 In the space that used to house a single transistor, we can now fit 1 billion. This portability enabled the invention of things like smartphones and Fitbits. So you might say the future is small. As an engineer, I'm inspired by this miniaturization revolution. And as a cancer researcher, I'm optimistic about what it could do for human health. It turns out that there's an incredible opportunity to save lives from the early detection and prevention of cancer. Worldwide, over two-thirds of deaths due to cancer are actually fully preventable using methods we already know about today. Things like timely screening, vaccination, and of course, stopping smoking. But looking for cancer by screening is a lot like looking at this black screen and waiting for the tumor to grow big enough that you can visualize it. In fact, it takes some tumors more than 10 years after initiation when they are more than 50 million cancer cells strong to be able to be seen using current technologies. So what if miniaturization could help us do better? Here on the left you see a standard microscope that would be used for looking at a cancer sample in a pathology lab. On the right what you see is from my colleague Rebecca Richards-Quartum. This whole microscope has been miniaturized into a part that fits on the end of an optical fiber. It can be brought to the patient and the decision to treat can be made in the moment. What if you could shrink it even smaller? Well, nanotechnology allows us to do just that. It allows us to make a detector that's so small it can circulate in your body, look for cancer, find it all by itself, and send a signal to the outside world. We do that by making the parts shrink from 100 microns a thousand times smaller to 100 nanometers. Now at length scale, materials also change their properties fundamentally. This big black crystal of cadmium selenide changes into nanocrystals that glow. And they glow different colors depending only on their size. Can you imagine an object like that in the macro world? It would be like all the denim jeans in your closet are made of cotton and they glow different colors just because they're different sizes. What's just as interesting is that it's not just the color of materials that changes at this length scale. How they traffic in your body also changes. So here's a little movie to show you what I mean. This is a blood vessel in your body and around the blood vessel is a tumor. We're going to inject nanoparticles into the blood vessel and watch how they travel from the bloodstream into the tumor. So it turns out that the blood vessels of many tumors are leaky and nanoparticles can leak out into the tumor and whether they leak out depends on their size. So here we have small 100 nanometer blue particles leaking out and the larger ones are retained. We recently used this concept to make a detector that could circulate in the body looking for cancer. We designed this detector to be activated by chemicals that tumors make as they invade called enzymes. One of these enzymes can perform a thousand chemical reactions in an hour and that makes this an ultra sensitive cancer detector. Now the trouble is how do we get this activated signal outside of the body into the outside world where we can do something with it. So here we use another aspect of the body which is that the kidney is a nanoscale filter. It turns out that the job of the kidney is to filter out toxins from the blood and put them into the urine. What the kidney filters is dependent also on its size. So what you see here is that things that are smaller than five nanometers come out into the urine and larger things are held back. So we can put all these concepts together. We can make a nanoparticle small enough to get into the tumor, be activated by enzymes, release a signal that is so tiny that it can be filtered out of the kidney and put into the urine. And now we have a signal in the outside world in the urine that we can detect. These signals are just molecules that we engineered and we can design them to be read out by our tool of choice. In this image what you're looking at is that we've designed paper diagnostics, a simple inexpensive tool to track these molecules and produce the color change. So I imagine that this means one day you may be able to get a shot, wait an hour, and do a urine test on a paper strip. You may not even need steady electricity or a medical professional in the room. And I hope this leads to earlier detection and treatment of tumors even more than we have today. I hope you'll agree with me that the future is indeed small. We think that miniaturization and medicine can come together to help us understand, monitor, and treat the human body in molecular conversations at the tiniest scale. What I'd like to discuss at the board today is how we might take an invention like this out of the labs at MIT into patients. Thank you.