People often ask me what I do for a living.
And the truth most of the times
it’s very hard for me to explain it.
On the plane while coming here,
I was looking for examples and saw the Avengers movie,
Age of Ultron.
For those of you who don’t remember it
or haven’t seen it, I’ve made some drawings for you.
This is the scene: we’re in a lab,
there’s Ultron who’s trying to transfer his consciousness to a new body.
A more human body, a bioprinted one,
having cells and tissues.
Behind him are the Avengers, who know nothing about science,
and then a scientist come
who’s going to bioprint Ultron’s body.
In real life, there’s no Ultron, there’s no Avengers,
but what that scientist did in that scene,
I do it every day.
I’m an Argentine and I live in the United States.
I’m a doctor and a researcher
and for many years I’ve been working at Harvard, MIT,
in the Science, Health and Technology division
printing small organs
we put in a chip to test pharmaceuticals.
What do I mean by pharmaceuticals?
They’re the drugs
you all have in your medicine cabinets.
And for that medicine to get to your hands,
one billion dollars are spent.
I’ll say it again: one billion dollars.
And that’s just the base.
It takes more than 10 years,
from the first compost, the molecule,
until the medicine gets to your hands.
To test the medicine is safe and effective,
it needs to go through three basic tests:
trials in cells, trials in animals,
and then trials in humans.
Trials in cells are made in two dimensions,
cells are stuck onto a plastic jar,
the lower and upper parts
have a liquid on top that keeps them alive and well.
As you can imagine, they are in two dimensions,
and they’re totally different from the three-dimensionality of humans.
Then we go to the animal model, little animals.
As you can imagine, this is the best model we have so far
but we’re nothing like rats, right?
Maybe some, but that’s something else.
Then we get to the clinical trials, with humans,
and here’s where a bunch of medicine
fail for a lot of reasons,
but the two most important ones are:
because they’re not efficient enough, which means they didn’t have an effect
in the human being, and also because of toxicity,
they’re toxic and hurt you.
We suggest using organs in a chip.
In the lab, what we do is we take human cells
and combine them with a hydrogel.
That hydrogel is like a sort of gelatin.
We put it in a bioprinter
and then this bit of tissue goes inside a closed chip.
And the final goal of these chips
is to replicate the function of an organ in the microscale,
to know how toxic is a medicine.
But how do we really make the chips?
A small container arrives to the lab,
with human cells, with donors.
They can be from any of you.
We mix that with this hydrogel
and then we put inside a bioprinter.
Then we tell the bioprinter with a program
which 3D shape we want cells to adopt with that hydrogel.
And once we have that, they go inside the chips.
These chips aren’t like computer ones,
they’re plastic chips that are joint to a bomb
that’s going to pass a flux through them, and that flux has oxygen
and nourishment to the cells.
Once we know the chips are okay,
we start the trial with pharmaceutical drugs.
Here I brought you a chip, those on the back might not see it well.
It fits in the palm of a hand, as you can see.
Once we have this, we start testing the drug.
Just so you have an idea, I worked a lot with a medicine
called Paracetamol.
It’s a medicine that’s used for headaches,
for toothache when you’re not feeling well,
it’s anti-inflammatory.
By using small doses of Paracetamol in the chip,
we can tell what’s going to happen in a bigger scale
when it goes to the human being.
Just so you have an idea, that thing you’re seeing
is the heart in a chip, you’re seeing it beat,
they’re cardiac fibers before putting the medicine in them.
The most important thing of all of this
is that chips have sensors
and these sensors will tell us how the state of the chip.
They’ll measure temperature, oxygen, protein,
and tell us in real time what’s happening to that transparent chamber.
Until now, we’ve created a liver, a heart,
and blood vessels in a chip.
(Applause)
This is my last creation, a blood vessel in a chip.
In the future, we want to create bigger and more complex organs.
Above all, we want diversity,
we want all of you to be inside a chip
so we know how you’ll react to different medicines.
Maybe someday we’ll be able to print an entire body
and transfer our old consciousness
to that new bioprinted body, as Ultron tried to.
That’s what we’re working for.
(Applause)
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