This week, we saw Dr. Anthony Fauci being grilled by an angry congress over, among other things, the origin of COVID-19, which is estimated killed at least 25 million peopl e. He was asked about how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until 2022, funded risky virus research at the Wuhan lab in China. Ever since the pandemic broke out, scientists, as well as policymakers, have been debating new restrictions on pathogen research, and last month, the White H...
Jun 04, 2024•30 min
A new precision medicine startup has launched that uses transcriptomic and epigenetic information to help with therapy for a wide range of chronic disorders. Hayward, California-based Aqtual emerged from stealth at the end of last year with data on its first assay, a blood-based test for rheumatoid arthritis.Today, we’re joined by Diana Abdueva, Aqtual’s Founder and CEO, and Maggie Louie, VP of Translational Research and Strategic Partnerships."We are complex organisms that work beautifully for ...
May 23, 2024•24 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Today, we pursue an exciting area of medicine for the first time: cell therapy for solid tumors.Most, if not all, of our audience will be familiar with the success of CAR-T therapies for blood cancers. But only 10% of cancer is in the blood. The other 90% develop solid tumors. Jason Bock is the CEO and founder of CTMC, a new company aiming to speed the advancement of the entire field of cell therapies. First, we cov...
May 16, 2024•6 min
The Clinical Knowledge Base (CKB) powered by The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) is a dynamic digital resource for interpreting complex cancer genomic profiles in the context of gene variant knowledge and protein impact, therapies, and clinical trials. Illumina has teamed up with JAX in the newly released Connected Insights software, which integrates CKB as a knowledge source.We’re joined by Cara Statz from JAX and Erica Schnettler from Illumina to discuss how their combined technologies are helping re...
May 14, 2024•33 min
A paper out this week in Nature Methods demonstrates a new technology which shows novel patterns of protein spatial polarization and co-localization in immune cells. The technology launched by Swedish startup Pixelgen has been dubbed “molecular pixelation” because it uses DNA pixels to tag and reveal relative locations. Unlike most other spatial technologies, molecular pixelation does not involve microscopy.Lead author of the paper, Filip Karlsson, joins us today to explain the technology and ho...
May 09, 2024•19 min
Damon Hostin has had an active and exciting journey in genomic medicine. He’s now at Illumina, where his title is illuminative: Lead, Health System Market Access.A regular on the precision medicine stage, Damon has some insights into what he calls the “blindingly fast progression” of genomic medicine that should convince the most jaded of its critics. Compared to other areas of medicine, we are witnessing a rapid uptake of new science. Damon’s biography includes work at Celera in the age of the ...
May 07, 2024•34 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Sarah LeBaron von Baeyer studied anthropology at Yale. Today she serves as the Director of Ethics Engagement at the new drug development company, Variant Bio, not a job she ever imagined at university.
May 02, 2024•5 min
In today’s show, we talk with Kyle Fahr, the VP and Distinguished Scientist leading Illumina’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. "We lack a way of training genomics AI as readily as you would for natural language processing, says Fahr. "There are vast amounts of data, but there are no labels, no supervision. One of the most powerful tools that we’ve found is using clues from natural selection. Fahr says the company began the AI lab seven years ago when deep learning took off. Two of the team’s AI alg...
Apr 30, 2024•29 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Today, we continue our look into the gap in the adoption of precision medicine. Why are those who need it not getting genetic testing? Patrick Short is the Host of The Genetics Podcast and CEO and Co-founder of Sano Genetics.
Apr 25, 2024•6 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Through its Center for Personalized Medicine, the University of Colorado Health offers its 2.2 million patients some of the country's most advanced precision medicine initiatives.
Apr 18, 2024•8 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com A new spatial biology company is promising to shake up the field. Last month, Curio Bioscience launched a new technology to early access customers that provides transcriptomic spatial data without the need to b…
Apr 11, 2024•5 min
John Cumbers is back on the show to preview the annual SynBioBeta, the leading global conference for the synthetic biology crowd. This year’s show includes 18 tracks on AI, space, longevity, and DNA synthesis. Speakers will include Stephen Wolfram and Stephen Quake, who will discuss large language models and biology. While 2024 saw a total investment of over $6 billion (not as high as the pandemic year of 2021), John says the new technologies and startups keep coming. "We’re seeing just a ton of...
Mar 26, 2024•25 min
Most of the news coming from Illumina has had to do with their leadership in the sequencing instrument space. What is lesser known is that they offer an end-to-end solution for the clinical lab, including variant calling and genome interpretation.In this podcast, we’re joined by Sam Strom, Principal Scientist at Illumina and a certified Clinical Lab Director. Sam comes to Illumina from the clinical testing side; for example, he’s co-chair for the expert curation panel for Parkinson’s Disease and...
Mar 21, 2024•31 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Today, we feature a new DNA synthesis company out of Sweden that is making a name with long, single-stranded DNA at scale. How long? Over 10,000 bases. Why single-stranded vs. genes? And what is meant by scale?According to Cosimo Ducani, CEO and co-founder of Moligo Technologies, the business of making DNA is just getting started. So much for thinking it was a mature business in the early 2000s when Integrated DNA T...
Mar 19, 2024•5 min
The rise of RNA therapeutics and cell therapies promises to take us where we’ve never been in medicine. The growing understanding of RNA, mRNA, and circular RNA and their crucial roles in disease has led to their application in targeting previously “undruggable” targets. Meanwhile, new cell therapies are promising cures to diseases that have plagued us without mercy. Scientists now ask what can’t we do. Still, biology remains dauntingly complex.At the base of these fields is a revolution in biol...
Mar 12, 2024•22 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Chapters: 0:00 Number one unmet medical need for dogs 6:25 Using “extra label” for cross species 12:57 Ideal for understanding human cancers 21:25 Playing catch-up with human medicine 28:04 1,000 pet clinic customers Precision medicine for dogs?— as in tumor profiling for the right therapies to treat man’s best friends at the right time? Yes, that’s right. …...
Feb 22, 2024•6 min
There’s a new genome editing company that everyone is talking about this year. Tome Biosciences came out of stealth in December, claiming the ability to insert DNA sequences of any size at any location across in vivo and ex vivo modalities. Their website says they’re “taking us into the final chapter of medicine.”Tome’s CEO, Rahul Kakkar, joins us today on the program. He’s a physician-scientist (cardiology) who has previously led a couple of biotech companies, Pandion Therapeutics and Corvidia ...
Feb 15, 2024•40 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com 0:00 Long reads at scale has made what difference?6:15 The long or short of it: How does one decide?12:31 Long reads in the clinic20:37 Apton tech to compete with Illumina’s NovaSeq X26:30 Plans for next instruments35:00 Surveying the competitionIn our first post-AGBT show of the year, we’re talking with the CEO of Pacific Biosciences, Ch…...
Feb 13, 2024•6 min
Why aren’t more folks receiving genetic testing?In a study published in JAMA last year, Stanford cancer researcher Alison Kurian found a surprising gap between those who need genetic testing and those who receive it. Among more than a million patients with cancer, only 6.8% underwent germline testing.Today, we begin a new series exploring this gap in testing with Robert Michel. He's the Editor-in-Chief at The Dark Report , reporting on the laboratory industry since 1996. Robert says the problem ...
Feb 06, 2024•40 min
Batten disease is a group of neurodegenerative lysosomal storage disorders that result from pathogenic variants in one of 13 CLN genes. Collectively, Batten disease affects approximately 1 in 100,000 individuals worldwide, making it the most common pediatric neurodegenerative disorder. The most common form of Batten Disease, CLN3 disease, is a rare and fatal autosomal recessive disorder caused by mutations in CLN3. Individuals with CLN3 disease typically experience vision loss in early childhood...
Jan 30, 2024•38 min
After ten years, the human brain mapping project has achieved some major milestones, says Tom Nowakowski, a researcher at UCSF, on today’s program. He says that mapping the brain is a “moon shot” easily on par with the Human Genome Project.So much of biology is basic quantification. Brain scientists are beginning to quantify how many kinds of brain cells there are. They are learning more about the function of various cells such as glial cells.. And they are developing a common language with each...
Jan 23, 2024•36 min
Karen Tumulty, a political writer for the Washington Post, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. She was told she had five years to live. Then she went to book club with friends. On the way home she came out about her diagnosis—and that changed her life. Someone in the car happened to be the President of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, Ed Abrahams. He made a referral and that led to better treatment and better survival. Karen’s story, along with that of her brother, is a must-listen for ever...
Jan 16, 2024•24 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Fun fact: we are composed of 90% bacterial cells and 10% human cells. Surely, the company that begins to turn that knowledge into health products will be the next billion-dollar startup. Pendulum Therapeutics is doing just that. Started in 2012, the company now boasts a full product line of probiotics that are not your typical probiotics. In 2020, the company released a scientific study showing that their glucose co...
Jan 09, 2024•5 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com "We can now begin to look at disease before it happens,” says today’s guest, Todd Druley. He’s the Chief Medical Officer at Mission Bio who has been offering the world’s first single cell and multi-omics instrument.
Jan 04, 2024•4 min
This month, the FDA approved the first CRISPR-based gene therapy called Casgevy (pronounced with a soft g). It’s a one-and-done treatment for sickle cell disease and is being hailed as major step forward in medicine. Joining us to discuss this breakthrough is our return champion, Kevin Davies, author of Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing and Executive Editor of the CRISPR Journal and GEN Biotechnology. Kevin takes us into the science of the new gene therapy...
Dec 26, 2023•48 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Many of our shows this year have explored a new wave of proteomics tools and research. So today, we wanted to get a snapshot of the field of proteomics, and to do that, we turned to John Yates III, Ernest W. Hahn Professor at The Scripps Research Institute. John was on the proteomics side of the famous Lee Hood lab in the 1980s. The most exciting work to come out of Hood’s lab was the first automated DNA sequencer c...
Dec 19, 2023•6 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com This month, a new philosophy of biology series premiers on PBS hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn. The series will go for thirteen episodes and includes over 250 interview clips with some of the world’s leading biologists and philosophers, including Richard Dawkins, Terrence Deacon, Peter Godfrey Smith, and Samir Okasha. Show titles include: Why Philosophy of Biology?, Philosophy of Units/Levels of Natural Selection, an...
Dec 12, 2023•5 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com John Shon is the Chief Technology Officer at Serimmune, a company specializing in precision immunology. Serimmune maintains a library of over 10 million random peptides that can mimic almost any disease. With this library, they are able to comprehensively map the relationship between antibodies and antigens.What does this mean? Take COVID, for instance; rather than just offering a diagnostic, Serimmune can show dise...
Dec 05, 2023•6 min
Our guest today introduced us to a new kind of immunotherapy called Super-NK. Imagine CAR-T, but in this case, the immune cells from the patient are not engineered, but rather “supercharged.” What’s remarkable is that the company is having success with the therapy against neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson's.Paul Song is the CEO of NKGen Biotech. The company just presented results from a Phase I trial at the 16th Annual Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease Conference (CT...
Nov 28, 2023•26 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Personalis, a company launched during the early days of whole genome testing and analysis, is claiming to have the most sensitive MRD testing available to date. They are demonstrating this with the results of their recently released TRACERx study of patients with non-small cell lung cancer. CEO Chris Hall and CMO Rich Chen both join us to profile these exciting results and debut the entrance of Personalis into MRD t...
Nov 21, 2023•6 min
