At TEDx Longwood this spring, Leonard Zon, MD, founder and director of the Stem Cell Program at Boston Children’s Hospital, took the stage. In his enthusiastic yet humble style, he took the audience on a journey that included time-lapse video of zebrafish embryos developing, a riff by Jay Leno and a comparison of stem cell “engraftment” to a college kid coming home after finals: “You sleep for three days, and on day 4, you wake up and you’re in your own bed.” Three takeaways:
1) Stem cells made from our own skin cells can help find new therapeutics. With the right handling, they themselves can be therapeutics, producing healthy muscle, insulin-secreting cells, pretty much anything we need. (So far, this has just been done in mice.)
2) Zebrafish, especially when they’re see-through, can teach us how stem cells work and can be used for mass screening of potential drugs. The Zon Lab boasts 300,000 of these aquarium fish, and can mount robust “clinical trials” with 100 fish per group.
3) Drugs discovered via zebrafish are in human clinical trials right now: A drug to enhance cord blood transplants for leukemia or lymphoma, and an anti-melanoma drug originally used to treat arthritis.
Zon, who co-founded the biopharm company Fate Therapeutics, will be part of a judging panel of clinicians and venture capitalists for the Innovation Tank at Boston Children’s Global Pediatric Innovation Summit + Awards (Oct. 30-31). Don’t miss it!
