Chapter 62: The First Product (3)
In order for people to buy the stem cell and optic nerve differentiation kit, they had to receive basic training about the experimentation method from A-Bio, as A-Bio would not sell it unless one attended the session. Although A-Bio couldn’t reimburse the transportation or accommodation expenses, the training itself was free.
As such, scientists from all over the world swarmed to A-Bio after the third phase of the glaucoma clinical trial ended. Usually, A-Bio’s stem cell experts would do the training, but Young-Joon decided to give the first lecture himself as it was the first time.
“Look, there are two kits. They look like eye drops, right? One drop of solution will come out of them if you squeeze the bottle,” Young-Joon explained as he showed the kit to the audience. “They are either called the first kit and second kit, or called the dedifferentiation and optic nerve differentiation kit.”
Young-Joon dropped one drop of each solution onto a tissue to show them.
“First, you need to overexpress the genes SOX2, cMyc, OCT4, and KTF4 in order to dedifferentiate somatic cells to stem cells.”
Young-Joon took a culture dish out of the incubator and showed it to the scientists.
“The sample of the patient’s somatic cell you harvested onto the culture plate should look like this. There’s a picture of a microscope beside it, right? Now, this somatic cell is mine,” Young-Joon said with a chuckle.[1] “We are going to add ten drops of solution number one, the dedifferentiation kit we developed.”
Drop! Drop!
“There is a living virus in this solution. For you to handle this, you will have to get a laboratory inspection and permit from your respective countries,” Young-Joon said. “This virus inserts the four genes I mentioned earlier into the somatic cell’s DNA. Then, dedifferentiation occurs as these genes are expressed.”
Actually, all of the scientists here knew that as they had all read Young-Joon’s paper, but even so, they passionately wrote down everything that he was saying.
“The volume ratio is one drop per culture medium, and you must distribute the solution evenly across the culture plate. After three days, they will have become iPSC. Let’s use iPSCs that I prepared beforehand since I have to show you how to do it.”
Young-Joon pulled out another culture dish.
“It will look something like this after three days, and you can see that morphologically, it has the structure of a stem cell. You can also additionally verify it through things like DNA methylation analysis,” Young-Joon explained. “I will leave that up to you. The next step is to make these iPSCs into optic nerves. Now, we use the second kit, the optic nerve differentiation one.”
Drop! Drop!
Young-Joon put a few droplets of the solution from the optic nerve differentiation kit onto the culture medium.
“They will now differentiate into optic nerves. But at this step, you must use a culture medium that contains five micromoles of hydrocortisone,” Young-Joon said. “It’s not that difficult. Everyone will actually be doing this experiment for about ten days here. I will hand out experiment protocol books so that you can read that and follow it after you leave.”
“Thank you.”
“I appreciate it.”
As they began their experiments, Young-Joon silently observed them. There were several scientists from numerous countries: Switzerland, Britain, USA, France, and more. They were also affiliated with different places; some were part of huge pharmaceutical companies like Roche or Pfizer, and some were from venture companies he had never heard of.
However, Young-Joon had his eye on one person.
‘Daniel.’
He was a scientist from Schumatix. He looked very friendly, but Young-Joon wondered what kind of person he was. Whatever it was, he would get training for ten days and buy the virus to take home. And there was a very high chance that it was going to be used in India.
* * *
Young-Joon was sending someone an email from his office.
[Hello, this is Ryu Young-Joon from A-Bio. I am sending you an email from the business card you gave me. There is something I want to ask as a favor. It might be a secretive talk. Please reply to this email if you are willing.]
Time passed, and it was now evening. Young-Joon was getting ready to leave when he got an email on his phone.
[Please use the cell phone we sent you. Pick up the phone at 9 PM in Korea time.]
‘A cell phone they sent me?’
As Young-Joon was confused, someone knocked on his office door.
“Sir? It’s Yoo Song-Mi.”
“Come in.”
Yoo Song-Mi was the secretary that was hired three days ago. She handed him a small package.
“Thank you.”
Young-Joon opened the package to see a tacky-looking foldable phone in it. When it became nine o’clock, he really got a call on this phone.
“Hello?”
—Hello.[2]
It was an electronic voice that had been altered.
“Hello, this is Ryu Young-Joon.”
—Nice to meet you. I called because you sent me an email, Doctor Ryu. It’s James.
It was Director James Holdren from the White House’s Office of Science and Technology, the person he had met at his hotel before attending the Integrative Brain Disorder Conference in America. He was also the person who warned him about how the huge pharmaceutical cartels would pressure him.
—You have something you want to discuss with me? And secretly?
“Yes.”
—I didn’t know that you would ask for this type of call from someone like me. I thought you only took public and clean paths.
“I’m sorry for disappointing you. It’s because it’s about a patient’s life.”
“-Haha, I’m joking. It’s fine. Please, go ahead. Although, I think I know what this is about.
“I am developing a product that will treat glaucoma,” Young-Joon said.
—Yes, I heard the news. Congratulations.
“Word travels fast.”
—Yes. And since I congratulated you, I will also warn you. From what I see, I think A-Bio is in danger because of that product.
“Have you heard something?”
—You hear things you don’t want to hear when you’re in this position. You should go first, Doctor Ryu. I think the fact you contacted me means that you sensed danger as well.
“I heard that Schumatix is building a next-generation hospital in India.”
—Haha, yes. That’s the information I got as well.
“I think that scientists need basic respect and trust toward other scientists in the same field. But to be honest, I can’t help but feel suspicious.”
—I think so as well.
“I hope that I’m just being overly anxious, but if they use my kit and try to ruin a patient’s life, the situation will go south.”
—I will be honest. In my opinion, Schumatix will induce eye cancer in a patient. They already used that idea to attack Neural Clinic’s new stem cell therapy.
—And there’s a fine line between stem cells and cancer cells. The biggest thing that all scientists fear when using stem cell therapy is cancer. There’s a big possibility that stem cells will cause cancer, right?
“I think so as well. And it’s going to be hard for them to make a connection with the stem cells if they cause any other diseases.”
—Of course. They can’t pour acid in the patient’s eyes and argue that it’s because of your stem cells. It’s not like they have the ability to melt eyes or something, so who would believe that?
—And if there is an immune response when it’s the patient’s own cell, it would mean that Schumatix contaminated something while growing the cell, and if there is an infectious disease, it would mean that the doctor neglected good sanitation when doing the procedure. No matter what, they would be cutting off their nose to spite their face.
“That’s right.”
—But not eye cancer. If cancer occurs, they can strongly propose that it is because of stem cells. Even if they don’t, people would think that it was because of the stem cells just from hearing that the patient got cancer.
“Probably. Cancer isn’t something that can easily occur naturally. I would also think it was because of the stem cells as well.”
—Yes. Then, how are you going to defend yourself when they do a press conference and say that Ryu Young-Joon’s stem cells aren’t safe?
“Cancer won’t happen.”
—What are you talking about? That’s what we’ve been speaking about this whole time? If you put in a large amount of stem cells and leave them, you get cancer. What I am saying is that Schumatix will only use one of your kits. They will use the first kit to dedifferentiate into stem cells and put it into the patient’s eyes without using the second kit and differentiating it into optic nerves. A lot of stem cells will turn into cancer.
—And there will be no evidence that it was Schumatix’s fault because people will just think that the cancer was caused by the stem cells that weren’t fully differentiated into optic nerves. They will think that, “Oh, they don’t all become optic nerves even if you use the second kit. If you’re unlucky, the stem cells don’t differentiate and it becomes cancer.” Then, they will think it is dangerous because they wouldn’t think that they only put in stem cells.
“Even if you just put in a huge amount of stem cells, you won’t get cancer.”
—...
“Among the technology we are developing, there’s a spinal nerve differentiation one. The differentiation rate is very low, but it’s quite successful. Do you know how we do that?”
—How?
“Because the differentiation rate is so low, we administer stem cells to the lesion in dosages that are a hundred to a thousand times larger.”
—Holy... Aren’t you just administering a tumor at that point? Doesn’t the cancer spread right away?
“We put a safety mechanism on it. The cells that don’t differentiate in a certain period of time will trigger their apoptosis mechanism and die,” Young-Joon said. “The optic nerve differentiation is the same as well. If the differentiation isn’t promoted by the second kit, all the stem cells will die in three weeks.”
—...
“Originally, it was a safety mechanism that we put just in case. This was just in case an unskilled scientist didn’t faithfully follow A-Bio’s protocol, or if they didn’t thoroughly verify that the stem cells were properly made with something like FACS. It was to ensure that even if some undifferentiated stem cells that were left go into the patient’s eyes, it doesn’t cause cancer.”
James couldn’t say anything. Nothing came out of his mouth because he was so shocked.
‘This is possible?’
“But if the scientist really ‘made a mistake’, most of the cells will be established in the retina because they are optic nerves. A very small number of stem cells will self-destruct in the patient’s eye. So, most people don’t know that there are stem cells left. They will just think that they’ve been cured.”
—Probably.
“But what if a scientist just puts in a large amount of stem cells that haven’t even started to differentiate into optic nerves in the patient’s eye?”
James gulped.
—What happens?
“When the safety mechanism is activated, because there is a large number of stem cells, they will aggregate[3]due to the nature of the destruction process. The aggregated mass will be big, and it will look like a tumor from a glance.
—Then...
“If Schumatix reports something about cancer, it will mean that they didn’t use the second kit and administered stem cells into the patient’s eyes,” Young-Joon said. “I will declare war at that moment. I will tell them to see whether the tumor on the patient’s eye disappears in three weeks. If it does, I will tell them that it’s not cancer, but the safety mechanism activating. I will argue about how scientists at a place like Schumatix did the experiment to get results like that.”
—They are either so horribly unskilled that they forgot a step even after getting training from the production site, or they tried to cause cancer in the patient’s eyes by purposely administering undifferentiated stem cells.
“Yes,” Young-Joon replied. “And if it’s the latter, I will do everything in my power to banish them from the scientific community forever.”
—... I guess I shouldn’t be worried about you. The bomb is in Schumatix’s hand. Then, what is it that you want to ask me for?
“There are two things. This probably won’t happen, but please stop it if Schumatix doesn’t use my kit at all and tries to induce a completely different disease in the patient.”
—You don’t have to worry about that. Schumatix is still one of the greatest pharmaceutical companies in the world, and there are a lot of intellectuals there. They won’t make a move that stupid. They would be shooting themselves in the foot if they did that.
—No matter what kind of disease they create, it will be hard for them to attack you if it’s not cancer because people will think that they made a mistake, whether it’s in the growing phase or the administration itself. And the truth will come out if they follow the evidence left on the patient’s eye. Their only option is cancer, the biggest problem with stem cells.
“I think so as well. I am just trying to be prepared for anything out of worry.”
—I see that I am also one of the safety mechanisms. Alright. What’s your next request?
“If I do a press conference and go to war with Schumatix, they might try to remove the patient out of anxiety,” Young-Joon said. “They might do that so that the world doesn’t see that the thing they claimed was a tumor was actually just stem cells in the natural process of dying from the safety mechanism. I am saying that they will try to get rid of the evidence.”
—They could do that.
“In that case, please protect the patient.”
—Now I get why you called me, and why it was so secretive.
“Yes.”
—You are asking me to move the CIA, right?
“Yes, that’s right.”
James smiled.
—I will report this to the President and begin. And I will also get you more information on this. If Schumatix reports of a tumor, I will let you know how far up the ladder it goes.
“Thank you.”
—Don’t forget to partner with the National Cancer Institute and build A-Bio’s cancer research lab here.
“Of course.”
1. This is a Korean meme originating from a news anchor reporting about how a person stole the certificate of a registered seal, which the actual owner provided to use their car as collateral for loans, and stole the car. The anchor says, ”Now, this somatic cell is mine” to reenact how the car was stolen. ?
2. Spoken in English. The rest of Young-Joon’s conversation with James is in English. ?
3. a process in which cells clump together ?
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