Transcriber: Flavia Pittini Reviewer: David DeRuwe
This is me at four years old
when Santa came to visit the intensive care unit where I was being treated
for a very severe form of spinal meningitis.
Spinal meningitis is an infection that impacts your brain and spinal cord.
The infection spreads very rapidly.
It causes brain damage, and it can be fatal within 24 hours,
and there are still no cures for spinal meningitis.
I realize how fortunate I was due to the intensive care of my doctors
and family, and an immune system that allowed me to combat the disease.
I’m here today, and I’m thrilled to be.
And that experience and that frame of that experience throughout my life
has led me to dedicate my life and my science to advancing ways
that we can optimize the immunity, your immunity,
and these discoveries have led us here and to you.
So today, I’m going to talk about how you are harnessing a very powerful
and potent living medicine right inside of you
and something that can help save lives today.
Now, we know that a weak immune system is deadly.
We also know it’s no surprise,
and you just heard from some of the speakers before me
that as we age, our immune system becomes less powerful, less effective.
This is no more obvious to us than what’s happened in the pandemic.
Since the start of the pandemic,
we actually lost 6 million lives to COVID 19.
75% of those lives were individuals who are older than 65 years old.
What’s remarkable is we lost, through the pandemic, one in 100 adults over 65.
What a massive change and impact to our population demographics.
But infections are not the only pathogens or problems
that impact a vulnerable or weakened immune system.
What about Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, cancer?
Now, cancer has become so prominent in our lives
that we have become nearly apathetic to it.
We come to expect it that we will know
or we will experience cancer in some capacity.
It’s unbelievable.
The pandemic took 6 million lives from us through the course of the pandemic,
and last year alone, we lost 10 million lives to patients with cancer.
Tolerance is an unresponsiveness of the immune system to pathogens.
When we hear about cancer, and when we hear about the number of lives lost,
it has come to be part of our expectation.
And when you look at what happens with the statistics of cancer,
you see the majority of individuals who succumb to the disease
are over 50 years old.
So when I hear cancer, it’s a call to action,
and my team of scientists have been working,
and we've made some discoveries that have brought us to you.
You are possessing living medicines,
living medicines that I can access with a single blood draw,
and I can administer those cells, these very potent cells,
to patients with infectious disease with cancer, with diseases of aging,
central nervous system disorders.
You actually possess parts of an immune system,
a healthy immune system, that we can harness, isolate,
and we can deliver to patients who need it.
Now, I started an immunology company called MiNK Therapeutics,
and at MiNK, we’ve designed the technology to isolate these cells from you,
purify them, and deliver them,
so that you become the treatment for someone who needs it.
Talk about an exciting supply chain.
So what are these cells?
What is this powerful medicine that you’re actually carrying around?
These cells are called invariant natural killer T cells.
These cells are not natural killer cells, and they’re not conventional T cells.
They’re a very specific type of cell,
and these cells are as rare in your peripheral blood or in circulation
as they are potent.
They’re the most highly-conserved cells in immunity.
Well, when you think about immunity, you have two arms of immunity:
natural, your innate immunity, that which you were born with;
and your adaptive immunity, that which evolves over time to combat new threats.
We think about that when we think about COVID 19 adaptive immunity.
These cells actually have the power to modulate both arms of immunity,
unlike any other cell in immunology.
These cells are so powerful, we’ve come to know them
when we were studying animal models that were deficient
or had poorly functioning invariant natural killer T cells.
And in those settings, what we saw, we observed
were high prevalence of diabetes, rapid aging, cancer, autoimmune disorders.
And in those mice models where we actually had a high level
of these particular cell types, what did we see?
A very healthy state of being.
These cells are very powerful,
but it’s been a challenge to industry to try to identify
how we can actually isolate these cells and use them as a treatment.
So how do we do it?
You may be thinking, “Well, how could I take my cells,
donate them to someone who needs them?
Won’t they reject those cells? Are these cells pure?”
And what’s so interesting is the first part now seems easy.
We are able, through a simple blood draw, to actually isolate these cells from you.
We can purify them so that they’re nearly 100% pure,
and then we could administer them to patients
through a simple 30-minute infusion - very straightforward.
But why aren’t these cells rejected from the recipients?
Now, we just heard about organ transplantation,
and we have built on science that actually was developed
somewhat here in Boston.
Dr. David Sachs had developed a protocol at Mass General Hospital,
in which we could induce something called tolerance I’d mentioned earlier,
so that we can successfully transplant organs into patients,
so that their immune system would not reject those organs.
That was just the beginning.
What we’ve done is we’ve been building on this.
Can we actually identify an immune cell that could be transplanted?
Could that cell actually even promote a healthy organ transplantation?
Can it prevent against diseases commonly associated with transplantation,
like graft versus host disease?
And based on the data that we’re generating to date,
we believe that these cells can do so.
So what are we seeing?
This technology sounds like science of the future.
By future technology, transplanting an immune system,
we’re actually delivering this therapy to patients today,
right here in Boston, Dana-Farber Cancer Center,
and also across the nation, from New York to L.A.,
and outside of the country in Brazil.
We’re taking healthy patients’ immune systems,
and we’re transplanting them into patients who need them.
And where did we begin?
We started with the sickest of the sick patients with COVID 19
who were in the ICU and intubated, elderly intubated patients.
Their likelihood of death from disease was 75 to 80%.
When we delivered these cells to those patients,
we’re seeing that about 75% of them are alive,
and that these cells can be administered.
We can take a billion cells from a healthy donor,
we could administer those cells to patients,
and we could see that those patients could accept those cells -
they don’t reject them.
Why they don’t reject them
is because of one of the most unique features of these cells:
These cells actually have a marker that is common in you and common in me.
So your immune system would see my iNKT cells as your own.
It's a really powerful cell type.
We’re thrilled with what we’re seeing in COVID 19, but it doesn’t stop there.
We've been dosing patients with cancer,
and what it appears, what we’re seeing,
is that these cells appear to be changing the trajectory of the disease.
These cells have intelligence. They home to where they need to go.
They arrive at cancer, and then they also recruit cells that are necessary.
So not only can they directly lyse and kill tumor cells,
but they can recruit cells that allow them to modulate or change
the microenvironment where the tumor sits.
They can create a hostile environment,
so that the tumor cannot thrive in that environment,
and that’s through a number of processes
that these cells can use to actually recruit partners to do their job.
This is just the beginning.
Today we’re taking natural native cells,
and we’re delivering them to patients at their greatest need.
And at MiNK Therapeutics, where I’m the CEO,
we're actually going beyond there.
Are there diseases that are harder to reach -
very specific pancreatic or brain cancers,
cancers that have a very specific marker on them?
Can we engineer these cells?
And we can.
So we believe the future of medicine is based on natural innate immunity,
your immunity,
and we’re here to ask you to partner with us on this path
and donate your immune cells, so that we can help more patients.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)