SPEAKER_04

But the immune system is key at every stage of the development because if you can reactivate the immune system in just the right way, then you can prevent the cancer from basically spreading or from metastasizing or from killing you, essentially.

That's exactly what is done.

In fact, when you get a tissue transplant or an organ transplant, you're suppressing the immune system.

The problem with that suppression is that you then put yourself at risk of cancer because what you're doing is you're turning off the immune system's ability to combat and go after a cancer the moment it forms.

So most people who are under immune suppression are at risk both of, let's say, virus infections, bacterial infections, but also for their cancers.

That would be a great thing to do if we could.

Right now, the only things that we have are systemic.

So yeah, I mean, for instance, if you could deliver to the organ that you're transplanting basically immunosuppressives locally, that would be great.

We don't have that yet.

But that would be via a form of gene therapy.

Do you want to come work in my lab?

You're accepted as a graduate student in the Stanford Department of Pathology.

Wow, that was easy.

One of the problems is that there are literally hundreds of different types of immune cells.

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.