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[[Circuitry of Cancer: GE's Biosciences Technology Organization 5th anniversary.]]
[[Christoph Hergersberg - Global Technology Leader for BioSciences]]
[My name is Christoph Hergersberg, and I'm the global technology leader for Biosciences,]
[a global technology organization in Niskayuna, New York at GE Global Research.]
[Before the biosciences organization was founded, global research ]
[and GE as a company, was known more for its engineering, and not for its biology.]
[Now, we've broadened the space for GE to also tap into the space of biology,]
[mostly in the healthcare, but also in other industries. ]
[Right now we are in one of the biosciences labs here.]
[Biosciences works on 5 big domains.]
[Another one is molecular imaging agents and imaging agents,]
[broad diagnostics like in vitro diagnostics.]
[Then we have clinical analysis and translational medicine,]
[and last but certainly not least, we have regenerative medicine and cell technologies.]
[Talking about cell technologies a little bit, what you see here is basically]
[analytical work going on where you take cells.]
[You take the cells, you harvest them, and you analyze them then here biochemically]
[to find out what's going on in the cell.]
[We can do that in a lot of different ways for a lot of different purposes.]
[For instance, in pathology, we are trying to find out what does a cancer cell do different]
[A cancer cell most notably grows without control,]
[and there are certain molecular mechanisms that tell the cell to ignore everything else]
[More and more we are understanding these molecular mechanisms,]
[and the drug industry is tailoring very specific drugs against very specific components]
[of the cancer cell, and by doing that, they can very specifically inhibit the cancer growth.]
[What we are trying here is also to understand these processes and to highlight them,]
[so that you can select the right patient for the right drug.]
[We have seen with other diseases, most notably infectious diseases, ]
[that they became from a death threat, or a death verdict, to become a chronic disease.]
[Cancer, in certain instances, has already become more of a chronic disease]
[The more we understand the molecular mechanisms of cancer,]
[we can cure it in many instances.]
[We can avoid it in other instances, and if both fail, we can manage the disease,]
[and make it a chronic disease that the patient live with for many more longer years. ]
[The overarching connection between all of these programs is that we're using ]
[our biomedical expertise, our applications knowledge, to enable engineering]
[for new products in the healthcare space and in other areas. ]
[The true value of global research for GE is really the interdisciplinary atmosphere.]
[If I was outside, I would be just another biologist doing biomedical research,]
[but here I'm enabling so much more.]
[This is an industrial research lab.]
[You have something that shows impact.]
[You have a purpose in what you do because you see it's going to be applied.]
[You see an optical imaging agent, a contrast agent,]
[a pathology technology being applied for a patient to improve their disease. ]
[As I look forward, I think healthcare is under so much pressure to do something better.]
[We will play a role in making it more effective and with that, more cost effective.]
