| So I am a pediatric cancer doctor and stem-cell researcher at Stanford University where my clinical focus has been bone marrow transplantation . Now , inspired by Jill Bolte Taylor last year , I did n't bring a human brain , but I did bring a liter of bone marrow . And bone marrow is actually what we use to save the lives of tens of thousands of patients , most of whom have advanced malignancies like leukemia and lymphoma and some other diseases . So , a few years ago , I 'm doing my transplant fellowship at Stanford . I 'm in the operating room . We have Bob here , who is a volunteer donor . We 're sending his marrow across the country to save the life of a child with leukemia . So actually how do we harvest this bone marrow ? Well we have a whole O. R. team , general anesthesia , nurses , and another doctor across from me . Bob 's on the table , and we take this sort of small needle , you know , not too big . And the way we do this is we basically place this through the soft tissue , and kind of punch it into the hard bone , into the tuchus -- that 's a technical term -- and aspirate about 10 mls of bone marrow out , each time , with a syringe . And hand it off to the nurse . She squirts it into a tin . Hands it back to me . And we do that again and again . About 200 times usually . And by the end of this my arm is sore , I 've got a callus on my hand . Let alone Bob , Whose rear end looks something more like this , like swiss cheese . So I 'm thinking , you know , this procedure has n't changed in about 40 years . And there is probably a better way to do this . So I thought of a minimally invasive approach . And a new device that we call the Marrow Miner . This is it . And the Marrow Miner , the way it works is shown here . Our standard see-through patient . Instead of entering the bone dozens of times , we enter just once , into the front of the hip or the back of the hip . And we have a flexible , powered catheter with a special wire loop tip that stays inside the crunchy part of the marrow and follows the contours of the hip , as it moves around . So it enables you to very rapidly aspirate , or suck out , rich bone marrow very quickly through one hole . We can do multiple passes through that same entry . No robots required . And , so , very quickly , Bob can just get one puncture , local anesthesia , and do this harvest as an outpatient . So I did a few prototypes . I got a small little grant at Stanford . And played around with this a little bit . And our team members developed this technology . And eventually we got two large animals , and pig studies . And we found , to our surprise , that we not only got bone marrow out , but we got 10 times the stem cell activity in the marrow from the Marrow Miner , compared to the normal device . This device was just FDA approved in the last year . Here is a live patient . You can see it following the flexible curves around . There will be be two passes here , in the same patient , from the same hole . This was done under local anesthesia , as an outpatient . And we got , again , about three to six times more stem cells than the standard approach done on the same patient . So why should you care ? Bone marrow is a very rich source of adult stem cells . You all know about embryonic stem cells . They 've got great potential but have n't yet entered clinical trials . Adult stem cells are throughout our body , including the blood-forming stem cells in our bone marrow . Which we 've been using as a form of stem-cell therapy for over 40 years . In the last decade there 's been an explosion of use of bone marrow stem cells to treat the patient 's other diseases such as heart disease , vascular disease , orthopedics , tissue engineering , even in neurology to treat Parkinson 's , and diabetes . We 've just come out , we 're commercializing , this year , generation 2.0 of the Marrow Miner . The hope is is that this gets more stem cells out . Which translates to better outcomes . It may encourage more people to sign up to be potential live saving bone marrow donors . It may even enable you to bank your own marrow stem cells , when you 're younger and healthier , to use in the future , should you need it . And ultimately -- and here 's a picture of our bone marrow transplant survivors , who come together for a reunion each year at Stanford . Hopefully this technology will let us have more of these survivors in the future . Thanks . ( Applause ) |