 The statistic that I saw that really drove me to this was that in the U.S. alone, drug interactions causing death is somewhere around the fourth or fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. Something that potentially should be preventable by knowing more about how drugs interact with the body. It could be preventable by eliminating bad drugs or a toxic earlier and hence never getting to the patient. We know it's a problem, so how do we overcome it? So I'm John Dordic, I'm the director of the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. And this is an area that's attracted a lot of attention from my purposes because we're quite interested in trying to understand how do we better develop a drug? How do we develop a drug that is better and safer? Here you can see. Well drug testing is very complicated. It's a non-linear process, but one of the biggest hurdles that the drug companies have to deal with is towards the end of the process, before it goes into the human it goes into the animal. And it's become pretty clear that much of the results, not all, many of the results that one gets in an animal don't really correlate well to the human. So one has to question why use the animal. And so what we've done is we've taken cells from the body, we encapsulate them in a three-dimensional matrix and literally spot them onto a slide. We've been looking at a number of ways to use bio-catalysis coupled with other things like human cell culture to be able to develop very high throughput approaches where we can spot individual human cells and be able to tell very quickly whether or not a drug is active or a drug candidate is active, whether or not it's toxic, and to do that in a very high throughput manner using simple biochips. In fact, the technology to spot them is essentially the same that inkjet printers use, where you can have little spots come out of an inkjet. And then we have to test it and we have to ask the question, are we getting results that would really do mimic the human body? We haven't overcome it completely yet, nobody has, but we're getting closer. And if we get to the point where we're close enough, then we're going to be in a position to know what's going to happen not only to humans, but maybe even to individuals. And so real personalized medicine is what we're going to do other than that. Small molecule antivirals have not been really very effective, although with HIV it's been stunningly effective, but for most viruses. Fundamentally, you've got something that has its own agenda, right? I'm going to live, I'm going to reproduce, and you're saying, I just want you to make as much of this insight as possible, so you've always got this pull with the organization. If this technology comes to the marketplace, and I think we're not far from that, it's going to reduce the cost of drugs, which is going to reduce the cost to the patient. It's going to generate better drugs, which is going to reduce the number of adverse drug reactions to the patient, which is going to drop dramatically the number of people who are harmed or perhaps killed by drug toxicity. At the end of the day, everyone benefits. The patients benefit. The pharmaceutical companies benefit. And of course the animals benefit, because they're not sacrificed for this. And it streamlines the whole process. And I think that's going to have the biggest impact in society.