Placeholder Image

Subtitles section Play video

  • [MUSIC PLAYING]

  • Please welcome MIT professor and 2015 National Inventors

  • Hall of Fame Inductee, Ioannis Yannas.

  • This discovery changed my professional life.

  • The discovery we made, Dr. John Burke-- my surgeon colleague

  • and myself.

  • It was a big surprise, totally unexpected, and hard

  • to believe.

  • It used to be called artificial skin,

  • but it was soon recognized as the first example of organ

  • regeneration in adults.

  • Being inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame

  • is a very big honor for me, especially when I

  • look at the names of other people

  • who had been previously deducted-- names like Steve

  • Jobs and Wozniak, Louis Pasteur, the Wright Brothers--

  • important names that I grew up with.

  • It really makes me feel a little small.

  • My photo was shown like I was the leader of a totalitarian

  • regime.

  • A little too much for me.

  • What I see is what used to be many, many years ago

  • when this discovery was made.

  • Some of our nation's greatest living inventors.

  • The recognition that this work is getting

  • will make it more clear there is something here

  • that has future and needs to be developed by other people

  • and made into one of the brand new tools of medicine.

  • In 1969, I was an assistant professor at MIT.

  • I thought that it could be a great idea

  • to meet one of the doctors in the Boston area.

  • That person turned out to be Dr. John

  • Burke who was then head of the Shriners Burns

  • Institute in Boston.

  • I found in him in a very difficult problem in medicine

  • that I thought I could contribute to each solution.

  • And I think what he saw in me was a material scientist who

  • could create a material that would be

  • useful to treat his patients.

  • There was a mutual clicking that happened when we met.

  • Dr. Burke was looking for a very sophisticated Band-Aid.

  • He had patients who were mostly children.

  • The children had massive burns.

  • Basically, the prelude to death unless you do something

  • drastic about it.

  • Dr. Shelton, Dr. Paul Shelton.

  • I remember very clearly the day that Dr. Burke took me

  • on a tour of one of the wards.

  • It was a very, very difficult sight.

  • I was shocked.

  • I was shocked beyond belief in what I was seeing there.

  • It was a very important moment in my life,

  • because it guided me towards a direction

  • that I would not have chosen.

  • I remember the children were lying in their beds.

  • There was extensive bandaging of faces and limbs in these kids.

  • Yeah.

  • Dr. Burke would softly explain the situation to me.

  • These pictures, in my mind, have stayed with me.

  • And they became the reason why I started

  • working on this project.

  • There was a great deal of human misery that was confronting me.

  • And I felt that I had to do something about it.

  • It was clear that we needed to solve the problem

  • as soon as possible.

  • The objective of speeding up the rate of closing of these wounds

  • that, in effect, became the problem

  • that Dr. Burke and I would have to solve.

  • My students and myself were synthesizing polymers

  • from different chemical families--

  • things like plastics, rubbers, textile fibers,

  • and the tissues of our body.

  • We were putting things dressings in foils.

  • We would then take the subway to Boston

  • and then go to the Shriners animal laboratory facility.

  • The technician would then put them on the animals.

  • This was going on family after chemical family.

  • None of the dressings we had worked with

  • had any effect on the speed of closure

  • of these wounds in the animals.

  • So far the projects had been a total failure.

  • I started thinking that maybe a polymer I had been working

  • with in my PhD thesis, which was collagen-- a collagen is

  • a polymer of the tissues of the body--

  • that maybe I should try this since almost everything else

  • had failed.

  • Lo and behold, this collagen dressing,

  • instead of speeding up the rates of closure,

  • it actually delayed it and make it very, very slow

  • so that's the wound would hardly close.

  • We were basically going the wrong way.

  • Instead of making it close faster,

  • we're making it close slower.

  • Nobody likes to have a failed experiment.

  • It's the last thing you want.

  • Trying to get to understand why the experiment had failed

  • was a very important step.

  • This was a great moment for myself and for Dr. Burke.

  • It was a great moment because of what

  • we decided to do with that failure, which

  • was to not just let go and go home and cry,

  • but to start trying to understand what had happened.

  • It was then that we saw that the animals that

  • had been treated with the collagen

  • dressings we're not making scar as every other animal before

  • had done.

  • The last dressing we had used was actually causing new skin

  • to be formed instead of scar-- skin not scar-- skin

  • that functions like skin as opposed to scar that does not

  • function like skin.

  • In addition to keeping children alive,

  • it gave them a chance to regrow the skin that they had lost.

  • It was way beyond what I expected.

  • It was way, way beyond that.

  • We could hardly find it possible to publish our results,

  • because people would not want to publish a paper that says that

  • you have regenerated something that everybody knows you cannot

  • regenerate.

  • Dr. Burke was very happy, because he could see now

  • a new way of treating his patients that

  • did not exist before.

  • Back in the 1970s, there were a lot of advances in ICU care.

  • And as a result of that, these very severe burn patients

  • were able to be kept alive for long periods of time,

  • but they oftentimes didn't have enough donor sites or skin

  • to cover them up.

  • So it was a bleak time.

  • Dr. Burke was a surgeon who espoused the concept

  • of early excision and grafting.

  • That wasn't universally adopted back then.

  • Taking a patient to the operating room

  • early on to carry out excision and grafting

  • was a dangerous prospect for the patient.

  • The excision can easily lead to very significant blood loss.

  • In addition, harvesting donor sites

  • can lead to significant blood loss.

  • So you needed a surgeon like Dr. Burke who was meticulous,

  • who was careful, and did this relatively new technique

  • and to make this invention successful.

  • The availability of Dr. Burke and Yannas's artificial skin,

  • which became known as INTEGRA, tipped the scale

  • towards early excision and grafting of large body surface

  • area burns.

  • Our skin is made up of two layers, the outer epidermis

  • and the inner dermis.

  • Now the epidermis is damaged.

  • It grows back quickly, and it regenerates.

  • But when our dermis is damaged, the dermis

  • never grows back by itself.

  • Instead the wound contracts and forms the scar.

  • Now when our regeneration template,

  • or what used to be called artificial skin, when

  • that is used, something entirely different things.

  • The contraction is stopped.

  • And the cells of the person move into the template.

  • There, the cells regenerate a new dermis or the template

  • is broken down and absorbed.

  • Not only are you able to solve the acute burn problem

  • and keep the patients alive, but at the end,

  • you're able to give them the skin that's

  • more natural and supple, pliable with less scar.

  • Back before advances like INTEGRA were available,

  • patients like Lauren, who had 35% full thickness

  • burn injuries were at risk of dying.

  • And now our goal is to try to restore them

  • as much as possible to the state that they were in

  • prior to having the injury.

  • So that is an absolutely transformative change

  • in burn care over the course of my lifetime.

  • And what Dr. Burke and Dr. Yannas did

  • has played a huge role in that change in our goals.

  • Look so good.

  • You've made my day.

  • [PATIENT LAUGHING]

  • It is quite clear that many lives

  • were saved by the development of the artificial skin.

  • We have a patient at Shriners right now

  • who sustained an over 80% deep second and third degree burn.

  • And his life was clearly saved by the use of INTEGRA.

  • My name is Matthew Hicks.

  • Are you going to get shy?

  • Yeah.

  • Yeah?

  • No.

  • No.

  • This is my son Mason.

  • He's eight years old.

  • He was burned on 87% of his body.

  • And uh, yeah.

  • Mason has the most incredible personality.

  • He's very easy to fall in love with.

  • Let me know.

  • [MASON CHUCKLES]

  • He's no longer stuck in a wheelchair.

  • He just learned to walk a year ago again.

  • And he's out playing soccer.

  • He's playing with the kids in the neighborhood.

  • And he's just like a regular kid again.

  • He was burned on 87% of his body,

  • in and out of surgery every other day

  • for a good two or three weeks.

  • They were using a lot of different things

  • to cover his skin including INTEGRA.

  • We're in the reconstructive part of the surgeries at this point.

  • Nothing holds him back.

  • Nothing at all.

  • INTEGRA definitely had an integral part

  • in saving his life.

  • There was no way he had enough of his own skin

  • to cover his body.

  • Without it, God, I have no idea where we'd be.

  • I don't think he'd still be here.

  • [MUSIC PLAYING]

  • To younger faculty, I would say, go

  • where the ignorance is maximum, because that's where you're

  • going to discover the goal.

  • What is meant by this is that many young researchers

  • go where everybody else is doing research.

  • And basically, they add an incremental piece of value

  • to what has happened before.

  • I would go where there already is

  • no value established by others, because no one has

  • thread that ground.

  • I was born in Athens, Greece.

  • I had somewhat of an early introduction to science.

  • When I was six or seven-year-old,

  • I got a hold of a little bottle of tincture of iodine.

  • And putting it over a gas flame in the kitchen of my home,

  • the alcohol evaporated.

  • And there I was holding the test tube

  • with a couple of little beautiful light purple crystals

  • of iodine.

  • It was actually one of the most beautiful things I've had seen.

  • I would never forget that.

  • Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the 2015 National

  • Inventors Hall of Fame--

  • When Dr. Burke and I got together and started working,

  • there was a step that very few people today

  • in science or medicine undertake.

  • It's a step requires working across disciplines,

  • which means working in areas that you're not

  • comfortable with.

  • Like I was not comfortable in Dr. Burke's surgeries.

  • And he was not comfortable with my molecules.

  • The fact that we got together was

  • something that was very difficult.

  • And I would credit this with the success that we eventually got.

  • There are two sources of satisfaction

  • that A person my position has.

  • One is the opportunity to see people treated with something

  • that he has helped discover.

  • [MUSIC PLAYING]

  • And that's a very big, big deal.

  • [MUSIC PLAYING]

  • The other is that if you're a scientist,

  • and you see what's going on on the other side of the mountain

  • that nobody else has, that's a very, very strange feeling.

  • It's like looking at a vista that is brand new

  • and has never been seen.

  • And I like that as well.

  • [MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Subtitles and vocabulary

Click the word to look it up Click the word to find further inforamtion about it