"My name is Darrell Kotton.
I'm the director for the center for regenerative medicine of Boston University and Boston Medical
Center and we're sitting here in our conference room in the middle of this center which we
affectionately call the CREM.
So the focus of my lab is lung regeneration and lung stem cells.
And so we don't just have one project.
We have many projects that are usually led by each student or trainee or junior faculty
member in the lab.
And all those projects have a common theme of trying to use in some way [unclear 00:00:55]
stem cells to either understand a lung disease or to help treat a lung disease.
The lung diseases we're mostly interested in are those that feature lung degeneration
in some form, so genetic lung diseases that people know by names like cystic fibrosis
or there's an inherited form of emphysema which is a big focus of ours for more than
a decade called [unclear 00:01:17] deficiency and pulmonary fibrosis and these kind of end
stage lung diseases for which there are very limited treatments are the focus of our lab.
So the easiest way to kind of explain what we do is that we think about people walking
around with diseased lungs like somebody with emphysema or cystic fibrosis for which there
are limited treatments and we think about what would it take to make new lung cells
for them and if they were their own lung cells in a laboratory could those lung cells predict
which drugs might work for that individual and one day could we use their own lung cells
that we might engineer for them, could we use those to build functional lung tissues
or entire functioning lungs that we could put back into the patient and one day have
a cure, a new lung that was theirs or a new lung cell that would engraft into them to
help heal their diseased lung.
So the idea of creating from scratch really new lung cells that's a patient's very own
meaning it contains their DNA, their genetic background but it's grown in a laboratory
dish.
This is what drives and fuels our work in the hope that those cells can help their disease,
help us understand the disease, develop new drugs, but also reconstitute or repair their
disease directly by delivering those cells back to them.
That's what drives our and motivates our work.
In the end our work would have resulted in the ability to take stem cells that we can
make from any patient with any lung disease really but especially those diseases that
have no cure or treatment currently.
And my hope would be that the patients one day with those diseases could have a stem
cell made from their blood, coaxed forward into real lung cells and those lung cells
could have the gene defect responsible for their disease fixed and those cells could
be healthy.
Now cured cells could be put back into them.
I don't know the form that they'll be put back into whether it's a whole bio-artificial
lung or one cell at a time or one tissue at a time but my hope is those patients will
be breathing easier, be cured and that when a parent hears their child's diagnosed with
a devastating disease or a genetic lung disease of any kind really that parent will be given
a plan that many scientists spent their lives working to achieve that plan so their child
will have hope, won't have to suffer, and can grow up a normal child on the playground.
That's the hope.
I also hope that part of that cure will result from availability of the stem cell reagents
we and my colleagues are making so we're totally committed to making these large repositories
that will be shared around the world with cells that grow forever so that no matter
what happens to us or how long the work takes, those cells will continue growing across the
world in 1,000 labs all focused on the mission of helping lung disease.
That's what I hope will come out of the work.
I think of somebody's curious, interested in science, certainly the life of a laboratory
scientist, a researcher, it's a wonderful life and a wonderful journey surrounded by
people that are friendly and smart.
There's a lot of social aspects to it and I wish I knew along the way that actually
the journey wasn't about the goal or climbing to the top of the mountain, that every step
of the way is actually part of what we live for.
It should be fun and pleasurable and the hard work isn't lacking in fun and enjoyment.
The ride itself and the journey itself and the training and the years of studying area
also really fun and stimulating intellectually and I would like to say that kids today that
if kids today are like me when I was a kid I was very focused on what will I be when
I grow up, how do I make the right decision and I wish I hadn't done that.
I wish I was more aware that the process was just as important as the end goal.
It's not really the end of the road that's the driving force.
It's also the road itself that's the meaning of life."