on monday, the reconstruction era. the end of world war ii in the atomic bomb. wednesday night, the anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall. >> ;elet us know about the projects you are watching. joing th the conversation. like us on facebook. follow on twitter. wasnew yourk ideas festival held this may. proceduresues and

to cure cancer. before lunch, i will give you a quick rundown of some of my world. i am a cancer biologist, genetic scientist. i will run through a few things about cancer and drug development and some of the work i have been doing that i think you will find interesting. i am with a group normally known for design with a brand-new group in that company focused on bio design. cancer is a relatively straightforward disease, even though we accumulated a large body of information on it. strip it all down and it is cells that have had their dna corrupted. if it keeps growing and starts to spread to the body, it can crash the network essentially. the problem is, when you think about it, cancer is an infection, not with the microbe or a virus, but with one of your

own cells who have gone rogue. 100 years ago, we did not worry quite so much about cancer because it was bacterial infections that can do kill us. small cuts, accidents, etc. we had nothing to fight it with. this molecule is discovered in 1929, penicillin. it was a game changer in the world of medicine. it still took a while to get it up to production in commercial volumes, but once penicillin and its chemical cousins became available, suddenly we did not die from microbial infections anywhere near as much. today, it is quite rare.

we do not even get a day off of work. this was a major life-threatening disease. cancer is treated in a completely different way. the look of a patient, the hair falling out, that is the treatment. it is not necessarily the cancer. we completely obliterate cells in a nondiscriminatory that are growing quickly. more modern medicines are targeted. medicines really key in on specific molecular pathways. they are very focused and they tend to use alongside chemotherapy, but when they work, it is as phenomenally different to the treatment outcomes as penicillin and

bacteria. phenomenal response. unfortunately, we do not have a lot of these magic bullets. we all want more of them. we are not going to get them. here is why. this is a 60 year trend in the outputs of drug development draft out as billions of dollars invested in r&d for new drug. this is an exponential graph, but it is not the graph we like to see in digital technologies. this is a negative exponential. what this means is that over the last 60 years, we are getting dramatically less drugs per

dollar invested in drug development. this is not one company. this is not one business. this is an industry that is not able to make its products faster and better and cheaper. this is something we expect from every digital technology, even though drug development is very high technology, it is really not giving us the medicines we need. last year, only 27 new drugs were approved. 27 for all diseases. the business model of the pharma companies is not hard to understand. it is the same one used by hollywood. they find interesting projects and they bring them in-house and

then polish them, they get them through sensors, the fda, and their marketing and advertising teams start to work to deliver it to the public. it is long and risky and expensive, which is why, like drug companies choose to seek blockbusters. when you think about it targeted medicine, they are more like those little indie art films, not a big audience. if you are making a niche drug, the result is, it ends up being phenomenally expensive. it is hard to get the insurance companies to pay for it or for an individual to pay for it.

the best medicines in depth helping the fewest people. kind of ironic. i started thinking about this a lot, how could this trend he reversed, how can we make a drug company that truly made faster, better, cheaper medicines and start to generate cancer drugs? you want to beat cancer, make better drugs. if i see everyone going one way, the whole industry is over on the side, mass-market drugs, i go the other way. i ended up creating an experimental drug company that was completely different than anything else. it was a cooperative drug company, completely open sourced. no money involved. i do not need any money, i do not want any money. that is not the case for me. i really wanted to focus on one person at a time rather than a mass market. no two cancers are the same. the cancer is your cells infecting your body. the second thing, if you make a

drug for one person, all the really expensive and time-consuming parts of drug making, getting it through phased clinical trials, are relevant. risk and benefit reduces to a single individual. it is simply a drug for one person and one cancer. that is a much easier problem to solve. i also had a big tech knowledge he in my back pocket as a genetic engineer. genetic engineering is getting really cheap. my goal was, can i make the most advanced medicines in the world using genetic engineering for the lowest price possible? i do not think free is so crazy. 1995, evening away a free e-mail account seems really strange. the challenge for me is i had this tool, i had this problem cancer that had not been solved.

what drug could i possibly make that was cheap enough to do for one person at a time? it is a virus that breaks apart cancer cells. it turns out there has been about 30 years of r&d. the basic idea is it is a really weak virus. quite a common one, usually. if it infects a normal cell, the normal cell shuts it down. it is so weak that a normal cell

has the defenses to say go away. breaks apart and never starts to replicate. cancer cells are broken cells. they are corrupted and it turns out some of those corruptions leave them vulnerable to weak virus attacks. the virus starts to grow in the cancer cell, breaks the cancer cell, and releases more virus. it is hijacking the cancer cells and turning them into drug factories. the problem with this, your immune system recognizes all viruses as foreign and intends to shut them down. the real breakthrough in the last decade, we have learned how to keep fighting the cancer. some of the companies are getting a lot of success. at the end of the day, cancer cells just get a cold. you don't get all of the dramatic effects. i want to find a way to make

these viruses faster, better, and cheaper. i was inspired by a 2003 paper on the genetic scientists and his research partner and nobel prize winner. in december of 2003, a computer designed a virus. a very safe little virus. it just kills e. coli cells. they could print out the dna of the virus and they could boot up the virus to make virus particles. this was the whole protocol. it reduces down to design of a genome, the build of that genome and the test of that genome. it took two weeks to do this work in 2003. that is with some brilliant genetic scientist. i work with this design company and we make really cool design software. we've been working on a project called project cyborg. it is for all forms of bio design, molecular design, dna origami.

we took that bacteria and we modeled it. we are really good at 3-d printing. we printed out some of these little virus particles. so cool when you hold them in your hand. there are molecular jigsaw puzzles. we also use the same tools and technologies that we use for 3-d printing. we sent it to this company, one of the best dna synthesis companies around, and a number of other companies. could you make this genome today? it turns out they could. they sent me these genomes.

they had to push their synthesis machines to the limit, what i was able to boot up with some colleagues these synthetic viruses. this is a growth plate. this is a synthetic genome booted up by a company, a software company, because viruses are biological software. i did not have to go on to the lab to do this. it was all digital. here is what i see happening in the future. we already have this digital diagnostics and the ability to get cells out of a patient. that is very straightforward. we can see a cancer genome in less than a day. you can feed into an auto design program. they can go to a printer to print that viral genome and we can get that in two weeks for $1000 and print costs. that allows us to make a virus that we can test on one-person cells. if it kills the cancer cells and

does not hurt normal cells, it passes, and it could be used as a treatment. we are testing this -- we would love to do veterinary studies, but this type of approach could get into humans very quickly because there is already such a foundation. here is something -- because we can really open source the entire design process, it is just software.

you do not need a lab to do this. the amazing part is, the cost of writing dna is falling so rapidly, it is remarkable. it cost $1000 to make that virus. next year, it will cost about $10. the year after that, maybe one dollar. instead of just making one drug and taking 10 or 15 years, why not a netflix model? change the fda requirements about approving a single drug. if these tools keep opening up, there is nothing to stop people from making their own drugs. we see phenomenal amounts of creativity coming into the 3-d printing space. i want to see every drug maker come from the maker community. i want to see it done fast and cheap and i want to see these amazing medi