Mendelspod Podcast

Dr. Eric Green returns to Mendelspod in a new role: Chief Medical Officer of Illumina. After more than three decades at the National Human Genome Research Institute, where he helped guide genomics from research initiatives to clinical reality, he now joins one of the industry’s most influential companies at a moment when the field is expanding beyond DNA alone. Green takes us on a tour around the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com For years, proteomics was described as the missing layer of biology. Why missing? Because measuring proteins at scale turned out to be vastly harder than sequencing DNA. That may finally be changing. In today’s episode Theral speaks with Dr. Yan Zhang, President of Proteomic Sciences at Thermo Fisher Scientific, about...

We’ve gotten very good at reading DNA. We’re just beginning to understand how to read its state. On today’s show, Rob Osborne, Senior Vice President of R&D at Biomodal, discusses new evidence that separating two epigenetic marks—5-methylcytosine and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine—can improve early cancer detection from liquid biopsy. In a recent Nature Communications Medicine study, his team showed that...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com On today’s show, a fascinating discussion about digital twins for medical research— leading to the 64 million dollar question of how much of the current AI wave in healthcare may eventually prove real. Drawing on her background in cancer research and now as CEO of Concr, Dr. Irina Babina joins us to argue that the fut...

An inventor of Solexa sequencing by synthesis has a new idea. On today’s show, Sir Shankar Balasubramanian revisits the accidental origins of Solexa sequencing, born not from a sequencing project at all, but from curiosity-driven experiments watching DNA polymerase at work. What followed helped transform DNA sequencing from a specialized pursuit into a routine engine of modern biology. But as Shan...

There’s a famous line attributed to Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics: “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” It’s still provocative. But it’s unfair to biology. Long before today’s omics era, biologists were uncovering causality everywhere from evolution and natural selection to Mendelian inheritance. They have never merely catalogued life. They have explained it. But...

You’ve heard of 5-base genomics. How about 6-base? It turns out that separating 5-methylcytosine (mC) and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (hmC) is pretty important. Peter Fromen has had a front-row seat to the evolution of sequencing, from the rise of high-throughput genomics at Illumina to long-read technologies at PacBio. Now, as CEO of Biomodal, he’s focused on integrating genetics and epigenetics into...

What is the value of someone’s genome over their life? Is a genome today what it was 10 years ago? How does the adoption of genomic testing compare to other areas in medicine, such as imaging or electronic health records? Today we take a pretty comprehensive look at genomic testing in practice with Damon Hostin, Head of Market Access, Clinical Solutions at Illumina. Damon brings a rare perspective...

Fei Chen of the Broad Institute describes the original problem simply: genomics gave us powerful inventories of gene expression, while microscopy gave us structure—yet the two lived in separate worlds. “You could either have your structure or you could have gene expression, but you couldn’t have both.” In this conversation, Fei walks us through how Slide-tags—now commercialized as Takara Bio Trekk...

Peptides are having a moment. But beneath the market excitement and the GLP-1 headlines, something more interesting is going on. A field that for years seemed technically promising but perpetually constrained is becoming wide open. To see into that open terrain, we’re joined by Charlie Johannes, founder of EPOC Scientific and president of the Peptide Drug Hunting Consortium , along with Tomi Sawye...

It was the biggest story in sequencing last year: Mark Kokoris, head of SBX sequencing at Roche and inventor of the technology, joins Mendelspod to talk about how Sequencing by Expansion (SBX) works and why it may redefine the limits of genomics. * 0:00 A long journey inspired by PCR * 7:20 What is sequencing by expansion? * 14:00 On scale and accuracy * 19:40 Multi-omics vision? * 24:40 What will...

Why do some animals live ten times longer than others? That question opens today’s interview with Steve Austad, Distinguished Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and one of the leading thinkers in the biology of aging. It quickly becomes clear why he’s been such an important voice in bringing aging research from the margins into the center of science. As he puts it, the field was...

Molecular residual disease, or MRD, has been part of oncology’s vocabulary for decades. But knowing something is there and being able to measure it precisely are two very different things. In today’s show, we explore how MRD testing moved from a long-standing clinical suspicion to one of the most consequential tools in modern oncology. Joining us on the program are Chris Hourigan, Director of the...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com For two decades, tests like Oncotype DX have helped oncologists decide which early-stage breast cancer patients should receive chemotherapy. But those tools were designed mainly to predict early recurrence, leaving physicians with far less clarity about the risk that cancer might return years later. For today’s progra...

We began this podcast back around the time the ENCODE project announced that much of the genome was biochemically active. The big science project was undoing the tidy idea of “junk DNA,” and not without controversy. But activity is not the same as purpose. On today’s show, we move past the question of whether the non-coding genome does something and ask a more ambitious one: why has evolution reta...

“We have been talking now for 15, 20 years about the diagnostic odyssey. That shouldn’t exist anymore. The new odyssey is the therapeutic odyssey.” That’s Stephen Kingsmore , president and CEO of Rady Children’s Hospital (he just announced his retirement), explaining the impact of a new genome mapping technology from Illumina. Whole-genome sequencing has transformed diagnosis, but some of the hard...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com CareDx is a company on the move. For years, they have been a bellwether in molecular diagnostics. Their early bet on gene expression testing in transplant medicine, their bruising fight over Medicare coverage, and their pivot into cell-free DNA monitoring have all reflected the growing pains of precision medicine itse...

Large-scale genomics is back — and this time, it’s global by design. In this episode of Mendelspod , we return to the kind of ambitious, shared genomics project that helped define the field a decade ago. The Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2) has now genotyped more than 100,000 participants worldwide, with roughly one third of samples coming from historically underrepresented populations. T...

What if the hardest part of scaling cell therapy turned out to be a materials problem not a biological one—and the solution looked like a sponge? On today’s show, Theral speaks with Yev Brudno , Associate Professor in the School of Pharmacy and also the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about a deceptively simple technology that could dramatic...

For today’s show, we return to discussing the exciting new Cellanome platform. Joining Theral are Pier Federico Gherardini, VP of Computational Biology at Cellanome, and Matthew Spitzer, Associate Professor at University of California, San Francisco, whose lab is using Cellanome’s CellCage technology to study immune cells in dynamic, interactive contexts. 0:00 From static snapshots to observing ce...

Half of oncologists in the U.S. are now ordering MRD testing, according to Adam ElNaggar, MD of Natera — but the other half, he says, “are still figuring out how to use it, or that it even exists.” In this episode, we talk with ElNaggar about the rapid rise of ctDNA-based monitoring and how it’s changing the very rhythm of cancer care. From Natera’s “tumor-informed” Signatera TM assay to its new “...

Aging may be the last great frontier of precision medicine—not a single disease, but the slow re-patterning of immunity, metabolism, and resilience that determines how well and how long we live. In this wide-ranging and genuinely mind-bending conversation, Alan Landay and Tom Blackwell make a compelling case that aging itself is finally becoming a legitimate—and testable—target of medicine. For La...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com The RNA revolution didn’t end with COVID. It’s only just beginning. Today Theral is joined by Andrew Geall , co-founder and Chief Development Officer of Replicate Bioscience , to explore why self-replicating RNA may represent the next major leap in vaccines and therapeutics. While first-generation mRNA proved what was...

Perhaps more than in any other field, AI is impacting drug discovery and development. To begin the year we’re joined by two AI software-as-service companies, one on the target discovery side and the other built for new compound identification for those targets. Theral speaks with Aqib Hasnain , Product Lead at Mithrl, and Cheng Hu , co-founder and CEO of Technetium Therapeutics , about how scienti...

In our most listened to episode this year, Certis Oncology CEO Peter Ellman breaks down how his company is reinventing cancer research by building orthotopic patient-derived tumor models that more faithfully mimic human cancer — and using them to improve both drug development and treatment decisions. What is meant by orthotopic? That’s when patient tumors are placed in the “correct place” inside m...