EMET Talk - Dr. Mark Rutenberg

um what is the scariest cancer you can think of so just just let's go this someone says to someone else you have X cancer what is the scariest thing to put in that xtic pancreatic right why because the survival rate is so low um if nothing is done it's going to be number two in mortality but in the next seven years um I don't even know what the pancreas usually detected when the patients's got a T3 T4 tumor and it's too late to do surgery and even if it's a T1 the survival is only about 50% that's about to end okay now I asked I to starting to talk about it last year when people asked me what I was up to I told them I gave them an evasive answer because it wasn't ready but it's going to be ready it's going to be it's clinically available in a few places within the next 30 days and uh people who can get it or high-risk patients the average risk of pancreatic cancer for average risk people is 1.5% there's a 98 and a half% chance you're going to check out of this hotel for some other cause could be a skiing accident on your 120th birthday it's not going to be pancreatic cancer but there's a 1 and a half% chance is pancreatic cancer unless you have a first-degree relative who had the disease so if a mother father brother sister son daughter the risk goes up to 4 and a half% and because of that people with those risk factors and there's some other risk factors like late on set diabetes are reimbursed and encouraged to get annual screening to try to find the disease early the problem is the screening tests don't really work we fix that okay and that fix is going to be in the market in about a month but here's here's the scenario I'm trying to I want to communicate to make a breakthrough in medicine or anything else you have to make a breakthrough in yourself there there are numerous groups that have raised billions of dollars literally billions of dollars to try to solve this problem okay do you ever remember that movie uh Raiders of the Lost Arc it was a really cool movie 1987 or something the first uh Indiana Jones movie remember that there was a there was a medallion that the Nazi guy put his hand on in a fire and The Medallion goes on the top of a stick in the middle of the stick there's a little lens and you stand in this special place and the sun shines through the lens and it illuminates on in the map room where the where the Aron a kodesh is buried was a great movie anyhow the guy put his hand on the on The Medallion and he got the wrong he he didn't know there was another side so he had the wrong length so when they figured this out Indiana Harrison Ford and his team figured this out it say they're digging in the wrong place because the the stick was one amama Too Short there were it lit up the wrong place in the map room I keep thinking about that there are numerous groups that are trying to find pancreatic cancer in the blood they're digging in the wrong place we we we're digging in the right place I'm not going to get into that we found it in the pancreatic fluid this is the fluid that's maed by the pancreatic juice so we did three years of animal experiments in Israel and then we started doing humans and um for the first group of humans I was working with pigs everything in GI is first done in a porene model with large 50 kilogram pigs we did 30 pigs and it worked and it was safe and there were no issues okay it's time to transition to humans so we got IRB approval we have FDA approval to go into humans fine I showed up in Florida with um with uh expired one of the drugs we use was expired by 3 months I know the manufacturer it's a powder it's probably good for the next 30 Years the exploration is are meaningless but I thought I was doing it with pigs so I wasn't thinking I put it in my suitcase I was late ran to the airport I show up there and now there's bunch of nurses who are getting the patients ready one of them comes up to me and says Dr Rutenberg this drug has expired it's okay I talk to the manufacturer says no we can't inject an inspired drug into a patient and I thought what an idiot I am here I am responsible for these patients and why did I do that I did it because I didn't believe in what I was doing I didn't believe in myself who am I to come up with a solution to this major cancer I didn't believe I didn't get those messages from my family no one of my family did anything like this you know you look at Bill Gates's parents or some of these other people they were they did stuff like he did no one in my family ever did anything like that and they even give me messages that I could come up with something that that that everyone else couldn't figure it out and I figured it out a lot of self-doubt it it's that self-doubt that resulted in me bringing expired lumisan to the experiment what the hell you think it's going to work anyway who the hell do you think you are got that voice in yourself so says next week's para when when the questions ASV ask yakob who the hell who do you think you are you have that there's an as of inside of each one of us that's asking that question who do you think you are I I came back I I managed to get unexpired drug it was a miracle the hospital pharmacy happened to have it I got someone to write a prescription I got it I brought it but I said to my I said to my wife um I just got a kick in the rear end by God he just gave me a kick in the rear end he says you got to take yourself seriously now the pancreatic juice has enzymes that's designed to digest your food food right amas lipase protease we're taking cells out of the pancreatic juice the juice was digesting the cells that was a problem for us so we came up with a solution to lower the pH of the pancreatic juice of of the of the formula I called my big expert the guru in in Harvard and she says Mark you don't want to do that no no don't want to do that neutral buffer formula that's what we always use and I was going to do that I was going to use neutral buffer formul and we're going to have half-digested cells little Pacman cells like we had for the last 3 years and I said to my wife we're in saroda there in this place and I said you know Hashem just gave me a kick in the rear end for bringing that because not believing in myself I think we have to reduce the pH of the formalin and I don't give a damn what she said I know she's the world expert and I showed up at 5:00 a.m. I put on I felt like I was in a high school biology lab with the white coat and the mask and the hydrochloric acid and the litus paper I lowered the pH to five and it worked beautifully and my expert at Harvard wrote us a letter saying I've never seen such beautiful looking cells that was big breakthrough and how did it happen because I realized I didn't believe in myself and I had to stop any breakthrough you make in any field you want to do anything you want to do you're going to be fighting with yourself and if unless you win that battle it's hopeless it's hopeless you win that battle you got some hope that's it 's up that was beautiful