Chapter 87: The Diagnostic Kit (4)

Most of the pictures that were sweeping through online communities were pictures taken in Kamathipura in India. Recently, a lot of foreign press were going to and reporting on Kamathipura, where major reforms were taking place, and those pictures and articles had suddenly become an issue. From Young-Joon and Ardip’s picture to the vaccination scene in Kamathipura, the huge amount of Karampia that was being transported in large trucks, and hospitals and doctors who were carrying out bone marrow transplants. The hundreds of photos and reports had everything about Kamathipura’s revolution. And a lot of praise poured out from online communities all over the world.

—He’s not just a scientist or a businessman now, right?

—He is definitely going to get the Nobel Prize. They’re probably going to tell him to take his pick from peace, chemistry, and medicine.

—He healed a hellish prostitution hole like Kamathipura...

—I am a businessman in Mumbai. Kamathipura changed a lot. In this town, Doctor Ryu Young-Joon is compared to Ambedkar.

—Who’s Ambedkar?

—He was a human rights activist for the Dalit of the caste system. He is regarded higher than Gandhi in India.

—I’m an employee at the WHO. It’s not just in Kamathipura, India. HIV is being caught at a rapid speed in Africa and China as well. Doctor Ryu is the genius of the century, but we are working hard as well :(

—Let’s go WHO! Let’s go Ryu Young-Joon!

—Last week’s report from the British Medical Journal: The growth rate of AIDS cases in sub-Saharan Africa was 48 percent last year, but it plummeted to 6 percent. They’re predicting that it will turn negative soon...

“Things are going faster than I expected,” Young-Joon said to himself as he read the articles on the web.

There was an even more shocking post on his fan club; it was a scene from a comedy show. A member from a girl group was picking her ideal type, and for some reason, Young-Joon was there.

His eyes widened.

“Wait, why...?”

He wasn’t a celebrity or someone on TV, so why? The thing that was more shocking was that one of the members of the group, Groovy, actually picked Young-Joon.

—It’s because I like someone who is smart and has a warm heart. I’ve been a fan for a long time. I signed up for the fan club a long time ago.

With a short subtitle, her statement was screenshotted and pinned in the fan club.

—Groovy, are you reading this? Doctor Ryu is off-limits.

—Groovy, submit some papers first. We’ll observe you first through an interview-type of thing, and then we can think about it.

—Our Doctor Ryu has to experiment! Everyone get lost! Doctor Ryu is already married to science!

“...”

Young-Joon, who was baffled, went to the WHO headquarters, trying to calm himself down. But this place was worse.

This was the headquarters of the HIV eradication project. In places like Kamathipura, Young-Joon was their savior, but here, he was the revolutionary who had started this huge project.

“Oh! Doctor Ryu?”

An employee, who was bald and looked to be in his forties, froze when he saw Young-Joon. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with his hand and held out a notepad and pen in a fluster.

“I’m a fan of yours. Could I get your autograph?”

That was the start. On his way to the Director-General’s office, countless employees who heard about his arrival from somewhere all came over and asked for his autograph and a picture.

“Leave the project to us, Doctor Ryu!”

“Doctor Ryu, I am voluntarily resigning soon, but it’s truly an honor to do something as important as HIV eradication before I go.”

“I went to Henan Province in China last week. Things have gotten a lot better. Apparently, they used to run a plasma business, so people sold blood. They said that it became Hell with AIDS as they began reusing disposable needles.”

“I love it because I am seeing HIV disappear in real-time. The results are really tangible if you examine patients with the diagnostic kit. HIV is caught by the diagnostic kit until you use a treatment like a bone marrow transplantation. When you see that it’s no longer there after the procedure, it’s touching and thrilling...”

Young-Joon was in shock as he heard the employees talk all around him. Even the managers who came out to control the employees all went back after getting his autograph.

* * *

Young-Joon, who barely made it to the Director-General’s office, delivered his congratulations and compliments to Tedros.

“I saw that HIV is being caught quickly. It seems that way from what the employees are talking about on the way here. I heard that the increase dropped from forty-eight percent to six. The World Health Organization is the World Health Organization for a reason. Congratulations.”

“Haha, it’s all thanks to you, Doctor Ryu,” said Tedros, the Director-General.

This tangible result that came out in a short period of time was evidence that the WHO was focusing all their power and strength on this project. It was also because in addition to the vaccines, cures, and bone marrow transplants, another powerful ally was added on the technical side.

“It’s all thanks to the diagnostic kit you developed. At this rate, I don’t think it will take three years. The spread was caught quicker than I thought.”

There were two ways to stop the spread of an infectious disease:

1. Preventing the virus from spreading even if an infected and non-infected person comes into contact with vaccines and such.

2. Quarantining so that the infected and non-infected do not come into contact at all.

They could not give vaccines to the billions of people without HIV, and they could not perform the expensive and difficult bone marrow transplant surgery on infected patients all at once. As such, the first way was impossible.

But if they used the diagnostic kit, they could easily do the second way since all they had to do was go to at-risk areas for HIV, give out a bunch of kits, diagnose them on-the-spot, then isolate patients. The World Health Organization was doing this job very well.

“You made us the gun, the bullet, and you taught us how to shoot it, so we would be idiots if we couldn’t even do that. We’re a United Nation organization; this is the least we should be doing,” Tedros said with a hearty laugh. “Doctor Ryu, I think the diagnostic kit will be used to catch a lot of other infectious diseases. Let’s just commission it to a lot of GMP production facilities and produce it in huge quantities.”

Tedros gulped down the fruit and vegetable juice from a small juice pack.

“With this, we can catch all kinds of infectious diseases like dengue, malaria, and Zika.”

“All those diseases are transmitted by mosquitoes, right?” Young-Joon asked.

“That’s right.”

“Then let’s get rid of mosquitoes.”

“Oh! Mosquitoes? Man, you really think big, Doctor Ryu. You’re talking about the one being done at Google and the Gates Foundation, right? We can try it if you have a good idea.”

“Yes. But this will have to be an international project. It will be bigger than HIV eradication.”

“The current mosquito elimination project is focused on reducing the mosquito population to less than eighty percent in tropical climates alone. It is having a hard time, but do you have a good strategy?”

“Pardon? No, I’m not talking about reducing the population, I’m talking about making them go extinct completely. Let’s get rid of the thirteen species that are the disease carriers.”

Tedros set down the juice he was about to drink. If he drank it, he might have spat it out in shock. As he started at Young-Joon like he didn’t understand, Young-Joon explained.

“That way, the malaria parasite and the viruses will go extinct. If I start this, I don’t intend on compromising on an ambiguous goal like population reduction. That leaves the risk of the disease developing.”

“... But Doctor Ryu, there were no significant results in that ambiguous goal of population reduction. Well, there have been some varying results, but not most of them. I’m saying that it’s not an easy thing to do even if Google or the Gates Foundation does it...”

“I know. The technology to reduce the number of mosquitoes mostly works by manipulating the male mosquito’s genes to make the larvae unable to hatch from their cells.”

“That’s correct.”

“But it’s only as effective as the number of mosquitoes that people manipulate and put into nature. If those mosquitoes die, it’s over.”

“... That’s right. If not that, then how...”

Tedros had no idea what Young-Joon was thinking. His eyes shook.

Young-Joon said, “We make it so that only males are born from the eggs of the female mosquitoes that mated with genetically modified mosquitoes. And if we make the offspring from those newborn mosquitoes only male, we can make a snowball effect by modifying male mosquitoes and releasing them into nature once.”

“Is that possible?”

“It is,” Young-Joon said. “The reason I asked for a meeting today was because I was curious if the WHO could afford to work on this project.”

“Hm...”

Tedros thought for a bit.

“Like you are worried about, we lack manpower right now because we are pouring everything into HIV eradication.”

“Of course. It’s not an easy disease.”

“But this is also an important project. We will try to prepare for it. However, we also need to do some research in advance on what disturbances will occur in the ecosystem,” Tedros said. “If you carry out this project with us, you may be criticized by ecologists. As the Director-General of the World Health Organization, I am on board because I think it’s more important to get rid of infectious diseases, but...”

“I know. I will make some data about the kind of disruptions that will occur in the ecosystem and whether it is something we will not be able to handle to convince them.”

* * *

Young-Joon’s humane image was in the spotlight during Ardip’s flight, but his star quality was still rooted in his ingenious research ability.

About a week after Young-Joon returned from Geneva, two huge papers and a cover news article was published in

Science

like he was trying to prove that he was a scientist.

[We differentiated induced pluripotent stem cells into cartilage cells.]

[We differentiated induced pluripotent stem cells into skin tissue.]

The differentiation into cartilage cells and skin tissue: the only project Young-Joon had left among the ones he started as he built the Next-Generation Hospital was making organs and spine regeneration.

Another powerful whirlwind began sweeping through the medical community.

First of all, cartilage cells had the potential to cure a very common and uncomfortable disease like arthritis. How many patients would there be if the number of patients that had rheumatoid arthritis, which occurred in young people as a type of autoimmune disease, and degenerative arthritis, which usually occurred in older people, were combined? There were nearly five million people just in Korea, meaning that one in ten people were arthritis patients.

Then what about skin tissue? The skin cell that A-Bio created was not just one type of skin cell. They had differentiated a total of seven types of cells each from epidermis cells that had the characteristics of the ectoderm, tissue cells from the mesoderm, and the dermis layer from the cranial neural crest cells. This meant that they not only could regenerate the outer layer of skin, but they had the potential to make skin itself. Samuel, who was admiring the huge potential value of it, even wrote a review on the paper.

[The skin is a complex organ that is intricately connected. If A-Bio succeeds in making this with organoids, it looks like they will be able to create hair follicles. I believe that it will be possible someday as they have already succeeded with organoids before.]

‘Create hair follicles.’

It was a statement that widened the eyes of many plastic surgery clinics. It meant that they could give bald people hair. Of course, it was true that cartilage and skin regeneration still had a long way to go as it was still in its development phases, but people felt like they would be able to see some results in the near future as Young-Joon’s research speed was abnormally fast. And in this noisy situation, a fascinating story began circulating among the sports news and rumors.

[Ryu Young-Joon, the CEO of A-Bio, has 122 new drug patents. They are not revealed to the public yet as it has not yet been one year and six months since its application and is still being approved, but there is a rumor that Doctor Ryu Young-Joon has 122 drugs for pet and livestock animals. According to Mr. K, an employee at the patent office, the approval period is getting longer because there are a lot of patents, but there is a high chance that it will be approved soon...]

This rumor had basically poured oil into Young-Joon’s fame, which was already burning up. And there was one person who was feeling anxious about this. It was Kim Hyun-Taek, the lab director of Lab One.

CTO Nicholas Kim’s term was about to end. In this atmosphere, there was a very high chance that the future CTO position of A-Gen would go to Young-Joon.

Kim Hyun-Taek could not go home and was lost in thought for the night.