Chapter 92: Cellicure (3)

“Um... Doctor Ryu, can you cure my little girl?” Kim Hyo-Jin, the patient’s mother, said with desperation in her voice.

“I don’t know yet. We do have a new liver cancer treatment, but we have to see if we can use it,” Young-Joon answered briefly.

He leaned towards Lee Yoon-Ah.

“Hi, Yoon-Ah.”

Lee Yoon-Ah giggled, then turned away and buried her face into her pillow. Then, she peeked so that only her eyes were out and glanced at Young-Joon.

“Say hello to the doctor,” said Kim Hyo-Jin as she patted Lee Yoon-Ah on the shoulder.

Lee Yoon-Ah just bowed her head without saying anything.

‘How is it?’

Young-Joon asked Rosaline.

—You can cure her with Cellicure. But to destroy the cancer cells completely, you have to precisely measure the number of doses and the amount. It will damage regular cells if it is too much, but the cancer cells will gain resistance if it is too weak.

𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

‘How do I adjust it?’

—You have to use fitness to check that.

‘Then use it.’

—Oh...

Rosaline moaned again.

—There’s a problem. I will send you a message later.

‘What? Why?’

—You are more important to me than hundreds of those children. There’s a problem in your hippocampus.

Bleep.

Rosaline’s status window disappeared.

‘Hey? Rosaline?’

Baffled, Young-Joon called Rosaline, but she did not reply. He couldn’t even pull up her status window.

Rosaline was focusing all her strength on examining his hippocampus. In front of her were over ten million neurons. Each neuron formed networks with about twenty or thirty thousand neurons and formed a large neural net of long-term memory. This was Young-Joon’s library of memories.

Rosaline was examining each of the electrical signals. In between the large nerve cells among the subiculum and presubiculum, there were heavy black nerves; they were very old tissue. To Rosaline, they looked like a dormant volcano or a dead old tree.

In those cells, there were memories such as the time Young-Joon met Ryu Sae-Yi for the first time in her cradle when she was a baby, the stone wall road that he used to take when walking her to kindergarten while holding her hand, and the time he worked a part-time job as a university student and bought her crayons when she was about to enter elementary school.

‘...’

They hadn’t had any activity for a long time.

And now that Young-Joon had found Lee Yoon-Ah, neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine were flowing out like lava.

“I am going to use some fitness.”

Rosaline sent a message to Young-Joon.

—Huh? Hey, tell me what to do with the Cellicure concentration!

“A little later. I have to pour all the fitness into this right now,” Rosaline answered briefly.

Then, she began controlling the expression level of a few genes. The neurons began relaxing, and the neurotransmitters that were being produced slowly disappeared. This had happened in a flash, but it felt like hours of work for the cells.

Rosaline was now able to take a breath.

‘But why does he keep getting so stimulated when I stopped it earlier?’

Rosaline stared past the neural net and examined it. The start of the excitation was not the hippocampus; the signal was coming from the other side.

The trauma left a scar on part of Young-Joon’s hippocampus, which preserved memories of Ryu Sae-Yi, but the trauma was mainly located in the amygdala. The amygdala was the structure that controlled the unconscious connected to the end of the hippocampus. And some information from memories was trapped there in the form of emotions.

‘Maybe when Ryu Sae-Yi died...’

Rosaline loaded herself into the blood vessels. She moved through the bloodstream that was beating from the heart.

‘I like that there’s a lot of glucose.’

There was an extreme abundance of glucose, the sole energy source for the brain, here. The carbohydrates Young-Joon ate for lunch flowed through here in the form of sugars.

Rosaline absorbed the glucose within the blood and moved towards the amygdala, a complex neural tissue that controlled emotions. She had influenced that region many times since she entered Young-Joon’s body, but she had never directly entered a cell into it.

“Doctor Ryu?” Professor Kim Chun-Jung, Lee Yoon-Ah’s primary doctor, asked Young-Joon. But she was a little surprised when she saw Young-Joon, who turned to look at her. His stone-cold face and the strange look in his eyes gave off an alienating feeling.

“Doctor Ryu...?” Kim Chun-Jung called him again.

“Yes.”

“Are you feeling alright?”

“Yes.”

Young-Joon was really fine. He was fully conscious as well, but for some reason, he felt like a psychopath who had no feelings. He felt the sympathy and sadness he felt for Lee Yoon-Ah just a few moments ago disappear instantly. And like how it was easy to find a needle in the haystack if the hay was all burnt away, the only thing that filled Young-Joon’s void head was pure logic and reason. His thinking had been extremely sharpened to the extreme as he was under the influence of Rosaline.

“Can we cure her with Cellicure?” Kim Chun-Jung asked.

“I can tell you after I look at her chart. Give me the data,” Young-Joon said mechanically.

Song Ji-Hyun stared at him in shock. His face and way of speaking was extremely awkward; he didn’t seem like the Young-Joon she knew.

* * *

The discussion on how to administer Cellicure began in Kim Chun-Jung’s office.

“Hepatocellular carcinoma. Tumor is located in the right lobe. Treated with 8881B therapy after removing the tumor with surgery,” said Young-Joon as he read the chart. “The tumor began growing in the liver again on day 174. Cisplatin and doxorubicin didn’t work, and it is currently two centimeters big.”

“...”

“Where is the child’s weight shown?” Young-Joon asked.

“It’s at the very top,” replied Kim Chun-Jung.

Young-Joon checked Lee Yoon-Ah’s weight at the top of her chart. She was twenty-four kilograms.

“We intravenously inject 0.6 milliliters of Cellicure, which has been developed into a new form, per kilogram. We have to inject it with a steady flow for two hours. The duration of the treatment will be two weeks, and administered twice a day.”

“...”

Kim Chun-Jung, Hong Ju-Hee, the nurses, and Song Ji-Hyun were staring at Young-Joon quietly.

“Why?” Young-Joon asked.

“Nothing... It was just fascinating how you can just determine the administration conditions of a new drug just like that,” said Hong Ju-Hee.

She and Song Ji-Hyun believed Young-Joon, but Kim Chun-Jung wasn’t that easy, as Lee Yoon-Ah was her patient. The entire process of treating a patient could not be done just by having trust in someone, no matter how brilliant they were.

“I’m sorry, but what is the evidence behind that method?” Kim Chun-Jung asked. “Why is it 0.6 milliliters per kilogram?”

“If you convert the concentration of Cellicure for the patient, we are injecting sixty percent of the dose that was used in patients in the first phase of clinical trials. However, because it is more stably introduced into the patient’s cancer cell when administered due to the change in drug form, the increase in efficiency should be taken into account. It is about 1.6 times more efficient than the original Cellicure if you induce exosome integration when it uniquely recognizes XRCC, a liver cancer cell marker. As such, the right amount of the drug is being injected compared to Phase One of clinical trials, considering that the patient is a child,” Young-Joon said.

For a moment, Kim Chun-Jung was at a loss for words. She stammered, then finally opened her mouth.

“T-Thank you. Then, why are we injecting it twice a day in twelve-hour intervals and limiting the administration time to two hours?”

“Like I said before, Cellicure is packaged in an exosome, so it attaches to cancer cells by recognizing the unique markers on liver cancer cells. The reason why we don’t pour in Cellicure all at once is to give it time to access the entire liver. Two minutes after the exosome enters the cell, the cell membrane collapses so that other exosomes cannot enter.”

Young-Joon poured out an explanation.

“As such, the exosomes that are injected slower in the span of two hours have the opportunity to enter the cancer cells sequentially and access many more cancer cells more effectively. If you pour it in all at once, all the exosomes would enter only a portion of the cancer cells.”

“...”

“The reason we have to treat the patient for two weeks is because of the size of the tumor. If Cellicure eliminates seventy percent of the tumor surface with one administration, it has to be administered for a total of twenty-six times with said conditions to theoretically kill all cancer cells. The extra two times are considering the proliferation of the cancer cells.”

“...”

Thud.

Hong Ju-Hee’s elbow accidently bumped her notepad onto the floor.

“... Sorry.”

She quickly picked it up.

Kim Chun-Jung didn’t show it, but she was extremely shocked.

‘Humans aren’t robots. How can he analyze things like that?’

She asked for his evidence behind the administration method, but she would have approved of the treatment if Young-Joon said something about the clinical data and how Lee Yoon-Ah was still a child.

However, the person who was the most surprised was Young-Joon himself. It felt like Rosaline had borrowed his mouth and was explaining it for him. But that sense of surprise was also a rational sense of surprise; it was a sort of a reasonable doubt about whether he was someone who was capable of such accurate analysis.

There was no sense of emotion at all since it was fully removed from him.

* * *

–-Ugh...

Rosaline groaned on the way out of the hospital. At the same time, Young-Joon felt like a loose screw in his head had been tightened again. He felt like he was back to normal now.

“Hey, what happened?” Young-Joon asked. “Did I explain everything right?”

—Everything was correct. Don’t worry.

“... Where did you go? What did you do to my body?”

—That’s what I want to ask you... What are you going to do about this amygdala?

“What?”

—You should clean up. It’s not like you’re using this body alone.

“...”

Young-Joon was baffled. What was she saying?

—I explored your unconscious mind where your trauma was. It was like hell. I have never seen such a vast universe like that in my life.

“Isn’t six months your entire life?”

—That’s true. Anyway, I cleaned up the unique structures that were floating around in your unconscious mind.

“What trauma? I have trauma?”

—Are you kidding? You have so many. Starting with your lame inferiority complex from your poor childhood, it’s just... Clean it up!

“...”

—Of course, the most severe one among them was about Ryu Sae-Yi.

Rosaline said.

—I couldn’t dare to touch it. Haha. Kim Hyun-Taek stimulated this when he stole Cellicure? He’s crazy. If he was unlucky, he could have been murdered.

“...”

—Anyways, there’s no way for me to get rid of this because it’s so big. You have to take care of it yourself.

“Me?”

—You will need like ten thousand fitness to remove it through cell apoptosis. But you can uproot it depending on the situation since you are not a cell, but a large human. If I’m a citizen, you are as big as a country. You can do things I cannot do by myself.

“Doctor Ryu!”

Someone shouted and followed Young-Joon. It was Song Ji-Hyun.

“You just left alone without saying goodbye when I was out for a moment... That was mean,” Song Ji-Hyun said like she was disappointed.

When he didn’t have emotions, Young-Joon just left because he was done with his business, but now he felt a little sorry. They came together, so it was also kind of weird to leave alone without even saying goodbye.

Young-Joon said, “Sorry. Let’s go. I’ll drive you home.”

He and Song Ji-Hyun went to the parking lot where his company car was parked.

Song Ji-Hyun said to him in the elevator, “Um... Are you okay?”

“Me?”

“You just seem a little different. You also look a little upset.”

“Oh, I’m fine. It’s just...”

Young-Joon was thinking of an explanation, but he couldn’t talk about Rosaline. So, he came up with a similar reason.

“I have a trauma about pediatric liver cancer.”

“A trauma?”

“My youngest sister died of liver cancer.”

“Oh...”

Song Ji-Hyun looked like she felt bad for him.

There was a moment of silence, and the atmosphere became sad very quickly. Young-Joon said something first because he felt bad.

“That’s also the reason why I went to grad school and started studying science. It was because I wanted to make a pediatric liver cancer cure.”

Song Ji-Hyun stared at Young-Joon.

“I see. So was that why you fought with the lab director when Lab One stole Cellicure?”

Young-Joon smiled.

“Yeah. How do you know about that?”

“Everyone in this industry knows,” said Song Ji-Hyun. “Back then, I was a rookie student, but now I am a scientist leading a company like A-Bio. I hope it really succeeds this time.”

“... Don’t worry.”

Song Ji-Hyun lightly patted him on the back.

“You rescued this drug that was buried after Celligener worked on it for seven years.”

Ding!

The elevator arrived at the underground parking lot.

—The elevator doors are opening.