 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. OK, we're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidelis, Community Matters, today, here on A Given Thursday. And we're going to report on two things today. One is how Harvey looks from the vantage of Bob Brown in San Antonio. And the second part of the show, we're going to talk with Ethan Allen, our science host, about a new breakthrough in cancer therapy that just was reported by the newspaper, and especially the MIT newsletter this morning. Very important. Anyway, so let's talk about Harvey first. Bob Brown, welcome to the show. Welcome to Think Tech. Well, thank you very much. Yeah, so you live in San Antonio, and my understanding is the storm did not directly hit San Antonio, but you had significant effects there. Can you describe how Harvey looks from the vantage of San Antonio? Well, you have to know what kind of viewpoint we have here. San Antonio was at the base of the Hill Country. We, myself, are located about 840 feet above sea level. Corpus Christi is about 230 miles from us. And Houston, downtown, is approximately 250 miles from where we sit for the vantage. When the Harvey came in, it was threatening to come up halfway between Corpus Christi and San Antonio. Consequently, it did drift a little bit to the north, and we were in the southwest quadrant. As the storm itself is counterclockwise, all that water was being uplifted and brought in north. Corpus Christi got hit with winds as a category three, just up above it. And we saw winds on the second day, I guess, after it hit, about 40, 45 knots. We can get straight winds here in San Antonio upwards of 70 miles an hour. So 40 knots and winds are nothing really big, although we'll start tipping the limbs and what have you. We had some squall lines come through, but even in the quadrant we are at, you don't get the tornado-tornadic activity that you was reported and touched down in the first couple of hours of Harvey coming ashore. So you lucked out in a way. You lucked out. We certainly did. We certainly did. When we first moved to San Antonio in 1988, we did have Gilbert come through, and it came right up to San Antonio. But, again, it was not much rain, but what we got was we were at that time in the correct quadrant, the northeast quadrant, and a couple of tornadoes hit and tore things up around here. So for you, Harvey wasn't as bad as Gilbert. Exactly, exactly. Plus, we haven't had rain for about a month. We were already in restricted water usage once a week for a certain part of the day, depending on what number you have on your house. So we were looking forward to the rain to help fill our aquifer, and it is going to be filled. We sit over an aquifer that needs about 640 feet of water before the restrictions can be lifted, and it's gone up to as much as 710. But when that happens, springs come up out everywhere. But like I say, it did disrupt our stake sale of treasure hunting, and we cut it short at about five on Friday when the winds started to pick up a bit. So how have you been disrupted? I mean, you must have some disruption, either supply disruptions or something. Well, we have a call to my family in Florida giving us advice on how to survive a hurricane. They know. We had advice coming in from Maui on how to survive a hurricane. They're all concerned about you, Bob. Yes, we had heard from relatives we haven't even talked to in a couple of years, but they all had advice for us, and we pointed out that we have enough bottled water and Dr. Pepper. We had Peter Cho, Jelly Bees, and we had rice. Yes, that was the question from Hawaii, is you have rice? Yeah, if I didn't mention it, Bob is from Hawaii, he's spent a whole career here, and moved to Texas a few years earlier. But anyway, so yeah, one of the disruptions. I mean, have you had trouble getting food? And how about supplies like gasoline? We have not personally had that problem. Like I say, had told you a little earlier that we did have people come out from Corpus and some people from Rockport to come in, but we have all already taken people in from Katrina and from Ike when it came through, and Rita, so we are not ill-prepared for evacuees to come, and we are having about 30,000 of them in San Antonio. As we speak, they may be going back, the waters are receding quickly down there. We've had no problems with food. We had, we kind of wanted our house to rest while we had 49 winds blowing. There was no reason to be out on the roads with things being tossed about. So we just ate leftovers. At least it was a shout-out. However, we have reports from people that they were lined up in the, in getting water and perishables in at the local HEBs. That's how it stands for how are you eat butts? It's big, it's a fairly large, it's like Albertsons or Kroger. It's a regional grocery chain. So where are the evacuees being housed? The AT&T Center where the spurs play and that photograph is where I was on Christmas Day, this past Christmas with my son there in the background. This afternoon, we just came in from going shopping, not for perishables, but for things that were on sale that we could send to our son and daughter in Alaska and in Seattle. And we had a hard time coming down the road because the prices on the gasoline have jumped 30 cents from this morning. Why? So people were, I guess there's a Labor Day kickoff. So everybody was, I've never seen, are we in Hawaii in the 70s, 75 and 72 and saw the increase in fuel there and Hawaii not having the gas. And it can't remember if it was being rationed or not because I did have a Porsche, but it did take much gas but I pushed it more often than it ran. So are there lines for the gas? There are lines out into the road. At, we saw, I guess the worst one was at Walmart. It just backed up. People trying to get in and Walmart has 16 pumps. And they have another Walmart about two blocks away that was probably the same way but just the drag from Randolph Air Force based up about a mile and a half that people were spilling into there. But we had filled up when it was less expensive. How about the news? You live in Texas, everybody in Texas is interested in, in fact, everybody in the country is interested in what's happening with Harvey, but how about in San Antonio, what kind of news are you getting? Constant. Say? We have the people in New York telling us how things are here. And we have people in Washington, DC telling us how things are here. And it's, the regular news is not, is being interrupted all the time. So we get nothing local. And some of it's correct. The flooding in Houston is a perennial thing. They probably got more water than they have ever, I thought they could ever take. But Houston is a foot and a half above the sea level. It's not in New Orleans. They don't have pumps except for some of the places where the interstate goes down. But it, those are all, surrounded Houston was, and still is a rice growing area. So the rice won't be affected that much. You have to remember too that Galveston was devastated to turn of the century, not this last one, but through the century past. And it was the main port for Texas. And it was wiped out with a great loss of life. And that's what actually established Houston as a port. They got, they just, they stopped using Galveston altogether. It was just blown off the map. And so, Houston built itself. It has no zoning. It's probably one of the- It's the fifth largest city in the country. It uses- Fourth largest city in this country, no zoning. No zoning, amazing. No, no. The refineries between downtown Houston, which has got a big BP presence there, just on the outskirts is a Baytown, which has a big refinery. And then from Baytown through Beaumont, through Port Arthur, through Lake Charles areas, just nothing but refineries. Interesting. And that's where all those pipelines coming from the North and from the West going out to the East Coast all originate in that one area. And I understand they're closed down. Well, that's- That's gotta be a reason for the increase in the gas price. Well, I think it's more of a panic for the people around here because if they think about it, Three Rivers is where we get our Valero has their refinery down at Three Rivers. And that's where we get our gas, gasoline. It doesn't come in from Houston. So, Bob, we only have a minute more before we're gonna go up to the next segment here. And I just wanted to ask you for your impressions in general and the lessons you learned or you believe should be learned by this whole event and the way it's been handled. My wife and I have a great pride in being from Ahoy. However, being in Texas is just another world. It's a state unto itself. And we'll do just right. The people come together and they have seen themselves get through Katrina and Rita and Ike. And this was not going to be something that will bring us down. Great. It shows you the sustainability, the resilience of not only the infrastructure such as it is but also the people because they make the community. Well, thank you so much. Bob Brown from San Antonio reporting on how Harvey looks from the vantage of San Antonio. We're gonna take a short break, come back with our next segment. Thank you again, Bob. And as they say, Aloha. Howdy. Welcome to Hawaii. This is Prince Dykes, your host of The Prince of Investing. Coming to you guys each and every Tuesday at 11 a.m. Right here on Theme Tech Hawaii. Don't forget to come by and check out some of the great information on stocks, investings, your money, all the other great stuff. And I'll be your host. See you Tuesday. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. But I have a story and I don't know where to start. I feel alone in a crowd. I can't sleep. I feel overwhelmed. I don't even know who I am anymore. I still have nightmares. I can't live like this anymore. I'm really not so good. But are you ready to listen? And keeping our community safe. Every day we move in and out of each other's busy lives. It's easy to take for granted all the little moments that make up our every day. Some are good, others not so much. But that's life. It's when something doesn't seem quite right that it's time to pay attention. Because only you know what's not supposed to be in your every day. So protect your every day. If you see something suspicious, say something to local authorities. I'm Helen Dora Hayden, the host of Voice of the Veteran. Seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. As a fellow veteran and veterans advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans, active duty and family members, I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show. In addition, I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions. As we navigate and work together through issues, we can all benefit. Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. Okay, we're back, we're live into our second segment here on Report from the Front. Actually, Reports from the Front under the banner of Community Matters. In this case, we have a community in San Antonio, Texas looking at Harvey and we have Ethan Allen from Likeable Science, the host talking about remarkable development, the approval of a remarkable development by the FDA groundbreaking gene therapy for cancer that is actually being used now. Right. And that is fabulous. So, tell us about this. This could change our worldies, and don't you think? Yeah, this is really a striking advance. This is the first time the FDA has actually approved a therapy where they literally pull cells out of your body, separate out one type of your immune cells, insert a particular gene into a particular place in those cells, stick them back into, and now those cells are essentially assassins for a particular disease cell. In this case, acute lymphoplastic leukemia. And they go specifically after acute lymphoplastic leukemia cells and kill them off. Right, and that kind of leukemia is bad. It affects young people, typically adults below the age of 20, either kids and or adults up to age 20, about 3,000 a year, about 600 of them each year relapse from it and don't have a very good prognosis. I can tell you that it affects elderly people too. My mother died from that. Really? Yeah. Wow. At the age of 53. Wow. So, yeah, it was a serious disease, but it's only one kind of cancer. Oh, yes. But let's talk about the solution as it is presented for this one kind of cancer. Who invented this? You know what school came out of? What hospital? No, it's apparently, I mean, the government has been funding a lot of different fundamental science, helping science understand these mechanisms. I mean, we'd say you insert a gene and that sounds like a fairly simple kind of thing. But, you know, every cell in your body has about six feet long of DNA in it, which has about 25,000 genes in it, and then probably 100,000 other things, not genes. But we have mapped this. We've mapped. Well, within the last 10 years or so, we have mapped every one of those genes. But you've got to take that gene that you want and put it in just the right place, because where a gene lives turns out to be very, very important to have functions. It's a relative to position. Yeah, so you have to somehow, in each cell you're doing this, you've got to be sure it plugs in just in the right place. It doesn't screw up anything else when it happens. Well, let's talk about that. So, when you say plug in, what are you plugging exactly? You're plugging it, it's essentially, it's a gene, so it's a string, a segment of DNA that basically gets translated into a protein. Okay, so it's a certain kind of DNA, which is a protein. It's a sequence of DNA that gets read into, turned into a protein. Okay, so here I am, and I have this person's blood, and I find, say, one cell, just start with one cell, and I get into the chromosomes, the genes on one cell. Chromosomes are inside the genes, and the genes are inside the chromosomes. Genes are part of the chromosomes. Genes are part of the chromosomes. Chromosomes is the sequence of ones. Okay, and so I gotta find the gene in this one little tiny chromosome, in this one little tiny, tiny cell, I gotta find it, and then I gotta modify it by putting the special protein in that gene so as to modify it. You're either pulling out the defective gene and sticking in a good copy of it, or sticking in pieces that fix it, in essence, that make it produce the proper protein. So now this gene is gonna operate differently, so it'll cause the body to operate differently for blood, in this case, it's gonna operate differently. Right, so these T cells now, these T immune cells now are programmed to produce a protein on their surface that specifically looks for a protein that only occurs on phoblastic leukemia cells, and basically latches onto that and then destroys those cells, marks them basically for destruction. Now the T cell, I mean, not to put it into general term, but the T cell is the cell you're looking for in the blood. That's the one you want. That's the one that Novartis pulls out. Separate that out from the blood. And genetically modifies. Modify it and then stick it back into you basically. That takes 20 days to do that. So you pull these cells out, spend 20 days messing with them as it were, and then stick them back into you. Okay, and that's just an infusion, an injection, so to speak, blood into blood. And that's of course the one drawback is that 20 day lag, if you are very, very sick with this cancer. But I would predict it's gonna get faster. Yes, there are other groups working on very similar kinds of things that are applying the FDA for approval for similar types of therapy. It's called CAR-T therapy for chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy. So a couple of things come to mind. I mean, number one is we described how you could fix one gene with this protein and either replace it or modify it. So now it's got a stronger immune system and can go kill the cancer cells. That's really wonderful. But that's one cell. I think at 20 days to do a lot of cells, how many cells can you do in 20 days? I'm sure it's not that many. I suspect actually they probably do some sort of batch processing where they're dealing with probably hundreds of thousands of cells at a time. Even that is small compared to the number of millions of cells in the human body. Right, right. I don't really know what the actual numbers they actually tweak are, but... So it's a little bit of blood, even with all of that, right? And you inject it back in. And now how does this little bit of blood, you know, kill leukemia all around, it's systemic all around your body, how does that happen? Well, so the T cells are part of your immune system and they're always circulating through your blood, circling it widely and they're looking basically for the bad guys, for the invaders, right? So now you have ordinary T cells that were not modified by the process. You also have these special high octane T cells that are now sort of unleashed. They have, as it were, they're carrying around the picture of the leukemia cell and saying, these are the bad guys. I'm after these specific bad guys. And your other cells are sort of a little bit blind to them. Why does it sound like a computer program? Well, it sounds like that. I mean, a lot of it, it is a matter of coding. It's coding in this case DNA to RNA, RNA to protein. And yeah, so it is not dissimilar in that sense to computer work. Now you were touching on this idea that we'd be able to do this in other kinds of cancers, finding other kinds of parallels to T cells. What's the story on that? Well, so again, you have a number of different types of cells within your immune system that have different jobs. And again, if you can get those cells to recognize that their particular enemy is better, or if you have somebody who has, his or her own cells are defective and you make them effective again, so they can recognize the bad guys they should. You know, in a sense, you fixed the real problem. You're not sticking in a bunch of drugs that are gonna mess with all kinds of other things, not bad stuff, bad side effects. It's a very neat, very specific therapy. You're only using your own cells. That is not to say it is without risk. They have had in early trials of this CAR-T therapy, they've had people die from it. They've had people get very, very sick from it because sometimes these chimeric antigenic receptors interact oddly and whether they are not targeting just the right thing or whether something else in your body now looks at them and says, these guys are weird. And so it's a different kind of side effect. It could be profound because we're not really, we don't understand all the side effects. Exactly. The side of the immune system. The biochemical side effects. Yeah, the immune system is tremendously complex. Yeah, and on that very note, it sounds like you have to find, first you have to target the single kind of cancer you want, in this case it's this plastic leukemia thing. And then work on that with the T cell for that, right, that kind of cancer. Now if you want to solve something else, you have to look at that kind of cancer and find the parallel there. And it's intriguing because just a little while ago, a couple of weeks ago they came out with a type, a new approach to cancer therapy that is not cancer type specific. So it hits a mechanism that underlies many types of cancer. Same kinds of mechanisms that underlie, at least on some level underlie, prostate cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer. Or in leukemia. And perhaps even leukemia. I don't remember exactly. So that underlying common denominator is a huge thing. Yeah, if you could combine these two things now, then you'd begin to have a tool that becomes very, very powerful, right? Yeah, yeah, so we really have broken through on something here. Because A, this sounds like, if the FDA approved it, this sounds like it's likely to work on people. Everybody in the country is gonna be interested in this for any leukemia case. Sure, sure. B is that, if we find the common denominator or we use the same technique in other kinds of cancers, this could be cured of multiple kinds of cancers in the same way that it works on leukemia. This is fabulous. Yeah, it's very exciting stuff. I mean, again, it's great. It suggests that we need to be supporting our scientists, supporting the work they do, the work when it seems often obscure or unconnected, it's payoffs come in. Payoffs like this. Who knows, it probably came from a bunch of ideas that just sort of came together for somebody, and somebody realized that this thing works with that thing and now you got a result. I mean, it was 70 plus years ago that Watson and Crick sort of figured out this business about what DNA really was. And that's turned out to be a critical basis for understanding a whole bunch. And now the research money we spent mapping the human genome is paying off big time. And it'll be more pay off along the same lines, I'm sure. I mean, the whole country's gonna want this, the whole world is gonna want this, this is big. So you found it in the MIT download, isn't it? Yes, yes. And you can sign up for that and you can look up this article and read more about it. It was also in the Times a day or two ago. So this is out there, it's happening, not only the FDA approved it, but it is being done in various hospitals around the country. It's about 20 centers around the country that are using it now. They hope to increase that to maybe 30 plus centers out. Fabulous. And I think what's interesting from political side, I didn't mention it in these articles, I don't think, but political side, this all happened before the Trump administration took office. And query whether the Trump administration would fund the kind of research like the mapping of the genome, you know, that somebody else funded before, whether they would fund anything like that now. So we're kind of in a hiatus of sorts going forward with new revelations this way. But happy news is that we had this revelation and it will encourage further research and maybe further administrations. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, thank you, Ethan. Thank you, Jay. Very exciting. Very exciting. Always a pleasure. Yeah. Take care.