Chapter 91: Cellicure (2)

Before coming to A-Gen to meet Park So-Yeon, Young-Joon met a guest. His name was Mckinney. He was a fifty-two-year-old American, and he was one of the big shots in the livestock industry. He was also suffering from pancreatic cancer. He had tried various intensive treatments at the hospital for two years, but it wasn’t easy. When Mckinney thought that there was nothing more he could do, he volunteered for the clinical trial of the pancreatic cancer cure Young-Joon was conducting in the United States.

It was a new technology that manipulated the bornavirus, which originally destroys pancreatic cells, induced it to the pancreas and selectively killed cancer cells. The cure was administered multiple times in small doses, and the size of the tumor decreased daily when he examined it through imaging. Mckinney was able to see the difference with his own eyes as his doctor showed him pictures every day. It felt like magic as the efficacy of the cure was amazing. He wondered how the disease that caused him so much pain in the second half of his life could be cured so easily.

After two weeks of medication, he was completely clear of cancer cells; they had been completely destroyed. And so, Mckinney was determined to meet Young-Joon.

Mckinney, who came to A-Bio, expressed his gratitude to Young-Joon over and over again.

“I regained my health thanks to you.”

“It’s a relief that the pancreatic cancer cure worked well. I’m glad it helped.”

Young-Joon was sincerely happy. He was always proud when he saw the new technology he developed cured patients who were in despair.

“There is something I would like to discuss with you,” Mckinney said. “There are one hundred twenty-two animal drugs among the international patent applications, right?”

“Where did you hear that from?”

“I hear rumors from here and there since I’m in the livestock industry. I heard that incredible drugs are coming out, although it seems like it hasn’t been revealed because it hasn’t been a year and a half and approved yet. I heard that the approval takes a long time because there’s a lot of them and because it’s an international patent, but it’s almost done.”

Taking a sip of his tea, Young-Joon didn’t reply and waited for him to finish.

“Mr. Ryu, along with those treatments, is there any way to use the diagnostic kit for livestock epidemics?”

“Infectious diseases of livestock?” Young-Joon asked.

“Yes. I don’t know about biology that much, but I thought you could somehow do it,” Mckinney said. “Mr. Ryu, with that and the treatments, we could save countless livestock and people from the national disaster of livestock epidemics that returns every year.”

“Save people?”

“Yes, it can save people.”

“Hm. I guess the economic damage is big if an epidemic occurs. It can help farm owners.”

Young-Joon nodded, but that wasn’t Mckinney’s point.

“Sir, I was talking about the cull house workers. Their job is a lot different from what people usually think. If you throw chickens or ducks into the rendering machine, you get screams, bits of meat flying around, and splashes of blood. It’s a mess. If you get ten day laborers, eight of them run away after the morning job. They vomit and get nightmares. The cull house is a living hell.”

“...”

“They used to originally use public officials, but they outsourced it to day laborers because they were taking sick leave due to trauma, quitting, and there were protests from the union. Usually, poor immigrant workers do that job. It’s like that in the U.S., so it’s probably the same in Korea as well. You have to bulldoze pigs to death, and you have to keep grinding up animals in a machine in the metallic smell of blood and bits of meat and bones from God knows what animal,” said Mckinney.

“Hm...”

“And people spend the night in that bloody hellhole and even eat there because they have to get rid of it quickly. After that, they all get PTSD or depression.”

“I see.”

“The economic damage is enough to drive a farm owner to take their own life, but you also can’t ignore the trauma of cull house workers. They provide psychological treatment with state funds in the United States, but I don’t know about Korea.”

“I don’t think they do.”

‘They don’t even take care of their veterans.’

With a sigh, Young-Joon said, “Like you said, it will be very helpful in catching livestock epidemics if we reform the diagnostic kit for animals. But the problem would be reducing the unit price of the kit since there are tens of millions of livestock culled just in Korea.”

“... Is there a way?”

“I will think about it. With this, we will definitely be able to create synergy with the treatments and bring about important changes in the livestock industry.”

* * *

“That’s why you came to see me,” Park So-Yeon said.

“Yes. I think we can lower the unit price by dividing the diagnostic kit by the disease,” Young-Joon said. “We don’t have to produce a lot of large kits that diagnose a bunch of diseases at once since the type of infectious disease is already specified when the animals are about to be culled. We don’t have to spend more money diagnosing other diseases when we just have to determine whether it’s AI[1] or not.”

“So, people will have one condensed kit that can diagnose all livestock diseases, use it on chickens or pigs that aren’t in good condition, check what disease it is, then track that disease spreading with the cheap kit, right?”

“That’s right.”

Young-Joon nodded.

“That’s why we need to reduce the size of the PDMS chip and make a small kit that can diagnose specific diseases like hoof-and-mouth disease, bovine tuberculosis, and bird flu one by one. And lower the unit price as much as possible.”

“I understand,” Park So-Yeon replied.

“But not everyone from the Life Creation Team will be able to join this project. Only Koh Soon-Yeol-ssi and Jung Hae-Rim-ssi will participate.”

“Yes, that’s alright. I just have to be better,” Park So=Yeon said calmly.

Ring ring!

Young-Joon’s phone rang loudly.

“Just one moment.”

Young-Joon picked up the phone. It was Song Ji-Hyun.

“Hello?”

—Doctor Ryu!

Park So-Yeon’s head fell as she heard a woman’s voice coming out from the other side of the phone.

—It succeeded. Cellicure. We said that we were going to coat it in an exosome and improve its efficiency by only sending it to cancer cells in the liver, right? It worked!”

“Oh, really?”

Young-Joon smiled brightly.

“Congratulations. Good work.”

—I was just passing by A-Bio. Are you free for a meeting right now? Or I can send you the data by email.

“No, let’s discuss this in person. I’ll head there.”

Young-Joon hung up.

“I have another meeting, so I have to go. Thank you,” Young-Joon said to Park So-Yeon.

* * *

Young-Joon arrived at A-Bio and met Song Ji-Hyun at the main entrance. She immediately got up from the bench when she saw Young-Joon. Her face was flushed with excitement.

“Doctor Ryu! Look at this.”

She ran towards Young-Joon, basically jumping in joy, and opened the data on her tablet.

“Haha, are we going to stand here and talk about it? Let’s look at it at that cafe over there.”

“Should we?”

Embarrassed, Song Ji-Hyun put her tablet back in her bag. Young-Joon was somewhat glad to see her so happy. He had become dull to this kind of feeling because he had spent half a year succeeding with everything he touched. As a scientist, Young-Joon knew what that felt like: the thrill of seeing the results of long, hard research because the desired data popped out miraculously.

“If you were part of A-Bio, I would have given you a bonus,” said Young-Joon as they walked.

“Should I go there right now? Will you hire me if I apply?”

“Of course.”

“Haha, thank you. But I still like Celligener.”

The two went into a quiet cafe that was in front of the company. Young-Joon met someone unexpected there.

“Doctor Ryu?”

Hong Ju-Hee greeted him with a bright face.

“Who is it?” Song Ji-Hyun asked.

“She’s a doctor who works in the newborn intensive care unit at Sunyoo Hospital,” Young-Joon explained.

The daughter of Son Soo-Young, the first clinical trial patient who was treated with the glaucoma cure, suffered from a disease called persistent pulmonary hypertension of the newborn. The baby’s primary doctor was Hong Ju-Hee. They had become familiar with each other when Young-Joon gave her a hint about treating the patient.

“It’s been a while, Doctor Hong. You’re probably so busy, but what brings you here?” Young-Joon asked as he greeted her.

“Oh, I’m actually here because I wanted to ask you for something, but... I was thinking about it by myself here because I didn’t know if I should call you.”

“Ask me for something?” “There’s a patient with pediatric liver cancer at Sunyoo Hospital.”

Young-Joon flinched.

“Pediatric liver cancer...”

—Agh...

Rosaline groaned.

“Sorry, wait.”

Young-Joon got a small headache. He excused himself and went to the washroom. He felt like he was going to vomit for some reason.

“Why am I like this all of a sudden?” Young-Joon asked.

—It’s because of me.

“Why?”

—Do you remember when I was created and established myself in your body?

“Of course.”

—I have over a hundred million cells in your body right now, but I only had one before. It’s the mother cell that is basically my main body. After the creation, the mother cell moved to your brain through your blood vessel.

𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

“To my brain?”

—The easiest energy source to consume is glucose, and it is supplied to the brain the most. And it located itself where the ganglion signal was the strongest. Do you know where that is?

“Where?”

—Among the nerve cells inside your hippocampal tissue responsible for long-term memory. The place where your obsession with science and research ethics is rooted.

Rosaline said.

—It’s where the memory of Ryu Sae-Yi, your youngest sister who died at nine-years-old, was located. She died of pediatric liver cancer.

“Oh...”

Young-Joon held his head.

—The moment you heard that it was pediatric liver cancer, the nerve cells near my mother cell suddenly got excited and affected it.

“I understand what you mean. Then, will this happen when I hear about pediatric liver cancer from now on?”

—It’s fine now. I have relaxed those nerve cells. I am stronger than the hippocampal nerve cells.

“Alright.”

Young-Joon caught his breath and left the washroom. In the meantime, Song Ji-Hyun and Hong Ju-Hee were having a serious conversation.

Young-Joon went to their table.

“How old is that patient?” Young-Joon asked Hong Ju-Hee.

“The patient is female, and she is nine-years-old.”

“...”

It was the exact same state as Ryu Sae-Yi. Something ached in his head again.

[I relaxed it again. It’s fine.]

Rosaline sent him a message.n

“How is the patient?”

“It’s a hepatocellular carcinoma. The tumor is located in the right lobe, and we are treating it with CCG 8881B therapy.”

“8881B?”

“It’s a treatment where we intravenously inject cisplatin and doxorubicin under the conditions provided by the American Academy of Pediatrics.”

“Is the reason you came to see me because it is not working well?”

“... The cancer cell gained resistance,” said Hong Ju-Hee in a depressed voice.

“What about other drugs?”

“The child’s prognosis isn’t that great. Using a drug that is more toxic isn’t recommended, so I came to see you in case you had any other way. But here... Doctor Song, was it? She said that she had a good drug,” Hong Ju-Hee said as she looked at Song Ji-Hyun.

Song Ji-Hyun nodded with a tense face.

Young-Joon said, “Doctor Song, let’s see the data for Cellicure.”

Cellicure was the most effective and safe drug among the existing liver cancer treatments, at least it was from the data from the first phase of clinical trials. It was also true from the data that Rosaline analyzed. There were barely any side effects.

* * *

Lee Yoon-Ah, who was nine-years-old, was admitted to Sunyoo Hospital when her friends entered elementary school. It wasn’t easy for a small child to tolerate chemotherapy that even adults had a hard time with. She cried and threw a tantrum every time she got a shot, but the surprising thing was that she did not lose her smile. Even then, Lee Yoon-Ah was sitting on her bed and laughing while on her phone.

“Hahaha. Mom, look at this.”

Lee Yoon-Ah showed her phone screen to the woman, who aged dramatically in just two years, who was sitting beside her.

“Someone is having a staring contest with a dog.”

“Yeah...”

The extremely exhausted woman laughed feebly as she glanced at Lee Yoon-Ah.

Kim Hyo-Jin was a young mother, just thirty-three-years-old. She got married in her early twenties and had her first child when everyone else was in university. All of her memories in her twenties were with her daughter; she had traded her youth with this child.

Kim Hyo-Jin stroked her forehead, which was completely bald.

Click.

The door to her room opened. There was Professor Kim Chun-Jung, Lee Yoon-Ah’s primary doctor, Hong Ju-Hee from the newborn intensive care unit, and a few nurses.

But Kim Hyo-Jin shot up from her chair after she saw the person behind them. Her eyes widened. She didn’t blink once as Young-Joon approached her with the doctors. She thought she was dreaming.

“Doctor... Ryu Young-Joon?”

Her voice trembled.

“Hello.”

Young-Joon greeted her, then glanced at Lee Yoon-Ah. He didn’t know if he was mistaken or it was because all her hair had fallen out due to chemotherapy, but she looked very similar to Ryu Sae-Yi.

1. short for avian influenza, or bird flu ?