It completely transformed the field.

Exactly.

And in particular, what caught my eye is they can really be curative in certain cases.

So very long-term responses that are considered cures at this point.

So I really wanted to work on the immune system for my PhD.

And it's also a really exciting time because we've just had this explosion of technologies to actually measure the immune system and human cells more broadly with incredible resolution at incredible scale.

So for me, coming as someone with a more quantitative background, I felt it was really perfect timing where my skill set was actually useful and some of the problems were really, really compelling.

Why do you think those mutant cells, which are generally bad for our health, heart disease, metabolic syndrome, cancer, why might those mutations be protective against Alzheimer's?

What about the o-other therapies that are out there right now using microglia?

Yeah.

Um, great point.

So there are already some, um, or, or one approved therapy that actually is curative in a, in a brain disorder l- uh, by, by using a bone marrow transplant, um, in part to replace defective microglia.

And this has been, you know, a very, very interesting story.

So this, this disorder is a rare genetic disease called cerebral adrenoleukodystrophy, cerebral X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy, that's caused by a mutation in a gene on the X chromosome.

So it particularly affects, um, boys, boys and men.

And, and in, in terms of delivering this new therapy, it's, it's a surgical procedure in humans, it sounds like? Or-

So maybe, Julia, can you give us the kind of similar summary of work you all did?

Yeah, first, thank you so much, Eric, for hosting this.

And similar to Nathan, I'm super excited that these two completely different approaches from our two teams really converged on the exact same human biology almost at the same time.

And so exactly like you set up, we set out to study mutations and use mutations as a lineage tracing approach.

And the way we really got into this was actually several years ago, looking at people with this phenomenon called clonal hematopoiesis.

And what clonal hematopoiesis is, is these precancerous mutations that are present in the blood.

And we started in those individuals to find the exact same mutations.

And Julia, is this only something that happens in humans and not in primates and other species?