Mendelspod Podcast

What new insights can we learn about cancer when researchers are able to look at the genome and the methylome together? Recently, Illumina launched its 5-base for Cancer Research Grant Contest to explore that question. Today, the three winners join us on Mendelspod with three very different problems in cancer research. Richard Tothill of the University of Melbourne is studying cancers of unknown p...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com A recent New York Times article highlighted a remarkable study showing that exercise can help keep colon cancer in remission. After eight years, 90 percent of patients in a structured exercise program were still alive, compared with 83 percent in the control group. Yet despite these results, such programs are rarely c...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Is biology headed back into the genome? While much of biology has been expanding outward into single cells, spatial biology and ever more biological context, Žiga Avsec and his team at Google DeepMind are making the case that there is still an enormous amount to learn by going deeper into DNA itself. Their new AlphaGe...

Mass spectrometry has been one of the most powerful technologies in clinical testing for decades. So why is it still largely confined to specialty labs? Don Mason has spent more than 25 years in clinical mass spectrometry. Now Senior Marketing Manager for Mass Spectrometry at Roche Diagnostics, he says the technology’s strength has also been its weakness: “Part of its power and part of its challen...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Jennifer Dionne, Stanford physicist and co-founder of Pumpkinseed, joins us to talk about a radically different way of reading proteins. Pumpkinseed’s deSIPHR technology combines nanophotonics with Raman spectroscopy to detect the molecular vibrations of individual amino acids. The goal is de novo protein sequencing t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Digital technology has been promising to transform pathology for years. But the last year looks different. Roche paid roughly $1 billion for PathAI. Tempus acquired Paige. Other deals are adding to a sudden wave of consolidation. And AstraZeneca is developing a computational pathology algorithm for TROP2 that could be...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com It was the heady days of the CRISPR revolution and of the gene therapy Casgevy. And when longtime genomics editor and author Kevin Davies went looking for a book that told the story of sickle cell disease and could not find one, he was perplexed and then inspired. A few years later, the result is Curved Air , a biogra...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com After being pursued for more than 150 years, cancer vaccines may finally be having their moment. The recent positive Phase III results from Moderna and Merck offer what today’s guest Dr. Elias Sayour calls the first “bona fide evidence” that a therapeutic personalized cancer vaccine can work. For Sayour, a pediatric o...

Single cell sequencing has given researchers extraordinary new maps of human biology. For Nick Banovich of TGen, the burning question is how to turn those maps into something that matters for patients. Banovich has spent much of his career studying pulmonary fibrosis, and single cell sequencing has changed the field’s understanding of the disease. Instead of looking at an average signal from disea...

Stanford physicist and bioengineer Polly Fordyce has a big vision. She’s attempting to measure protein function at the scale at which we learned to measure DNA. We can sequence proteins. We can increasingly predict their structures. But we still have a surprisingly difficult time measuring what proteins actually do. Fordyce wants to change that. Her lab is developing ways to measure protein foldin...

Mark Van Oene has just taken over as CEO of Pacific Biosciences, and Mendelspod is his first interview in the new job. He began his career as a scientist studying cystic fibrosis genetics at Toronto’s SickKids, then spent fifteen years at Illumina, rising from its first sales rep in Canada to Chief Commercial Officer. He joined PacBio in 2021 as COO and has spent the past five years helping build...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com 10x Genomics has been remarkably good at figuring out where biology is going next. In this wide-ranging conversation, co-founder and CEO Serge Saxonov explains why. Despite decades of genomics, “we still understand very little biology.” For 10x, the way forward has been to build better tools for measuring it and to wo...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Those of us in biology tend to think that chemistry is rather straight forward. But today’s guest says there’s quite an art to synthesizing a molecule. A few years ago, Lee Cronin, a chemistry professor at the University of Glasgow joined Mendelspod for a sprawling conversation about the origin of life, alien biology,...

There are very few genomics projects with the level of ambition of the NIH All of Us Research Program. The latest release includes data from more than 747,000 participants, 535,000 whole genomes, 480,000 electronic health records, and—for the first time—long-read sequencing, proteomics, transcriptomics, and a large collection of information extracted from clinical notes. More than 24,000 researche...

Welcome to Mendelspod’s 16th season! It’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this for just over 15 years, following first and foremost the people reshaping biology and medicine. But also the technologies and ideas. Our original vision was to feature the “people behind the headlines” and you’ll see that what we continue to do in this first show of the new season. A sincere thank you to everyone who h...

On Mendelspod, we’re always searching for scientists who are looking at biology in new ways. Sometimes that means a new technology. Sometimes it means asking entirely different questions. Erdinc Sezgin is bringing the tools of physics to biology. Sezgin is a group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, where he heads the Membrane Biophysics Group. His research f...

One of the biggest technology shifts we saw in biology over the past year came from the young company, Cellanome. Instead of relying only on static single-cell snapshots, the Cellanome platform enables longitudinal observation of live cells. In this conversation, Pier Federico Gherardini, VP of Computational Biology at Cellanome, joins Matthew Spitzer of UCSF, whose lab is putting the Cellanome pl...

Acute leukemia patients often wait days or even weeks for the full battery of molecular tests needed to guide treatment decisions. Dr. Parth Shah from Dartmouth believes long read sequencing can dramatically shorten that timeline. In this episode, Shah joins Agilent's Rita Shaknovich and Oxford Nanopore's Claire Attwooll to discuss some details of how long reads are beginning to move from research...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com We’ve become remarkably good at reading cancer cells. Spatial biology enabled us to read them in context. Today we discuss a new Nature study suggesting that the tumor microenvironment—the immune cells, stromal cells, and surrounding biology that often determines whether a therapy succeeds or fails—can be measured fro...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com For the past decade, liquid biopsy has largely been defined by oncology. Tumors shed DNA carrying mutations and epigenetic changes which allows researchers to detect cancer and monitor response. With this physicians are increasingly able to guide treatment. But chronic diseases are different. There is no tumor. Biolog...

The future of genomics has arrived in Abu Dhabi. On today’s show, Dr. Mohamed Alameri of the UAE Department of Health and Albarah El-Khani of M42 describe one of the most ambitious precision medicine efforts underway anywhere in the world: the Emirati Genome Program, which has already sequenced more than 900,000 genomes and is rapidly integrating that data into everyday healthcare. The UAE program...

On today’s show, Dr. Ryan Flynn of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital takes us into a newly emerging layer of biology: the architecture of the cell surface itself. Flynn first gained attention for the discovery of glycoRNA — RNA molecules displayed on the outside of cells — a finding that challenged the traditional picture of the cell surface as a world composed primarily of pro...

For decades, biology has been driven by the powerful notion that if we could sequence enough genomes, transcriptomes, epigenomes, then we could finally explain the cell. On today’s show, Gary Schroth, the Chief Scientific Officer at Cellanome, argues that something essential was still missing. Schroth spent nearly two decades at Illumina helping build the sequencing revolution. He has now joined C...

Today on the show, we’re discussing a new study just presented at ASCO 2026 that could change how chemotherapy decisions are made for a large group of breast cancer patients. During ASCO we spoke with Phil Febbo, Chief Scientific and Medical Officer at Veracyte, and John Leite, the company’s Chief Commercial Officer, looking at the results from the OPTIMA study, a large prospective trial involving...

For years, precision oncology has largely been discussed through the lens of breakthrough drugs. But there’s another story running underneath modern cancer care: the quiet rise of companion diagnostics. These tests are increasingly deciding who receives those therapies in the first place. In many cases, the real bottleneck is no longer discovering a drug target. It’s building a reliable system for...