[Music] i'd worked an emergency room inside a hospital for four years it's very surprised that there's nothing that's going to allow them to bond materials and tissues together [Music] so up on a screen here you can actually see the method that they're using every day today to suture blood vessels it hasn't changed in over 100 years every one of those blood vessels they have to repair takes about 20 minutes of suturing that can cause unnecessary damage and a lot of pain [Music] i had this idea to make a new type of chemical glue it could theoretically be activated and deactivated with light or voltage or even magnetic fields and it'll create these tiny little micro hooks almost like velcro that allow you to cross link almost any type of service we knew that it had a big chance of failing i had many discussions with my mentor sumu he liked my ideas and he gave me a lot of encouragement and said there needed to be some kind of breakthrough there and so we went for this initial grand funding something like fifty thousand dollars [Music] the first application will be an implantable medical device i thought i'd given a perfect presentation this is unproven technology you don't have enough data we don't think it's going to work how are we supposed to be confident that you're going to be able to do it we got turned down so i was like what do we do next and then we submitted for a million dollar grant did you continue believing in yourself the whole time no we always had doubts fifty thousand dollar one failed what's the chances with the million dollar one i remember just literally jumping out of my chair we got that million dollar grant when we got this initial funding we had to decide which type of materials we're going to use natural or synthetic materials natural compounds have a better reputation in terms of biomedical devices and biomaterials we naturally went with these the first few experiments they went great but the next week they'd be completely different results we didn't understand why day in day out it wasn't working for two years i watched the data sets came in and said that even though it's not working we need to keep going down this direction what's the definition of insanity terry when we keep repeating something and expecting different results right if you're not meeting your objectives they can take the money away if it failed then you don't get tenure my career in academia would be done when he came up for promotion as the chair of the department it was my unpleasant duty to inform him that he did not get through his 10-year process when his promotion was denied terry considered giving up this as a career but that would have been a great loss to the academic world you have the doubts from the grant reviewers you have the doubts from the colleagues and then the students themselves they're having their own doubts should we keep believing and doing what the professor says so we spent hours discussing this i was able to convince him that his work was worth pursuing i had a conversation with my graduate student he found out that the polymers would just randomly fall apart one of the assumptions i made in terms of natural materials was wrong so we moved to synthetic polymers from the very first test everything that we envisioned it to do how fast it could react how safe it could be it was all working now i was walking in air for like a week i was walking now we're in animal trials there is no toxicity to the tissues we're putting together blood vessels we're using it for drug delivery the nurses are planning different studies with it first inhuman trials within three to five years we never had a problem with funding again [Music] his second attempt was enough to get him tenure and now it's recognized as a wonderful contribution to bio adhesives a lot of people are emailing us now can we make sandpaper with it can we use it to glue together different automobile parts we're not moving an automotive automotive called us i would say of course i had my self-doubt but i also knew that in order to go to somewhere new we have to be confident enough that if you really think this is a good idea and you prepared yourself enough then you know that this is the right way to go