Solving Complex Problems

TAKEAWAY: SOLVING COMPLEX PROBLEMS

NOSEWORTHY:
Well, Mayo is heavily invested, as you would expect, in the illnesses that cause either serious problems—and cancer would be one of those, Alzheimer’s would be another—or complex problems. What we mean by complex is a puzzle. No one can figure out what’s wrong with this particular patient. And again, across those interfaces of cancer, neuroscience, transplantation, immunology, aging, and so on, we invest more than $1 billion a year in research and education to move that forward. The field of regenerative medicine—a couple of us were talking about our knees a minute ago. I’d like to wait for regenerative medicine to fix my knees, but I was told yesterday I can’t wait that long. But for some of you, it’ll be coming.

There’s just a lot happening. All those areas are very, very exciting. The Alzheimer’s field, as a neurologist, has basically come to realize that we’re on the wrong path. Now, I’m not an Alzheimer’s researcher, but there are well over 100 enormous and expensive clinical trials of promising therapies that work in experimental models, in animal models in Alzheimer’s disease, and they don’t help patients—100 negative trials in Alzheimer’s disease. So presumably the hypothesis that we’ve been following is wrong, or at least it’s not fully accurate and right, and so we’re going back to look at neural networks and how they interact and how they advance aging and so on. So, it’s kind of a drawback.

Cancer, on the other hand—and I’m not a cancer expert—I’ll just say I am a director at Merck, just to clear the record, so I understand the work they’re doing there, and Mayo does a lot of work in cancer.  But the diagnostics, the predictive analytics, genomics to understand who’s going to have cancer, and now turning cancer into a chronic disease, which is our ultimate goal—ultimately prevention, of course—but it’s a reality now. There are now dozens of cancers that we can put in remission. If you look at President Jimmy Carter, for heaven sakes, he had metastatic brain cancer from a skin malignancy, and he’s well. I mean, that never happened in my career, in my 35 years in medicine, that patients with metastatic melanoma—sometimes now other metastatic diseases—can be put into prolonged remission. So, it’s a very exciting time.