2016 University of Waterloo 3MT first prize winner: Gah-Jone Won

[Applause] [Music] take a look at this image on the top left here it's blurry right it's very blurry and if you've never had uh if you've never had the opportunity or or pleasure of waking up one morning just to realize that your favorite novel or your favorite newspaper is out of focus then let me tell you that day is coming and it's going to hit you hard because presbyopia which is the age related loss of nearby Vision affects us all now there are currently two major treatment options for presbyopia you could either purchase a pair

of bifocals which are essentially reading glasses or you could go through surgery now surgery is it's expensive it's invasive it's bloody it's dangerous and as you can tell from this image here you could quite easily lose an eye now usually there's a third treatment option and that is the pharmaceutical or drug treatment but unfortunately that hasn't been developed yet and that's where I come into play so to tell you a bit about how I've done this and about my project let's take a look inside the human eye so this image on the left here is

is essentially a cross-section or or human eye cut in half and as you can see at the front of the human eye there's an oval structure known as the crystallin lens now how the crystallin lens works is if you bring a newspaper closer to your eyes there's a muscle around the crystallin lens that contracts contraction of that muscle causes the lens to round when the lens rounds it increases the power of our eyes so we can focus on those nearby objects the problem with this mechanism is as we get older the crystallin lens actually gets

stiffer and our muscle gets weaker the combination of these two factors means that as we age we lose we lose the ability to focus on these nearby objects so you can kind of see how if it was possible to soften the crystallin lens in some way then perhaps we can develop a treatment to presbyopia so just keep that in mind for now okay so now we're going to take a perfectly healthy human eye we're going to take the crystallin lens we're going to rip it out we're going to throw it on a table and we're

going to take a look at it under a microscope and that's essentially what you see in in in the picture in the middle right there and so you can see that the crystallin lens is actually composed of these very beautiful hexagonal structural proteins and we know that if we treat these hexagonal structural proteins with a drug known as Bist Statin it actually softens the lens which is great news the problem with Bist Statin is it actually affects all of the structures in the eye so we need to make it more specific so what I've done

is I've attached BBY I've tethered it to a very specialized protein known as an IGG antibody together this forms an antibody drug conjugate which is what you see on the right hand side there now when we treat the eye with this antibody drug conjugate the antibody component targets the crystallin lens specifically the drug is released only within the vicinity of the crystallin lens and the lens gets softer without affecting the other structures in the eye so that means the lens gets softer we can contract change the shape of the crystal lens increase the power of

our eyes so we can see very important headlines such as the one in tomorrow's newspaper thank you very much for your time