It’s the age of multi omics. Or multi comics, if you don't catch spell check. A few weeks ago at the annual meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics, we were pleased to find not only genomics companies but some proteomics outfits finding a home. As we chatted with one of these, Olink Proteomics, we were blown away to hear that they were announcing the publication of 1,000 scientific papers. It wasn’t so long ago that genomics companies were boasting this kind of milestone. Has proteomi...
Nov 22, 2022•53 min
Have you ever heard of proximity ligation? We knew of it in research form back in the day, but not that it had been commercialized until this summer. It’s not every day we come across a powerful new genomics tool on this program. Which begs the question, where have Ivan Liachko and his company, Phase Genomics, been hiding? The company received a grant this summer from the Bill Gates Foundation as well as the NIH to pursue phage therapeutics. That’s using viruses to go after bacterial infections,...
Nov 14, 2022•36 min
Last week, during the first International Conference on Newborn Sequencing, a landmark study to sequence the genomes of 100,000 newborns was announced. Called the GUARDIAN study, the project is the brainchild of Wendy Chung, Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University. The study will take place in New York State and is somewhat similar to an ongoing project in the U.K. being done by Genomics England. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access ...
Nov 13, 2022•35 min
Pharmacogenomic testing, or PGx, is considered low-hanging fruit, a no-brainer for the application of genetic testing in the clinic. And some may think it is small fruit. Not so, says today’s guest, Kristine Ashcraft. "Currently we lose a life every two minutes in the United States to non-optimized medications,” says Kristine in today’s show. She has spent over twenty years working to see pharmacogenomic testing adopted into standard-of-care medicine. Kristine serves today as the Medical Affairs...
Nov 10, 2022•34 min
Last week with a crowd of 1,200 customers in a Los Angeles nightclub, sequencing company Pacific Bioscience launched two new sequencers, both long and short read, Revio and Onso. It was a night of great technology, music, and anticipation. Their customers have waited a long time for this moment. Revio offers long read whole genomes at scale for under $1,000. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendelspod.com/su...
Nov 03, 2022•37 min
A new generation of biologists is pushing the limits of third-generation sequencing, furthering the technology's development and defining new applications to answer biology’s most pressing questions. This is the express goal for the lab of Vijay Ramani, assistant professor at UCSF in the department of Biophysics and Biochemistry. Vijay also has an appointment in the Institute of Data Science and Biotechnology at the Gladstone Institute, and in 2019 he was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 rising s...
Oct 18, 2022•42 min
In our age of specialization, today’s guest, Dr. Will Hwang of Massachusetts General, went against the trend and received three bachelor degrees in different fields. Or is this the new trend? Will says that despite the diversity of pursuits, there was a thread that ran throughout his life as a student. He always liked to look at things at the fundamental unit. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendelspod.com/...
Oct 11, 2022•47 min
Arutha Kulasinghe was pumped for the AGBT (Advances in Genome Biology and Technology) Conference this year. He is the Principal Investigator for the Clinical-oMx Lab at the University of Queensland. Dr. Kulasinghe has pioneered spatial transcriptomics using digital spatial profiling approaches in the Asia-Pacific region, contributing to world-first studies for lung, head, and neck cancer and COVID-19. Not gathering last year due to the pandemic, the AGBT conference has became a kind of revival f...
Oct 07, 2022•32 min
One thinks of Invitae as a leading genetic testing company that has worked to improve clinical quality while bringing prices down. And they are, and they have. But after listening to today's show, you will see that their vision is bigger than that. Farid Vij is the President and General Manager of Data at Invitae. A year ago Invitae bought a company he co-founded called Ciitizen which was focused on providing patients with access to their complete medical records. This is a public episode. If yo...
Sep 22, 2022•44 min
Satellite Bio is named descriptively for the way its platform works. Out of stealth in the past few months with what you might call a middle ground approach to generative medicine between stem cell therapy and organ transplant, the company takes its name from the tissue therapy constructs they surgically implant in patients. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendelspod.com/subscribe...
Aug 25, 2022•24 min
There was a tweet thread at the end of the recent Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) conference where researchers took a moment of silence for all the sequencing companies that have announced big plans at the conference and then died. It was clearly aimed at this year’s sequencing tools entrant and buzz-generating Ultima Genomics. The company emerged from stealth the week before AGBT announcing the $100 genome with a purse of $600 million backed by funders including Khosla Ventures...
Jun 23, 2022•42 min
Has the pandemic unleashed the molecule of RNA to be the new future of drug development? Tim Mercer is the Director of the BASE Lab at the University of Queensland which has recently become one of Australia’s leading national facilities for the manufacture and research of RNA technologies. Tim is the next guest in our series on enzymatic DNA synthesis which he says is "a quantum shift” in our ability to synthesize DNA. Tim then goes on to explore the future of mRNA vaccines and other RNA therape...
Jun 16, 2022•36 min
Heidi Rehm’s talents for genomics are legendary. Our field has devoured them like a hungry beast. Discovering an appreciation for the natural logic of genetics in her early school years, Heidi would later learn she was good at the standardization of genomic databases for clinical use. This would make her a pioneering superstar of genomic medicine. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendelspod.com/subscribe...
Jun 09, 2022•54 min
The area of early cancer detection continues to become ever more exciting these days. Each month more companies add liquid biopsies to their product offering as new technologies advance and are able to recognize cancer with increased sensitivity and specificity, particularly from cell-free DNA in the blood. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendelspod.com/subscribe...
Jun 02, 2022•42 min
While we’re able to sit outside on a warm summer’s night under the ocean of stars, let us contemplate some of the bigger questions. We’re very excited to start out our twelfth season of the podcast with the chemist, Lee Cronin, from the University of Glasgow. Lee published an original and fundamental theory about the universe in the weeks after we taped which has profound implications for the question about the origin of life and could have some interesting applications in genomics. This is a pu...
Jun 01, 2022•59 min
Dr. Eric Green has been the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2009. Two years ago, he and his colleagues at the Institute came up with a strategic plan for the next ten years. Today we discuss the plan with the director and get his outlook on the future of human genomics. Dr. Green says human genomics can be roughly divided into four chapters. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscri...
May 28, 2022•50 min
Pacific Biosciences has introduced a new method for detecting DNA methylation simultaneously with DNA sequencing. They are calling it 5-base sequencing. Today on the program, Jonas Korlach, PacBio’s Chief Scientific Officer, and Tomi Pastinen, the Director of the Genomic Medicine Center at Children’s Mercy Research Institute in Kansas City join us to describe the new breakthrough and connect it to clinical possibilities. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscrib...
May 25, 2022•30 min
Alec Ford is passionate about his message. No wonder. There's an astounding fact in cancer medicine that is little known and could make a big difference. More cancer patients are dying from infections than they are from their cancers. And Alec's company has the technology to do something about it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendelspod.com/subscribe...
May 18, 2022•37 min
One of the underrated but true successes of precision medicine has been pharmacogenomics. Beginning in the ’90s with the approval of the drug Herceptin for HER2 positive breast cancer, tailoring drugs to genotype has been one of the less controversial areas of our field and will only continue to build on the early promise of sequencing the human genome. Today we talk Michelle Whirl-Carrillo, Director of PharmGKB, a one-stop go-to for pharmacogenomics data that has been funded by the NIH since 20...
May 10, 2022•31 min
Today we talk with John Nelson, Senior Principal Scientist at GE Research and veteran in the field of DNA synthesis. On January 7th, 2020, two weeks before the first cases of the coronavirus were reported in the U.S, John and a team of scientists and engineers proposed a new project to DARPA called NOW, or Nucelic Acids on Demand Worldwide. The goal of the project, now fully underway, is to deliver DNA-based vaccines anywhere in the world in three days. This is a public episode. If you'd like to...
Apr 14, 2022•37 min
“I’ve seen a lot of revolutions. Now we’re at the beginning of spatial biology, and I think it has the chance to transform life science similar to next gen sequencing, but even more. It’s going to have more ramifications that spread through more disciplines than any of the revolutions I’ve seen in a while.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendelspod.com/subscribe...
Apr 07, 2022•39 min
Are we now entering the age of proteomics the way we did with genomics thirty years ago? We were told we should talk to today’s guest by four people in one week. He’s Omid Farokhzad, CEO and Founder of Seer Inc. When we did, we understood why. Seer offers its customers the chance to “see the proteome in a way that’s never been possible before.” So what does that mean? This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendels...
Mar 31, 2022•45 min
"There's an entire field of fragmentomics with a whole lot of people working on it. The DNA which is shed into the bloodstream has a certain length. The length of ctDNA is shorter than cfDNA, and depending on where the cancer cell is located, the fragment size and pattern is different. So you can actually deduce information about the tissue of origin from the fragment length and pattern. And that's just the beginning." This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscriber...
Mar 17, 2022•35 min
The DNA synthesis space is seeing some real creativity and disruption this past year. One newcomer, in particular, is shaking things up. Sylvain Gariel is the co-founder and chief operating officer of DNA Script, who has recently launched the world’s first benchtop enzymatic DNA synthesizer. In today's show, Sylvain, co-inventor of the new system, tells how he met his co-inventors at a French gas company and came to invent a whole new way of writing DNA. This is a public episode. If you'd like t...
Mar 03, 2022•28 min
Even though Brian McKelligon calls himself a rookie CEO, he comes to the top position at Akoya Biosciences with a veteran’s resume. His path to one of spatial biology’s hottest companies in 2022 worked him up the ranks of some of the top names in life science tools: Affymetrix, Ingenuity, Ion Torrent, and 10X Genomics. Last year Brian led Akoya through an IPO and this year the company has launched a new integrated product line called the Phenocycler-Fusion which they are calling the fastest sing...
Feb 24, 2022•30 min
Harlan Robins is the Chief Scientific Officer at Adaptive Biotechnologies in Seattle. In 2014, Harlan and his brother Chad co-founded Adaptive as a spinout from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center where Harlan had served as the head of computational biology. Adaptive has been developing what they call "immune medicine" mainly in the area of cancer. When the corona virus pandemic hit, they came out with the world’s first T cell-based COVID diagnostic. The test has garnered them a lot of data on T c...
Feb 16, 2022•31 min
“DNA is changing everything for the better,” says today’s guest, Emily Leproust, CEO of Twist Bioscience. Twist has emerged at the heart of what a New York Times Magazine write-up recently headlined The Gene Synthesis Revolution . This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendelspod.com/subscribe...
Feb 10, 2022•39 min
Working at the Broad Institute early in his career, Michael Schnall Levin was discovering he was a biologist at heart. He’d begun his studies in physics then done his PhD in mathematics. But he'd wanted “to do math that had an application in the real world.” It was at the Broad that Michael came in contact with the new tools that were revolutionizing biology. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendelspod.com/s...
Jan 27, 2022•38 min
According to scientists, 30,000 species per year are going extinct. That’s 6 an hour, 150 per day. Up to one half of all species could be extinct by 2050. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendelspod.com/subscribe
Jan 20, 2022•41 min
Chris Mason is back on the program for our end-of-year special. He’s Professor of Genomics, Physiology, and Biophysics at Weill Cornell School of Medicine and the author of such an outstanding book that we had to have him on the program a second time this year. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendelspod.com/subscribe...
Dec 21, 2021•47 min
