TEDxAmsterdam - Anita Goel - 11/30/10

Key Concepts

• Nanobiophysics: The intersection of physics, biology, and nanotechnology.
• Gene Radar: A nanochip technology for rapid and accurate disease diagnosis.
• Nanomachines: Molecular motors that read and write information in DNA.
• Environmental Knobs: Factors in the environment that influence nanomachine function.
• Open Systems: Systems that exchange matter, energy, and information with their environment.
• Information Processing Machines: Viewing nanomachines as processors of information from DNA and the environment.

Nanobiosym's Three-Tiered Approach

Nanobiosym operates on three levels:

1. Research Institute: Focuses on creating new science and technology at the convergence of physics, biotechnology, and medicine. Aims to develop new technologies, spin-off companies, and solutions to global problems in healthcare, energy, and the environment.
2. Nanobiosym Diagnostics: Develops and commercializes the Gene Radar product platform.
3. Global Initiative: Aims to bring emerging technologies to developing countries, addressing the challenge of deploying advanced technologies in remote rural areas.

The Quest for Unity in Nature

The speaker's early experiences fostered a belief in the underlying unity of nature, suggesting that the same rules of math and physics should apply to life, living systems, and medicine. However, a significant divide exists between modern physics (focused on inanimate matter and closed systems) and modern medicine (practiced at the level of chemistry and molecular biology). Nanotechnology is presented as a bridge to bring physics and biology together.

Einstein's Insight and the Expansion of Physics

Einstein's quote, "one can best appreciate from a study of life and living things how primitive physics still is," highlights the need to expand physics to adequately address living systems. This requires:

• Extending the framework of physics to deal with open systems that exchange matter, energy, and information with their environment.
• Expanding theoretical and mathematical machinery to incorporate matter, energy, information, and potentially even consciousness.

Nanomachines and Environmental Control

The speaker's research focuses on nanom machines that read and write information in DNA. These machines are influenced not only by the information encoded in the DNA but also by information embedded in the environment. The key questions are:

• How does information in the environment control or affect how these nanom machines read DNA?
• What role does the environment play in regulating this process?
• How can we understand the coupling between the environment and how these nanom machines read and write DNA?
• What mathematical machinery can we use to describe and predict how different environmental factors control DNA reading?

Identical twins example: Two different people, identical twins, could have the exact same genome and one could develop cancer and the other May may not. And it could be not because of the DNA that they have but what role the environment played in affecting how that information stored in the DNA got expressed.

Controlling Nanomachines with Environmental Knobs

Research involves understanding the design principles of these machines, developing the ability to control them by tuning environmental factors, and creating a mathematical framework to predict their behavior.

Example: Mechanical stress on DNA can be used to control the speed at which an enzyme reads DNA. Increasing tension can slow down or even reverse the enzyme's movement. At zero tension the enzyme is happily humming away around 100 150 bases a second as you increase the mechanical force you actually start to tune down its speed around 35 picon Newtons the enzyme comes through a screeching halt and if you pull harder you actually cause the motor to reverse gears and starts start running backwards and unzipping DNA.

Nanomachines as Information Processing Machines

Nanomachines can be viewed as information processing machines that process information from both DNA and their environment. This leads to questions about whether they process information Quantum mechanically and their potential as future Quantum Computing architectures.

Gene Radar: A Nanochip Technology for Disease Diagnosis

Gene Radar is a nanochip technology that enables rapid and accurate disease diagnosis from a drop of blood or saliva. It aims to revolutionize healthcare by enabling real-time point-of-care diagnosis, empowering patients to diagnose their own diseases outside of traditional healthcare settings.

SARS Case Study and the Need for Rapid Diagnosis

The SARS outbreak highlighted the limitations of traditional diagnostic methods, which took almost a month to sequence the virus. This delay hindered containment efforts and resulted in significant loss of life and economic impact. Gene Radar aims to address this by providing a rapid and accurate diagnostic tool that can be deployed in the field.

Traditional method: You take infected throat cells from patients you grow them up via cell culture this is the traditional way it was done and then uh you beat up the cells and squeeze out the DNA in this case it was RNA that takes about days and then uh you take the string of DNA or RNA you chop it up into little chunks 4 to 500 bases each because the current Technologies are not accurate and precise enough to go after the whole genome at once and you do something called shotgun sequencing that takes only four to five hours but then you spend two weeks trying to cleverly recreate the original 30,000 based pair virus so that takes another 2 weeks some fancy supercomputer technology and and some uh sophisticated bioinformatics people so it takes about 20 it took about 28 days total a trailer size facility at best.

Gene Radar Applications and the Developing World

Gene Radar has applications in various markets, including biodefense, life sciences, clinical diagnosis, water testing, food and beverage testing, and crop testing. It also has potential in biofuels, such as selecting algae strains for increased oil yield.

The developing world presents a significant opportunity for Gene Radar. By making disease diagnosis cheap and accessible, it can empower people to diagnose their own diseases and access necessary therapies. The cell phone industry serves as a case study, demonstrating how portable and affordable technology can create a paradigm shift in communication.

Quantum Leap in Healthcare

Portable diagnostic healthcare technologies like Gene Radar can enable a "Quantum Leap" in countries lacking traditional infrastructure (running water, electricity, roads, trained medical personnel). This can overcome the need for massive investments in traditional healthcare infrastructure.

Other Applications of Controlled Nanomachines

• Ultra-efficient energy transduction: Nanomachines can convert chemical energy (ATP) into mechanical work with 99.9% efficiency, compared to 20-40% efficiency in car engines.
• Precision DNA read/write: Applications in information storage, including in biomaterials and DNA.
• DNA data storage: Fineman's calculation that all the world's information could be stored in a box of DNA smaller than a human hair.

Conclusion

The convergence of physics, biology, and nanotechnology offers new approaches to understanding and manipulating living systems. By controlling nanom machines and harnessing their capabilities, we can develop innovative solutions in healthcare, energy, and information storage, with the potential to transform industries and improve lives globally. The Gene Radar platform exemplifies this potential, offering a path towards accessible and affordable disease diagnosis, particularly in the developing world.