Please welcome MIT professor and 2015 National Inventors

Hall of Fame Inductee, Ioannis Yannas.

This discovery changed my professional life.

The discovery we made, Dr. John Burke-- my surgeon colleague

and myself.

It was a big surprise, totally unexpected, and hard

to believe.

It used to be called artificial skin,

but it was soon recognized as the first example of organ

regeneration in adults.

Being inducted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame

is a very big honor for me, especially when I

look at the names of other people

who had been previously deducted-- names like Steve

Jobs and Wozniak, Louis Pasteur, the Wright Brothers--

important names that I grew up with.

It really makes me feel a little small.

My photo was shown like I was the leader of a totalitarian

regime.

A little too much for me.

What I see is what used to be many, many years ago

when this discovery was made.

Some of our nation's greatest living inventors.

The recognition that this work is getting

will make it more clear there is something here

that has future and needs to be developed by other people

and made into one of the brand new tools of medicine.

In 1969, I was an assistant professor at MIT.

I thought that it could be a great idea

to meet one of the doctors in the Boston area.

That person turned out to be Dr. John

Burke who was then head of the Shriners Burns

Institute in Boston.

I found in him in a very difficult problem in medicine

that I thought I could contribute to each solution.

And I think what he saw in me was a material scientist who

could create a material that would be

useful to treat his patients.

There was a mutual clicking that happened when we met.

Dr. Burke was looking for a very sophisticated Band-Aid.

He had patients who were mostly children.

The children had massive burns.

Basically, the prelude to death unless you do something

drastic about it.

Dr. Shelton, Dr. Paul Shelton.

I remember very clearly the day that Dr. Burke took me

on a tour of one of the wards.

It was a very, very difficult sight.

I was shocked.

I was shocked beyond belief in what I was seeing there.

It was a very important moment in my life,

because it guided me towards a direction

that I would not have chosen.

I remember the children were lying in their beds.

There was extensive bandaging of faces and limbs in these kids.

Yeah.

Dr. Burke would softly explain the situation to me.

These pictures, in my mind, have stayed with me.

And they became the reason why I started

working on this project.

There was a great deal of human misery that was confronting me.

And I felt that I had to do something about it.

It was clear that we needed to solve the problem

as soon as possible.

The objective of speeding up the rate of closing of these wounds

that, in effect, became the problem

that Dr. Burke and I would have to solve.

My students and myself were synthesizing polymers

from different chemical families--

things like plastics, rubbers, textile fibers,

and the tissues of our body.

We were putting things dressings in foils.

We would then take the subway to Boston

and then go to the Shriners animal laboratory facility.

The technician would then put them on the animals.

This was going on family after chemical family.

None of the dressings we had worked with

had any effect on the speed of closure

of these wounds in the animals.

So far the projects had been a total failure.

I started thinking that maybe a polymer I had been working

with in my PhD thesis, which was collagen-- a collagen is

a polymer of the tissues of the body--

that maybe I should try this since almost everything else

had failed.

Lo and behold, this collagen dressing,

instead of speeding up the rates of closure,

it actually delayed it and make it very, very slow

so that's the wound would hardly close.

We were basically going the wrong way.

Instead of making it close faster,

we're making it close slower.

Nobody likes to have a failed experiment.

It's the last thing you want.

Trying to get to understand why the experiment had failed

was a very important step.

This was a great moment for myself and for Dr. Burke.

It was a great moment because of what

we decided to do with that failure, which

was to not just let go and go home and cry,

but to start trying to understand what had happened.

It was then that we saw that the animals that

had been treated with the collagen

dressings we're not making scar as every other animal before

had done.

The last dressing we had used was actually causing new skin

to be formed instead of scar-- skin not scar-- skin

that functions like skin as opposed to scar that does not

function like skin.

In addition to keeping children alive,

it gave them a chance to regrow the skin that they had lost.

It was way beyond what I expected.

It was way, way beyond that.

We could hardly find it possible to publish our results,

because people would not want to publish a paper that says that

you have regenerated something that everybody knows you cannot

regenerate.

Dr. Burke was very happy, because he could see now

a new way of treating his patients that

did not exist before.

Back in the 1970s, there were a lot of advances in ICU care.

And as a result of that, these very severe burn patients

were able to be kept alive for long periods of time,

but they oftentimes didn't have enough donor sites or skin

to cover them up.

So it was a bleak time.

Dr. Burke was a surgeon who espoused the concept

of early excision and grafting.

That wasn't universally adopted back then.

Taking a patient to the operating room

early on to carry out excision and grafting

was a dangerous prospect for the patient.

The excision can easily lead to very significant blood loss.

In addition, harvesting donor sites

can lead to significant blood loss.

So you needed a surgeon like Dr. Burke who was meticulous,

who was careful, and did this relatively new technique

and to make this invention successful.

The availability of Dr. Burke and Yannas's artificial skin,

which became known as INTEGRA, tipped the scale

towards early excision and grafting of large body surface

area burns.

Our skin is made up of two layers, the outer epidermis

and the inner dermis.

Now the epidermis is damaged.

It grows back quickly, and it regenerates.

But when our dermis is damaged, the dermis

never grows back by itself.

Instead the wound contracts and forms the scar.

Now when our regeneration template,

or what used to be called artificial skin, when

that is used, something entirely different things.

The contraction is stopped.

And the cells of the person move into the template.

There, the cells regenerate a new dermis or the template

is broken down and absorbed.

Not only are you able to solve the acute burn problem

and keep the patients alive, but at the end,

you're able to give them the skin that's

more natural and supple, pliable with less scar.

Back before advances like INTEGRA were available,

patients like Lauren, who had 35% full thickness

burn injuries were at risk of dying.

And now our goal is to try to restore them

as much as possible to the state that they were in

prior to having the injury.

So that is an absolutely transformative change

in burn care over the course of my lifetime.

And what Dr. Burke and Dr. Yannas did

has played a huge role in that change in our goals.

Look so good.

You've made my day.

[PATIENT LAUGHING]

It is quite clear that many lives

were saved by the development of the artificial skin.

We have a patient at Shriners right now

who sustained an over 80% deep second and third degree burn.

And his life was clearly saved by the use of INTEGRA.

My name is Matthew Hicks.

Are you going to get shy?

Yeah.

Yeah?

No.

No.

This is my son Mason.

He's eight years old.

He was burned on 87% of his body.

And uh, yeah.

Mason has the most incredible personality.

He's very easy to fall in love with.

Let me know.

[MASON CHUCKLES]

He's no longer stuck in a wheelchair.

He just learned to walk a year ago again.

And he's out playing soccer.

He's playing with the kids in the neighborhood.

And he's just like a regular kid again.

He was burned on 87% of his body,

in and out of surgery every other day

for a good two or three weeks.

They were using a lot of different things

to cover his skin including INTEGRA.

We're in the reconstructive part of the surgeries at this point.

Nothing holds him back.

Nothing at all.

INTEGRA definitely had an integral part

in saving his life.

There was no way he had enough of his own skin

to cover his body.

Without it, God, I have no idea where we'd be.

I don't think he'd still be here.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

To younger faculty, I would say, go

where the ignorance is maximum, because that's where you're

going to discover the goal.

What is meant by this is that many young researchers

go where everybody else is doing research.

And basically, they add an incremental piece of value

to what has happened before.

I would go where there already is

no value established by others, because no one has

thread that ground.

I was born in Athens, Greece.

I had somewhat of an early introduction to science.

When I was six or seven-year-old,

I got a hold of a little bottle of tincture of iodine.

And putting it over a gas flame in the kitchen of my home,

the alcohol evaporated.

And there I was holding the test tube

with a couple of little beautiful light purple crystals

of iodine.

It was actually one of the most beautiful things I've had seen.

I would never forget that.

Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the 2015 National

Inventors Hall of Fame--

When Dr. Burke and I got together and started working,

there was a step that very few people today

in science or medicine undertake.

It's a step requires working across disciplines,

which means working in areas that you're not

comfortable with.

Like I was not comfortable in Dr. Burke's surgeries.

And he was not comfortable with my molecules.

The fact that we got together was

something that was very difficult.

And I would credit this with the success that we eventually got.

There are two sources of satisfaction

that A person my position has.

One is the opportunity to see people treated with something