TEDMED just released a fascinating talk about color-coded surgery by Dr. Quyen Nguyen, a surgeon at the University of California San Diego. We’ve recently covered some pivotal developments in Nature Medicine and Science Translational Medicine that describe the use of fluorescent probes to selectively illuminate cancer cells during surgery. Those projects resulted from international collaborations (The Netherlands, Germany, Indiana; Japan, Maryland), and Dr. Nguyen herself has been working with a team including Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, Dr. Roger Tsien, so it is appropriate that she emphasizes in the talk that “successful innovation is a team sport.” Interestingly, her group has also worked on illuminating nerves so that surgeons are better able to avoid severing important connections. If the pace of this work continues, it may not be too long before surgical fields look more like Gray’s Anatomy pictures.
