(high-pitched music note)
- The University of Michigan has often blazed a trail
in advances in medical science.
Researchers here performed the world's first
successful lung removal.
And, they pioneered the emergency use of angioplasty.
And, they discovered the gene responsible for
cystic fibrosis, just to name a few.
Now a new generation of researchers
are working on new tools and therapies to help cure
some of our most intractable diseases.
And some day, the life they save may be yours.
- Go ahead and look at me,
shut your eyes as tightly as you can okay,
don't let me open them.
- When I received the diagnosis,
a diagnosis of a fatal disease,
you end up reexamining all of your decisions,
your life, what you do with it,
and where you've gone, where you've been.
- [Jennifer] Six months ago, Bob Schoeni
was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis,
better known as ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease.
- Yeah definitely, it's nonstop.
Nonstop, yeah.
So I think the very first few days
was a period of shock and intense grieving.
So there's a lot of atrophy in that hand,
you can see it right there.
The disease is part of my life every single day,
every single hour.
It's part of what I live,
it's affected my wife and I in fundamental ways.
- Good.
Don't let me come down, give me absolutely all you got.
- It can happen.
- [Jennifer] It's the courage of patients like Bob
that gives direction to the research efforts
of Dr. Eva Feldman.
- Are you able to take your thumb and first finger
and do like that?
- Yeah, yeah.
- How do you know where to start?
How do you know what questions to ask?
- So my questions come from my patients.
So I'm as you know an M.D. Ph.D.,
and I really cherish both pieces of that occupation.
But the questions that I do as a Ph.D.
all come from my M.D. life.
- [Jennifer] Dr. Feldman is one of the world's
leading biomedical researchers, and director of the
A. Alfred Taubman Medical Research Institute.
She gave me a tour of her lab,
part of the consortium for stem cell therapies
where some very innovative scientists are collaborating
in search of cures.
- And we really enjoy the space,
as you can see we have all open laboratory space
which has been very conducive to interacting.
- [Jennifer] Finding new therapies can often feel
like swimming upstream.
So maybe it's little wonder fish have been enlisted
in the effort.
- One thing that we've done,
and Stacey Sakowski has helped us with this a great deal.
She's a post-doctoral fellow in my laboratory.
We've actually hooked the ALS gene onto a marker
that makes all the Zebra fish who are infected
with Lou Gehrig's Disease green.
So you know we can do a neurologic exam on these fish
in the way we examine a patient,
we can see how quickly these fish swim.
- [Jennifer] The fish with the green marker have ALS.
They swim more slowly as the disease progresses.
So therapies can be evaluated on how long
they keep the green fish swimming normally.
- The camera is tracking the movement of the fish,
the fish are pseudo-colored yellow.
And their distance that they're moving
is the blue line that's following them behind.
And what this software can do,
is it can actually record those distances
and translate it into a velocity for how fast the fish swim.
Which is correlated with the muscle strength
or muscle weakness, or degeneration that would occur in ALS.
- So these fish become weak,
have a progressive weakness, the ALS fish,
just like what we see in my patients in our clinic.
- [Jennifer] Why take the time to develop gene markers
that turn fish green,
or software to track their speed?
Because testing with Zebra fish
has the potential to fast-track new cures.
- This is our Zebra fish facility,
and what we are doing here is breeding many animal models
of disease here in Zebra fish.
Jim Dowling who's a Pediatric Neurologist
who works with us,
it was really his invention, his idea to begin
to use the Zebra fish.
- Where did that idea come from?
- Well one of the great things about
the building that we work in is that there's
lots of other investigators who do other kinds of research.
And they recommended that we try the Zebra fish.
- What's so nice about using the Zebra fish
is they are permeable to molecules and to therapy,
so for ALS, or for muscular dystrophy for example,
we can take the fish, put it in a small well,
and put a potential therapy.
And then see if that helps the fish retain
its ability to swim.
- [Jennifer] Why are the fish so much more suitable
for your work?
- [Dr. Feldman] Faster, much less expensive, and volume.
We can screen, for example, a hundred, two hundred drugs
in a few weeks,
and that would take years if you were using a primate,
or even years if you were using mice.
So this is gonna help us fast-track therapies.
- So how many spaces do you have here?
The efficiency of testing on Zebra fish allows
Dr. Feldman's team to quickly zero in on the most
promising therapies to pursue.
And that's only one of the many collaborative approaches
being taken in her lab.
- I mean I just showed you some Zebra fish,
and we really take the findings that we have
in the Zebra fish,
and we transfer it here to the computer.
And so what we have here,
is we have four individuals who work here
and we actually call this our geek bay,
(Jennifer laughs)
because they all take our scientific findings,
and using new novel methods and programming of the computer
can ask and answer questions that we can't easily do
with a bunch.
- [Jennifer] Such as when Dr. Adam Schuyler
constructs an atom-by-atom map of the surface
of a single protein.
- [Dr. Schuyler] There are over a hundred different
mutations that are known on this protein that cause ALS.
By looking at these different locations here that change
in the disease state,
we can then model the dynamics of this protein,
and those dynamics are what ultimately
drive biological function.
- Does this also help you project
how the disease may progress?
- Yes, with this modeling approach,
one of the predictions we can pull up
are new target locations, especially on the surface
of this protein,
that are changing the most according to these
different mutant forms.
And these are very natural targets for therapeutic design.
- [Jennifer] Whether it's using Zebra fish
to sift through hundreds of potential therapies,
or painstakingly mapping microscopic genetic mutations,
the hope this cutting-edge research provides
is something Dr. Eva Feldman can take
directly to her patients.
You're in a really interesting position,
in that you are a scientist, a researcher.
And you're also a clinician.
- Yes.
- So you are,
- I'm a bridge.
- You're a bridge?
- I'm a bridge.
- What is that like for you?
- I really have the best life of anyone you will ever meet.
I truly mean that.
Because I get to go see my patients in clinic,
and I get to tell them what I'm doing here.
I get to go there and say you know
I am trying very hard to understand
what causes your disease,
and to develop new therapies for your disease.
My best hope is that we can use stem cells
for the treatment of ALS,
and that it will minimally stop the progression
of the disease if we use them early.
And even potentially maybe even help people
become better with the illness,
something that we'd never even hoped for before.
So the best of all worlds,
in a short term, that's what I see.
And I don't wanna think 10 years out,
I wanna think 10 months out for my patients.
- [Jennifer] That sense of urgency isn't lost
on people facing the day-to-day reality
of currently incurable diseases.
How has your diagnosis
changed or developed your perspective on stem cell research?
- Certainly with someone with a condition like mine,
parent, I have two young children, and husband,
I think from my own perspective gives me and my family
some hope that an effective treatment may be
not too far out in the future.