Mendelspod Podcast

Jacob Rubens is having quite a career.  Studying at  MIT in the Synthetic Biology Center with Professor Tim Lu, he invented gene circuits that allow engineered cells to do novel analog, digital, and hybrid computations, enabling the emerging field of “intelligent” cell therapies. In 2017, he was honored in Forbes 30 under 30 and, in 2021, in Business Insider’s list of 12 young serial entrepreneurs...

Human genomics is complex. With new, scalable tools, we are unraveling that complexity. For example, we don’t just each have one genome; we have trillions, as each cell has a unique genome. Analyzing biology at the single-cell level continues to be one of the major frontiers in research. To learn how Single Cell Discoveries (SCD), a contract research organization in Utrecht, the Netherlands, has s...

Vik Bajaj is bullish on genomics in the age of artificial intelligence. A pioneering figure in biotech—co-founder of Verily and Grail—Bajaj now leads Xaira Therapeutics, where he's exploring how AI can revolutionize drug development. In today’s episode, he joins Theral to break down how the intersection of AI and genomics is unlocking new possibilities in drug development, with the potential to ac...

Singular Genomics launched its fast and flexible mid-throughput sequencing platform, the G4, in the heady days of the pandemic when we saw a renaissance in new technologies and companies. At AGBT earlier this year, the company unveiled its latest offering in development, the G4X Spatial Sequencer, an upgrade to the G4 that unlocks the system to perform high-throughput in situ multiomics.  The plat...

Ellen Matloff is back on the show today to discuss the changing landscape of genetic testing and counseling in 2024. She is the founder and CEO of MyGeneCounsil and a strong advocate for the critical role of genetic counselors in healthcare. She also writes a regular column for Forbes magazine. In 2024, we’ve seen a dramatic transformation of the genetic testing landscape, with big labs buying the...

Depending on your age, DNA sequencing is experiencing a second or third renaissance. New sequencing tools continue to make genomics one of the fastest-growing industries of all time. All this scaling can create a bottleneck in sample prep. Volta Labs, a company founded out of the MIT Media Lab by Udayan Umapathi, has just commercialized a new instrument for sample prep called Callisto. The instrum...

Genetic studies of human populations have become a major tool for drug development. In the last few years, these studies have moved toward comprehensive proteomics profiling as well. In late 2023,  a paper was published in Nature  by the Pharma Proteomics Project, which characterized the plasma proteomic profiles of 54,219 UK Biobank participants. This was a precompetitive biopharmaceutical consor...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com A new blood collection device offered by startup company Tasso is a blood lancet that collects whole liquid blood samples. Its ease of use for at-home collection could dramatically improve patient testing compliance and impact the scale of clinical trials. Ben Casavant is the co-founder and CEO of Tasso. He joins us t...

Today, we continue “The New Biology” series with a non-reductive geneticist from Trinity College in Dublin.  Kevin Mitchell is the author of Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will .The problem of free will has dogged philosophers and scientists as much as any question going back to the Greeks.  Determinism, typically argued by physicists, usually goes something like: the laws of physics pred...

Today, we go to the frontlines of cancer treatment for a case study on the use of ctDNA testing in the clinic. ctDNA, or circulating tumor DNA, is now used as a biomarker in new testing to detect cancer in a patient’s blood. Oncologists, such as today’s guest, Dr. Ben Weinberg, are increasingly using this testing. Dr. Weinberg is an associate professor of medicine and an attending physician specia...

For over a hundred years, biologists have been working to fully understand biology at the level of chemistry, in other words unite biology with chemistry. This is considered the reductive approach inspired by the unification of chemistry with physics in the early 20th century with the Periodic Table and the Bohr model of the atom. In the attempt to reduce biology to chemistry, the gene has been th...

Adham Jurdi was an oncologist at the Austin Cancer Center when the pandemic hit. His cancer patients were a doubly vulnerable population. Office visits, follow-up care — every interaction between the patient and the healthcare system put them at risk for COVID-19 infection, which would hit extra hard because of their compromised immunity. It was then that he discovered a blood test that could moni...

Alzheimer’s disease is now one of the hottest areas of research despite little progress in the decades up to about five years ago. The disease was proving especially difficult to diagnose early and to treat. Today researchers are largely on board with the amyloid cascade hypothesis. There are several FDA-approved drugs for treating the disease, with another just around the corner. New biomarkers f...

There’s a new company in the consumer genomics space that last month released results for the first adopters of its new consumer-facing whole genome product. Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi, aims to reinvent direct-to-consumer genomic testing with "the consumer reach of 23andMe and the clinical consequence of Myriad Genetics.” Kian joins us today to talk about his vision for the company...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Avi Veidman spent over 20 years in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), leading multi-disciplinary teams in the use of AI, machine learning, and data science.  One of his key projects involved developing systems that mapped the world with satellite images to spot adversaries from space.  Upon retirement, he co-founded Nuc...

Yuling Luo is a serial entrepreneur who has founded three significant companies in life science tools. Most recently, he is the founder and CEO of Alamar Biosciences which this year commercially launched its ARGO HT instrument as well as a powerful new panel to detect inflammatory proteins called NULISA. Before founding Alamar, Luo was the founder and CEO of Advanced Cell Diagnostics, which was ac...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com One might think the pandemic would have been good for diagnostic companies.  So why the financial hangover? Mara Aspinall has 30 years of leadership in genomics and the diagnostics industry.  This has led her to her current role as a new partner at Illumina Ventures, a venture fund independent from Illumina that is fo...

The genome has been the core focus of biomedical research for twenty years. Although the genome is prewritten and predetermined, much biology happens after it appears. One area is epigenomics, which is the modification of genomic outcomes. Bret Barnes has spent his career at Illumina developing the DNA methylation Infinium arrays that have become the workhorse of epigenomic studies around the worl...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Not content to offer “me too” products, a new company in the prenatal arena, Billion to One (BTO), is reimagining prenatal testing. Last year, their new Unity Fetal Risk Screen was featured in the American Journal of Human Genomics as a top advancement in applying genomics to clinical care. Joining us today is Jennife...

This week, we saw Dr. Anthony Fauci being grilled by an angry congress over, among other things, the origin of COVID-19, which is  estimated killed at least 25 million peopl e.  He was asked about how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until 2022, funded risky virus research at the Wuhan lab in China. Ever since the pandemic broke out, scientists, as well...

A new precision medicine startup has launched that uses transcriptomic and epigenetic information to help with therapy for a wide range of chronic disorders. Hayward, California-based Aqtual emerged from stealth at the end of last year with data on its first assay, a blood-based test for rheumatoid arthritis. Today, we’re joined by Diana Abdueva, Aqtual’s Founder and CEO, and Maggie Louie, VP of T...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Today, we pursue an exciting area of medicine for the first time:  cell therapy for solid tumors. Most, if not all, of our audience will be familiar with the success of CAR-T therapies for blood cancers.  But only 10% of cancer is in the blood.  The other 90% develop solid tumors. Jason Bock is the CEO and founder of...

The Clinical Knowledge Base (CKB) powered by The Jackson Laboratory (JAX) is a dynamic digital resource for interpreting complex cancer genomic profiles in the context of gene variant knowledge and protein impact, therapies, and clinical trials. Illumina has teamed up with JAX in the newly released Connected Insights software, which integrates CKB as a knowledge source. We’re joined by Cara Statz...

A paper out this week in Nature Methods demonstrates a new technology which shows novel patterns of protein spatial polarization and co-localization in immune cells. The technology launched by Swedish startup Pixelgen has been dubbed “molecular pixelation” because it uses DNA pixels to tag and reveal relative locations. Unlike most other spatial technologies, molecular pixelation does not involve...

Damon Hostin has had an active and exciting journey in genomic medicine.  He’s now at Illumina, where his title is illuminative:  Lead, Health System Market Access. A regular on the precision medicine stage, Damon has some insights into what he calls the “blindingly fast progression” of genomic medicine that should convince the most jaded of its critics.  Compared to other areas of medicine, we ar...