In this episode of Mendelspod , we’re joined by Raju Rayavarapu, bioinformatician at DNAnexus and former FDA data specialist, to discuss how regulatory science is adapting to the age of AI, big data, and cloud platforms. * 0:00 How has AI changed regulatory informatics? * 4:15 KISS * 12:50 On standards * 25:00 So nothing new about AI? The juicy question of the interview * 32:45 Raju’s life: good days and bad nights Despite the buzz around AI, Raju insists the fundamentals haven’t changed much. “...
Aug 05, 2025•36 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com “Genomics works. Don’t be scared of it.” That’s the message from Mike Kreitzinger, a longtime Illumina leader now advising the Institute for Pediatric Rare Disease at Florida State University and stepping into a broader role as a genomics advocate. In this episode, Mike gives us an inside look at Florida’s newly funded Sunshine Genetics Act , which includ…...
Jul 31, 2025•5 min
Illumina’s new interpretation software, Illumina Connected Insights, signals a turning point in oncology genomics—where sequencing power meets end-to-end clinical utility. On this episode of Mendelspod, host Theral Timpson sits down with Jing Gao, VP of Software Engineering at Illumina, to explore how the company is extending its leadership from sequencers to software. “We’ve moved from offering modular tools to building full-stack solutions,” Jing explains. “Connected Insights is about taking r...
Jul 30, 2025•25 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Can we finally replace animal testing in drug development—and still know a drug is safe and effective? That’s the provocative question at the heart of this episode, as we sit down with Andrei Georgescu, co-founder and CEO of Vivodyne . The company is developing robotic, AI-enabled systems for growing living, biopsy-like human tissues that can be used to t…...
Jul 24, 2025•5 min
In this episode of Mendelspod, Theral welcomes Dr. Rita Shaknovich, Chief Medical Officer in Agilent’s Life Sciences and Diagnostics group, for a high-level and deeply insightful look at where liquid biopsy technology stands today. With her background in hematopathology and molecular diagnostics, Rita brings clarity to a field that has long promised transformation—and is now delivering. “It’s not the future anymore. It’s actually here,” she says. Liquid biopsy has moved beyond the buzzword phase...
Jul 23, 2025•26 min
In this episode of Mendelspod , Theral speaks with Frédéric Debode, Scientific Director at CRA-W in Wallonia, Belgium, about the evolving landscape of GMO detection in the age of gene editing. From early work in real-time PCR to the latest in next-gen sequencing and target enrichment, Debode has been on the front lines of tracking genetically modified organisms—often when the modifications leave almost no trace. What’s at stake? In Europe, labeling GMOs is not just a policy—it’s the law. Debode ...
Jul 17, 2025•28 min
“We’re going to be rewriting the textbooks on how tissues work.” In this compelling reunion with spatial biology pioneer Joe Beechem and a first-time visit from Oliver Braubach , we explore the rapid evolution of spatial technologies at Bruker , a legacy instrumentation company newly resurgent in the spatial space. Following Bruker’s acquisition of Nanostring and Canopy, the company has emerged as a unifying platform where whole-transcriptome discovery meets translational assay development—under...
Jul 10, 2025•36 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com In this episode of Mendelspod , Theral sits down with Rob Neely, co-founder and CSO at Tagomics, to discuss how his company is fusing genomics, epigenomics, and fragmentomics into a single, assumption-free assay for early cancer detection. The conversation begins with breaking news: Tagomics has just received a new grant from the UK’s Innovation Agency a…...
Jul 01, 2025•5 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com In this premium episode of Mendelspod, we’re joined by one of the few people speaking clearly and globally about biosecurity in the era of synthetic biology and AI: Sophie Peresson . A consultant and leader in responsible innovation, Sophie brings an unusually broad and grounded perspective. With experience spanning international law and governance, she p…...
Jun 12, 2025•4 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com As artificial intelligence continues to influence the life sciences, some researchers are questioning not just what it can predict, but what it can explain. On this episode, Mike Kiebish, VP of Platform and Translational Sciences at BPGbio, discusses the company’s “biology-first” approach to drug discovery—one that begins not with models or literature, …...
Jun 05, 2025•4 min
In this episode of Mendelspod , we plunge into the shape-shifting world of RNA with Dr. Gavin Knott, associate professor at Monash University and alum of Jennifer Doudna’s lab. Knott is part of a new generation of researchers setting structural biology ablaze with AI, decoding RNA-guided systems and expanding the CRISPR toolbox far beyond its original scope. Knott introduces the listener to RNA not just as code, but as living language. He discusses how AI now allows scientists to see molecules i...
May 29, 2025•31 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com For decades, drug discovery has followed two main roads: small molecules that can slip into cells but often lack precision, and biologics that offer specificity but struggle with delivery and manufacturing. In this episode, Christian Schafmeister introduces us to a third path: spiroligomers —synthetic, fused-ring molecules designed to combine the best of…...
May 22, 2025•4 min
What if drug design didn’t depend on pre-existing biological data? In this episode of Mendelspod , Theral sits down with Aridni Shah, co-founder and CEO of Immunito AI, a Bengaluru-based biotech startup reinventing how we develop antibody therapies. Shah and her team are using artificial intelligence to design antibodies from scratch , bypassing traditional animal-based and data-heavy methods. “We no longer need to rely on pre-existing data,” she explains. “We’ve gone to the fundamental atomic l...
May 15, 2025•22 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Yes, the Trump economy has been tough on life science tools—but according to today’s guest, the business model was failing us anyway. It’s time to go back to rethinking the basics. Today we’re joined by Stephane Budel , founding partner at DeciBio , one of the leading market research and consulting firms focused on life science tools and precision medicine…...
May 13, 2025•4 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com On today’s episode of Mendelspod , Theral sits down with Giovanna Prout, CEO of Scale Biosciences , to explore a how the company is achieving new orders of magnitude of scale in the single cell space. "In the past, single cell was one cell per well—maybe 96 cells per experiment," Prout explains. "Now, with our Quantum Scale platform, we can scale from 85,…...
May 08, 2025•5 min
What if you could step inside a molecule ? On today’s episode of Mendelspod , we talk with Steve McCloskey, founder and CEO of Nanome , the company bringing virtual reality into the world of drug discovery and molecular modeling. A former nanoengineering student at UC San Diego and a self-described futurist, Steve founded Nanome to create what he calls the "ultimate scientific interface"—a way for scientists not just to visualize molecules, but to interact with them naturally in 3D space. * 0:00...
May 01, 2025•42 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Wait! What? Sequencing as a service? That was the reaction when Mark Budde first set out to upend a basic ritual in molecular biology—confirmation Sanger sequencing—with his company Plasmidsaurus. You’ve heard it many times: Illumina machines sequence around 80% of the bases in the world. But as Mark points out in today’s interview, it’s not 80% of th…...
Apr 29, 2025•5 min
Just weeks before the FDA’s sweeping rule to regulate laboratory-developed tests (LDTs) was set to take effect, a federal court struck it down. What does this mean for the field of precision medicine and for labs themselves? There are have been those on the side of regulation arguing its importance for reimbursement. Yet many, such as the plaintiffs in this case, the ACLA and AMP, have argued that FDA regulation could stifle innovation in a new field and even force labs to shut down. Today we ta...
Apr 22, 2025•38 min
In today’s show, Theral is joined by Chris Petersen, Chief Technology Officer at Scientist.com, a company sometimes called the "Amazon for science"—though with a great deal more complexity. Chris pulls back the curtain on how AI is transforming the research services marketplace and offers a rare look into how AI is already reshaping the infrastructure of pharma and biotech. Calling this the "tinkering phase" of AI, Chris likens the current moment to the early days of the web—when best practices ...
Apr 17, 2025•27 min
In today’s program, we continue our series on disease subtyping with Dr. Jeffery Klco, a pediatric pathologist and researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Dr. Klco joins us to discuss groundbreaking work recently published in Nature Genetics , which redefines the genomic landscape of childhood acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Klco and his team have identified twelve novel molecular subtypes of pediatric AML—some driven by genetic alterations that had long gone undetected by standard co...
Apr 15, 2025•25 min
Dr. Aaron Viny, oncologist and researcher at Columbia University , begins today’s conversation with a personal milestone—he’s now been leukemia-free for 21 years. This experience gives his work on cancer a powerful human dimension that comes through in his interview with Theral today—not only in his dedication to patient care, but in his boundary-pushing research on the epigenetic roots of cancer. Dr. Viny’s research focuses on the epigenetic architecture of hematologic malignancies, exploring h...
Apr 10, 2025•41 min
We’re happy to welcome back Ben Busby, Principal Scientist at DNAnexus, to dive deeper into the evolving world of disease subtyping and multi-omic data sets. Building on our previous conversation with Busby about the genomic data ecosystem, we explore the shift from single-cause disease models to multifaceted approaches that incorporate genomics, proteomics, imaging, and more. "We’re no longer in a world where we’re doing genomics or imaging or proteomics," he explains. "These things are all com...
Apr 03, 2025•30 min
John Cumbers , founder of SynBioBeta, joins Theral for our annual look ahead at the field of synthetic biology and the upcoming SynBioBeta 2025 conference , happening May 6–9 in San Jose . It's obviously a big year for AI, and synthetic biology is no exception. As John puts it, “Biology and AI coming together represents a huge opportunity for us to be able to understand biology and then ultimately engineer biology.” This year’s conference features a strong emphasis on AI's role in scaling and ac...
Apr 01, 2025•38 min
Today Theral is joined by returning guests Chris Mason of Weill Cornell Medicine and Simon Fredriksson , CEO of Pixelgen Technologies, for a deep dive into the emerging field of cell surface proteomics and its power to illuminate both space biology and cancer research. Chris Mason shares new insights from his work on the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA), the largest collection of astronaut health data to date. His latest findings confirm that space is more than a hostile environment—it’s a r...
Mar 27, 2025•24 min
In our last episode, we explored the growing shift from genomics to multi-omics. But for Pacific Biosciences CEO Christian Henry, the foundation of discovery remains clear: “ DNA is still where it’s at. ” PacBio is doubling down on long-read sequencing, committed to delivering on its promise of accuracy and completeness. 2024 marks a “watershed year ” for PacBio, with the launch of the Vega system—a benchtop long-read sequencer at an unprecedented $169,000 price point—alongside major advancement...
Mar 20, 2025•39 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com It’s time for our annual deep dive into sequencing—no, wait— multi-omics ! Back on the show is our resident sequencing guru, Keith Robison, scientist at Ginkgo Bioworks and author of the OmicsOmics blog . Keith is our all time return champion, and as always, he brings technical experience alongside the storytelling instincts of a seasoned journalist. Keith …...
Mar 13, 2025•8 min
This week on Mendelspod , as we celebrate International Women’s Day, we’re spotlighting groundbreaking contributions from women in science. Our guest, Dr. Mirna Ghemrawi , is at the forefront of forensic genetics, where DNA analysis meets the pursuit of justice. As Associate Director at the Center for Forensic Science Research and Education, Ghemrawi applies next-gen sequencing and AI to some of the most challenging questions in forensic biology. Originally from Lebanon, Ghemrawi’s path to foren...
Mar 06, 2025•21 min
In this urgent and unflinching conversation, Stanford law professor Hank Greely returns to Mendelspod to address the mounting threats of the Trump administration to public science funding and the institutions that regulate medicine. As the NIH faces existential challenges and the FDA comes under fire, Greely lays out a compelling case for why government-supported research remains essential—not just for innovation, but for maintaining a functional society. “Research is like fishing,” Greely expla...
Mar 04, 2025•34 min
For decades, drug developers have struggled with so-called "undruggable" proteins—those regions of the proteome that evade traditional small molecules and antibodies. But Aikium , led by Eswar Iyer , could be changing the game. In today’s show, Iyer, a prolific scientist with over 100 patents and a background in George Church’s lab, shares how his company is tackling one of the toughest challenges in therapeutics. At the heart of Aikium’s approach is Yotta-ML 2 , an AI-powered wet lab platform t...
Feb 27, 2025•32 min
Today Theral talks with Laura Hercher , Director of Research for Human Genetics at Sarah Lawrence College , about the growing political assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in scientific research. With the NIH facing sweeping budget cuts and DEI programs cancelled, Hercher makes a compelling case for why diversity isn’t just a social or moral issue—but a scientific imperative. "What you're cutting is cancer funding. What you're cutting is Alzheimer's research. What you'r...
Feb 10, 2025•40 min
