(upbeat music)
- Some people are firm on the notion
that social media is bad for society.
Some say that it disconnects us more than it connects us.
They point to the increases in depression and anxiety
as reasons why it's not good for our mental health.
But I wanna give you one example where social media
has had a fantastic impact on our society.
In the midst of my social media fame,
I started a foundation called Limitless Tomorrow
and my aim was to help other individuals
and even companies who aspire to do great things
in this world to make a change that affects
all of us as humans.
The startup funding for this foundation
started through a unique collaboration
between Coffee Meets Bagel, a dating app, and myself.
I ended up auctioning a date off for charity
and raised almost $100,000 for my new foundation.
Now, a lot of people have asked me questions,
where did that money go?
Where does it go now?
This video highlights a prime example
of a person set out to change the world
in a positive way for us all.
Meet Dr. Angelo Leto Barone.
- Approximately 10 million people overall in the world
suffer from various ear and nose deformities.
At ReconstratA we have a dream.
We imagine a world where we can easily treat the severe
facial deformities in an easy, reliable
and cost-effective way.
So basically thanks to Limitless Tomorrow,
we were able to create a cookie cutter
for ear and nose reconstruction.
- Dr. Leto Barone, can you tell us what your current
position is and how you figured out that you're
gonna go into your field of choice
because we have a lot of medical students watching.
They're trying to figure out what they
wanna do with their lives.
They're curious to know about all aspects of medicine,
so how did you get into the the field that you're in now?
- Absolutely, so I was actually six years old
and I saw this man go around my town back home in Italy.
He was going around, he had a complete burn of his face.
It was completely disfigured and I was looking
at this person and I saw that he had lost
like a sense of self.
So I just pulled my mom.
I was like, who's the doctor who does that,
who fixes that?
She was like, you know, being a physician herself--
- Pretty impressive for a six-year-old.
- Right.
And she was like a plastic surgeon.
I was like that's what I wanna be.
- But you have a unique journey because you didn't just go
and do the specialty here in the United States.
You were born in Italy, right?
- Correct.
- Palermo's your hometown.
- Yep, where I went to medical school.
- Nice.
And how did you do that?
Did you go through medical school right away?
What's the training in Italy like?
- So the training is you do five years of high school
and then it was very rigorous.
And then you go straight into medical school
which is six year.
- Which is different than what we have here
in the United States because we do high school,
university then medical school.
- Correct.
- And then in medical school, were you set
in saying I'm gonna specialize in plastic surgery?
- I was set.
Everyone kept saying you're gonna change your mind
a thousand times.
Didn't happen.
I had my mission and I stuck with it.
And I went to the University of Palermo Medical School
then I was recruited to the residency
with the program there.
And then I decided that--
- Now, was that a competitive process
because here in the United States, if you want
a plastic surgery residency, very difficult,
you have to be at the top of your class.
As you know, if you're a foreign graduate,
it's very difficult to get a position
in plastic surgery residency.
So how is that in Italy?
Does that compare?
- It's also very challenging.
There is less spots and also less people applying,
but at the same time, you can only apply
to one program at a time.
- Wow.
- So I applied to the only program that I was interested in
and you either match or don't match,
so it's little bit more...
- Scarier.
- Yep, a little scarier.
I did a lot of research through residency.
A few years I was at Harvard, the Mass General,
and then I went back home, finished residency
and decided to come back and join
the Johns Hopkins University program.
- Interesting, so what kind of research
did you do there while you were--
- It was mostly teaching engineering
and vascularized composite allotransplantation which is--
- That's not complicated at all, by the way,
totally easy to say.
- It's a fancy word for face and hand transplant research.
So you know that these operations,
besides being extremely challenging,
they require a lot of immunosuppressants
to make sure that the body doesn't reject the face
from the cadaver who donated it.
- Very impressive stuff.
You're working at Johns Hopkins.
You're a happy but very tired plastic surgery resident
and you wake up one morning or you're in the OR one day
and you say I have an idea.
Take me through that.
- It was both in Italy and the U.S. it started,
mostly in Italy.
We were doing a case and we were basically having problems
with the cartilage and lacking cartilage
and I was thinking as we were trying to treat
this microtia case, so this kid was born without an ear,
and we were trying to carve this ear out of rib cartilage,
which is a cartilage that comes from the rib cage,
I realize that it was a process that was,
that entailed a great amount of detail and skill
that probably most plastic surgeons did not have,
despite going receive your training,
but it also required a very long surgery.
And this is course suboptimal for a patient
who's 10 years old and who has to undergo
a 12 hour operation.
So I was like, this is 2017 or 2015, whatever year it was,
2012, and we cannot do this, we cannot have this operation
last this long.
So I thought what if somebody made a cookie cutter
that could allow us to do this very quickly.
- Do you like cookies,
is that why you went to the cookie cutter?
- I love cookies, I like the Cookie Monster.
- See, we never really give cookies any benefit
because we always blame diabetes on cookies,
all these issues, but look, cookies can save the world
and clearly they were a motivating factor here.
- Absolutely, just like playing with Play-Doh.
- Exactly.
- There was really a humanitarian mission
and purpose behind it.
In the U.S., it's easy to perform such an operation
with these incredibly talented surgeons
and with the resources that we have,
but there are resources for countries
that cannot have either access to plastic surgeons
with that training or have the
economical potential to undergo the surgery.
- Sure.
- So we thought if we make this cookie cutter,
we could actually go to these countries
and not only as a company donate this device
to those hospitals, but also bring our own set
of physicians and train them to perform the operation
without, basically giving them a fish,
but basically teaching them how to fish.
One of my students who was actually writing papers
with me and who was very interested in plastic surgery,
who holds a biomedical engineer degree from MIT,
told me one day, like, hey--
- That's not impressive.
- Not impressive at all.
Too bad he couldn't be here today.
So basically he was like, do you have any ideas
that we can actually bring to fruition
because he had like a month off and I thought,
you know what, in Italy I thought of this cookie cutter.
We need to really bring it to life.
And we designed it together and we started
our Kickstarter campaign which is actually how we
got in touch with you, looking for funds.
- Today's a great day because today's the first day
that I actually see your devise.
- Yes, absolutely.
- This magical device that can change so many people's lives
and we have the device right here with us.
This very beautiful project.
Not only is it functional, but it looks great,
so that whole aspect is there
from a plastic surgery standpoint.
So tell us a little bit about it.
- Absolutely, so this is AuryzoN and was mostly funded
through our Kickstarter campaign as well as
the Limitless Tomorrow's funds
that you graciously awarded us.
So it's basically modular components.
You have a top cassette that is basically customizable
and then this would be anchored.
There you go, super easy.
And then you would remove the base cassette.
You would select the cassette that has--
- There's sizes here if you don't see.
- Right, so this is a small ear,
which is a 48 millimeters, for example.
- I have small ears.
- And give this gives basically an idea
of where the cartilage should sit in order to be stamped
appropriately with the blade.
You would just press.
And once you, boom, once you raise it,
you have something that you can suture together with wires.
- Now how much time does a process like this save
from the actual sculpting, because there are surgeons
in the world that can do it relatively quickly,
but you could probably count them on one hand.
- Right, I was lucky enough to actually go to Dr. Nagata's
clinic in Japan, he's the guru of ear reconstruction
and one of the surgeons who advanced the field.
So currently the gold standard of reconstruction
is his technique, which is what this allows to do
super quick, so Nagata can do this operation
in about four, five hours.
Most surgeons take up to 12 hours.
And as you have mentioned before,
one minute in the OR cost $82.
So if you consider 12 hours of an operation
of this kind, the cost would be about $42, $45,000,
you guys do the math.
So this would allow it to carve everything
at a very precise level in a matter of seconds.
- Excellent.
- And then the assembling and then the--
- Actual attachment.
- The attachment to subcutaneous pocket
would take probably like an hour or two.
- And now the other techniques that exist,
what's the different between those and--
- So there is another technique that uses a polymer
and a synthetic ear framework and that is--
- So it's not human.
- It's not human.
- It's made out of different compounds
that are not found within the body.
- Correct, it's basically a biocompatible plastic.
- Okay.
- And you basically put underneath the skin flaps
and you create an ear.
Unfortunately, there results are not always optimal
and not in everyone's hands are optimal.
And at the same time, it's still a foreign body,
so it can give a lot of inflammation,
it can give infections, it can stick out
and we call that extrusion.
And when it sticks out,
usually the whole area gets infected.
You can go back to square one or even to a worse scenario.
- Has there ever been a thought
about using donor application cartilage,
or maybe even animal cartilage?
You know pig cartilage is used all over in medical stuff.
- Absolutely.
So, pig cartilage or cadaver cartilage
have a hurdle which is the fact that pig cartilage
is a xenotransplant, so it's a transplant
between two different species and for that reason
it will be rejected.
So it cannot be used.
So it would resorb and actually create,
probably create an infection as well.
At the same time, cadaver cartilage,
which we use actually during this kind of reconstruction,
has been irrigated and the cells are not going to--
- They're not quality.
- Well they're not going to give an immunological response,
so they're not gonna be attacked by your own body.
So it is used, sometimes it resorbs a lot
and often we did not get enough of that in big pieces
to really make the ear, so we really need to get
the patient's own ribs.
- Got it.
What's the next step?
How are we gonna see this in real-world application?
How long does that take?
- So as you can imagine, it takes a long time
because first it's gonna...
It will need to be tested by skilled surgeons
in a very controlled fashion,
which is what we plan on doing in my institution.
It could be as quick as one or two years.
It could take way longer.
It really all depends on the funding that we
will be able to secure and then of course
the reach that we can get through you
and in general our institution.
- And you.
- And you guys.
- So people wanna learn more about the AuryzoN device,
they wanna maybe even donate and help you
achieve even more spectacular results with the device,
what do they do, where do they go?
- So they can donate definitely to our company.
We are setting up a non-for-profit branch
that will allow us to finance both the device
and the humanitarian mission portion for it.
- We wanna give a huge thank you for having you here today.
- Thank you for having me.
- And all the amazing work that you're doing.
And we wish you the best of luck from myself
and I'm sure everyone watching at home.
- Thank you very much.
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