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Please welcome MIT professor and 2015 National Inventors
Hall of Fame Inductee, Ioannis Yannas.
This discovery changed my professional life.
The discovery we made, Dr. John Burke-- my surgeon colleague
and myself.
It was a big surprise, totally unexpected, and hard
to believe.
It used to be called artificial skin,
but it was soon recognized as the first example of organ
regeneration in adults.
Being inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame
is a very big honor for me, especially when I
look at the names of other people
who had been previously deducted-- names like Steve
Jobs and Wozniak, Louis Pasteur, the Wright Brothers--
important names that I grew up with.
It really makes me feel a little small.
My photo was shown like I was the leader of a totalitarian
regime.
A little too much for me.
What I see is what used to be many, many years ago
when this discovery was made.
Some of our nation's greatest living inventors.
The recognition that this work is getting
will make it more clear there is something here
that has future and needs to be developed by other people
and made into one of the brand new tools of medicine.
In 1969, I was an assistant professor at MIT.
I thought that it could be a great idea
to meet one of the doctors in the Boston area.
That person turned out to be Dr. John
Burke who was then head of the Shriners Burns
Institute in Boston.
I found in him in a very difficult problem in medicine
that I thought I could contribute to each solution.
And I think what he saw in me was a material scientist who
could create a material that would be
useful to treat his patients.
There was a mutual clicking that happened when we met.
Dr. Burke was looking for a very sophisticated Band-Aid.
He had patients who were mostly children.
The children had massive burns.
Basically, the prelude to death unless you do something
drastic about it.
Dr. Shelton, Dr. Paul Shelton.
I remember very clearly the day that Dr. Burke took me
on a tour of one of the wards.
It was a very, very difficult sight.
I was shocked.
I was shocked beyond belief in what I was seeing there.
It was a very important moment in my life,
because it guided me towards a direction
that I would not have chosen.
I remember the children were lying in their beds.
There was extensive bandaging of faces and limbs in these kids.
Yeah.
Dr. Burke would softly explain the situation to me.
These pictures, in my mind, have stayed with me.
And they became the reason why I started
working on this project.
There was a great deal of human misery that was confronting me.
And I felt that I had to do something about it.
It was clear that we needed to solve the problem
as soon as possible.
The objective of speeding up the rate of closing of these wounds
that, in effect, became the problem
that Dr. Burke and I would have to solve.
My students and myself were synthesizing polymers
from different chemical families--
things like plastics, rubbers, textile fibers,
and the tissues of our body.
We were putting things dressings in foils.
We would then take the subway to Boston
and then go to the Shriners animal laboratory facility.
The technician would then put them on the animals.
This was going on family after chemical family.
None of the dressings we had worked with
had any effect on the speed of closure
of these wounds in the animals.
So far the projects had been a total failure.
I started thinking that maybe a polymer I had been working
with in my PhD thesis, which was collagen-- a collagen is
a polymer of the tissues of the body--
that maybe I should try this since almost everything else
had failed.
Lo and behold, this collagen dressing,
instead of speeding up the rates of closure,
it actually delayed it and make it very, very slow
so that's the wound would hardly close.
We were basically going the wrong way.
Instead of making it close faster,
we're making it close slower.
Nobody likes to have a failed experiment.
It's the last thing you want.
Trying to get to understand why the experiment had failed
was a very important step.
This was a great moment for myself and for Dr. Burke.
It was a great moment because of what
we decided to do with that failure, which
was to not just let go and go home and cry,
but to start trying to understand what had happened.
It was then that we saw that the animals that
had been treated with the collagen
dressings we're not making scar as every other animal before
had done.
The last dressing we had used was actually causing new skin
to be formed instead of scar-- skin not scar-- skin
that functions like skin as opposed to scar that does not
function like skin.
In addition to keeping children alive,
it gave them a chance to regrow the skin that they had lost.
It was way beyond what I expected.
It was way, way beyond that.
We could hardly find it possible to publish our results,
because people would not want to publish a paper that says that
you have regenerated something that everybody knows you cannot
regenerate.
Dr. Burke was very happy, because he could see now
a new way of treating his patients that
did not exist before.
Back in the 1970s, there were a lot of advances in ICU care.
And as a result of that, these very severe burn patients
were able to be kept alive for long periods of time,
but they oftentimes didn't have enough donor sites or skin
to cover them up.
So it was a bleak time.
Dr. Burke was a surgeon who espoused the concept
of early excision and grafting.
That wasn't universally adopted back then.
Taking a patient to the operating room
early on to carry out excision and grafting
was a dangerous prospect for the patient.
The excision can easily lead to very significant blood loss.
In addition, harvesting donor sites
can lead to significant blood loss.
So you needed a surgeon like Dr. Burke who was meticulous,
who was careful, and did this relatively new technique
and to make this invention successful.
The availability of Dr. Burke and Yannas's artificial skin,
which became known as INTEGRA, tipped the scale
towards early excision and grafting of large body surface
area burns.
Our skin is made up of two layers, the outer epidermis
and the inner dermis.
Now the epidermis is damaged.
It grows back quickly, and it regenerates.
But when our dermis is damaged, the dermis
never grows back by itself.
Instead the wound contracts and forms the scar.
Now when our regeneration template,
or what used to be called artificial skin, when
that is used, something entirely different things.
The contraction is stopped.
And the cells of the person move into the template.
There, the cells regenerate a new dermis or the template
is broken down and absorbed.
Not only are you able to solve the acute burn problem
and keep the patients alive, but at the end,
you're able to give them the skin that's
more natural and supple, pliable with less scar.
Back before advances like INTEGRA were available,
patients like Lauren, who had 35% full thickness
burn injuries were at risk of dying.
And now our goal is to try to restore them
as much as possible to the state that they were in
prior to having the injury.
So that is an absolutely transformative change
in burn care over the course of my lifetime.
And what Dr. Burke and Dr. Yannas did
has played a huge role in that change in our goals.
Look so good.
You've made my day.
[PATIENT LAUGHING]
It is quite clear that many lives
were saved by the development of the artificial skin.
We have a patient at Shriners right now
who sustained an over 80% deep second and third degree burn.
And his life was clearly saved by the use of INTEGRA.
My name is Matthew Hicks.
Are you going to get shy?
Yeah.
Yeah?
No.
This is my son Mason.
He's eight years old.
He was burned on 87% of his body.
And uh, yeah.
Mason has the most incredible personality.
He's very easy to fall in love with.
Let me know.
[MASON CHUCKLES]
He's no longer stuck in a wheelchair.
He just learned to walk a year ago again.
And he's out playing soccer.
He's playing with the kids in the neighborhood.
And he's just like a regular kid again.
He was burned on 87% of his body,
in and out of surgery every other day
for a good two or three weeks.
They were using a lot of different things
to cover his skin including INTEGRA.
We're in the reconstructive part of the surgeries at this point.
Nothing holds him back.
Nothing at all.
INTEGRA definitely had an integral part
in saving his life.
There was no way he had enough of his own skin
to cover his body.
Without it, God, I have no idea where we'd be.
I don't think he'd still be here.
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To younger faculty, I would say, go
where the ignorance is maximum, because that's where you're
going to discover the goal.
What is meant by this is that many young researchers
go where everybody else is doing research.
And basically, they add an incremental piece of value
to what has happened before.
I would go where there already is
no value established by others, because no one has
thread that ground.
I was born in Athens, Greece.
I had somewhat of an early introduction to science.
When I was six or seven-year-old,
I got a hold of a little bottle of tincture of iodine.
And putting it over a gas flame in the kitchen of my home,
the alcohol evaporated.
And there I was holding the test tube
with a couple of little beautiful light purple crystals
of iodine.
It was actually one of the most beautiful things I've had seen.
I would never forget that.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the 2015 National
Inventors Hall of Fame--
When Dr. Burke and I got together and started working,
there was a step that very few people today
in science or medicine undertake.
It's a step requires working across disciplines,
which means working in areas that you're not
comfortable with.
Like I was not comfortable in Dr. Burke's surgeries.
And he was not comfortable with my molecules.
The fact that we got together was
something that was very difficult.
And I would credit this with the success that we eventually got.
There are two sources of satisfaction
that A person my position has.
One is the opportunity to see people treated with something
that he has helped discover.
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And that's a very big, big deal.
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The other is that if you're a scientist,
and you see what's going on on the other side of the mountain
that nobody else has, that's a very, very strange feeling.
It's like looking at a vista that is brand new
and has never been seen.
And I like that as well.
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