1: I'm Scott Martin.
We're at NCATS, that's the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, and
I'm with the division of preclinical innovation.
Our role is to find out what human genes do in the context of different biological processes.
As a kid, I grew up in New York City.
I was a late bloomer in school.
I spent most of my time playing baseball on the streets and just having fun.
I developed a knack for math and science.
I selected a lab that made small molecules and applied them to cancer cells and other
biological systems to see what would happen, and the greatest thing about science is that
it always changes.
What I do today won't be what I'm doing ten years from now.
So, what we do is we use this technology termed RNAI screening, and that allows us to down-regulate,
to turn down, each gene in the human genome, there is about 20,000 genes in the human genome,
and ask what genes are important for the spread of cancer.
We can ask what human genes are important for the spread of different viruses such as
Ebola or a pox virus.
We have in our portfolio, right now, about 40 different projects that span a wide variety
of exciting biology.
Today, we'll be working on your melanoma project.
We'll be able to look for any genes that are important for melanoma cells, that can be
used in the clinic in the future.
For us to interrogate the entire human genome, over 20,000 human genes, we have to do many,
many experiments.
What we have over here is a robotic platform where we can transfer materials, using 384
plastic tips, to transfer materials into this plate.
It's called the microplate.
We can do 384 different experiments.
Then, we can take those plates and incubate them at body temperate in any one given experiment.
Of 20,000 genes, I guess you would say your overall success rate, it's very high.
That this gene is important in the spread of the Ebola virus, or this gene is important
in the migration of cancer cells.
Nadia is prepping cells for this experiment, and they're now ready to be used.
They'll be fed to this dispense head, where we'll be able to add cells and other reagents
to enable those SRNAs to go into the cells and down-regulate the genes.
We'll ask if any of the genes we've down-regulated have affected the growth and spread of the
virus in the wells that we've added virus to.
So, the cell she's preparing, we grow in these incubators for harvesting, for the experiment.
We look for spread of virus by taking pictures of every single well in the experiment, and
quantitate how much virus has spread.
Once we acquire all of that data, we communicate with our collaborators.
As we accumulate all of this information, across many different systems, we begin to
understand how all genes work and how they tie together.
Right now, we're in a paradigm where most drugs that people take are small molecules.
The next step is developing tools to then affect what's wrong in the diseased cells,
for example.
I think it's very easy in really, all areas in life, not just in a career, to get yourself
onto a path that's not going to lead to fulfillment of your life, and I think it's important that
people be honest to themselves in terms of what they're passionate about and what they
are pursuing and chasing, because that is definitely possible throughout your life.