people in the hospital right now
suffering and in pain there are many
debilitating diseases such as
Alzheimer’s Parkinson’s spinal cord
injury that caused the injured our
nervous system and cause disability and
death once I was the daughter of one of
those patients I’ve spent most of my
childhood at the hospital waiting for my
mom to go from one painful treatment
after the next for us patients and
family the only hope is signs we always
hope that a scientist in some part of
the world will find a new cure or a new
medication to alleviate the pain of
those we love as I grew up I’ve decided
to become a scientist myself and I
decided to try to solve it or at least
try to help those people at the hospital
but even after many years of studies and
all my efforts I couldn’t do much why
because science is slow every question
generates more questions what is pain
it’s a response of the nerves to injury
what’s nerve injury it’s a lesion caused
to the nerve by a disease an accident or
tumor how can we understand it to really
understand the mechanism of neuronal
degeneration and how it leads to
disability and death we have to go
deeper into our nervous system the
nervous system is formed by a network of
neurons and neurons are smaller units
that are made by cell bodies and axons
little wires that passes information
from our brain the power source to the
rest of our body enabling us to speak to
think and to move to work prop similar
to them well let’s say similar to the
electric wiring of a house to work
properly the
nervous system relies on the network and
on the precision of neuronal connections
if the axons they equivalent to the
wires or the neuronal connections the
equivalent to the switch are damaged the
information path is compromised and
function may be compromised as well just
like the electric wiring of a house we
can have a small damage that just burn a
book or a big damage and a complete
blackout when you find a dark room in
your house we have to investigate what
is the cause it could be a bad bulb a
burned fuse or something else to
investigate lesions in the nervous
system is even more challenging and
difficult because we do not have access
to the precise region of the injury and
we cannot just open someone’s brain and
try to figure out what’s working and
what’s not
in addition all the structures the
neuronal connections and also the axles
they are very very small they are in the
micro and nanoscale and to understand
how they work
we need micro and nano tools and that’s
the reason the wire came to Montreal
Montreal is a very famous city in your
science research mantra is the city of
dr. Wilder Penfield and dr. Brenda
Milner pioneer neuroscientist in the
study of the brain and spinal cord
injury I started working at the Montreal
Neurological Institute in a
collaboration with the McGill physics
department where once Nobel Prize winner
Ernest Rutherford also used to work for
me it was the equivalent of being in a
Disney word for scientists Montreal had
it all you know we had the great
scientists great facilities and all the
tools they need to finally understand
how the nervous system is injured and
how we could reconnect it so my plan was
to use nanotechnology to take one neuron
at a time cut it and try to reconnect it
try to make it functional again just
like the same processes a disease does
the disease cut a neuron so I was trying
to mimic this in the lab and then try to
understand how I could fix it so I
prepared
through on the petri dish I took the
culture to the microscope and then I saw
this entangled mass neurons on a petri
dish just do not organize like in the
human body
they get entangled they form clumps and
it’s very hard to identify single axons
cut them after injury find where in this
mess is the other half and try to
reconnect it back to see if it’s working
or not
back to the house analogy you know when
you have that broken electric cable in
your house and then you try to fix it
and this full of those mini wires they
are all the same color all entangled and
you have no idea how to connect them
back well that’s exactly the petri dish
and that’s what I was trying to fix even
worse every time we prepare neurons on a
new petri dish they form a different
network completely different from the
previous one so if I just found a way to
reconnect neurons in petri dish number
one I try to repeat the experiment in
petri dish number two and it takes me
ages just to find the localization how
the network is working well let’s go
back to the house analogy let’s imagine
now that you finally fix that broken
cable and then every time you turn on a
switch a different bulb turn on aha what
happened we have to change that so if
you ask someone else if you ask another
scientist to use exactly the same
technique to reproduce what you did it’s
just not possible it will not work it’s
almost impossible for someone to make
the same si that you did that and what
happens is that every science has to
repeat the same experiment over and over
and over again and every time you repeat
the experiment what’s up what’s
happening we’re increasing the time it
were delaying the delivery of new drugs
for those people at the hospital that
are waiting for you we’re also
increasing the costs because we’re using
more scientists more equipment more
reagents to produce a new test so
everything is becoming more expensive
and it’s delaying in fact
today from 10,000 drugs being tested
only one we arrive at the market after
10 to 15 years of research and over a
billion dollars investment this is just
too long you know in the past 100 years
on more than a hundred years ago the
petri dish was invented to culture cells
in the lab and it has not changed until
today they use exactly the same
procedure in the meantime scientists
have evolved they have become
increasingly qualified in microscopes
have become complex machines with a much
better vision than the human eye this
means that today we do have the
technology to perform multiple tests a
day we do have the technology to
automate the whole process but we just
cannot do this because the petri dish is
an outdated model it’s archaic and it
cannot standardize the culture we cannot
send it to a microscope to read it by
itself
in fact lack of reproducibility is a big
problem in science today and what I’ve
realized that my major challenge as a
scientist was not to have the best
facilities the best equipment or the
money my major challenge was to try to
reproduce the nervous system environment
on a petri dish so that we can get
standardized reproducible data and this
way we can accelerate the drug
development cycle so that you better
understand what I’m talking about and
how the petri dish works let’s make an
analogy let’s say we want to evaluate
how people to react to different events
in the park right there is a concert as
people arrive in the park some like to
stay crowded close to the band others
prefer to stay distant in a more
comfortable East’s if we take pictures
from the event what we are going to see
is that depending on where the pictures
are taking we could have multiple
subjective interpretations if you see
the picture close to the band you say
all the events crowd if you see the
picture further away you say oh the
event was empty nobody was there and
it’s very hard to compare between events
that’s exactly what happens to the petri
dish the cells when they fall on a petri
dish they organize themselves
randomly so now imagine we organized the
same event on a stadium and then it’s
much easier to quantify how many people
were present because they are precisely
seated on specific positions so if we
take an image we can say how many people
were present how many seats were empty
we could even automatically write a
program to count how many people were at
the event just using a computer and it
will be much easier to compare the
reaction of people between events in
addition we could even get more data we
could ask the computer check how many
people were wearing a red shirt how many
people are standing you see how
organization makes data analysis much
faster that’s what we want to do with
the petri dish so I spoke to my friend
engineer and I said I have this idea why
don’t we build a stadium for the cells
and then we did and that’s what I have
here in my hands in this small device
made of silicon is a little mold that we
create to grow 120 mini spinal cords in
less than a centimeter square now
instead of having you know sitting in
the microscope and try to find one or
two axons a day I have 120 perfect axon
similarly organized as in the body that
I could use a test as a will I could
slash all those 120 axons at once and
try to reconnect it see which drug is
working or not asking my other friends
in other countries other scientists to
test the same thing easily we could
compare the results you see the micro
moulds just by organizing the cells make
drug testing faster more efficient and
more reproducible and I’m very proud to
say that by using this technique we
achieved a major breakthrough because
now I had much more time to think and to
do other things we had this great idea
why not to try to elongate the axles and
we managed to do that well or gaiter the
axon 60 times faster than they grow
naturally we were capable to reconnect
the axons to other cells very precisely
and make this connection functional what
does it mean it means that in the future
we just need some more studies but in
the future it will surgeons will be able
to use the same technique to reconnect
nerves after injury this is a huge hope
I could finally help those people at the
hospital or give them more hope you know
we can maybe in the future develop a new
technique to reconnect your nerves and
to help you regain your thoughts your
memories and your movements as I started
presented this data in different
conferences people came to me and said
oh could I have this micromoles to use
in my research after one year
we’ve sold over 2,000 devices to people
to accelerate research in Alzheimer’s
disease Parkinson’s multiple sclerosis
spinal cord injury cancer even in
parasitic disease at this time I
realized you know I develop these
devices just to make my work more
efficient but suddenly by mass-producing
it I saw that it could help everyone
else making their work more efficient
and this is a very rewarded feeling is a
feeling like you know you can contribute
to society we can make a better world so
in fact if you chat today ten of the
most cited papers of all times seven of
them are new techniques or software’s
that became essential in their field it
means that seven of the small cited
papers were scientists that develop a
new tool that enable other scientists to
achieve better results much faster not
very standardized and reproducible way
unfortunately
reproducibility is a big problem in
science today and in a recent survey
published by nature magazine they show
that in biology alone over 60% of the
research produced cannot be reproduced
scientists cannot reproduce their own
research they are doing a lot of tests
what does it mean means that they have
to make more and more tests and use the
cells over
and over and over again and that means
more costs and longer time to deliver
drugs for those people that need it we
have to change that it is about time
that we develop something better than
the petri dish because we have the
technology and there are millions of
people in the hospitals right now
waiting for us to bring medication from
the lab to the bedside what we’re
solving now it’s much bigger than just
cells on a petri dish we’re bringing
research into the 21st century the
message I would like to leave is for all
the kids watching all the kids that like
me have parents at the hospital don’t
lose your faith in science because we
can do better we can do much better we
have the technology and we have the
minds for it for all the scientists
watching
let’s bring more innovation to science
because we need it thank