How to biohack your cells to fight cancer - Greg Foot - video Dailymotion

TED-Ed

Check out the science of biohacking, where biologists go into a patient’s genetic code and reprogram their immune system to recognize and fight cancer cells.  --  The human body is made up of about 30 trillion cells that carry a code which has been duplicated over and over for billions of years - with varying degrees of accuracy. So what happens when the system breaks down and the machinery turns on itself, leading to cancer? Greg Foot dives into the science of how biologists are biohacking the human body to try to fix the seemingly unfixable.   Lesson by Greg Foot, directed by Pierangelo Pirak.

Transcript

00:00okay so you are a four billion year old meat robot yep you heard me right in fact as you're

00:14made of 30-ish trillion cells and each of those have their own task you're a robot made of trillions

00:20of mini robots you are a mega meat bot and your mission for the past four billion years or so

00:27and for as long as you keep playing this game of life is to safeguard the code to duplicate it

00:33to pass it on the thing is you're rubbish at copying your own code every time it's copied

00:39errors crop up not good when an error makes a robot worse at surviving but sometimes a mistake helps

00:47them survive and they pass that glitch in the code on that's evolution in a nutshell right which means

00:53you're not the result of some fancy design i'm afraid you're a result of billions of years of

00:59bad copies go you another reason you're not totally awesome is because that megabot of yours often

01:06breaks down fortunately cardiologists immunologists microbiologists all the ists have spent centuries

01:12figuring out our sensors and wiring so if something does go wrong they can usually fix it where they

01:19struggle though is when the machinery turns on itself when a copying error leads a cell to start

01:24dividing uncontrollably to grow and multiply into a tumor that's cancer and sadly even with the might

01:32of our modern medicine some cancers evade treatment but this is where a new band of biologists step into

01:39the story the synthetic biologists these biohackers are mashing up science medicine and engineering to rewrite

01:47the code and fix the unfixable biohackers are going into a patient's genetic code and reprogramming

01:55their own immune system to recognize cancer cells and destroy them it's called car t cell therapy and

02:01it's awesome see you're constantly under attack by pathogens single cell bacteria viruses and fungi

02:09despite deciding back in the day to stay solo and not avengers assemble like you did those pathogens see

02:16you in all your mega meatbot glory as a fortress ripe for the plundering thankfully you've got a

02:22security team in place to battle these invaders your immune system and some of its top guards are

02:28your white blood cells they trawl the darkness that is your inner space checking the ids of any cells they

02:35pass although they're not name badges but rather protein fragments on the cell's surface called antigens

02:41there are two types of these guards t cells and b cells t cells check those antigen ids using special

02:49claws receptors that lock with a particular antigen if they find a match they attach and they release toxic

02:55chemicals that burst open the invading cells membrane their b cell workmates create antibodies loads of small

03:02proteins little claws that latch perfectly onto a particular antigen marking them for destruction

03:12these two comrades have got your back and your immune system is brilliant at spotting and fighting

03:17pathogens that invade from outside however they're not so good at spotting your own cells that have gone

03:23rogue the antigens on cancerous cells don't look weird they look a lot like your own cells and the t's and b's

03:31aren't programmed to attack them the usual way to deal with cancer is to try to cut the tumor out

03:37or turn to radiotherapy and then chemotherapy to destroy or block the growth of cancer cells

03:43but if it's a blood cancer if it's floating around your whole body you can't do that

03:50and if the blood cancer actually starts in your white blood cells those key guards in your immune

03:55system you'll really struggle to spot it that's the case with acute lymphoblastic leukemia and that's

04:02where car t-cell therapy is kicking butt the biohackers are reprogramming a patient's own immune system to

04:10recognize particular antigens those particular protein fragments on the cancer cells to do it you first need

04:19millions of a patient's t-cells then to get a t-cell to do something different you need to replace its

04:25normal code with something new something you've designed what synthetic biologists can now do with

04:31dna is super cool they use a computer to put together their own sequences of bases the chemical letters that

04:38spell out the dna then they model what that new genetic code will do on a computer and then make those

04:44sequences on a dna printer yeah that's a thing printing not with ink or with a plastic polymer

04:50like in a 3d printer but with those fundamental building blocks of life with those a's and c's and

04:56t's and g's the new code they designed for a t-cell has three key instructions one it tells it how to

05:04recognize and kill a cancer cell more specifically how to modify an antibody what the b-cells make to latch

05:10onto a target antigen the antibody is modified to make a new receptor that can detect the particular

05:16antigens on the specific cancer two it tells it to make copies of itself when it finds that cancer cell

05:25and three it tells it to survive in the patient's body to get this new code into the patient's t-cells

05:31you use a vector it's something that will easily infect the t-cell and carry that bespoke dna in with

05:38it and voila one car t-cell the name comes from a fire breathing monster from ancient greece that had

05:45a lion's head a goat's body and a serpent's tail it was called chimera a name that has now come to

05:51be used for something that contains two or more different types of tissues or cells as this newly

05:57engineered cells genetic code is part t-cell part antibody it's a chimera and it goes in search of

06:03the cancer's antigen using its new receptor before you put the multiplied up t-cells back into the

06:14patient you give them a mild dose of chemotherapy to wipe their existing t-cells then you simply

06:19reinsert the now modified t-cells the car t-cells and they follow their normal dna programming to move

06:26and search however thanks to their new butt kicking code they've changed what they're looking

06:32for they're now on a mission to find the cancerous cells and destroy them unlike conventional chemical

06:39based drugs that get used up or excreted from the body pretty quickly car t-cells are living drugs that

06:46stay in the patient's bloodstream for years that's a huge pro the flip side is that they're expensive

06:53each car t-cell treatment is bespoke to the patient and it's more difficult to get them to work with

06:58common cancers like breast or lung because you need a specific antigen on the cancer cells for the

07:03car t-cell to target and it's much easier to find that in blood cancers it's still early days though and

07:10there's an exciting future for car t-cell therapy researchers like dr martin puil and his team at ucl are

07:17working on improving the leukemia and lymphoma treatments even further and there's recently

07:22been some promising work on solid cancers thanks to car t-cell therapy the survival rate for b acute

07:28lymphoblastic leukemia has improved hugely nearly all patients go into remission which means that the

07:34leukemia cannot be detected anymore and most patients stay in remission biohacking is here and it can

07:42reprogram your own genetic code to enable your mega meatball to do things it's never been able to do before

07:52so

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08:00you

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How to biohack your cells to fight cancer - Greg Foot

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