Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show

Send us Fan Mail Homelessness, addiction, mental health, aging and incarceration are often treated as separate problems. But for the people experiencing them, they're frequently connected. What would it take to build a system that sees the whole person - and could emerging technology help us get there?  Ericka Fusilier is Executive Vice President of External Affairs at VOA ( https://www.voa.o...

Send us Fan Mail What if the next breakthrough in diabetes treatment isn't necessarily a new drug molecule, but a better way to deliver the drugs we already have? One biotechnology company is developing a platform designed to target the liver with insulin - and exploring whether the same principle could eventually apply to GLP-1 and other metabolic therapies. Today, we're exploring the s...

Send us Fan Mail Cancer medicine is advancing rapidly. But are patients getting the tests and treatments they need to benefit from those advances? Chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL, is one of the most common forms of adult leukemia. And while advances in targeted therapies have transformed the treatment landscape, a critical question remains: Are patients actually getting access to the right te...

Send us Fan Mail The brain is one of the most complex systems in biology, and understanding it requires more than a picture of its anatomy. We need to understand its connections, activity, and response to injury.  Today we're going to ask a fascinating question: Can advanced neuroimaging and artificial intelligence give us a much better understanding of what happens to the brain after injury...

Send us Fan Mail We usually assume that before we can use electricity somewhere, we need to build the infrastructure to deliver it. But what if we could bring the energy infrastructure to the location instead? That's the idea behind Beam Global's approach to solar-powered EV charging, energy storage, and resilient power. Desmond Wheatley is President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Be...

Send us Fan Mail A drug can look promising in the laboratory and still fail when it reaches human testing. One of the biggest challenges in drug development is predicting what a compound will actually do inside the human body - including whether it will cause dangerous side effects. Could AI help us make those predictions more accurately, before patients are ever exposed? Dr. Natalie Ma, Ph. D. is...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when your ADHD medication wears off, but your day isn't over? Homework, family responsibilities, relationships, and everything else still demand your attention. So why are we still thinking about ADHD treatment in terms of the school day or the workday? Today, we're exploring whether a different approach to drug delivery could change that. Today we're g...

Send us Fan Mail What if a promising drug fails a clinical trial not because the drug doesn't work, but because it works for a subset of patients whose response gets lost in the averages? What if AI could help us find those patients hidden inside the data? That's the challenge we're exploring today with mathematical scientist Dr. Joseph Geraci, Ph. D., co-founder and chief technolog...

Send us Fan Mail We've been automating laboratories for decades. Robots can pipette, instruments can run assays, and computers can analyze enormous datasets. But that's not necessarily an autonomous laboratory. The really interesting question is: what happens when the system itself can decide what experiment should come next? AI proposes. Robots execute. Instruments measure. The data goe...

Send us Fan Mail What if you could treat a genetic disease without actually fixing the defective gene? That's the fascinating idea behind a new approach being developed for devastating pediatric lysosomal storage disorders. These diseases can have completely different genetic causes - but ultimately disrupt some of the same cellular machinery. So instead of trying to correct every individual...

Send us Fan Mail Cancer treatment can save a patient's life - but what happens when the treatment itself leaves them struggling with pain, fatigue, weakness, limited mobility, or other lasting physical effects? Cancer rehabilitation is changing how we think about recovery, helping patients prepare for treatment, maintain their function, and regain their independence. Cancer treatment has made...

Send us Fan Mail We have some of the most powerful AI systems in history - but what if one of the biggest obstacles to using AI to solve biology isn't the algorithms? What if it's the data? There are enormous amounts of biological data sitting inside pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies and research institutions. The problem is that much of it is proprietary - and the organization...

Send us Fan Mail What if we could look inside the breast without X-rays, without compression, and without injecting a contrast agent - and instead use sound to create a three-dimensional map of the tissue? Dr. Raluca Dinu, Ph. D. is Chief Executive Officer of QT Imaging ( https://www.qtimaging.com/ ), a medical technology company developing quantitative, three-dimensional breast imaging using tran...

Send us Fan Mail There are tens of millions of Americans quietly caring for a parent, spouse, child or loved one - often while trying to maintain a career and a normal life. Yet much of that work is essentially invisible to our healthcare system, our economy and even our data infrastructure. Richard Lui ( https://richardlui.com/ ) is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, author, entrepreneur, an...

Send us Fan Mail A robot can see you. It can recognize you. It can track where you're moving. But can it understand what you're trying to do? Because humans don't simply move through the world - we constantly interpret one another's intentions, expectations, emotions and behavior. And as AI-powered robots move from factories into restaurants, hospitals, hotels, stores and event...

Send us Fan Mail Your face can now be turned into a mathematical representation, searched against enormous databases, and potentially matched in fractions of a second. But what happens when AI moves beyond recognizing your face - and starts understanding everything happening around you? B. Scott Swann is CEO of ROC ( https://roc.ai/ ), formerly known as Rank One Computing, a company developing AI-...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine being exhausted all the time, dealing with an itch that can become unbearable, and worrying about progressive liver damage - yet having everyone around you tell you that you look perfectly healthy. That's the reality for many people living with Primary Biliary Cholangitis, or PBC. But here's the fascinating question: if PBC is fundamentally an autoimmune disease,...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine walking into a major hotel or casino and discovering that the building already has a workforce you barely notice. Robots are cleaning floors, navigating around people, responding to changing conditions and reporting back on what they've accomplished. Now imagine those robots aren't operating independently - they're being coordinated by an AI system that can...

Send us Fan Mail We've made extraordinary progress against breast cancer - better screening, targeted therapies, immunotherapy, antibody-drug conjugates and increasingly sophisticated molecular profiling. But one uncomfortable question remains: Why haven't all women benefited equally from that progress? Today we're going inside that question with two physician-scientists from City o...

Send us Fan Mail We normally think of a CT scan as a picture that a doctor looks at. But what if that picture is actually an enormous dataset containing thousands of quantitative measurements about what's happening inside your body? And what if AI could extract information from those images that humans simply can't measure by looking at them? Today we're going to explore how that co...

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the biggest assumptions in modern drug development is wrong? For decades, we've tried to find the one molecule responsible for a medicine's effects, purify it, manufacture it and throw away everything else. But what if, in some cases, the complexity is actually the medicine? Today we're exploring a very different approach to drug development - one tha...

Send us Fan Mail What if the problem isn't that your immune system can't see the cancer - but that the cancer has effectively reprogrammed the immune cells around it? Faron Pharmaceuticals is pursuing a very different strategy: using an antibody called bexmarilimab to target Clever-1 on macrophages and potentially change an immunosuppressive tumor environment into one that can support an...

Send us Fan Mail For centuries, surgeons have learned by watching other surgeons. But what happens when we can record virtually every movement, every instrument, every decision - and then have AI analyze millions of operations? Could we create a new “language of surgery”? Could AI become a surgical copilot? And as brain-computer interfaces begin generating entirely new forms of neurological data,...

Send us Fan Mail What if you could have an infection, already be experiencing symptoms, and yet the diagnostic test could still tell you that you're negative? That's one of the central challenges of Lyme disease - and today we're going inside the biology and technology behind the race to detect it earlier. Dr. Joseph J. Burrascano Jr., M.D., is a physician and longtime researcher wh...

Send us Fan Mail We spend roughly a third of our lives in bed. But what if the sheets, pajamas and bedding surrounding your body aren't just making you comfortable - what if they're actually affecting your physiology and your sleep? Today we're going to explore a surprisingly important question: can what we wear - and what we sleep on - actually change the quality of our sleep? Lara...