Ion Genomics Podcast

Episode 15: OHSU Researcher Andrew Adey discusses his interest in methylation and how researchers are using new technologies to fill in theories about cell identity and aging dating back to  the 1950s.  For more stories, podcasts, and other coverage of genomics, visit www.iongenomics.bio. Show Notes Eric Topol Substack Article: “Loss of Cell Identity Drives Human Aging” Review paper on epigenetics...

Grail’s Galleri blood-based cancer detection test appears headed towards approval by the FDA after it passed a trio of votes from an advisory committee Sept. 23. However, a closer look at the votes — especially the split vote on the question of efficacy — and the debate that preceded it revealed just how much remains unsettled about what the test achieves. As this is the first test of its kind, wi...

Episode 13 China’s burgeoning biotech and genomics markets make for the ultimate compare and contrast.  Like the US, it has regional hotspots, intense competition, and a big company whose success has helped seed a second wave of startups, many of whom are now breaking through.  However, the clinical system is both vast and vastly different, marketing approaches can seem stuck in the past, and succ...

Nicholas Larus-Stone is Benchling’s Head of AI and coauthor of a new benchmarking study putting large language models (LLMs) like Claude and ChatGPT to work redesigning wet lab protocols.  The models did just fine, but didn’t blow the Benchling team away. “They can certainly be helpful at certain biological tasks, but they've by no means solved some of the kind of biology problems that people real...

Gordon Freedman and I both developed an interest in mitochondria due to our love of cycling and to understand the limits of performance. Whereas I sought to find a racer’s edge by delving into the biology underlying endurance sports, Freedman sought answers to a simpler question: Why can’t I push as hard as I used to be able to? Follow us down the rabbit hole to a world where there are multiple ge...

How are people fighting ongoing epidemics using genomics-based technologies such as PCR diagnostics and mRNA vaccines in a world where funding from the US and other rich countries is on the decline?  My guest this week, my dear friend and fellow journalist William Herkewitz, has reported on the recent Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo as well as tuberculosis around the world. A fo...

What happens when scientists come together and realize they didn’t have the data to back up their assumptions? Dino Di Carlo, my guest on this week’s Ion Genomics podcast, shares how he reacted when he found out that there were huge gaps in understanding how individual cells communicate with each other. To remedy this, he has proposed a project to analyze a billion cells, largely in two-cell dyads...

My guest this week, Johnny Yu, has seen firsthand how the new code-writing capabilities of LLMs has widened horizons for the use of AI in biology. Tahoe Bio, a company he cofounded, has built its own AI agents, which are helping it rethink how to use AI in drug discovery and development. We discuss two other recent agentic AI developments from recent weeks. A publication in Science from Jure Lesko...

In 2024, Sid Sijbrandij got the news that no cancer patient wants to hear: his tumor was back and his doctors told him they had nothing left to offer.  Sid, a tech entrepreneur who up until that point had been running his company, GitLab, went all in, doing as much testing and as many treatments as he could.  It seems to have worked. Moreover, Sid’s team thinks they’ve been able to figure out what...

“We right now are developing our technology to be able very soon to sequence roughly hundred-length proteins that are on each of those sensors within a 24-hour period. You can think about this as being essentially 10 billion letters per day: 100 million sensors times those 100-mers on each sensor and then sequencing letter by letter.” That’s the scale that Pumpkinseed CEO and Cofounder Jen Dionne...

What kind of market share can Illumina expect when it launches its own MRD kits and is it worth the risk of annoying customers that also offer those tests?  Why did liquid biopsy company stocks do so well in May? What were his headline takeaways from the recent American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting? Where is he going on summer vacation after a hectic several months? Tune in to hear...

“It's one extra step ahead of a single cell RNA-seq workflow where we can get all the information that we can get from standard Perturb-seq, but we also know the spatial location.” That’s how my guest this week, Arc Institute Senior Scientist Alexander Nevue, describes PerturbSpace, a new method he and his colleagues introduced in a preprint posted to BioRxiv May 18.  PerturbSpace is the latest me...

Craig Venter, the renegade scientist who tried to beat the publicly-funded Human Genome Project with a private company — and nearly succeeded — died last week at 79. My guest this week, Jamie Shreeve, shadowed Venter for two years as part of his research for The Genome War , a book about the saga that captured not only the best and the worst aspects of Venter, but of human nature itself.  Shreeve...

Do AI models in biology have to get bigger to get better? And what can you do with more training, more computing power, and more outputs?  Joining me this week to talk about MaxToki , a new AI-powered model that can predict how cells age, is Christina Theodoris, a physician scientist at the Gladstone Institutes who is using her models to study cardiovascular disease. She's a pioneer in this field,...

Earlier this week I spoke with 10x Genomics CEO and Cofounder Serge Saxonov at the AACR meeting, where 10x launched Atera, its new instrument for spatial biology. In addition to hitting product pricing and specs, we spoke about the challenges of starting a new company, our favorite model organisms, and why he thinks Atera will be 10x’s most consequential product launch yet.