Cancer Awareness Pins

hi i’m dr. hackie reitman, welcome to anotherepisode of exploring different brains, today i’m very excited to have one of my heroeshere, cause he is not only an orthopaedic surgeon, he’s also a senior vice presidentof translational research over southeastern university, he was head of the tissue bankdown in miami and maybe still is, and he does a million other things, so welcome tom temple. thank you very much hackie, it’s a pleasureto be here. well, first of all i want you to tell everybodywhat is translational research so we know, because you are over at nova southeasternand you’ve already moved mountains over there in a short period of time, so tell uswhat is all about.

well, thank you for asking. it has taken me a long time as well, but atranslational scientist is really someone who sits on the fence between clinical medicineand basic research, and fundamentally connects the dots between discovery and clinical application,so is somebody who recognizes but doesn’t necessarily do the basic sciences and somebodywho’s had a real feel for clinical medicine but doesn’t really do the clinical trialsthemselves. so a translational scientist is someone whoknows what the clinical problems are and connects the two. now, you are an orthopaedic surgeon and youare one of the few orthopaedic surgeon who

specializes in oncology or cancer as it relatesto bones and i myself as a practicing orthopaedic surgeon back in the day used to call you upand beg you for help down at the head of the university in miami section there. tell us the training that goes into, not onlygoing to medical school, and then internship and then your residency to be an orthopaedicsurgeon but the fellowships and sub specialization involved for this cancer sub-specialty whichi don’t want to get lost in the wash, right here. well you never had to call me and beg forhelp, because i knew when you called you had a problem, and i had to struggle to try tofigure out what to do.

but the reality is in preparing for orthopaediconcologist, it’s a general one year fellowship, it’s generally intense, i did mine at themassachusetts general hospital with dr. henry menkin, who was one of the great leaders inthe field of orthopaedics and orthopaedic oncology in general. it was one of the leaders in bones transplantationsthat became very near and dear to my heart. so orthopaedic oncology is a clinical yearof study and then is a lifetime of trying to sort it all out. i also spent five years at the armed forcesinstitute of pathology and bone and muscular skeletol pathology so i tried to learned itall and not sure if i was successful in every

aspect of it but like arnie palmer said “themore i practice the luckier i get”. well said. let’s get back to what you are doing now,and part of what you are doing now, i think it’s still a bit with the tissue bank atthe university of miami? yes tell us about that, because that was a verypioneering thing when you got into that. yes, so the university of miami is the oldestcommercial tissue bank in the united states and it was started by a fellow named ted milenon,and when i was called to visit the university of miami or at least consider the job, itwas back in 1998 and i was perfectly happy

at the university of virginia and mark brownwas the chairman at the time, and he said, would you like to come to miami? and i saidno, i’m perfectly happy here, and if i had to list fifty cities if only miami would beon the top 50. and he called and he called and finally convincedme to come down and i saw the program and i saw the potential there but more importantlyi saw what ted milenon was doing at the tissue bank, and he was truly a pioneer in transplantation. now henry menkin was a great clinician butit was really on the backs of people like ted milenon who really sorted out the wholefundamental issues with bone transplantation and cartilage transplantation and growingcartilage in nutrient media, micronizing bones

and putting it back together with stem cellsand in-culture them and really that was the fundamental basis of my interest in the tissuebank and then around in 2006, the bank wasn’t doing too well financially and the dean saidthat “we don’t think is relevant to back the academic mission anymore” so he gaveme one more year to turn it around, we were about 2.5 million dollars in revenue overnightwith some affiliations, with some larger distributors we were able to turn into an 18 million dollarbusiness, and positioned it for sale for a company that now has taken it to a 60 milliondollars, so we were able to preserve that tradition, apply some business disciplinearound it, and still give that service fundamentally to the community and to advance some ideasin regenerative medicine.

well it’s been incredible. it started out with a couple of key inventionsand one was just sort of sitting around one day and watching a guy cutting bones on abench-saw and fundamentally asking, what happens to that dust that we just throw away? andwhat we did is we took it down to the meinheimer foundation and we created close segment defectsin animal primates we looked at different particles’ sizes, we looked at 100 microparticles, 1 to 3, 3 to 6, 6 to 8 and so on, and what we found was that when we lookedat the 1/100 micro particles sizes which was the dust that we were basically taking offthe stage of the bank saw, that was the most powerful material that to consolidate thosedefects, so we took it right to humans and

the next 2000 cases where we had bone defectsof that nature we’d just fill it with that micronized bone, and it was phenomenal. it just healed better than autologous bonegraft and it changed the way we thought about bone incorporation. we all thought that bone has to resorb andthen be replaced but really what happens with this is, you get a massive migration of stemcells in in the periphery and it goes bone to bone it doesn’t resorb and it fills invery quickly. so then, years later we were working witha group of the v.a and they created something called the miami cell, which was a very powerfulpoorly differentiated embryonal like stem

cells in adults that lived in a hypoxic spaceof the bone marrow. and they have worked on this for 15 yearsand they were publishing papers left and right but they never understood what it could possiblydo. so we took it, the miami cell and we marriedit to the micronized bone, and we created one of the first living bone products, calledvia graft, and via graft sales through the roof right now, but is one of the few livingbone products that we can actually create bone in vitro, we can make it any shape, anysize, and it’s been very powerful in healing non unions and very difficult pseudoarthrosisof patients with other co-morbidities so it’s really revolutionized i think in many respectswhat we are doing in the bone world.

and now with what tom’s doing over at novasoutheastern, it has this 6 story edifice, and under one roof, he is putting what? so, this is really a magnus opus, george handers’vision of basically creating research infrastructure that not only produces great ideas, but harnessesthose ideas in a meaningful way. so he’s also looking putting in a 400 bedhospital, a hotel, and a maybe 2 200 square foot medical office buildings. of which one is going to house potentiallyproton beam radiotherapy and the research clinical trials . so what exists now in thatclinical research building is the self therapy institute and the self therapy institute isheaded by a fellow richard jove, who really

is fundamentally invested in the problemsof ageing and tissue regeneration and with him came a whole cater of people from thekarolisnka institute in stockholm sweden, who by the way issued a nobel prize for medicinein physiology. these guys are working on everything fromtaking natural killer t-cells which is a primary in defense in our body and reprogramming themso that they recognize specific tumor antigens and markers. so we can actually take the blood out of anindividual and isolate these t-cells, we can reprogram them or expand them and put themback in the body, to basically just attack solid tumors and that’s one of the biggestfocuses we have at nova southeastern, taking

pediatric solid tumors and identifying thosekids that don't respond to conventional therapy and enroll them in the immune therapy trials. they’ve already cured melanoma in multiplerefractory cases in sweden, we are gonna to bring that technology here as well. the other thing they are doing is really fascinatingin the stem cells space, is they are taking embryonic stem cells and they are… as youknow stem cell, all of our cells have a unique markers called hla markers and they are consequentiallygoing through that stem cell and removing those markers, one by one until they coulddeliver a cell product that doesn’t look foreign to an individual.

so imagine a universal stem cell, that alreadyhas genes that are coded that will form retinopatia cells cells, they could form cartilage, theycould form bone, they could do anything you like and if it gets out of hand, it has akill switch. so you could just simply shut it off at anytime if it were to get out of control. so these are just a few of the things thatwe are doing in the self therapy institute, and as partners we brought in diverse groupslike ge health, big pharma, circa research institute, everybody who was kind of interestedin this immune therapy space which is… maybe the first encouraging thing that i have seenin 20 years in terms of not just controlling cancer but potentially curing it.

the work we are doing is really transdisciplinary,innovative, and focused on things that we do well. and looking at the prescient diseases of ourtime. tell us other projects you have there andhave to do with the neurosciences. so i think the neuro immune institute is thatcomponent that is looking at these neuro degenerative conditions like parkinson’s disease, theseneuro immune conditions that simply alter your perception of space and time, and otherdegenerative conditions like alzheimer’s disease and either reversing these diseasesby understanding first of all who’s at risk and developing the proper biomarkers to identifythem and then getting into their underlined

physiology and finding reversible mechanismsto turn these things around and i think in our life time i think we are gonna see somesubstantial improvement in our understanding of these neurodegenerative conditions andwhere we are going. there’s an interesting lady at the universityof miami, who runs the brain bank and her name is deborah mash, she has the largestbrain repository in the united states. even bigger than the one at boston university. even bigger than that one. and we work with her to recover brains, throughthe different medical examiners’ offices throughout the state and she still workingin bio-markers to predict for example who’s

at risk for addiction. it’s fundamentally a chemical imbalancein the brain, is not just because you have a defect in your soul. it’s really a fundamental abnormality imbalanceof chemical events that occur on your brain and what she’s trying to do is figure outwhat those are, how you can identify them, who’s at risk, and how to intervene. let shift gears a minute to tell me aboutsomething you are wearing on your clothing there, that somebody named lacey craddock,who’s your right hand person had a little bit to do with, tell us about that.

so lacey understands that science and knowledgedon’t move without money, and we can think about it all we want, but if somebody is notpaid enough to think about it and paying for that effort, things don’t happen. so lacey sees that and she understands thatwe need to generate, and the way to do that is to bring awareness to people who have cancer,in this particular case, breast cancer in solid terms, sarcomas and things of that nature. and by purchasing these pins, this money goesback into the research effort to allow us both the infrastructure and the scientificknow-how to advance these ideas. so that’s a pink shark of nova southeastern

exactly, they are the sharks indeed. one of the big things that our mutual visionshave in common, is that at differentbrains.com the way i see it precisely because of my ignoranceand the fact that i am not a real scientist is that all of these different xylose of researchfor autism, for alzheimer’s, for strokes, for parkinsonism, the list goes on and on,it’s all just variations on the same thing, with the same theme, the same principles,and a lot of the same tools we can use to attack these problems and i know you are notthere yet but i know ot’s on your horizon, would you like to elaborate on some of thefuturistic…? absolutely.

i think that this is one of the final frontiers,our fundamental understanding of the brain, and we have a number of behavioral initiativesand… parkinson’s disease for example, and addictionand people whose brains have been affected by toxic exposure; and our goal is to bringin all of these behavioral elements into the various institutes and there’s so many synergiesbetween the brain and cancer, the brain and the immune system, the brain and stem cellsfor example that we could fundamentally take a human being with parkinson’s disease anddeliver a stem cell product into a very specific part of the brain and reverse those effects. now, we have a parkinson model right now ina rat, where we actually created a defect

in that part of the brain and those animalswalk in a circle just like a part of a behavior, but when we repopulate that part of the brainwith a stem cell we can write their date. so we are looking at different ways of usingstem cells, of using drugs and delivering them in the blood brain or through the bloodbrain barrier or across the blood brain barrier through a nasal root. so there are a lot… when you combine pharmacy,when you combine cell biology, stem cell research and neuro-biology, and neuro-anatomy and whatwe are doing is breaking down those silos. we don’t have the department of parkinsondisease, we are not the department of bad behavior, i mean they are together and that’sthe whole purpose of the centre for collaborative

research, i mean, everybody is focused onproblems from their different perspective and they actually talk to one another, andthey actually learn from one another and is not just nova southeastern, we have globalrelationships with the university of saint petersburg, with india, with the karolinskainstitute, so this is a global enterprise. it’s not just nova southeastern and we’vegathered the best of everybody in the world to look at these problems and tackle them. our viewers, or listeners- how do they findout what you do there at nova southeastern? we have a website, the tred website, the translationalresearch economic development website at nova southeastern edu that’s one of the bestwebsites that we have available, and i think

that all the information of the clinical trials,and the activities that are going on are basically in that website. we have our own office of translational researchand economic development office right, interestingly in the law school, imagine an orthopaedicsurgeon clean buried in a law school with all these lawyers. i get hives every morning. we would welcome visitors there, we wouldhave symposiums, we had music programs, where people can come and learn a little bit moreabout what we are doing, we have some of the greatest pianists in the world, perform atthese small recitals.

so we have a lot of things going on wherepeople can come and enjoy, not only that south east has a beautiful campus but learn moreabout the things that we are doing there. what are some of the websites and joseph andmichael put this up on our screen, but what are some of the websites that people can goto off the top of your head? that’s great. we’d been talking to tom temple and thishas been an amazing, and if there is one message you would like anybody to take this in thisto get in this log line if you will. as camus, and henry menkins, used to alwaysreinforce: “there’s always hope” there’s always hope, and on that note i’mgonna thank you h thomas temple of nova southeastern

university. thank you very much. it was a great pleasure and thank you forhaving me here today.