Mendelspod Podcast

Our goal with today’s show was twofold: bring you a practical holiday gift idea and to take you into the world of a synthetic biology entrepreneur. Our guest: Zack Abbott, CEO of ZBiotics. Zack is a scientist turned businessman who is on a mission to change the conversation around GMOs. His first product is a genetically engineered probiotic that alleviates the morning-after hangover by breaking d...

When excitement around early cancer detection first surfaced, we heard about the “pan-cancer” test that would look for any and all cancers, and early. Now that we’re some years into it, the approach is turning out to be more of a narrow one. Which cancer will we likely see targeted first with an FDA cleared test? Colorectal, according to today’s guest. This is a public episode. If you'd like to di...

Winter is here.  In America, we're just back from the Thanksgiving holiday when many of us travel and get together.  And so far there is no great COVID surge this year.  Or is there? Today's guest says there likely is, and we don't know it because of the most significant shift in our pandemic response: at-home testing. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers...

Today spatial biology company, Vizgen, makes their debut on on the program. When Vizgen CEO Terry Lo was first involved in developing what we now call spatial biology at Perkin Elmer, he admits that he never thought it would have a genomics side to it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mendelspod.com/subscribe

It’s the age of multi omics. Or multi comics, if you don't catch spell check. A few weeks ago at the annual meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics, we were pleased to find not only genomics companies but some proteomics outfits finding a home. As we chatted with one of these, Olink Proteomics, we were blown away to hear that they were announcing the publication of 1,000 scientific pape...

Have you ever heard of proximity ligation? We knew of it in research form back in the day, but not that it had been commercialized until this summer. It’s not every day we come across a powerful new genomics tool on this program. Which begs the question, where have Ivan Liachko and his company, Phase Genomics, been hiding? The company received a grant this summer from the Bill Gates Foundation as...

Last week, during the first International Conference on Newborn Sequencing, a landmark study to sequence the genomes of 100,000 newborns was announced. Called the GUARDIAN study, the project is the brainchild of Wendy Chung, Professor of Pediatrics at Columbia University. The study will take place in New York State and is somewhat similar to an ongoing project in the U.K. being done by Genomics En...

Pharmacogenomic testing, or PGx, is considered low-hanging fruit, a no-brainer for the application of genetic testing in the clinic. And some may think it is small fruit. Not so, says today’s guest, Kristine Ashcraft. "Currently we lose a life every two minutes in the United States to non-optimized medications,” says Kristine in today’s show. She has spent over twenty years working to see pharmaco...

Last week with a crowd of 1,200 customers in a Los Angeles nightclub, sequencing company Pacific Bioscience launched two new sequencers, both long and short read, Revio and Onso. It was a night of great technology, music, and anticipation. Their customers have waited a long time for this moment. Revio offers long read whole genomes at scale for under $1,000. This is a public episode. If you'd like...

A new generation of biologists is pushing the limits of third-generation sequencing, furthering the technology's development and defining new applications to answer biology’s most pressing questions. This is the express goal for the lab of Vijay Ramani, assistant professor at UCSF in the department of Biophysics and Biochemistry. Vijay also has an appointment in the Institute of Data Science and B...

In our age of specialization, today’s guest, Dr. Will Hwang of Massachusetts General, went against the trend and received three bachelor degrees in different fields. Or is this the new trend? Will says that despite the diversity of pursuits, there was a thread that ran throughout his life as a student. He always liked to look at things at the fundamental unit. This is a public episode. If you'd li...

Arutha Kulasinghe was pumped for the AGBT (Advances in Genome Biology and Technology) Conference this year. He is the Principal Investigator for the Clinical-oMx Lab at the University of Queensland. Dr. Kulasinghe has pioneered spatial transcriptomics using digital spatial profiling approaches in the Asia-Pacific region, contributing to world-first studies for lung, head, and neck cancer and COVID...

One thinks of Invitae as a leading genetic testing company that has worked to improve clinical quality while bringing prices down. And they are, and they have. But after listening to today's show, you will see that their vision is bigger than that. Farid Vij is the President and General Manager of Data at Invitae. A year ago Invitae bought a company he co-founded called Ciitizen which was focused...

Satellite Bio is named descriptively for the way its platform works. Out of stealth in the past few months with what you might call a middle ground approach to generative medicine between stem cell therapy and organ transplant, the company takes its name from the tissue therapy constructs they surgically implant in patients. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscr...

There was a tweet thread at the end of the recent Advances in Genome Biology and Technology (AGBT) conference where researchers took a moment of silence for all the sequencing companies that have announced big plans at the conference and then died. It was clearly aimed at this year’s sequencing tools entrant and buzz-generating Ultima Genomics. The company emerged from stealth the week before AGBT...

Has the pandemic unleashed the molecule of RNA to be the new future of drug development? Tim Mercer is the Director of the BASE Lab at the University of Queensland which has recently become one of Australia’s leading national facilities for the manufacture and research of RNA technologies. Tim is the next guest in our series on enzymatic DNA synthesis which he says is "a quantum shift” in our abil...

Heidi Rehm’s talents for genomics are legendary. Our field has devoured them like a hungry beast. Discovering an appreciation for the natural logic of genetics in her early school years, Heidi would later learn she was good at the standardization of genomic databases for clinical use. This would make her a pioneering superstar of genomic medicine. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss...

The area of early cancer detection continues to become ever more exciting these days. Each month more companies add liquid biopsies to their product offering as new technologies advance and are able to recognize cancer with increased sensitivity and specificity, particularly from cell-free DNA in the blood. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get acces...

While we’re able to sit outside on a warm summer’s night under the ocean of stars, let us contemplate some of the bigger questions. We’re very excited to start out our twelfth season of the podcast with the chemist, Lee Cronin, from the University of Glasgow. Lee published an original and fundamental theory about the universe in the weeks after we taped which has profound implications for the ques...

Dr. Eric Green has been the Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2009. Two years ago, he and his colleagues at the Institute came up with a strategic plan for the next ten years. Today we discuss the plan with the director and get his outlook on the future of human genomics. Dr. Green says human genomics can be roughly di...

Pacific Biosciences has introduced a new method for detecting DNA methylation simultaneously with DNA sequencing. They are calling it 5-base sequencing. Today on the program, Jonas Korlach, PacBio’s Chief Scientific Officer, and Tomi Pastinen, the Director of the Genomic Medicine Center at Children’s Mercy Research Institute in Kansas City join us to describe the new breakthrough and connect it to...

Alec Ford is passionate about his message. No wonder. There's an astounding fact in cancer medicine that is little known and could make a big difference. More cancer patients are dying from infections than they are from their cancers. And Alec's company has the technology to do something about it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus...

One of the underrated but true successes of precision medicine has been pharmacogenomics. Beginning in the ’90s with the approval of the drug Herceptin for HER2 positive breast cancer, tailoring drugs to genotype has been one of the less controversial areas of our field and will only continue to build on the early promise of sequencing the human genome. Today we talk Michelle Whirl-Carrillo, Direc...

Today we talk with John Nelson, Senior Principal Scientist at GE Research and veteran in the field of DNA synthesis. On January 7th, 2020, two weeks before the first cases of the coronavirus were reported in the U.S, John and a team of scientists and engineers proposed a new project to DARPA called NOW, or Nucelic Acids on Demand Worldwide. The goal of the project, now fully underway, is to delive...

“I’ve seen a lot of revolutions. Now we’re at the beginning of spatial biology, and I think it has the chance to transform life science similar to next gen sequencing, but even more. It’s going to have more ramifications that spread through more disciplines than any of the revolutions I’ve seen in a while.” This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get acces...