Sometimes you want to give
a lot of drugs to a person.
And the most sensitive
tissue is the bone marrow.
So if you remove the bone
marrow before the treatment,
you protect it
from the treatment,
then you can give it
back again afterwards,
you can give a more
severe treatment,
and that helps the cure.
But the
bone marrow they have in it
cancer cells.
So if you give it
back again, you
re-infecting the person
with their own cancer.
So what we want to do is
remove those cancer cells
from the bone marrow
before we put it back.
So let's have a look at
a demonstration of how
we do that using our
monoclonal antibodies.
Let's have another volunteer.
And you in the blue there,
well, yes, come down.
Why don't you come?
Thank you.
What's your name?
Naomi.
Naomi.
All right, Naomi is going to
do this experiment for us.
It's a very simple one.
So what we've got here is
in here are cancer cells.
The red ones are
the cancer cells.
And the white ones
are the normal cells
in the bone marrow.
And the cancer cells
have had a little magnet
stuck on them using a
monoclonal antibody that
goes only to the cancer cells.
And you're going
to use this magnet
to get rid of
those cancer cells.
So just have a go.
Put the magnet on there
and see if you can
get out the cancer cells.
Keep going until you've
got rid of them all.
Take them all the way out.
OK, let's see it.
Take them out.
Get the other one.
I'll hang onto those.
See if you can get them all out.
There we are.
There we are.
There's still one left there.
Got rid of it all?
See how we can use the magnet
to get rid of all those cancer
cells?
Thanks very much, Naomi.
[APPLAUSE]
Now, how can we do that?
How can we do that
with our cells?
Well, we can use little
magnetic beads that are actually
smaller than a cell.
Just to show you
they're magnetic,
I've got a magnet here.
And when I put this
magnet here, you
see the beads going to where the
magnet is clearing from there?
See that?
They've all gone
down the side there.
Now supposing we can put
a monoclonal antibody
onto those beads that just
attacks our cancer cell.
And we've got the magnetic
beads on the cancer cell.
And we should remove the
cancer cell with our magnet.
Well, there you see it
up on the screen there.
You see the blue things,
they're the cancer cells.
And the little brown things are
the magnetic beads around them.
So now they're just stuck to the
cancer cells with the antibody,
we can remove them.
So we've got a
demonstration of that here.
Here's the bag with
the sample before we've
remove the cancer cells.
And we're pumping it through,
pumping it through here.
Is it going around
the right way?
Pumping the blood through,
it's coming through down here.
And it's going
over these magnets
here, two lots of
magnets to be sure.
And as it goes over, it
pulls out the cancer cells
with the magnetic
beads around them.
So we'll collect--
you can just see
it starting to come up there.
We'll collect into this bag,
we'll collect the cleaned up,
the purged bone marrow that no
longer has the cancer cells,
which we can give
back to the patient
after they've been treated.
So that's one way that we
can use the magnetic beads
and monoclonal antibodies
to remove cancer
cells from the bone marrow.
