Transcriber: David Goldovt-Ryzhenkov Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
One of the biggest inspirations in my life was my grandmother.
Her name was Wynema,
which means woman-chief in Cherokee.
She was sick her entire life.
All of the memories I have of her growing up
are of her being sick,
of spending time with her in doctors' offices and in hospitals,
and that was just the normal life that I grew up in.
I grew up in West Texas where - it wasn't a huge metropolitan center,
there weren't major medical centers available.
And what had happened was
the healthcare system didn't have the right tools to figure out
why she was chronically ill.
She lived in chronic pain her entire adult life,
and that was a very profound -
had a very profound effect on her and her family.
She was told by the healthcare system that she was not sick,
that this was all in her head,
so basically she was labelled a hypochondriac.
And that label was really very detrimental,
not only to her, but also to her family.
She planted the seed in me for a love of medicine.
She would always tell - brag about me to the doctors and nurses
when I would visit her about how I was going to be a doctor when I grew up.
No one in my family had ever gone to college,
so this was a big seed to plant.
We lived in the middle of the desert
and there was not a lot of talk about college.
And being a young, scrawny girl growing up in West Texas,
I didn't really fit in, and that was okay.
So fastforwarding to today, I've now co-founded two companies.
I'm the CEO and co-founder of Aperiomics.
We're a biotech company,
and our mission is to advance healthcare through revolutionizing infection testing.
With the latest technologies and new technologies
that we're developing at the company every day,
we can identify nearly 40,000 microorganisms in every sample.
That's every known bacteria, virus, parasite and fungus.
This will change everything about how infections are identified.
Why is this important?
Why do we need to identify so many things?
The current testing looks for one thing at a time,
or five things at a time.
And that current testing has failed so many people.
We now have millions upon millions of people
living with chronic infection.
And this is the reality.
The reality is
these people are being told that they are not sick.
They're being told that they have a psychological condition.
They're being told that they have an "autoimmune condition"
because the doctors just don't have the right tools
to figure out why they're sick.
So, rather then live with this reality,
we are pushing this forward,
and we are changing the way that infections are diagnosed.
We are changing the way that we consider what can be an infection
and what can't be an infection.
In this day and age, in advancing technologies,
there's no reason why people should be made to live in chronic pain
and chronic suffering for decades of their life.
Case in point:
This is Joan.
She is 68 years old; she lives in West Virginia.
She has been in pain for much of her adult life,
with no real explanation for why this is going on.
She's been diagnosed with Lyme disease,
she's been diagnosed with arthritis from Lyme disease,
and she's been diagnosed with pain of unknown origin.
Her doctor ordered a blood test from us.
We received this blood test in our lab,
and we removed all the DNA from the sample.
We then took that DNA
and used a process called "shotgun metagenomic sequencing,"
which creates a genetic fingerprint,
or a genetic blueprint of everything that was in the sample.
From that genetic blueprint, we were to screen 30 million DNA fragments.
So we looked at massive amounts of information
from this one blood sample.
From 30 million DNA fragments, we identified 270 DNA fragments
that matched perfectly to Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
She did not have Lyme disease.
She had tuberculosis.
So how in the world did her doctors miss this?
Well, she didn't present as a typical tuberculosis case.
She was not coughing and spitting up blood,
which is what you think of when you think of tuberculosis.
She had an extrapulmonary chronic infection of tuberculosis.
So the tuberculosis had originally been in her lungs,
but then it had moved into the other parts of her body.
It had set up shop in the joints and her spine.
And so while she didn't present with the typical symptoms of tuberculosis,
she did present with chronic extrapulmonary symptoms of tuberculosis.
So she had massive joint pain and swelling,
and her spine was beginning to curve.
So the future is now.
We have heard for years
that precision medicine will change the course of medicine.
We have heard for years that precision medicine
is going to help the human condition in amazing ways.
And so far it's not really been executed on just yet.
But what we are doing
is we are bringing this precision medicine into people's lives right now.
So, instead of looking for things one at a time,
or five at a time,
we screen for everything that's known.
And by looking for everything that's known,
it gives us so much more information,
it gives the doctors so much more information
so they can make a more -
a more educated decision on what an appropriate course is for the patient,
given all the information that they have.
Had my grandmother been alive today, she would be 88.
She died at 64,
and her prognosis would be very different today.
Her prognosis today would have been met with a lot more advances in healthcare,
and likely she would have been able to carry on
a much better quality of life.
Innovations that are going on right now
are going to disrupt and change healthcare
in ways that we just can't imagine.
We are pushing forward into a new world
where the computational power of what we can do
is better than ever before.
And it will only continue to increase and continue to get better.
The reality of big data is here.
We are able to look at things in ways we never could before.
Using these technologies
and combining the power of computation with medical knowledge and data,
we are going to be able to advance the human condition in ways
that we can't even yet imagine.
We are going to be able to improve the human condition
in ways that are going to be remarkable.
And I am honored to be one of the leaders bringing this technology forward.
So as you think about your healthcare,
the call to action here is to be an active participant in your healthcare.
Understand that there are new technologies and new advances coming,
and push and support and encourage for innovation.
Innovation will be able to change everything
about how the human condition is,
and will be able to provide a much better outcome for all of us
on planet Earth.
(Applause)