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[piano intro] - Hi there, I'm Frank Graff.

New discoveries are helping patients with autism and Alzheimer's.

The fight against COVID-19 fuels the search for a pan-vaccine.

And did you ever wonder what happens with that blood test?

Health science is our focus on Sci NC.

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[gentle instrumental tune] ♪ - Hi again, and welcome to Sci NC.

The US Centers for Disease Control reports about 1% of the world's population has autism spectrum disorder.

That's 75 million people.

The data also shows one of every 100 patients on the spectrum are children.

As producer Evan Howell explains, the autism spectrum covers a wide range of symptoms and levels of severity that scientists are only now learning more about.

[gentle music] - First from 1885 to 1889, and then 1889 to 1893 was Benjamin Harrison, but then 1893 to 1897 was Grover Cleveland's second term, but on his second term, that's when his voice was recorded, not his first term.

I'm homeschooled here.

It's called Highland Classical Academy.

Right now I'm on summer break.

I will start at the beginning of August.

- Let's see, if you were reading about... - [Joshua] Paul Revere.

- Paul Revere, and you were gonna be doing a keyword outline for it, what would you start to do?

He gets to kind of learn at his own pace.

Areas where he needs more time, we can take more time.

Areas where he's picking things up really quickly, we can just kind of move ahead, he doesn't have to wait.

- Autism is a way your brain is wired and it can make you act a little different and also make you think a little different and also make you feel a little different in your emotions.

Makes you a little different from other people.

- Little things, I guess, for him that I thought were just him being super bright.

When he was 18 months old, he knew his alphabet and he could tell you, by the time he was two, he could look at any car on the road and tell you, "That's a Honda Civic.

That's a Toyota Camry."

Little things that I was just like, "Oh, he's just super bright."

Which he is.

We just didn't realize some of the things that would be a little bit more difficult for him until he got a little bit older.

[gentle music] - Sometimes I just read it a few times and then my brain just remembers it.

And I'm like, whenever I recite it, I recite the whole thing.

- We contacted TEACCH over at UNC and went in, and he definitely qualified for a diagnosis.

- Right there is this Nintendo entertainment system.

It's one of the old classy game systems from the '80s.

- He's just a happy, quick learner.

He loves being around other people.

Kind of all the things that you would want in a kid, he's got them.

Like Joshua said, autism's just a different way of having your brain wired.

It doesn't make you any better or any less than anyone else.

Just means things are a little bit different, right?

- You're the same as other kids or adults.

Just try and find a way to be yourself.

- [Erin] That's right.

- So we define autism as a behavioral syndrome, which means it's a co-occurrence of certain behavioral phenomenon.

There are two key phenomenon.

One are certain kinds of social deficits, deficits in regards to social interaction.

And the other domain is a little bit of a messier umbrella term.

We use the term ritualistic repetitive behaviors.

- [Yuko] Could you tell me what is the title of the painting to the camera?

- This is "Having a Good Day" because it's with the leave.

- He said, "One day I'll be a painter.

So I said, "Okay, I've never seen you paint really much."

- It's purple.

- Purple!

99 is purple.

Okay.

Just because we think non-verbal doesn't necessarily means that he doesn't have a very powerful message, and it's up to us to be able to hear what that message is and be able to communicate with him.

- Just like when you hear really good music, there's a lot of music theory behind it, but you don't know it.

If you're not into music, you don't really know it, but you feel it.

So the same thing when you see his art.

Sometimes people just come up.

They couldn't explain it, but they love it.

So I think that's awesome.

- Most of the autistic person has very difficult time articulate their feelings.

And I think this was a token that he knew that he could express himself through art.

- It's having a fun day.

- [Thomas] If we think about one of his pieces of artwork, a bad day is probably red, probably going to be the number seven.

07.

So, many times he may not say a lot of words, but the words that he uses and chooses to say are very profound, very powerful.

- I would think that you would never know what is the disabled can do for abled.

- Yeah!

- How do I say?

- That's great.

Yeah.

- Could you help me out with the words?

You gotta find what they can do.

- I would say just allow your child or your person to thrive with what they have passion with and don't limit them just because we think that they don't have an ability or they have a disability.

They are overlooking the ability.

[gentle instrumental tune] - What we've learned over the last 10 or 15 years, particularly from genetics, is that there are multiple autisms.

And as we sort of look under the hood, when we look at the brain or we look at genetics based on defining people as having autism, we find a bunch of different stuff.

And that's essentially a problem in our field because we find too much.

- It is a school designed to provide the regular school curriculum to students on the autism spectrum.

It was actually when- It's really strange, it was actually when I was in grad school, I had all these autistic behaviors and no one picked up on it.

And then I was reading about it because it relates to emotional behavioral disorders.

I was reading about it, and there are so many things I was reading about that made me shudder, 'cause it felt so familiar to me.

- Isn't there a story where he tricks someone to marry him, like a really beautiful- - [Student #1] Yeah, he gets married to Aphrodite.

- [Student #2] I heard that on a Neil Gaiman story.

- Well, I've been teaching for a long time.

So there's that.

I actually have had an easier time teaching a group of students with the same disability as I because we almost have a mind lock, like we're the Borg of "Star Trek".

Now I'm showing my geekiness.

It's very common.

- No, no, no.

It's football.

- We actually have this thing at the school called "Follow the Group Plan", which is if a child is doing a behavior which doesn't fit the class, we say, "Follow the group plan."

And we call it not a class as much as a group.

And the purpose is to teach the child to move toward independence and being able to work in a team so they can have successful employment.

Neurotypicals or non-autistics should not have to feel like you have to walk on eggshells.

It's a time and age now where a lot of people are coming out with all sorts of things about themselves.

Like, "I have anxiety, I have depression, I'm LGBT, I'm this, I'm that."

And trying to figure it out and trying to say, "You should accommodate me for this."

But you know what, everybody's got something.

Or she could be a monster of plastic surgery disasters.

I, like everybody, wanna have a job and have a meaningful life.

And I can't walk into a room and be like, "Y'all, stop!

I have autism."

I really believe that humans are social beings and they naturally want other people.

And that's why I believe so many people with autism are depressed and anxious because we're not getting that social interaction.

We don't know how.

we really want to.

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- Still with brain research, but now to Alzheimer's.

There are many ethical and biological challenges to testing Alzheimer medications on adult brains.

But what if in early drug development you could test the medicines on brain tissue, sort of a mini-brain?

That way you'd know if the medicine is effective and worth further testing.

And that's what scientists at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University have developed.

[gentle music] Medical science has come a long way in its ability to treat human diseases.

Trouble is that process of developing new medical treatments and new medications is slow and arduous and expensive.

- We start with the Petri dish and the preclinical studies and clinical studies, and then finalize to the FDA approval.

This takes a lot of years, 15 to 20 years.

- [Frank] That's especially true with medical issues involving the brain.

Medicines must cross the blood brain barrier protecting the brain.

Scientists must make sure the medication isn't rejected and medicines must target the correct neurons.

Animal brains and human brains are too different to adequately test all of that.

So researchers need to use a human brain or something equivalent to it for drug research.

Dr. Yun discovered how to solve the problem; create a brain cell from another type of cell.

- Recently, the scientists found a way to generate the stem cell from the skin cell, and that allowed to provide the tremendous amount of stem cell, I mean, easily compared to what we have done before.

- [Frank] Stem cells are the bodies master cells.

They are the building blocks of all the cells, the organs, and the tissues in the human body.

Using skin cells called fibroplasts and through a process called differentiation, Dr. Yun and his team created brain cells.

He calls them mini-brains.

- The goal of our research is to develop viable brain organoids or mini-brains.

And the purpose of this is so we can simulate not only brain development, but how brains operate when they're exposed to diseases, as well as possible therapies moving forward.

- It really can accelerate the discovery of new therapies and drug development.

The research that he's doing can reduce and even replace, for some topics, the use of animals in research.

And so the work that he's doing with the mini-brain is really outstanding, and we're really excited about it.

- [Frank] Dr. Yun's mini-brain tissues will provide realistic and real time data about how drug therapies will be able to access brain tissue as well as the drugs effects on brain tissues.

That mini-brain model has already provided new insights into traumatic brain injury.

- As engineers, we can really create the environments of the traumatic brain injuries and see how the mini-brain responds with these injuries.

- [Frank] But the mini-brain's greatest impact may be in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease research.

That's because scientists are able to study the diseased cells in real time.

- So if you're able to take cells from an Alzheimer's patient and make an actual mini-brain of it and then be able to model the disease and figure out what specific drug that would work best for him, which is what Dr. Yun is doing, I think that would save so many lives.

That would be very cost efficient, it would save so much time.

[upbeat instrumental music] - [Frank] The research could unlock more personalized medicine options for doctors to treat patients.

Medicines could be designed to treat particular symptoms or specific stages of a disease.

As the mini-brain model process is refined, Dr. Yun sees great opportunities.

- [Dr. Yun] It's quite expensive for the mini-brain research right now, but I think next couple of years, with all the scientists and community, it will lower the cost a lot.

Then I think maybe everyone can have mini-brains.

I mean, in the futures.

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- Vaccines saved countless lives during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In fact, scientists are working on new vaccines to counter COVID-19 variants as we speak.

But what if one vaccine could protect us from all types of coronaviruses, even the common cold?

That's the research being conducted at Duke.

[gentle instrumental music] - [Dr. Hayes] Well, the last couple of years have been just incredibly intense.

You have to understand, though, that this is what the Human Vaccine Institute is for.

Our niche is to respond to the needs of society on problems that are not immediately attractive to the pharmaceutical industry because they're so difficult.

[gentle instrumental music] - [Frank] To really understand what researchers at the Duke Human Vaccine Institute are searching for, you have to go back... [classical music] To a 13th century legend.

To this guy, King Arthur, who sent his Knights of the Round Table on a quest for the Holy Grail.

That term is now a metaphor for anything eagerly sought after.

And after the COVID-19 pandemic that killed more than 6 million people and disrupted life across the entire planet, the holy grail for these scientists is creating a vaccine that protects against all kinds of coronaviruses.

- Do you know, we've had three epidemics now of coronaviruses.

We had SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, that occurred in 2003.

We had Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, MERS, that occurred in the Middle East.

And then we have SARS-CoV-2 that arose from a bat virus in China.

There's reason to expect there'll be another, and that candidate will be somewhere on the universe of coronaviruses.

- [Frank] A vaccine that addresses a broad array of coronaviruses could stop a future pandemic.

That type of vaccine is called a pan-vaccine.

- I have a picture here of the SARS-CoV-2.

- [Frank] The receptors on those spikes are how the virus infects us.

- So the virus uses these red spikes on its surface to physically attach to cells of the respiratory system, either the upper respiratory system in our nose or down in our lungs, and uses this molecule to infect our cells.

- [Frank] But those receptors can also be targeted by antibodies and prevented from binding to human cells.

- So this is a model of an antibody.

- [Frank] Vaccines teach our bodies to make antibodies.

And those antibodies block viruses from attaching to the cells in our bodies and creating infections.

- Then I have here a model of this red molecule, the spike protein.

So this is the spike protein that is present on all over a SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Within the spike protein, there are pieces of it that bind to that host protein that it uses to infect our cells, and that is called the receptor binding to domain or RBD.

This is the piece of the spike protein to which this antibody binds to prevent it from infecting.

So by physically binding here, it blocks the infection of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

[gentle instrumental music] - [Frank] The key to creating a pan-vaccine is finding a common receptor between many types of coronaviruses that an antibody can bind onto.

- But we have the concept, we have a pathway forward for how we expect to make the universal coronavirus vaccine.

And so that's what the team here is working on, is really getting the data to show that this works.

- [Frank] A COVID 2 vaccine developed at Duke, and now in clinical trials, may point the way to creating a pan-vaccine.

- This is how the vaccine is constructed.

So if you've ever looked at a soccer ball, you'll know that it has tiny hexagons that come together to make the larger sphere.

So that's what's shown here.

And so the sphere, we basically use it as a scaffold, where we can take a small piece of a virus, which part of the virus that we really want the immune system to see and focus on, and then we can array it around the surface of this spherical soccer ball-like scaffold.

And that allows us a really potent way of being able to target that specific piece of the virus.

- Early studies show the vaccine generates a strong immune response to the virus that causes COVID-19.

- So that's how the vaccine has been designed, is to really activate the immune system to see a specific site.

And in this animation, it shows a blue molecule that's the receptor binding domain from SARS-CoV-2.

And so that blue molecule gets arrayed around the surface of the molecule, the scaffold, and it makes the overall nanoparticle.

- [Frank] But what if you placed pieces of other types of coronaviruses on that scaffold?

- So what we know right now is that with one receptor binding domain, you can induce a broad neutralizing antibody response.

So these are the antibodies that block infection, but that can only get you so far.

So that covers a certain number of viruses.

But to really go towards a universal coronavirus vaccine where you really are covering the majority of coronaviruses, we know that we're gonna need more than just one.

And so this technology is amenable to that, meaning that you can then take multiple pieces of viruses from multiple different coronaviruses and array it and show it to the immune system.

[classical music] - [Frank] That's the holy grail researchers are scrambling to find.

- Which parts of those of the spike protein are similar among all these viruses?

- [Dr. Saunders] So I think with the upfront work that we're doing now to really put in place the technology for manufacturing, we'll be able to move this really quickly once we decide on what's the right mix of coronaviruses for us to target.

- [Announcer] Hey, parents, teachers, and homeschoolers, looking for lesson plans?

You'll find free interactive ones about all types of science covered by Sci NC online.

- So how many times have you done the sleeve roll-up for the blood draw?

A simple blood test is one of the best diagnostic tools a doctor has to check on your overall health.

That analysis can warn of disease.

It can also guide current therapies, but did you ever wonder what happens to that vial of blood once it's drawn?

That's where Burlington based Labcorp comes in.

- I believe the statistic is 70% of healthcare decisions are made based on laboratory data.

So we know the results we provide are very influential.

- [Announcer] And that lab data comes from this- Ooh, pause that!

The lab data comes from this; the blood test ordered by your doctor.

This is the story of what happens to that small vial of blood.

It's just about four teaspoons.

Not much considering the average adult has roughly eight to 12 pints of blood flowing through their veins.

So what about that blood test?

This is Labcorp's Greensboro Clinical Laboratory, where those blood tests are analyzed.

- Sometimes we're looking for the presence of something, such as how much cholesterol is in a sample.

Other times we might be looking for the absence of something such as a tumor marker.

If somebody has cancer or not, we're really looking for the negative of that.

- [Frank] 10 million lab tests per month are performed here.

Those blood samples being tested, come from healthcare providers in four states.

Labcorp operate more than 20 facilities like this around the country.

- We know these are individual lives that we're touching.

Labcorp was started here in Burlington, North Carolina in 1969, and we've been able to impact more and more lives through diversifying our test menu by cutting edge, leading edge science and all of the parts of the supply chain that make our ability to interface with that patient and with that physician or healthcare provider that is in pursuit of the answer to that question.

- [Frank] The lab offers more than 2,000 tests to answer those healthcare questions.

Most routine blood screenings require 20 to 30 tests.

Blood samples collected during the day arrive at the lab in the evening.

They are analyzed overnight.

Most results are sent out by morning.

- We wanna make sure that the physician has those results in their hands as soon as possible and timely every morning, so they can make the diagnosis decisions that they need to make for patient care.

- [Frank] But that's gotta be, I mean, that's a balancing act.

You wanna be fast, but you gotta get it right.

- Yeah, absolutely.

You never ever forget about quality, since there's quality reviews, there's quality metrics, there's quality measurements.

- [Frank] It's a highly automated, tightly coordinated, barcode driven dance of technology and medical science.

The barcode tells the system which tests are ordered.

The blood samples in each vial are divided into smaller amounts and sent to specific tests.

- There are some common tests for sort of routine visits that we are expert on getting high volumes of tests performed at a high quality in a short amount of time.

There are other tests that we perform here that are relatively low volume, because maybe it's a rare disease, a unique condition.

- The high tech scanners and diagnostic tools search in what you could call in individual's healthy range.

If the results are good, all is fine.

Unusual results are flagged.

- When there are abnormalities that we can detect, then it will go in for other reviews by our trained medical technologists and pathologists.

- And this is a laser here you said?

Laser shooting at the blood sample, and this is what it's flagging?

- Right, so the laser is actually looking at the cell size and the complexity of the cell and everything.

And based upon that then, it's partitioning the cells into different areas.

And based upon that then, we can tell that this is an abnormal group of cells, and it will flag our specialists to look at.

- So the computer is saying, "This isn't normal.

Take a look at this."

- Absolutely.

Yes.

And so it's able to do that.

So when we have that, then we will look at the slide and then alert the physician on any abnormalities.

[gentle music] - [Frank] The maze of technology allows for test results that are faster, more complete, and more comprehensive, and that can diagnose and prevent serious illness and even save lives.

- The idea is every tube belongs to someone.

So when we speak to our staff and we speak to our teams, it's a mom, it's a dad, it's a sister, it's a brother.

It could be your mom or dad.

So let's treat it like we want the best possible outcome for them.

- And that's it for Sci NC for this week.

Be sure to check us out online if you want more Sci NC.

I'm Frank Graff.

Thanks for watching.

[gentle music] ♪ ♪ - [Announcer] Funding for Sci NC is provided by the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

[gentle music] ♪