TED Fellow Nina Tandon has engineered human heart tissue in the lab — that actually beats. Though it may sound like a plot from a science fiction universe, someday, surgeons could use this tissue in the same way that mechanics use spare parts in cars.

But there is another potential use for this lab-created tissue — it could be used to test pharmaceuticals.

The process for testing new drugs is clunky at best. As Susan Solomon shares in her TED Talk, below, drug discovery on average takes 13 years, costs $4 billion, and has a 99% failure rate. Drugs are tested in the lab, then in animals, then in human trials that often aren’t big enough to be conclusive. Human beings have a near infinite number of differences — a truly amazing thing, until different bodies start reacting in unpredictable ways to the same treatment.

In today’s talk, filmed at TED Global 2012, Tandon explains that induced pluripotent stem cells — essentially, cells that have been tricked into acting like embryonic stem cells — can be grown into skin tissue, brain tissue, heart tissue, you name it. This means that a model of a person’s body could be stored on a chip. In the future, clinical trials could be conducted on these chips.

The reason we currently test on animals, usually rats, is because each creature is a complete ecosystem, which allows researchers to see how a drug for the heart may affect the liver and how an antidepressant might affect the lungs. But Tandon shares that tissue engineering is beginning to team up with microfluidics, and that researchers are starting to build maps of the human body that will allow examination of the same interactions.

Once a drug is approved, engineered tissues could have another application — helping to create personalized treatments. Because a patient’s tissue samples could exist on a chip, doctors could test exactly how different drugs would work for them. In the future, we could have a world where patients will be able to pick out treatments the way they do a pair of jeans that work best for them.

“Tissue engineering is poised to help revolutionize drug screening at every single step of the path,” says Tandon in her talk. “Disease models making for better drug formulations; massively parallel human tissue models helping to revolutionize lab testing, reduce animal testing and increase human testing in clinical trials; and individualized therapies disrupting what we even consider to be a market at all. We’re dramatically speeding up that feedback between developing a molecule and learning how it acts in the human body.”

To hear more about this fascinating area of research, watch Tandon’s talk. Below, four more talks with ideas for bettering the medical research process.

Susan Solomon: The promise of research with stem cells
Susan Solomon founded the New York Stem Cell Foundation (NYSCF) to give researchers a safe-haven to study stem cells, which she calls “our bodies’ own repair kits.” In this talk from TED Global 2012, Solomon shares how they are using a machine that creates stem cell lines — 2,500 of them by the end of the year. The idea is to eventually produce a comprehensive array of 25,000 stem cell lines — which act like avatars for a wide sample of people — that researchers would have access to as they develop new drugs.

Ben Goldacre: What doctors don’t know about the drugs they prescribe
In this talk from TEDMed 2012, Ben Goldacre shares a scary fact of our medical testing apparatus — that a large number of the trials conducted on any given drug never get published, meaning that doctors do not have all the information necessary when they write prescriptions. Goldacre sounds a warning bell that medical research shouldn’t be conducted by companies hoping to turn profit from drugs, and that there should be no option not to publish the results of any medical trial.

John Wilbanks: Let’s pool our medical data
When signing on for a medical trial, participants are given “informed consent,” a document that carefully lays out the scope and risks of the research. It’s a great thing, intended to shield participants from abuse and trickery, but has one unfortunate consequence. Because of informed consent, medical data has become siloed. In this talk from TED Global 2012, John Wilbanks shares an idea for pooling medical data and making it available to anyone wishing to test a hypothesis.

Jay Bradner: Open-source cancer research
Jay Bradner’s lab made an exciting medical discovery — a molecule that might inform cancer cells. But instead of patenting it, they published the finding and even mailed samples out to other labs. At TEDxBoston 2011, Bradner shares what he sees as a flaw in our current medical research system — that information that could benefit us all can be claimed and owned.

In this short talk from TEDxCooperUnion, bioengineer (and TED Fellow) Nina Tandon talks about her experiment in using TED Conversations as a teaching tool in a tissue engineering class — inspiring students to ask bigger questions online, and engage with a broad community to create wide-ranging discussions about biology, ethics, perception and much more … Read more about Nina’s TEDinClass experiment >>

Sarah Meyer:  So your students asked questions of the TED community as they studied? Did any of their conversations get particularly good responses? Did you or your students learn anything from any of the comments?

Nina Tandon: We’ve been just blown away from the response — our TEDinClass Conversations, for example, have been trending in the top five for 9 weeks straight, and each conversation is being viewed in up to 60 countries. And in total, the conversations are reaching about half a million Facebook users via shares. The students are also learning a ton content-wise through responding to comments. And then there’s the more-difficult-to-measure but equally important lessons in poise and maturity that comes from leading. It’s been amazing.

Emily McManus: What did you worry about most when starting this experiment, and how did you control for it?

Nina Tandon: When we first started, I was worried most about coming up with topics with the right balance between being general enough to relate to the TED community and yet specific enough to relate to class material. I decided to just be upfront about this with my students and to ask them each week to check in and let us know their thoughts. I’ve noticed that as weeks go by that the students are having more and more fun with coming up with these types of questions. One common way we traverse between the “super specific” and the “general” is via analogy. One student last week, for example, hosted a conversation loosely based on an analogy to muscle fibers. He’d noted that we have different types of muscle fibers with different “specialties”: fast twitch and slow twitch — so he drew an analogy to collaboration between specialists and asked: “Does society need more interdisciplinary work? Or more well-rounded individuals working together?” I could never have predicted conversations like this to come out of my class, but am so heartened to see it happen!

Melinda Dvisa: I’ve been using TED Conversations as journal prompts in my class for the past year. My students can use their journals to come up with topics for writing or as pre-writing. It’s proven effective. I’m now teaching developmental reading, and I often select TED Conversations to feature authors. Again, this has proven popular.

Nina Tandon: Wow Melinda, these are all great ideas! Thanks for sharing :)

Join the latest conversation from Nina’s class: “How does virtuality translate into reality?“

Check out all the student-run Nina’s Class Conversations: www.ted.com/conversations/topics/Bioelectricity

If you have further questions, or are thinking about using TEDConversations in your classroom, please email us at conversations@ted.com and we’ll be happy to work with you!

How did the idea to have your students host TED Live Conversations come about?

In the bioelectricity class I teach at Cooper Union, I have undergrads and masters’ students ages 20 and up. It’s an electrical engineering elective where we learn about the electricity within biological systems.

TED hosted me for a Live Conversation, which many of the other Fellows have led as well. As I was doing it, I realized it was similar to the class blog I’d been doing in the classroom with my students. This blog is published online and is, in theory, public. But it’s small. It’s contained. And people don’t really find it. So I thought, wouldn’t it be kind of cool to step it up a notch with my students and have them really engage more actively with the public, as opposed to creating this blog that’s more of a container and an extension of the classroom? So we came up with this idea of “external participation,” and really putting the students on the hook for not only what they say in the classroom and how well they absorb the knowledge in the classroom, but how well they engage with that material in the outside world.

Every week, we have two students that each lead a conversation, so two conversations per week. And that’ll go on for nine weeks because there are 18 students. Right now, we’re into our 13th week. Some of the most popular topics have been Andrew Leader’s How are different body parts connected to the emotions we traditionally associate with them?, Howard Yee’s Can technology replace human intelligence?, Simon Kuvis’s How can computer models help us build intuition? and Sophie Rand’s Can we ever know how another person “senses” the world?

What have the challenges been?

The challenge with TED Conversations was: How do we present a subject that’s so specific in such a way that it’s also relevant to a global community, to participants who maybe don’t have any scientific knowledge at all?

This turned out to be a fun exercise. For example, the class was talking about nerves and senses. We were talking about how, in our eyes and ears, we have cells that create sensation by being able to sense mechanical disturbances or lights, let’s say. And so in a way, those are information producers. Then we have nerves that transmit that information, say, to the brain. Those are information propagators. Then there is the third one in the brain where we have information processing. The students said: “That’s kind of like life. Who do you want to be? Do you want to be the person who creates information, or do you want to be the person who propagates it, or do you want to be the person who processes it?”

Putting this conversation to the TED community turned a talk about cells into a huge philosophical discussion about the nature of social networks. Are you a person who spreads information, or are you a person who produces it? It was a beautiful thing.

I think this is a perfect example of creating an analogy between a biological system and the larger world. And I think it still holds relevance for the classroom, because what we’ve learned in the classroom is expanded into something almost like a dinner conversation, where the classroom topic serves as a launching pad. Exercising the capacity for lateral thinking is a critical skill going forward.

And of course, opening up the discussion to the TED community means some ridiculously cool people – including Fellows Greg Gage, Oliver Medvedik, James Patten, Luke Hutchison, Awab Alvi, and Colleen Flanigan – have just hopped on. Some TED speakers, such as David Bismark, have been contributing. It’s almost like bringing guest speakers into the class for a panel discussion with the students. But also, in a way, it’s like having the students teach.

What’s the response been like from the TED community, and what do you think makes conversations successful?

It’s been amazing. Our TEDinClass Conversations have been trending in the top five for a month straight, and each conversation is being viewed in up to 60 countries. And each conversation is reaching about half a million Facebook users via shares. So there is something really cool going on. I mean, obviously the TED team has been really supportive, but then from that point on, it’s really the student-led conversation itself that takes on a life of its own. I’m really happy to watch how it’s developing.

I’m not sure what the magic formula is, but I think that hooking people into the conversations with thoughtful, pithy questions and the students’ collective enthusiasm and commitment both play a large part in what makes the conversations successful. Each week, the students really get into the extrapolations of class ideas into this “broader realm” as we brainstorm possible questions. Once the conversations are launched, they each jump in and help each other respond to comments, in turn encouraging more responses, and so on — it’s a bit of a virtuous cycle.

Did you tell your students what you wanted the outcome to be, going in?

I didn’t tell them what I wanted, except for them to engage. I guess I really had pictured that it would be an interesting exercise in and of itself, like the act of conversation itself. Some of the students were stressed out that they wouldn’t have answers, that they would feel like they might not have the expertise to engage in the conversation, so they felt really shy about it. And so I said, “Well, you’re not necessarily giving an answer – but you are facilitating a discussion.”

So far it’s been going really well. Once they got over their initial shyness, they started to really get into the whole process, especially as they’re seeing the quality and diversity of people on the TED side that are contributing actively to their conversations.

And what are the students themselves saying about the experience?

Well, every week we’re interviewing them. We have a videographer who comes in to document the process. For the first 20 minutes of class, we have a discussion about how it went, and he’s been recording that. We’re going to be very interested in seeing, by the end of the semester, what the progression was like. Right now, we’re really at the beginning stages, seeing them transitioning from being terrified to really getting high — they look physically euphoric — after the latest conversation we hosted.

One of my students was unsure at first, but then she hosted a great conversation. The following week, she couldn’t stop smiling. She said that it was one of the most exhilarating experiences of her intellectual life.

Another benefit is that I’m getting to know my students faster than I have in past years, because I got to see their TED profiles, I get to see their conversations. I’m getting to know their names a lot faster. I know their hobbies! I have a ukelele player, a long-distance bike rider. So that’s another thing to recommend about having an online community as part of the classroom.

Any plans to roll this out in other classrooms?

Yes – TED 2011 Senior Fellow Jessica Green‘s doing this too, using a slightly different model, where instead of having each student each week post a conversation, it’s the entire class, or a segment of the class, with one leader. As a pilot, we’re calling it TEDinClass. Depending on what we learn from this, it might fun to roll out further.

We’re doing actually a bunch of collaborations with TED with this classroom. As part of the class we’re hosting a TEDx as well, and some students are doing the conversations. And the students are going to be contributing to TEDx. Logan Smalley at TED was also saying, well, if some of the videos we produce are more conducive for TED-Ed, maybe we can collaborate there too. Just being in New York facilitates some of these really fast collaborations, because we can literally go to the office and sit down and hash things out. I’ve been so impressed with how fast we’ve turned this around. With literally an idea in October, we thought about it a little bit, and then by January we were on our way.

Can students learn better by sharing what they know? TED Fellow Nina Tandon believes in the power of sharing ideas and using TED Talks in her classroom. In addition to that, she is now using the TED Conversation platform in the Bioelectricity course that she’s currently teaching at Cooper Union in New York City. After hosting her own conversation on TED Conversations, Nina was inspired to use the platform in her classroom and let students take the role of sharing knowledge and leading discussions with the global community.

Here, Nina Tandon shares her motivation on using TED Conversations in her class:

“I’ve been hosting a class blog each year for the past four years as a way for students to share amongst each other, but this year I wanted to extend our reach into the global community, to have the students engage in “external participation.” I’m hoping that the students will learn by teaching, and will appreciate the unexpected lateral connections that may develop by engaging with the diverse TED community in the context of their developing classroom expertise! It’s an experiment, but I’m really looking forward to seeing how this experience contributes not only to the students’ growth, but hopefully to the TED community as well. Thank you so much to the TED Team for collaborating with us in this exciting endeavor!”

Each week throughout the semester, students will be starting new conversations. You can track them by searching the following tags: TEDinClass and Bioelectricity. Each conversation will be open for 1 week, until the next students starts a new one.

One of the students Samantha Massengill kicks off the conversation series with this question: How immune should science be from the political environment of its time?

And Ariel Habshush suggests an idea: Our bodies are amazing nano/micro electrical factories! and hopes to share his knowledge on this topic throughout the conversation.

You can access all these classroom conversations here as they are added, every week until mid-April. Students will be sharing what they’ve learned during the course on TED Conversations. Come to learn, participate and share, at ted.com/conversations/topics/TEDinClass.