 Thanks for joining us here at the third annual Vail Scientific Summit. I talked with Dr. Farsh Gulyak from St. Louis about not only anti-aging, but how they're turning cells into little computers. No, it's true. My lab is really interested in understanding the cartilage in your joints and why it breaks down and wears out and what we can do to try to repair it in cases where you have a joint injury, if you break off a piece of your cartilage, or if you have arthritis and the whole joint is affected. So we're working mostly on cell-based therapies using stem cells and other techniques to try to regenerate the cartilage in our joints so that we can return people to activity and get them out of pain. Well, I've always been working in cartilage and studying osteoarthritis and then probably 10 or 15 years ago we got very interested in the fact that cartilage just doesn't repair by itself. It doesn't have a blood supply, it doesn't have nerves, so when it's damaged it just gets worse and worse. At the same time I started to injure my own knees and got more interested as I started to have my own pains from playing sports. So it's a personal interest now, but it really started as just such an interesting problem that has been very difficult to address and a lot of people working on it we still don't have a great solution. Johnny and I have known each other for probably 20 years. We're great friends and colleagues. And I have to say we're sort of on the same conference travel circuit so we see each other all the time and watch each other give talks. And Johnny was kind enough to invite me to the summit last year and I showed some of my recent data on some work that we're doing in the stem cell field. And Johnny came to me right afterwards and said, this is exactly what we need to do with our stem cells. And Johnny had many years ago been able to develop a technique for isolating stem cells from muscle. And these stem cells are very unique and are very capable of doing what we've been doing with our stem cells. So we got together, we wrote a grant right after the conference and we got a nearly perfect score on it so it's going to be funded and we're starting to collaborate on that now. So the techniques that we have been developing on stem cells is to try to make them smarter. And by smarter it means that we're actually trying to program logic circuits inside of cells. So a cell is pretty smart by itself but it doesn't always know where to go and what to do and how much drug to make and all the things that we think it can do, it can't always do on its own. So we've been able to modify the DNA in a cell so that we can actually make a tiny little computer inside the cell that we can program and tell it what to do. So we've been using those to create artificial cartilage that can sense its environment and it can tell when there's inflammation around it and when it's signaled it turns on the drugs that it needs to fight inflammation and pain. And then when it doesn't need it, it turns them off. So that way we have a smart cell. And so we're building these circuits and making them more and more complex. Johnny has some really interesting studies in the muscle area where we need the same type of drug delivery in a really controlled manner. So we're taking his muscle-derived stem cells and reprogramming them to make drugs. So hopefully we'll get this to patients but all these things take several years. So the timeline is that we've shown that these cells work really well in the lab. We're testing them in animals now and so far they look great, it looks like it works. And if that's the case then we can start to think of real true preclinical animal studies that we need to do to get them to patients. Typically that'll take at least five years if everything is successful. One of the complexities is that we are taking cells and modifying them and it's a very new technique so we don't know how the FDA is going to regulate it but we're very optimistic that it'll make it to the clinic eventually. So this is a conference I look forward to every year and it's such an exciting meeting because we have such a mix of different people here. We have scientists from all different fields. We have biologists and bioengineers and people with different backgrounds but we also have clinicians and orthopedic surgeons, some of the top surgeons in the country who are here at the Steadman-Philipon Clinic. And this year we have, and last year also, we have people who are not scientists. We have business people and entrepreneurs and investors. It's such an exciting mix of people who are interested in this topic but bring very different expertise to it. And this environment, especially now that we have some time off in the afternoons, it gives us time to watch each other's talks and then have great discussions about the science and this is what's led to these collaborations.