Transcriber: Mónica Díaz Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Can you believe that a 52-year-old man,
a car mechanic,
each year saves the lives of more than 2 million women and 5 million newborns?
Now, try to imagine a car repair garage in Argentina.
A group of car mechanics in dirty uniforms are watching a movie -
how to extract a loose cork from inside an empty bottle of wine.
On the screen, someone inserts the plastic bag into the bottle,
inflates the bag which envelopes the cork
and pours out bag together with the cork.
Standing in the middle of this group is Jorge Oton.
Jorge watched the movie, went back home, ate dinner and went to sleep.
At 4:00 in the morning, he screamed: "Eureka!
I've discovered something:
the same method that's used to extract a loose cork
from an empty [bottle of] wine
can be also used to pull out a baby in a complicated delivery."
His wife said: "Are you crazy?
It's the middle of the night! You don't know anything about obstetrics!
So please go back to sleep and focus on the job you are good at:
repairing cars."
He wouldn't give up.
Now, picture this scene:
the next morning a few pregnant women are waiting to see a doctor.
[Sitting] in the middle of them is none other than Jorge Oton.
He wanted to explain his idea to him.
Now, Jorge doesn't work as a car mechanic anymore.
He's working for a big company famous for its medical devices.
He's developing his idea with them.
So, now everyone who wants to be an inventor can go to a garage,
wear a dirty uniform, watch YouTube
and wait for inspiration, right?
Not really.
Open eyes are useless when the mind is closed
for getting inspiration from other fields.
So, open your eyes, open your mind,
and very likely, one day you will also say: "Eureka!"
Do you know any other examples of people with open eyes and open mind?
I'm sure you know.
What about the richest calligraphist in the world? You know this guy:
Steve Jobs, exactly!
He exploited his knowledge gained during calligraphy studies
to build Apple into a huge commercial success.
Thanks to his phones,
he injected a piece of human beauty into the cold computer world.
Another example, bugs that caught onto the clothes of George de Mestral
during his alpine walks irritated him so much
that he studied them under the microscope.
He discovered the loop and hook structure and patented it as velcro.
History shows that even a simple visit to a circus can change medicine.
Horace Wells was very curious why clowns inhaling dinitrogen oxide
known as laughing gas did not feel pain at all.
He later introduced it to dentistry and anesthesiology.
And all these examples show that you, and you, and you too
can be an inventor.
And I am an inventor too.
I'm a 36-year-old professor,
one of the youngest in Poland.
For many years I've been working in the cancer research field.
I'm particularly interested in tumor microenvironment
and interactions between cancer cells and the immune cells.
Why is this topic paticularly important?
Every second a person in this room
will hear during their lifetime,
diagnosis: cancer.
One out of four people here will die because of this disease.
To understand why solid tumors are still such a big problem in medicine,
you should understand how they are built.
Imagine a little stone growing larger and larger every day,
growing really fast, located somewhere in your body.
This is like a little country inside another country,
like little organisms composed of many various cells:
cancer cells, immune cells, blood vessels; they are all very crowded together.
Cancer cells grow much faster than blood vessels.
That's why there are some tumor regions
that are completely deprived of blood vessels
and almost completely unreachable.
And because of that, and because classic anti-cancer drugs
do not show any tumor specificity to the tumor itself,
only 1 to 2% of the intravenously administered drug reach the tumor.
It's too little to be effective.
The rest goes to other organs destroying healthy cells.
So what's the solution for that?
I thought of other things in life that are built like a solid tumor.
To me, a solid tumor looks like an impregnable fortress
surrounded by a wall with gates
that even if one or two soldiers go inside
they are quickly removed or killed.
So, what was the most spectacular fortress conquest in history?
Trojan horse.
Exactly. Eureka!
So, we have read the solution for cancer.
Let's go to a woodworker to carve a Trojan horse and it's done!
Not really, instead of a woodworker, I needed to gather together biologists,
doctors, biochemists, biophysicists, men and women, business people
in order to create a Trojan horse that is able to fight against cancer.
Okay, first of all, we thought: "What could be our Trojan horse?"
"What could reach these unreachable sites of the tumor?"
There is just one guy that goes there:
the macrophage -
immune cell that looks for the problems,
and once it identifies the problem, it goes there,
so it migrates even from blood vessels to get into these unreachable sites.
Okay, but it was not just a wooden horse that captured the Troja,
there were warriors inside.
So, how to put an anti-cancer drug that kills live cells into a live cell
if it's alive?
Impossible?
My colleagues and I discovered a group of proteins
that have a nanocage-like structure
and can be loaded with various anti-cancer drugs.
So, we have an idea, but let's check if it works.
First of all, we needed to check if our macrophages
are able to uptake these nanocages.
Yes, they do.
Okay, now let's check if they remain alive after loading them with toxins,
with anti-cancer drugs.
It works, they remain alive.
But the most important question was still waiting for an answer.
Will they transfer anti-cancer drugs to cancer cells and kill them?
To check this,
we loaded macrophages with green nanocages
and put them together
with red [inaudible] cancer cells
and watched the action under the microscope.
In a few minutes, we recorded a beautiful movie we are watching now
that shows that green macrophages transfer in a very fast manner -
green nanocages directly to red cancer cell.
And this is the first evidence
that macrophages can be used as a Trojan horse
to deliver directly to the cancer cells, anti-cancer drugs.
We've discovered new biological mechanisms and we named it "TRAIN."
Now, we are developing our idea as a start-up company,
and of course, we have still many years of hard work
before we attempt to treat the first patients.
But our method is beautiful in its simplicity
because we just exploit the normal biological mechanisms
that undergo every second [inaudible] in cancer-suffering patients
in order to [inaudible] anti-cancer drugs to cancer cells.
We checked this with many different drugs and it works.
Creativity is the ability to join things and facts.
When you ask creative people
how they came up with their idea for their invention,
they very often feel embarrassed
because they hadn't done anything special;
they had just open eyes, open mind and saw something obvious
that was not seen before.
So, look around you, because ready solutions are everywhere.
Free your creativity,
because even simple alpine walk,
or visit to a circus can give you inspiration.
But remember:
Open eyes are useless when the mind is closed.
Thank you.
(Applause)