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TEDx Talks
Published: 2016-05-22
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQV5F2tlIZE
thank you it's a real pleasure to be here %HESITATION I'm gonna tell you today that nature has beat cancer twelve times now I'm at the bottom line is to I know god stopping right I mean the bottom line is to do the whole idea behind about design institute is to look into the designs that involved in nature and use those designed to solve real world problems
and this is the example that now these guys have solved the cancer problem an elephant is a hundred times larger than human has a hundred times more cells than human and yet gets less cancer than a human I want to get through this problem and has about a calculus paradox that that I just mentioned but I tell you about this fictional creatures called one pow right
these little guys form POW they don't get much cancer this one right here has got one selves but become cancerous so one out of five approximately then support understand cancer starts in a single cell and the swamp out have a sister species called the mega form now Meg a plump pout and ten times more cells in the little guy but the but otherwise the bounties identical
the mega fun I have a problem because they have ten times more cells they the same probability personnel getting cancer it's a pretty much every individual mega form POW is gonna get cancer back is more likely to get multiple cancer a big problem for the mega form they've grown big and in nature we've independently seen the evolution of large organisms twelve times within twelve different cases
where evolution is solved the cancer problem because they grow so large you have to find some way of suppressing cancer long enough to reproduce at the very good reason grow large you get the more sex that's another good reason you don't get even as often so this is the reason why organisms tend to grow large involved a large over time that brings this this problem of
cancer vulnerability with all this extra cells so they also have to involve better ways of suppressing cancer the evolution of large body size and cancer suppression have gone hand in glove now why should we care about cancer suppression large organisms like elephants the short answer is because it's so hard to cure cancer and understand that I need to take you down into the world of a
tumor it turns out that a tumor is a microcosm of evolution inside a tumor we have billions the trillions of cells that are mutating like crazy and some of mutations if they give the cell advantage over the other cells that we can divide faster we survive better that we can sell will start spreading in the tumor as you get evolution Donna that cellular level is driving
this whole process of getting cancer and eventually some people and some organisms will lead to a malignancy and they kill them now this evolutionary process is happening down the cell level is also the reason we had such a hard time curing cancer when a patient goes the doctor be because they're feeling sick and turns out they have cancer they have these billions the trillions of cells
in the tumor hundreds of thousands of mutations and just by bad luck some of those mutations make a cell resistant or chemotherapy but when we apply chemotherapy to a cancer patient we kill most the cells is just like Springfield with pesticide you kill most the past in the field but you leave behind the past that are resistant to your poison and then they gonna outbreak of
past that no longer be controlled by your poison the same thing happens in the oncology clinic we apply chemotherapy to a tumor we kill most the cells we leave behind some cells that it just by bad luck have mutations that make them resistant or chemotherapy and the tumor regrows from those resistant cells that humor comes back and now it though no longer response that drug that's
the basic explanation for why we have had such difficulty curing cancer and that explanation applies to every single drug that's been out developed for cancer biology for cancer therapy every drug selects for resistance so cancer is a and it it that the enemy we're fighting the power evolution when we fight cancer and that's what led to a phone call from these guys the Naval War College
has a strategic studies group that convenes every year to try to address and solve the pressing problems the US navy one of those pressing problems is that our enemies adapt to whatever we do right crew in general in warfare and military our enemies at that so they called me for some strange reason I'm for that reason was because I think about how do we deal with
an adaptive enemy that is cancer and what can we learn from that this led to one of the embarrassing moments of my life so I'm there there's a few shaped table the military brass is around the table the admiral of the work because there's introducing them captain captain commander captain captain captain and I'm so use the thing about rank in the army where captain rank somewhere
below of major and will bit above lieutenant and suddenly realize well wait a minute these are captains of ships they have thousands of people under them that depend on them and I'm standing in front of them to me would recover from that but when I did I told them three things you do three things with an adaptive enemy one change the incentives on that enemy make
them into a friend released a new to I try to contain as the prime it works better third try to slow them down and that's because in cancer in many cases first mutation that starts the cancerous process happens fifty to sixty years before you feel sick enough to go to the doctor happening throughout our lives fifty to sixty years well the implication of that is if
we slow that process just by a factor of two if we can double the time it takes to get cancer then it would take a hundred two hundred twenty years to get cancer we wouldn't start feeling sick until we are well into the second century of our lives that's where we're going so the way we try to justice in my left arm is with aspirin so
the epidemiologists upon us that aspirin often seems to help prevent cancer aspirin is an anti inflammatory drug reduces inflammation we think that's important because often information drives cancer we don't know exactly how so we study Barrett's esophagus is one of the the tumors we study it's a pre cancerous tumor having it become lignin or life threatening doesn't always do so and we have a cohort of
patients in Seattle that we've been following and in that co are there some patients that change the use of aspirin usually because for heart disease so we're just observing what happens we're able to use these observations of the patients over time sample their tumors but we found is the people that went on aspirin the mutation rate inside the tumor dropped by an order of magnitude ten
times slower mutation rate in the field it started taking cancer that's one way that we're trying to approach it to try to slow down this process by reducing imitation right how elephants on it well I clambered in Utah Josh if men in his lap but they found was you take elephants cells and apply a little bit of radiation or some chemical mutagen those elephants cells rather
than getting the DNA damage and causing the Tatian they just kill the cells like that open cells extremely sensitive to the DNA damage they kill themselves that's a self self suicide process called apoptosis this is another way reducing the mutation rate is killing many cell gets a mutation no human cell won't kill itself so easily it requires more radiation or more DNA damage for himself to
commit suicide now sell they don't care if they get DNA damage they're gonna get picked off by predator within a few months %HESITATION they better just reproduce as fast as they can the mechanism that nature has discovered printing Catherine and elephants seems to be through a pup ptosis themselves suicide mechanism how do elephants does do this well they do it through a gene called P. fifty
three if it if it is the most important tumor suppressor gene we know of in humans we have two copies of it one for your mother and one from your father elephants forty copies that's only to discover my student Leah collimated number of years ago alright so elephants suppress cancer with is the first time we've been able to answer Peter's paradox open suppressed cancer by the
cell suicide mechanism but there been twelve independent times the large body size is a ball in mammals we're not services also must have a solution to preventing cancer they're huge animal but a hippopotamus your raps also suppress cancer they're very large animals they've involved this large body size simply independently of the other other animals water buffalo Indian bison shire horses polar bears manatees have also grown
large independently they must have a solution to answer suppression so have elephant seal so have walruses and so have well now it might be the case that nature rediscover the same mechanism every time but that's not true at least in Wales we currently siting wells my lab were sequencing the genome and analyzing it and I can tell you already whales do not have extra copies of
PP three they've only got two one from the mother one from their father so there's some new solution we have it discovered preventing cancer it was exciting for me about this is that the solutions for preventing cancer are out there the down the street in the local zoo across the world all the others use of the world and you're in the wild now I know you're
thinking what about dinosaurs and you're absolutely right nature discovered a way of suppressing cancer dinosaurs probably multiple times there are a lot harder to study the elephants nevertheless when the lab is going to work on and dinosaurs as well the idea about designs to take the solutions from nature it his way the nature discovered viable bertl organisms that can suppress cancer and translate that into human
