♪♪♪ Aloe Blacc: What if we could live in a world where we can give our loved ones an extra moment?

Tom Patterson: Being alive, seeing a sunset, hearing a bird sing, having a wife who loves you so much, it's the most special thing.

Aloe: What if we could reimagine how we heal?

Aloe: You may know me from my music, but I've always been inspired by the tenacity of scientists and doctors who in the face of impossible odds, refuse to give up, because in medicine, innovation doesn't just lead to breakthroughs, it saves lives.

Tom Patterson: I came as close to death as you could possibly imagine.

I was infected with a superbug.

Aloe: An infection no antibiotic could touch, but from that darkness came a spark, a glimpse of what the future of medicine could look like, a future driven not by fear but by discovery and people who will do whatever it takes when their loved one's life hangs in the balance.

Tom Patterson: I made a choice.

I decided I was going to live.

The awe of life was really what I wanted to experience and continue to be a part of.

Aloe: Our modern world is filled with complex medical problems where artificial intelligence, big data in medicine, and the brilliant minds behind them are needed to completely rethink our health, where if nothing changes, the medicine itself could fail.

A new era of discovery is unfolding.

♪♪♪ Bil Clemons: I think as a child, I was curious how things worked, and so, you know, I would take toys apart, eventually to the point that my parents decreed that I was not allowed to take my siblings' toys apart until they were done with them.

Life is fascinating, and I think that I'm driven by questions that are just what is life-- what could life look like?

Like, what are the rules for life?

So you're putting these pieces together where you don't know what the answers are, but because you've got a wealth of information that you've already taken in, you can use that to sort of synthesize some new ideas that are testable in the lab.

Aloe: Scientists like Bil are considering how biotechnology can be used to combat some of the most complex problems in modern medicine, like the rise of superbug infections.

Bil: Bacteria, unlike us, can change their genomes very rapidly, so when you put a new antibiotic on the market, you already know that there are ways that bacteria can evolve to resist that.

Steffanie Strathdee: A superbug is essentially a bacteria that's resistant to multiple antibiotics.

Because of our overuse and misuse of antibiotics, especially in agriculture and farming, that's bred bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.

Aloe: Superbugs contribute to the death of over 4 1/2 million people each year, and those numbers are expected to rise.

Bil: If we don't do anything now, in the next 50 years, more people are going to be dying from bacterial infections than die from cancer.

Aloe: Steffanie learned of the devastating effects of superbugs firsthand when her husband caught one.

Steffanie: In November of 2015, Tom and I decided that we would go on vacation to Egypt.

It was on his bucket list.

After we'd had this lovely seafood meal on top of the cruise ship, he just got very ill.

He was vomiting and sweating and had stomach pains, and I just figured he had food poisoning.

The next day when he couldn't keep anything down, I realized that we were in a lot more trouble.

A doctor was called to the ship.

He said, "Wow, your husband is going into shock."

At that point, so was I, because I thought how can this be?

He was just fine a minute ago, and now he has to get rushed to the hospital.

They diagnosed him with pancreatitis and inflammation of the pancreas that's associated with this gallstone attack.

He was medevaced first to Germany, because he was too ill to be taken back home right away, and that's when they realized, okay, this gallstone has caused this abscess the size of a small football in his abdomen.

But that wasn't the worst of it, they came forward with this flask with putrid, like brown liquid, and they said, "Look, this is the liquid that was inside your husband's abscess.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but this is the worst bacteria on the planet.

It's called acinetobacter baumannii.

Not only is this the worst bacteria on the planet, it's resistant to just about everything right off the top."

Aloe: Doctors placed Tom into a medically-induced coma and prepared Steffanie for the worst.

Steffanie: So, Tom was stabilized.

They medevaced him back to San Diego.

About 4 months later, here's a guy who had been 300 pounds, he was now 180 pounds.

He's on three different pressors to keep his heart pumping, and now his kidneys are starting to fail.

So the question we have for you, Steff, is do you want to start kidney dialysis?

Because it's going to be imminent.

And I realized what they're asking me is do you want to pull the plug?

At this point, he was in a coma.

Some days he could wiggle his eyebrows or maybe squeeze my hand, and I was hoping it was going to be one of those days, because I said, "Look, honey, I know you're fighting really hard, and you're really tired.

I want to grow old with you, but if you want to let go, I'll let you go.

So if you want to live, please squeeze my hand, and I'll leave no stone unturned."

And then he squeezed my hand really hard, and I thought, oh, wow, you know?

And I pumped my little, you know, fist with my blue glove in the air, and then I thought, oh, wow.

Like, what am I going to do?

Like, I'm not a medical doctor.

Aloe: With Tom's bacterial infection, doctors were stumped as it was resistant to every antibiotic they could employ to treat it, but Steffanie found a solution in an unexpected place, Phage therapy.

Steffanie: I found this old paper, it was published in about 2012, and it was called something like alternative treatments for multi-drug resistant acinetobacter baumannii and, buried in that paper was something called bacteriophage therapy.

Aloe: Just like us, bacteria has DNA that controls and affects its nature and behavior.

Some types of bacteria help us digest food, while others can be deadly.

In the case of the bacteria in Tom's body, it had evolved to the point where the standards of modern medicine, like antibiotics, simply wouldn't cut it.

When antibiotics are inserted into our body, they work to fight bacteria directly, but as bacteria reproduces, it adapts and becomes more resistant.

Phages are naturally-occurring viruses that attack only bacteria by inserting genetic information directly into the cell.

Phages were discovered over 100 years ago, and doctors quickly realized their potential to treat infections.

In the early 1900s, British bacterialist, Frederick Twort, and French Canadian microbiologist, Felix D'herelle, independently observed these tiny bacterial assassins.

D'herelle quickly recognized their medical potential, and as early as 1919, he was using them to treat children suffering from severe dysentery in Paris with remarkable success.

But in the 1940s, a new revolutionary medicine came along, penicillin.

Unlike phage, which required matching bacteriophage to specific bacteria, penicillin could kill a broad spectrum of infections, and it was easy to produce, store, and prescribe.

Phage was largely abandoned by most of the Western world.

But bacteriophage therapy could be the game-changer that Steffanie needed.

Steffanie: For every prey, there is a predator.

For every bacteria, there are phage that will kill it, but you have to find the right phage to kill the bacteria that's causing the problem.

Right now we have different but very small libraries of superbugs and phages, and I liken it to having a million keys scattered all around the world and a million locks scattered all around the world, and you don't know which lock matches which key, and that's a problem, because if somebody's dying, you need to know right away which phages are going to work.

In this world of bioinformatics and AI, we can identify which phages are gonna go best together in a cocktail, and that will be really powerful information, put machine learning to test.

Aloe: Using artificial intelligence to understand biological constructs could have a profound impact on medicine.

At organizations like Biohub, investors are encouraging collaborations between biologists, doctors, and the developers of language models.

Started by Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg in 2015, Biohub has a lofty goal.

Priscilla Chan: Our mission with BioHub is to cure or prevent all disease.

We used to say by the end of the century, but we've been able to see a pathway to this becoming a reality much sooner.

Aloe: Inspired by her time as a physician, Priscilla Chan realized that diseases can vary greatly based on our genetics.

Priscilla: I trained as a pediatrician at UCSF.

For a lot of people who bring their kids there, it is because no one else has been able to give them an answer.

Aloe: At Biohub, scientists investigate how these diseases take form by digitally mapping the cells of our body.

At labs all across the United States, they bring together the brightest minds in science with cutting-edge AI models.

Loic Royer: AI is this very powerful tool that has enabled many areas of science and biology to be more effective in measurements.

Aloe: At the Biohub San Francisco location, they're using language models to interpret the data of high-end microscopes.

The team starts with imaging the embryos of zebrafish to study how various genetic mutations might lead to diseases or other outcomes.

Loic: There are millions of cells in our images.

Humans cannot possibly go after every cell and record the trajectory in space and time, so instead, we write algorithms that are AI-based that can follow cells.

Aloe: BioHub's AI models are trained on data showing the evolutionary relationships between different organisms, cell types, and diseases, and how those relationships translate to humans.

They're building a comprehensive map of cellular life that will unlock a whole new way of understanding human health.

Loic: The types of diseases that our research is uniquely positioned to help understand and eventually treat are diseases that arise during development.

Priscilla: The same DNA creates your skin cell, creates your heart cell, your liver.

If we can understand how it works when it's healthy and what happens when there's an error, then you can design very specific treatments to actually correct the issue.

Loic: All these advances that are really foundational and that make the future of healthcare possible, I hope that our work will have accelerated cures.

Aloe: As diseases mutate and become more infectious and resistant, scientists across the field of medicine and biology develop new ways to combat them, but the process of finding new medicines is incredibly time-consuming and very complex.

Tom Miller: Finding a new medicine is very much like trying to find a star in the expanse of the universe.

The number of possible molecules that could make a new medicine is staggeringly large.

That is a search problem.

We need to search these possibilities.

The advantages of AI are to take big datasets and produce optimal recommendations.

Aloe: To search for those new medicines, Iambic uses AI to run simulations in a fraction of the time it takes in a lab at a level that's beyond microscopic.

Wallace Derricotte: The physics of very small particles basically don't follow the rules of physics as we would know them, and so we need different physics.

Aloe: Since everything is so much more complex at the quantum level, they use Schrodinger's equation to define those different physics.

Wallace: That's going to help drive hypotheses for the team.

You're running simulations to see how flexible proteins are, different conformations of proteins.

You can start to iterate on that idea and change the molecule and figure out what's the best way to interact with this residue.

Tom Miller: On average, you would have to make thousands or tens of thousands of molecules before you find one that looks promising enough.

In our program, we found our ultimate clinical drug only having to make 120 compounds.

So we ran a very focused search that greatly accelerates the pace at which you can bring that medicine to patients.

Aloe: In Steffanie's case, she would have to mount a huge collaborative effort from scientists and doctors all over the world.

Steffanie: So, then the next problem was, well, where am I going to find these phage?

You know, this isn't my field.

And I went back to the internet and did a search and made a list of people that were fairly close by in the US that were studying phage.

Luckily, I heard back from someone I emailed, and that's Dr.

Ryland Young from Texas A&M University.

He said, "I'm the same age as your husband, I'm close to retirement, I've been working on phage my entire career.

I was hoping that phage therapy might be brought back to the West someday.

Maybe you can cut through the red tape to make this happen, because this is gonna take a huge effort."

Well, he turned his lab into a command center.

These phage were sourced from sewage, duck ponds, like absolute horrible samples, and that's because wherever there's a lot of bacteria, there's a lot of phage, the perfect predator to feed upon them.

People were offering phage from places like India, Switzerland, the Republic of Georgia, Belgium, and now we had two phage cocktails within the span of three weeks from my first email to the day that we were ready to treat Tom.

Wow, it was the scariest day of my life when we did that.

We injected a billion phages per dose every two hours into his bloodstream and also put them in the drains in his abdomen and just prayed that something good was going to happen, and within a couple of days, Tom started to turn around.

His vital signs started to get better.

His daughter was there at the time, Carly, and she just couldn't believe it.

He opened his eyes, lifted his head off the pillow, and kissed her hand.

That was the first day that we had hope.

Tom Patterson: Well, what I went through was not something I would recommend.

I lost 100 pounds.

It's not a weight-loss program I would recommend to anybody.

But I would say I'm so privileged.

I'm privileged because I had a wife who advocated for me.

I was privileged because a global effort was made to save me.

Aloe: Stories like Tom's remind us how fragile but resilient life can be.

With that same spirit, scientists like Nabiha Saklaan are now transforming the very fabric of medicine.

Nabiha Saklayen: I always wanted to be a physicist.

That was my big dream and goal since I was 16, 17, and at some point I decided I wanted to actually shift gears a little bit and use my physics training to work on biomedicine.

When I started grad school, my grandma passed away and she had a Type 2 diabetes, and there weren't many good ways to treat the disease at the time, so it sparked this question in me of how do we do better?

What can we do differently?

How do we take diseases that have always led to pain, suffering, and death and say, okay, that's not how this is going to go, and we have a better way?

Aloe: As we age, our cells begin to deteriorate, which can lead to all sorts of medical ailments.

But what if those cells can be regenerated?

That's what the team at Cellino is trying to figure out.

Stem cells are an important part of the human body.

They are responsible for helping our organs heal after injury, and they are one of the few cells that can convert into other cell types.

Stem cells are classified as either unipotent, in which they can only produce the same cell type over and over again; multipotent, which can differentiate to a specific range of cell types; or pluripotent, in which they can produce a lot of different types of cells.

These stem cells are normally only available when an embryo is first being developed until Shinya Yamanaka discovered the process of induced pluripotent stem cells.

Nabiha: The way this works is you take a skin biopsy or you take a blood sample, and then you can add biological factors to it to take that cell back to its stem cell state.

You're essentially turning back the clock on your cells.

What a cool thing to be able to do.

With these cell and tissue replacements, we should be able to cure some of these diseases that are chronic and age-related.

And what if we could make induced pluripotent stem cells for everybody?

How would that change the world?

We tried it, and these cells responded really well.

Nabiha: Welcome to the Cellino lab.

So I'm gonna show you our automated robotic work cell that's generating high-quality stem cells right now.

It's in this enclosure, and we like to have it in this enclosure because we want to maintain a clean space inside.

We have microscopes here, we have two of these, these are automated, so they're taking images, and they're sending those images to our Google Cloud where there are algorithms that live in the cloud that we've pre-trained, and these algorithms can decide which cells are good or bad or what to do with those cell types.

You can almost think of it as a mini-factory that is doing all the hard work for many, many weeks.

It's really compelling, because systems like this build the foundation of what could be delivered to hospitals and clinics.

Nabiha: The ultimate idea is that every hospital would have a cell and tissue foundry where these robots would run, and they would generate high-quality cell and tissue therapies for everybody.

My life mission now is to deliver our technologies at scale to every hospital clinic nationwide, ultimately worldwide in a way that patients go in, let's say they are diagnosed with a disease, and their doctor says, "Not to worry, come back in a couple of weeks, and we'll have your cell and tissue replacement ready."

In the back end what's happening, you know, the patient might do a blood draw or a skin biopsy, and they go home.

Those cells end up in the cell and tissue foundry that's run with the Cellino technology.

They come in, and their cells are transplanted by the surgeon in a couple weeks.

This technology will have an incredible range of applications in clean meat, in agriculture, in bacterial engineering.

Now, I have a whole list of ideas where this could go.

Aloe: We are entering a new golden age of healthcare where solutions to our complex medical problems require innovation, intuition, and collaboration.

Steffanie: Tom was the first person in the US to receive intravenous phage therapy for a systemic superbug infection.

It became known as the Patterson case.

We started to hear cases like this after Tom's case was publicized, and the first call came from China, the second call came from Mexico, another one from Canada, then all around the US.

Aloe: Steffanie and Tom co-founded the first dedicated phage therapy center in North America, the Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics.

Bil: At some point we're going to be able to understand in exquisite detail both the bacterial side and the phage side.

You're gonna walk into a clinic, you're gonna have some infection, and they're gonna do a swab, and then they're gonna sequence that bacterial infection, and then they're going to spit out a series of phages that you can treat with that.

Nabiha: If we can actually cure these diseases and not have our loved ones suffer anymore or even ourselves as we age, wouldn't that'd be awesome?

But what would it take to get there?

And the world we have to build is a world in which the way we manufacture and make these cells has to be super-easy, it has to be super-cheap, it has to be scalable.

That's the future we can build.

Priscilla: It really comes down to how do we build tools to make every single scientist better and to be able to test their riskiest, bravest ideas?

Tom Patterson: I hope my story is a catalyst, a match that gets the ball rolling.

I became a gigantic guinea pig for this experiment, which I think has changed the world.

Aloe: These incredible scientists are envisioning a bold future.

As artificial intelligence and big data aid these scientists in finding new cures faster, they are giving us the extra time we need with the ones that we love the most.

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