My research team and I are rare cell（细胞） collectors（收藏家）. Some people collect rare stamps or rare coins. But we've been working for over a decade to develop new systems that allow us to find（找到） and collect in profile the rarest of human cells（细胞）. Cells that are one in a million that we think may have tremendous（极大的） potential（潜在的） for the treatment of disease. Our core（核心的） idea was that if we could comb through vast（巨大的） collections of cells（细胞） from the circulation of the human body, that we might be able to find rare disease fighting cells. And if we could do this type of exhaustive search, for example, in a cancer（癌症） patient, that we might be able to find incredibly rare immune（免疫的） cells（细胞） from the blood that had encountered（遭遇） a tumor that knew how to recognize cancer（癌症） cells（细胞） and eradicate them.

  We knew that this was going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack. But if we were successful, we thought that we might be able to unlock（开启） new possibilities in the treatment or for the treatment of cancer（癌症）. But in order to test out this idea, there was a significant（重大的） technological（科技的） challenge that we had to tackle（处理）. A tube of blood contains 25 billion cells. And as of about five years ago, our top cell processing（ 处理） speed was about a million cells（细胞） an hour. That may sound pretty speedy（快的）, but if we want to look at all 25 billion cells in a tube of blood to find those rare tumor（瘤）-killing immune（免疫的） cells（细胞）, it's too slow.

  A million cells an hour means that it's going to take us two weeks to get through that tube of blood. And cells really only live outside of the body for a couple days. And so this slow processing speed was a major impediment（妨碍） to the search for these potentially（潜在地） tumor（瘤）-killing immune（免疫的） cells（细胞）. The reason that cell processing was so slow was because we looked at cells one at a time. We would put them through instruments that would kind of put them into a single file format（开本）. And serially, we would analyze them and profile（描…的轮廓） them to see if they had interesting properties.

  Our big breakthrough（ 突破） was that we were able to massively parallelize the profiling of cells（细胞）. So what you're looking at here is a micro device where we're flowing through millions and millions of cells a minute and getting up to processing speeds of about a billion cells per hour. So now able to get through a tube of blood in about a day. Once we're finished processing（加工） all of the cells（细胞）, even if we just have 10 or 20 in a vast background of other cells, they're collected in this nice little protected pocket that is created by our X-shaped structure. So this is how we were able to really move past this bottleneck of cell processing speed to really be able to look at an entire（全部的） tube of blood. And we've used this for a number of different applications.

  We have looked for cells that are markers（记分员） of disease in blood. We have used this technology to learn（学习） new things about human biology. But what I want to spend my time on today is how we've used this to look for rare immune cells and to think about how we might harness（治理） the power of those cells（细胞） to create, eventually, a new treatment for cancer where the therapy（治疗） is something that's generated（产生） from a tube of a patient's own blood. Treating cancer, a really terrible and often devastating disease with our own immune cells, that may sound like science fiction to you. But over the past decade or so, the biomedical research community has been making（使） incredible progress in using the immune（免疫的） system to fight diseases like cancer（癌症）.