SPEAKER_04

And, you know, really until recently, and frankly, until a technology my lab developed about over a dozen years ago, we couldn't look at all of the immune cell types all at once in a single picture.

So I came from a laboratory, Lennon Lee Herzenberg, when I was a grad student at Stanford, and they had developed an instrument called a fluorescence-activated cell sorter.

And that allowed you to look at three proteins at a time.

And if you could know ahead of time what the cell types were that expressed the proteins that you're interested in, you could look at just those three cell types.

Then I came up with a way to look at, you know, 50 or 60 proteins at a time, sort of stepping up what they had already taught me how to do.

And then suddenly that gave us the ability to look at nearly every cell type in the body and immune cell types.

And then that gave us the – let's say the raw data to build mathematical models that we could do better predictions of what outcomes would be.

Well, so for instance, there is a kind of leukemia called AML, acute myelogenous leukemia.

It starts in the bone marrow.

And it is a distorted version of a myeloid cell type.

It starts as a stem cell.

And that stem cell goes down a number of different paths.

And depending upon the person, the disease is sufficiently different that it might follow a slightly different path towards what becomes the disease itself.

And so being able to trace the path and to know which steps along the way that it takes to become what becomes then the metastatic leukemia,

could only be accomplished by having enough markers that allowed us to trace everybody along the path.

It's kind of like if I wanted to follow you from who you are as an egg through development through to who you are today and I had snapshots every month,

I need different markers to measure what you are as an egg versus what you are as a baby versus what you are as an adult.

And so each of those different markers in my world would be different proteins that tell me something about an adult leukemia versus a baby leukemia.

And then we use something called pseudo time, which is a mathematical concept that allows us to stitch together those photographs.

I could take a random box of photos of you from an egg to who you are today.