ultimately -- and here's a picture of our

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bone marrow transplant survivors,

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who come together for a reunion each year at Stanford.

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Hopefully this technology will let us

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have more of these survivors in the future.

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Thanks.

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(Applause)