"So my name is Shawn Douglas and i'm an assistant professor at the University of California
San Francisco.
We're in my office in Mission Bay and I run a research lab here and so we're trying to
use nanotechnology with building blocks from our own living cells like DNA and proteins
in order to build useful things to hopefully cure diseases.
[INAUDIBLE]
Well one thing that we're trying to address is how to build better chemo therapies or
better cancer therapeutics so there's a big challenge that every cancer patient or many
cancer patients depending on what type of cancer they have, they have to face these
really nasty regimens of drugs.
If we step back and think okay well suppose we could design from scratch the ideal therapeutic,
what properties would it have?
Well now that we have software it takes hours which, but back when we first started it would
take weeks or months sometimes to design something and then you order all the DNA which is hundreds,
sometimes thousands of dollars and you finally get all that DNA together in the lab and you
mix it together and then aneal it under different conditions, purify that material and then
eventually take it to the electron microscope and when you finally get this microscope in
focus and you see hundreds of thousands of little particles and you zoom in and you finally
can make out oh actually the thing that I designed it worked, it self assembled and
there's thousands of copies of that, that little device and that's like really, really
cool.
I could trace back my interest in building things back to just growing up and working
with my dad in the shop.
So we had a little workshop in the backyard and yeah my father was always since well before
I was born, building model airplanes, model cars, model rockets.
We'd, I just grew up tinkering and building and taking things apart.
Maybe when I was in fifth or sixth grade I got my first computer which was like a 386
SX with two megabytes of RAM and 100 megabyte hard drive.
Then I got, yeah I got into more building my own computers.
So that was my background and then when I was in college, I didn't really have much
direction starting out.
My freshman year I was majoring in English after I failed all my science classes.
And then I kind of worked my way back to science by way of computer science.
So yeah when I got to grad school then I just rotated in different labs and talked to different
professors and the things that really stood out to me were William Shih's lab.
So he was a new assistant professor working in this field that almost nobody has ever
heard of, DNA nanotechnology and the idea there is actually rather than using DNA as
a genetic kind of information storage material, we would instead kind of repurpose it as like
a Lego building block.
This stuff just worked and then it was just kind of no turning back.
I was just addicted at that point.
There was a lot of problems in the world that people who are not so fortunate just because
of bad luck, maybe they have some genetic disorder or have gotten sick for some reason,
that we don't yet understand and after awhile you start thinking like okay well we have
this really powerful method of using DNA to make self assembly nano structures.
And we can look at nature and see that nature uses self assembly to do all sorts of really
sophisticated things.
So then it kind of raises the question well can we repurpose DNA to build devices that
would actually do useful things just like our own immune system does?
But since we're building them from scratch then maybe we could actually design them to
do even more than what already exists.
So that's kind of the vision for the technology and for working in a lab.
That would actually justify kind of all the fun, cool stuff that we get to do in terms
of Lego building block.
It's actually very serious potential applications even though the kind of process itself is
actually, it could be really fun."