everyone wins themselves now when I was
a kid I broke my son my fingers and toes
and our regular misadventures but 20
years ago I flew off my push bike and
used my face as a brake on the bitumen I
don’t recommend it
but all I had to do was keep the winds
clean and covered and I healed but not
everyone does some people suffer from
chronic wounds
these are wounds that just don’t heal
imagine getting a cut in your foot and a
week later it hasn’t healed you go to
the doctor get antibiotics and it still
doesn’t seem to help a month later you
go to hospital and with a weepy mess all
they can do is scratch clean out the
gunk and bandage it every day this
happens to a lot of people especially
military personnel the elderly smokers
and diabetics it sounds horrific and it
is but it’s not as uncommon as you think
one to two percent of people will have
these chronic wounds at some point now
diabetes is a big problem
it affects five to fifteen percent of
the world that’s 500 million people
diagnosed with diabetes in Australia
it’s 7 percent and that’s 1.7 million of
us and it’s increasing by a hundred
thousand people every year now you’ve
heard of insulin injection there’s a
treatment for diabetes and that helps
some but it doesn’t help chronic wounds
15 percent of these diabetics will have
a chronic wound at some point and this
one gets deep it just keeps getting
deeper often gets to the mind and one in
ten of these will require an amputation
even those that don’t have an amputation
often require 4 to 5 months in hospital
with regular daily treatment and this is
all really really expensive it costs the
world 50 billion dollars to treat
despite all this treatment 12 wuzzies a
day losing a foot to diabetes and around
the world every 30 seconds someone is
losing a foot to diabetes now for a
little bit about me I love worms not the
ones in your garden
the web’s in your guts ooh the gross
disgusting and you’re right but they’re
amazing
over the millennia they’ve developed an
amazing array of biological defenses to
dodge and hide in our immune system
the parasitic blood slick for example is
like a Marine sniper hiding in the
environment they wear camouflage
clothing to hide into the trees and the
blood fluke makes bits that look like us
so they can hide and just like the
marine covers themselves in leaves to
further hide in the environment the
blood slick does the same its sticks
bits of your blood onto it so it’s
hiding from your eternal police force
the immune system but this is where you
find the one that fascinates me the most
the tile liver fluke opus orcas favor
any it’s found throughout Thailand Laos
and Cambodia and in fact 9 million
people and it’s deadly it causes a
particularly dangerous form of liver
cancer that kills 26,000 tires every
year why is it restricted to this
particular region well it’s the
environment the particular animals and
the freshwater streams are all critical
for its survival when you’re infected
with the worm you’ll poop out the eggs
every day and during the monsoon season
they’ll get flushed into local streams a
snail comes along and munches up the
eggs within the snail the egg hatches
and multiplies and bursts out like a
fish targeting missile and this looks
like a microscopic tadpole it wriggles
around it eventually finds a fish until
it insists in the fish flesh the locals
catch these local kind of like a small
little carp or almost a goldfish they
catch these little fish putting the in
giant earthenware jars and add these
local ants to the dish they ferment them
for a few days and it becomes something
something like fish sauce before it’s
fish sauce and it’s delicious they mix
it up with herbs and so it’s a fisherman
it’s called pleura once it’s eaten it
activates in your guts and crawls up
into your liver here it grows into a 1
centimeter or half inch long parasitic
flatworm that’s the shape of a leaf and
it can live for decades now as a tourist
it’s not such a problem because you can
take a pill to get rid of it but the
locals are come
Tinh yulie eating this fish as it’s
their major protein source and they get
heavily infected all the time but this
one is munching around your liver and
causing wounds as it goes it’s actually
got an amazing superpower wound healing
worm spit just like if you knock a hole
in your wall at home you’re going to fix
it up and the worms doing the same thing
but it’s homes your liver with its wound
healing won’t spit it’s healing the
wounds as it goes as it munches around
and keeping its home nice and healthy
for decades but what does this mean for
the rest of us who aren’t infected with
the worm well maybe we can steal its
super power maybe we could use it for
good so that’s what we’re trying to do
in the lab now we would never be able to
grow enough worms to harvest all of this
was fit to use of the treatment but if
we could find the active ingredient we
might be able to use it and that’s what
I was able to do we identified the
active ingredient that causes wound
healing in worms spirit and it’s named
granule and it’s similar to some
components in us that involved in
development and wound healing and it’s
got this really amazing structure it
forms a spring shape and it’s held
together tightly with bonds now while
this is fascinating to study it makes it
really expensive really tricky and
really messy to make so we’d never be
able to turn it into a pharmaceutical
but maybe we don’t need the whole
molecule maybe we just need a little bit
of it and that’s what we tested in the
lab a whole range of different bits of
it in the lab we’re able to make it with
amino acids and gluing them together bit
at a time to make it synthetically and
thus allowed us to make these various
different active molecules to test in
our studies so then we ran out tests
through some healing mouse winding tests
here’s the mice or anesthetized and kept
on painkillers when we make a small
wound between their ears we photograph
this over days and watch those wounds
close and we measure how long it takes
to get to 80% closure so here’s a
baseline healing rate of 8.6 days of our
no treatment control when compared
against the currently available biologic
treatment it was able to improve healing
by 29% now this treatments only
available in career in the USA and cost
over three so
and dollars of treatment our granule and
protein was out the hill wins 41 percent
faster but even better our synthetic
granule and is able to mate cleanly and
cheaply healed in 4.9 days that’s 43
percent better than controls and almost
50 percent better than the currently
available treatment so we think we’re
onto a winner something that can make
cheaply cleanly and is effective at
wound healing but this isn’t all about
graphs and figures
it’s about people imagine going to the
doctor and getting diagnosed with a
chronic wound this reach the bone you’re
going to need an amputation this isn’t
just going to change your life it’s
going to change everyone around you it
wasn’t anything you did it wasn’t
anything that could have been prevented
chronic wounds are just horrible in this
way but what if you could have had a
cream some kind of treatment that could
have supercharged your wound healing
like our worm spit that might have been
able to heal that chronic wound and
avoid that amputation and this is a
really big deal because diabetics who
get an amputation only half of them will
survive for more than five years due to
all the horrible complications so it’s a
really big impact on their lives so
hopefully with the right funding we’re a
few years away of getting some kind of
treatment that might be able to go into
humans and help the million diabetics
who are on track every single year to
lose a limb so remember don’t eat raw
fish in Thailand where it heals wounds
and a new treatment might be just around
the corner to help diabetic chronic
wounds and avoid these amputations thank
you
you
a kid I broke my son my fingers and toes
and our regular misadventures but 20
years ago I flew off my push bike and
used my face as a brake on the bitumen I
don’t recommend it
but all I had to do was keep the winds
clean and covered and I healed but not
everyone does some people suffer from
chronic wounds
these are wounds that just don’t heal
imagine getting a cut in your foot and a
week later it hasn’t healed you go to
the doctor get antibiotics and it still
doesn’t seem to help a month later you
go to hospital and with a weepy mess all
they can do is scratch clean out the
gunk and bandage it every day this
happens to a lot of people especially
military personnel the elderly smokers
and diabetics it sounds horrific and it
is but it’s not as uncommon as you think
one to two percent of people will have
these chronic wounds at some point now
diabetes is a big problem
it affects five to fifteen percent of
the world that’s 500 million people
diagnosed with diabetes in Australia
it’s 7 percent and that’s 1.7 million of
us and it’s increasing by a hundred
thousand people every year now you’ve
heard of insulin injection there’s a
treatment for diabetes and that helps
some but it doesn’t help chronic wounds
15 percent of these diabetics will have
a chronic wound at some point and this
one gets deep it just keeps getting
deeper often gets to the mind and one in
ten of these will require an amputation
even those that don’t have an amputation
often require 4 to 5 months in hospital
with regular daily treatment and this is
all really really expensive it costs the
world 50 billion dollars to treat
despite all this treatment 12 wuzzies a
day losing a foot to diabetes and around
the world every 30 seconds someone is
losing a foot to diabetes now for a
little bit about me I love worms not the
ones in your garden
the web’s in your guts ooh the gross
disgusting and you’re right but they’re
amazing
over the millennia they’ve developed an
amazing array of biological defenses to
dodge and hide in our immune system
the parasitic blood slick for example is
like a Marine sniper hiding in the
environment they wear camouflage
clothing to hide into the trees and the
blood fluke makes bits that look like us
so they can hide and just like the
marine covers themselves in leaves to
further hide in the environment the
blood slick does the same its sticks
bits of your blood onto it so it’s
hiding from your eternal police force
the immune system but this is where you
find the one that fascinates me the most
the tile liver fluke opus orcas favor
any it’s found throughout Thailand Laos
and Cambodia and in fact 9 million
people and it’s deadly it causes a
particularly dangerous form of liver
cancer that kills 26,000 tires every
year why is it restricted to this
particular region well it’s the
environment the particular animals and
the freshwater streams are all critical
for its survival when you’re infected
with the worm you’ll poop out the eggs
every day and during the monsoon season
they’ll get flushed into local streams a
snail comes along and munches up the
eggs within the snail the egg hatches
and multiplies and bursts out like a
fish targeting missile and this looks
like a microscopic tadpole it wriggles
around it eventually finds a fish until
it insists in the fish flesh the locals
catch these local kind of like a small
little carp or almost a goldfish they
catch these little fish putting the in
giant earthenware jars and add these
local ants to the dish they ferment them
for a few days and it becomes something
something like fish sauce before it’s
fish sauce and it’s delicious they mix
it up with herbs and so it’s a fisherman
it’s called pleura once it’s eaten it
activates in your guts and crawls up
into your liver here it grows into a 1
centimeter or half inch long parasitic
flatworm that’s the shape of a leaf and
it can live for decades now as a tourist
it’s not such a problem because you can
take a pill to get rid of it but the
locals are come
Tinh yulie eating this fish as it’s
their major protein source and they get
heavily infected all the time but this
one is munching around your liver and
causing wounds as it goes it’s actually
got an amazing superpower wound healing
worm spit just like if you knock a hole
in your wall at home you’re going to fix
it up and the worms doing the same thing
but it’s homes your liver with its wound
healing won’t spit it’s healing the
wounds as it goes as it munches around
and keeping its home nice and healthy
for decades but what does this mean for
the rest of us who aren’t infected with
the worm well maybe we can steal its
super power maybe we could use it for
good so that’s what we’re trying to do
in the lab now we would never be able to
grow enough worms to harvest all of this
was fit to use of the treatment but if
we could find the active ingredient we
might be able to use it and that’s what
I was able to do we identified the
active ingredient that causes wound
healing in worms spirit and it’s named
granule and it’s similar to some
components in us that involved in
development and wound healing and it’s
got this really amazing structure it
forms a spring shape and it’s held
together tightly with bonds now while
this is fascinating to study it makes it
really expensive really tricky and
really messy to make so we’d never be
able to turn it into a pharmaceutical
but maybe we don’t need the whole
molecule maybe we just need a little bit
of it and that’s what we tested in the
lab a whole range of different bits of
it in the lab we’re able to make it with
amino acids and gluing them together bit
at a time to make it synthetically and
thus allowed us to make these various
different active molecules to test in
our studies so then we ran out tests
through some healing mouse winding tests
here’s the mice or anesthetized and kept
on painkillers when we make a small
wound between their ears we photograph
this over days and watch those wounds
close and we measure how long it takes
to get to 80% closure so here’s a
baseline healing rate of 8.6 days of our
no treatment control when compared
against the currently available biologic
treatment it was able to improve healing
by 29% now this treatments only
available in career in the USA and cost
over three so
and dollars of treatment our granule and
protein was out the hill wins 41 percent
faster but even better our synthetic
granule and is able to mate cleanly and
cheaply healed in 4.9 days that’s 43
percent better than controls and almost
50 percent better than the currently
available treatment so we think we’re
onto a winner something that can make
cheaply cleanly and is effective at
wound healing but this isn’t all about
graphs and figures
it’s about people imagine going to the
doctor and getting diagnosed with a
chronic wound this reach the bone you’re
going to need an amputation this isn’t
just going to change your life it’s
going to change everyone around you it
wasn’t anything you did it wasn’t
anything that could have been prevented
chronic wounds are just horrible in this
way but what if you could have had a
cream some kind of treatment that could
have supercharged your wound healing
like our worm spit that might have been
able to heal that chronic wound and
avoid that amputation and this is a
really big deal because diabetics who
get an amputation only half of them will
survive for more than five years due to
all the horrible complications so it’s a
really big impact on their lives so
hopefully with the right funding we’re a
few years away of getting some kind of
treatment that might be able to go into
humans and help the million diabetics
who are on track every single year to
lose a limb so remember don’t eat raw
fish in Thailand where it heals wounds
and a new treatment might be just around
the corner to help diabetic chronic
wounds and avoid these amputations thank
you
you
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