Mendelspod Podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Sarah LeBaron von Baeyer studied anthropology at Yale. Today she serves as the Director of Ethics Engagement at the new drug development company, Variant Bio, not a job she ever imagined at university.

In today’s show, we talk with Kyle Fahr, the VP and Distinguished Scientist leading Illumina’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. "We lack a way of training genomics AI as readily as you would for natural language processing, says Fahr.  "There are vast amounts of data, but there are no labels, no supervision.  One of the most powerful tools that we’ve found is using clues from natural selection. Fahr s...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Today, we continue our look into the gap in the adoption of precision medicine. Why are those who need it not getting genetic testing? Patrick Short is the Host of The Genetics Podcast and CEO and Co-founder of Sano Genetics.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Through its Center for Personalized Medicine, the University of Colorado Health offers its 2.2 million patients some of the country's most advanced precision medicine initiatives.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com A  new spatial biology company is promising to shake up the field. Last month, Curio Bioscience launched a new technology to early access customers that provides transcriptomic spatial data without the need to b…

John Cumbers is back on the show to preview the annual SynBioBeta, the leading global conference for the synthetic biology crowd. This year’s show includes 18 tracks on AI, space, longevity, and DNA synthesis. Speakers will include Stephen Wolfram and Stephen Quake, who will discuss large language models and biology. While 2024 saw a total investment of over $6 billion (not as high as the pandemic...

Most of the news coming from Illumina has had to do with their leadership in the sequencing instrument space. What is lesser known is that they offer an end-to-end solution for the clinical lab, including variant calling and genome interpretation. In this podcast, we’re joined by Sam Strom, Principal Scientist at Illumina and a certified Clinical Lab Director.  Sam comes to Illumina from the clini...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Today, we feature a new DNA synthesis company out of Sweden that is making a name with long, single-stranded DNA at scale. How long? Over 10,000 bases. Why single-stranded vs. genes? And what is meant by scale? According to Cosimo Ducani, CEO and co-founder of Moligo Technologies, the business of making DNA is just ge...

The rise of RNA therapeutics and cell therapies promises to take us where we’ve never been in medicine.  The growing understanding of RNA, mRNA, and circular RNA and their crucial roles in disease has led to their application in targeting previously “undruggable” targets.  Meanwhile, new cell therapies are promising cures to diseases that have plagued us without mercy.  Scientists now ask what can...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Chapters: 0:00 Number one unmet medical need for dogs 6:25 Using “extra label” for cross species 12:57 Ideal for understanding human cancers 21:25 Playing catch-up with human medicine 28:04 1,000 pet clinic customers Precision medicine for dogs?— as in tumor profiling for the right therapies to treat man’s best friend...

There’s a new genome editing company that everyone is talking about this year.  Tome Biosciences came out of stealth in December, claiming the ability to insert DNA sequences of any size at any location across in vivo and ex vivo modalities. Their website says they’re “taking us into the final chapter of medicine.”Tome’s CEO, Rahul Kakkar, joins us today on the program.  He’s a physician-scientist...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com 0:00 Long reads at scale has made what difference?6:15 The long or short of it:  How does one decide?12:31 Long reads in the clinic20:37 Apton tech to compete with Illumina’s NovaSeq X26:30 Plans for next instruments35:00 Surveying the competitionIn our first post-AGBT show of the year, we’re talking with the CEO of P...

Why aren’t more folks receiving genetic testing? In a study published in JAMA last year, Stanford cancer researcher Alison Kurian found a surprising gap between those who need genetic testing and those who receive it.  Among more than a million patients with cancer, only 6.8% underwent germline testing. Today, we begin a new series exploring this gap in testing with Robert Michel.  He's the Editor...

Batten disease is a group of neurodegenerative lysosomal storage disorders that result from pathogenic variants in one of 13 CLN genes. Collectively, Batten disease affects approximately 1 in 100,000 individuals worldwide, making it the most common pediatric neurodegenerative disorder. The most common form of Batten Disease, CLN3 disease, is a rare and fatal autosomal recessive disorder caused by...

After ten years, the human brain mapping project has achieved some major milestones, says Tom Nowakowski, a researcher at UCSF, on today’s program.  He says that mapping the brain is a “moon shot” easily on par with the Human Genome Project. So much of biology is basic quantification.  Brain scientists are beginning to quantify how many kinds of brain cells there are.  They are learning more about...

Karen Tumulty, a political writer for the Washington Post, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma. She was told she had five years to live.  Then she went to book club with friends. On the way home she came out about her diagnosis—and that changed her life.  Someone in the car happened to be the President of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, Ed Abrahams.  He made a referral and that led to better...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Fun fact:  we are composed of 90% bacterial cells and 10% human cells.  Surely, the company that begins to turn that knowledge into health products will be the next billion-dollar startup. Pendulum Therapeutics is doing just that.  Started in 2012, the company now boasts a full product line of probiotics that are not...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com "We can now begin to look at disease before it happens,” says today’s guest, Todd Druley.  He’s the Chief Medical Officer at Mission Bio who has been offering the world’s first single cell and multi-omics instrument. 

This month, the FDA approved the first CRISPR-based gene therapy called Casgevy (pronounced with a soft g). It’s a one-and-done treatment for sickle cell disease and is being hailed as major step forward in medicine. Joining us to discuss this breakthrough is our return champion, Kevin Davies, author of Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing and Executive Editor...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Many of our shows this year have explored a new wave of proteomics tools and research.  So today, we wanted to get a snapshot of the field of proteomics, and to do that, we turned to John Yates III, Ernest W. Hahn Professor at The Scripps Research Institute.  John was on the proteomics side of the famous Lee Hood lab...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com This month, a new philosophy of biology series premiers on PBS hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn.  The series will go for thirteen episodes and includes over 250 interview clips with some of the world’s leading biologists and philosophers, including Richard Dawkins, Terrence Deacon, Peter Godfrey Smith, and Samir Okasha....

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com John Shon is the Chief Technology Officer at Serimmune, a company specializing in precision immunology.  Serimmune maintains a library of over 10 million random peptides that can mimic almost any disease.  With this library, they are able to comprehensively map the relationship between antibodies and antigens. What do...

Our guest today introduced us to a new kind of immunotherapy called Super-NK.  Imagine CAR-T, but in this case, the immune cells from the patient are not engineered, but rather “supercharged.”  What’s remarkable is that the company is having success with the therapy against neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson's. Paul Song is the CEO of NKGen Biotech.  The company just present...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Personalis, a company launched during the early days of whole genome testing and analysis, is claiming to have the most sensitive MRD testing available to date.  They are demonstrating this with the results of their recently released TRACERx study of patients with non-small cell lung cancer. CEO Chris Hall and CMO Ric...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Chapters: 0:00 Delivering on last year’s announcements 8:50 Illumina 14:25 Long reads 25:50 PacBio vs Oxford Nanopore 31:36 Element 38:27 MGI 45:47 The rise of proteomics 51:20 What next? The end of the year approaches, and we look back today on the state of DNA sequencing with two of our return champions, Shawn Baker...