at that time he was the chief of
orthopedic surgery at the Brooklyn
Jewish Hospital in New York and there
was nothing he liked more than taking
care of patients he would wake up early
in the morning at 5:00 a.m. to review
their charts he would stay late in the
evenings at the office and he’d go in
nights and weekends to deal with
emergencies but then one day he started
having having trouble communicating he
lost track of small things like house
keys his speech came out jumbled and the
spark in his eyes began to dim in the
course of a few short years this once
brilliant surgeon who saved people’s
lives could not even recognize us his
family his children his grandchildren
not to say take care of patients he was
diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and the
father right knew was no longer here on
this earth his body was here strangely
inhabited by some being who knew me not
now let me ask you by show of hands how
many of you know someone who have a
family member who suffered from
Alzheimer’s dementia Parkinson’s and on
yes
almost everyone not surprisingly because
each year millions are people millions
of people are diagnosed with these
but surprisingly after decades of failed
studies and research that attempts to
stop and halt the progression of these
diseases there is hope after animal
studies and human clinical trials which
have shown the promise of being able to
slow down even restore health from these
diseases today I’m here to give you a
glimpse of a breakthrough now before I
do that we need to spend a little time
and understand a bit more of what’s in
common with these diseases in your body
the human body is an unbelievably
wonderful system every day we take in
oxygen the food we eat is converted into
the energy that powers our brains our
eyes our hearts our muscles if something
gets damaged a broken bone a skinned
knee the body quickly repairs and heals
the damage the system is way more
amazing and complex the most wonderful
bit of technology to come out of Silicon
Valley now how does this happen your
cells your body is made up of billions
trillions of cells that make this
possible and for today I want you to
think of each of these cells as a tiny
City a well-run organized city that
makes power and energy builds buildings
repairs roads collects the waste and so
on and inside of each of these tiny
cities there’s a little factory
and that Factory is where the oxygen you
breathe and the food you eat is actually
converted into energy and those
factories are called mitochondria
mitochondria are the most incredibly
complex systems you can imagine they’re
just beautifully designed they’re
incredibly efficient I sort of think of
them like maybe the Tesla Model S of the
body but like any great product design
they come along with a few bugs and the
first one is that these incredibly
efficient machines process 98% of the
oxygen you breathe is converted into
energy
98% however the other 2% leaks out and
causes what we refer to as oxidative
damage or oxidative stress and what is
the oxidative stress is also generated
by toxins and pollutants in the
environment it’s actually like a fire
burning inside your cells and if this
fire burns out of control it can cause
huge damage to your body’s precious
resources now there’s a second bug while
the inside of these tiny little
factories is very well designed the
walls of these factories are not made of
strong steel some other material that
resists damage unfortunately they’re
made of a very delicate material which
is sort of like wood and you might know
that wood is probably the last thing you
want to have near these fires that are
burning not a great plan
but actually the body knows how to take
care of that in this case we have what
are called antioxidants and the
antioxidants are like the water that
puts out the fire and where do we get
antioxidants from they’re part of our
diet we eat things like berries dark
leafy vegetables and those become the
antioxidants that fight the fires in our
factories with the tiny wooden walls and
after the fires raged we have to rebuild
the wall so we take in in our diet what
are called omega-3 and omega-6 fatty
acids we get omega-3 from primarily from
fish we get omega-6 from corn oil and
other oil products and those oils end up
repairing the membranes of our little
factors so they all becomes the membrane
and whenever there is damage it’s
replaced by what we’ll think of as nice
freshly cut wood and this process of
destruction and reconstruction goes on
day in and day out so here’s a little
model that’s showing you what happens in
the normal course and the oxidative
damage happens it proceeds it burns up
you see the number on the bottom is the
number of lipid molecules the oil in
your membrane that’s destroyed and it’s
kept under control by the little green
dots those are the antioxidants I talked
about which stop the burning fires so
when we’re young and when we’re healthy
we can keep this very delicate balance
between the damage that occurs
li from that two percent of the oxygen
that we don’t consume and the ability of
our bodies to repair it by using new
wood but as we get older we can no
longer keep those two mechanisms and
balance the fires rage the antioxidants
are not sufficient and in fact our
factories shut down and if enough
factories shut down the entire city will
shut down and once the city shuts down
poof that was one of the neurons in your
brain that just stopped working poof
that was part of your heart muscle which
just stopped working okay so what are we
going to do at this point you’re
thinking look this is I know how to
solve this problem all we need are more
antioxidants to put out the fire and at
the same time we’re going to need more
wood more lipids to replace the ones
that got burned unfortunately it turns
out that the membranes of your
mitochondria can only take a very small
number of antioxidants compared to the
amount of lipid or wood they have in
fact you can only have approximately one
I show here a bucket of water one
antioxidant for every thousand lipid
molecules and this is strictly limited
you just cannot get more antioxidants
than that in the walls of our tiny
wooden factor
so here’s what happens in a case of a
disease where the amount of oxidation is
ten times the normal but I have the same
maximum amount of antioxidants that can
go into our walls and you see here
massive damage occurs that leads to the
death of the mitochondria eventually
this and as we age we cannot control
this process primarily affects our
brains and one by one
the lights of our cities go out so at
this point I think I’ve kind of painted
myself in a corner because I’ve said we
need more antioxidants to be able to put
the fires out but I said we can’t put
to stop the fires from burning so what
are we going to do at this point I have
two choices
I can either quickly leave the stage or
I can do an amazing feat sort of like
that other famous Harry Harry Houdini
and find a way to escape from this
contradiction and in fact that’s what
we’re going to do today about ten years
ago I received a phone call from a
friend and colleague his name is Charles
Kantor he is a superstar biochemist
Charles ran the first human genome
project he’s a member of the National
Academy of Sciences he has over 400
peer-reviewed papers published so when
and I can’t quote to you exactly the
words but the essence of what he said
was look we can’t get enough antioxidant
in the system to put out the fires but
what if we could prevent the fires
happening by creating by fire proofing
the walls of these little factories
could we construct a alternate version
of those lipids that would not be
destroyed by these oxidative fires and
I’m here to tell you that after 10 years
of very hard work we’ve made that vision
a reality and how does that happen so I
said that the membranes the walls of our
little factories are made up of these
oils that we eat daily and what we’ve
done is to create a synthetic version of
that same oil but that is fireproof we
actually replace bit by bit the wooden
walls of that factory with a fire
proofed fortified version of that same
exact lipid it’s available in the form
of capsules which you ingest just like a
multivitamin or omega-3 supplement but
the only difference is that it is 50 to
30 times less susceptible to oxidative
damage but otherwise it’s completely
safe metabolized by the body
participates in all the normal functions
except one it resists being oxidized
so here’s that same example that we saw
before with the huge amount of oxidative
damage only now 10% of the membrane has
been substituted by this fortified
version of the lipid and you can see
there’s an incredibly smaller amount of
damage that occurs since then we have
done animal trials and found that mice
were flick TEDWomen Alzheimer’s like
conditioned are able to still learn and
retain memories every bit as well as the
normal mice who don’t have that
condition another experiment done with
mice that get a form of diabetes this
compound is able to completely protect
their retinas which is one of the tragic
side effects often of diabetes compared
to the control mice and perhaps more
amazingly we have evidence that not only
can this approach stop the progression
of the disease but we may be able to
reverse the condition if the tiny
factories and little cities are not
completely damaged it is possible for
them to regenerate last year we began
human clinical trials and I’m happy to
say that the results exceeded our
fondest expectation we saw evidence of a
reversal of four separate measures of
the disease progression in these
patients and the results of that will be
delivered at a conference later this
month the American Association of
Neurology annual conference in in Boston
the most prestigious neurology
not only that but we think that all of
these diseases which involve oxidative
damage to mitochondria may be helped by
these compounds so had this treatment
been available in 1989 my father’s
career as a doctor might have continued
to flourish his lifespan might have been
extended for decades
and he still might have been the father
the husband the grandfather that we all
knew and loved instead of merely a
remnant of himself we are on the cusp of
being able to live not only longer but
better and healthier and that is my wish
for my family for those I love and that
is my wish for all of you today thank
you [Applause]