Why do some bodies respond differently to disease? | Erika Moore

0:00This is TED Health, a podcast from TED, and I'm your host, Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider. If you've ever felt like your body just doesn't bounce back like someone else's, whether it's healing from a cut, handling a cold, or reacting to a medication, you're not imagining it. It turns out the reason might not be random at all. In this episode, we're hearing from TED Fellow and Equity Bioengineer Erica Moore. In this special podcast version of her TED Fellow film, Erica's asking a bold question at the intersection of identity and biology. What if your background, yes, your actual lived experience, could help shape better, fairer medicine for everybody?

0:44And now, TED Fellow, Erica Moore.

0:50When I was younger, I just did not heal the same way. I would see these scabs and like I'd pick at them, they'd take forever to close, and my brother's skin would just close right up. And then, you know, my sisters could have cramps and they would just take ibuprofen and it would be like nothing. And I would take ibuprofen. I would take a lot of ibuprofen and I would get no response for my whole body. And so I just was like, why? Please help me. At first, I felt like I got the short end of the biological stick, right? Why does my body not work the same way? There was a lot of frustration because no one knows how they respond to something until they try it.

1:30But it was just, I was different from them. That's all. I'm Dr. Erica Moore, and I'm an equity bioengineer. So every single time you get a paper cut or even a bruise, your immune system is there. Macrophage immune cells are present. They're like the watchdog of the body. I think of them as like squishy balls, and they just kind of are always surveilling around the body. Sometimes they're eating, but other times they're just saying, hey, man, don't be mad. This is cool. We can heal now, right? Just imagine like a squishy ball that's sometimes angry, sometimes happy. They're super cute. I love them.

2:08I really study what function or state they adopt based on what environment they're in and based on whose body they come from. There are a lot of other material scientists, bioengineers who've asked and developed really cool applications. But oftentimes we don't really consider who is studied. My work really focuses on the who of the disease. So I really want to study the diseases that particularly are health disparities, right, that only certain swaths of the population are affected by. Because I think that by shining a light on those diseases, we can ensure better health equity for everyone in the world.

2:47I think I'm the first person or lab to really spearhead or cheerlead some of these endeavors. because there are lived experiences that a lot of other people in academia and in traditional PhD training don't really have to consider, right? So there aren't that many women of color who are assistant professors who run research programs and do these other things. I knew so many women growing up who died from lupus. It was very common. When I went to try to study lupus, there were a lot of people who were like, oh yeah, we're agnostic. Like, we don't care about the background of the patients. But I was like, we know that, like, 90 % of lupus patients are women.

3:28So we really have to consider that, right? It should be a variable. Some women develop lupus. They don't ever have flares. They're fine. Other women develop lupus and have flares back to back to back and pretty much develop major cardiovascular disease very early on. And so we want to take their patient cells and look at their interactions with blood vessels and see how they confer or propagate different inflammation in the system. And we do that all in this little jello construct. So it's almost like a mini tissue outside of the body, and we put the cells in it, and then we can study how they would respond in a tissue-like environment.

4:02What we found was really cool. The patient's background really directly affected the blood vessels in the system. These tissue models helps us answer some really important questions. What if we could pinpoint why inflammation happens in certain bodies more violently than What if we could cure autoimmune illnesses by accounting for disease differences based on your background? What if we could prevent excessive fibrosis by tailoring your macrophages to respond differently to injury? I think my lived experiences made me more likely to ask these questions. And then I was just willing to try, you know, and I'm still willing to try.

4:37I think by continuing to try, we innovate on what's the norm and set new standards for the future. If we pay a little bit more attention to the details, I think we can easily build a more equitable health care system for everyone. That's my goal.

4:59And that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. TED Health is a podcast from TED. And I'd love to hear your thoughts about this episode. Send me a message on Instagram at ShoshanaMD. This episode was produced by me, Shoshana Ungerleiter, and Jess Shane. Edited by Alejandra Salazar and fact-checked by Vanessa Garcia-Woodworth. Special thanks to Maria Lages, Farrah Degrunge, Daniela Balarezo, Constanza Gallardo, Tansika Sangmarniwang, and Roxanne Highlash.