Hello everyone
I did my Bachelor's degree in Engineering,
my Masters in Engineering,
my Doctorate in Engineering,
my postdoctoral studies in Engineering,
I've worked in Engineering, have done research in Engineering,
am a professor of Engineering,
...and today, I'm going to talk to you about cancer.
And I can see some reactions to that already.
Why is an Engineer here to talk about cancer
instead of it being a specialized doctor?
It's because I firmly believe that Engineering
can significantly contribute to the fight against cancer.
If you look around you,
you'll see that Engineering is everywhere.
Absolutely everywhere, except in the fight against cancer.
One of the objectives in Engineering is to find solutions
for modern society's problems.
And cancer is one these problems.
A very important problem.
Look to your neighbors on your right and on your left.
According to current statistics,
one of these people, over the course of their life,
will go see a doctor who will tell them they have cancer.
40-45 % statistically.
But what is cancer?
If you were to look it up, a dictionary entry would read:
"Pathology, characterized by the presence of a tumor..." etc.
But to a specialized doctor,
who sees patients everyday to be treated for cancer,
cancer means a lack of tools.
To give you an idea of how important tools are:
if you've ever tried to put a screw in the wall with the wrong screw driver,
its the same type of frustration a doctor feels
when patients are dying and there aren't enough tools to help them.
But how is cancer defined by patients and their families?
To them, cancer means despair.
When we started our research and started obtaining results,
the media got interested in our work
and I received many phone calls from families in despair.
I'll give you an example.
A couple with an 11-year old daughter, their only daughter,
whose doctor tells them she only has a few months to live
and there's nothing that can be done.
The family calls me and says,
"We will entrust you with our only daughter,
you can do whatever you want, inject her with anything,
we won't ask questions, but please save her."
Stories such as those happen everywhere every 4 seconds.
Somebody dies of cancer every 4 seconds.
And I'd like to take this time to dedicate 4 seconds to my father
who also died of cancer.
In 2020, it will be 2.1 seconds.
We are focusing all our efforts,
and all our energies,
but the situation is worsening over time.
Let's talk about treatment.
Treatment = delivery.
You might have the best medicine to treat cancer,
but if it doesn't get to the right place, it isn't useful at all.
Its simple: treatment = delivery.
If we consider the deadliest cancers
-- lung, prostate, breast, colorectal, liver etc--
what do they all have in common?
What do the deadliest cancers have in common?
They are all localized; they affect a specific area.
Here is a very simple equation:
Treatment effectiveness = effectiveness in delivery
In other words if delivery is more efficient,
medical treatment will automatically be more efficient.
Simple.
Whenever a package is to be shipped to a specific destination,
be it by plane, by boat, by car or by foot,
it goes from point A to point B.
We do this everywhere-- its the logical thing to do.
There is only one area in which this isn't the case.
In the fight against cancer, we go everywhere.
The delivery process is systemic.
What does going everywhere mean?
It means reaching a vascular network in every human body,
made up of almost 100 000 km of blood vessels.
That's almost 2.5 times the circumference of the Earth at the Equator.
So to ensure, since there are some blind spots,
that enough of the drug reaches the right area, a lot more of the drug is injected
and it is extremely toxic.
The logical solution, is to do like we do everywhere
and deliver directly.
Now the question is, how?
How do we do this be done?
40 years ago, we had an idea of how to do this.
"Le Fantastique Voyage", the movie.
Hollywood had found the idea.
If you look at this from an Engineer's point of view,
and considering hydrodynamic equations,
in order to reach a tumor, you need to go from the bigger vessels to the smaller ones.
The environment is different;
we need two different systems of propulsion and navigation,
represented here by a submarine,
and by the divers, the frog-men.
And they complete each other.
Here is the scenario in 5 steps.
First, the drug, a molecule, is encapsulated by nano capsules.
These are also often called lipozomes, or biodegradable polymers, by biochemists.
Then, using antibodies, they are attached to bacteria.
Bacteria are our crew members:
they go into the submarines.
Why? Because we can't shrink adults like in the "Fantastique Voyage" movie.
We don't have that technology yet.
So we use a diver that can fit perfectly into the smallest human blood vessels.
This diver can beat any Olympic swimmer,
swimming at over 150 times its own length per second.
To put this into perspective,
imagine your car going 2 times faster than the speed of light, but underwater.
Its super effective. A molecular caged, propulsion engine,
and to boot, they can be controlled by computer.
They do exactly what they are told, without question.
Next step: they are encapsulated in the submarines.
In the particles.
To these particles, on top of the bacteria, we add nano-technology:
such as ferromagnetic or superparamagnetic particles.
When we put it into an impermeable field,
such as in magnetic resonance scanning, in machines found in all hospitals,
these particles become mini propulsion systems, like little engines.
They can be propulsed 3-dimensionally anywhere in the human body
and navigated from point A to point B for delivery.
So in the next step, we inject it into an artery
and navigate it to the technological and possible limit
using the best possible materials we can find.
Here it isn't possible to get right up to the tumor:
its the furthest our submarine can get to.
So what do we do next?
We release our crew members
and their therapeutic vests,
Bacteria have natural sensors,
and we exploit these sensors by making them think that
the center of a tumor is the ideal place for living, eating a lot of food,
with a perfect amount of oxygen
and they'll be very motivated to go.
It only takes 5 steps.
Now you might say all this is like science-fiction.
We try and keep things simple, but somehow they always get complicated with time.
Why not?
Jules Verne had ideas about the Moon; though the technology was different in his time
we have put a man on the Moon.
History repeats itself.
Let's look at Egypt now.
Instead of the previous story, lets imagine we have 5000 bacteria
we'll treat them like slaves,
make them build a miniature pyramid block by block,
and all of this will be controlled by computer in less than 15 minutes.
Is it science-fiction?
Now picture all these bacteria.
We could easily use 5000, 50 000, or even 1 000 000 of them
each with therapeutic dosage that can be determined by the doctor;
and if we are able to use bacteria to build a pyramid,
we can use them to deliver a drug to a tumor.
Here you see the submarine carrying the bacteria inside.
Hope is starting to appear on the horizon.
The question is, when?
When will this type of treatment be available to humans?
Its a frequently asked question.
In 2007,
we navigated through an object no bigger than the tip of a ballpoint pen
in the carotid artery of a pig at a speed of 100 cm per second.
This was an autonomous process with no human intervention.
And pigs are the closest modern relatives to humans.
This was done with a magnetic resonance imaging system
that can be found in hospitals everywhere.
In 2010, we modified this bacteria in order to reach very deep tumors,
still in animal subjects.
In 2011, we reduced the size of the submarine to half the diameter of a human hair,
the technological limit,
and we navigated through the hepatic artery of a rabbit and into specific regions
in the liver to treat liver cancer.
These particles contained Dacarbazine,
the medicine used in chemotherapy
to treat cancer in humans,
and with a controlled release.
In 2012, we're working with an interdisciplinary team
to develop a new therapeutic agent
based on bacteria
to treat colorectal cancer in humans.
But is this progress fast enough?
I'll let you answer that question.
We have a precise objective:
Why not go for goal with direct targeting?
Now I have a question.
If this is logical,
why is it that, other than all the time we spend on research,
do we spend so much time and energy on finding resources to achieve this objective
when time is of the essence, and the solution is under our noses?
Thank you