Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show

Send us Fan Mail David Gottfried ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Gottfried ) helped create the modern green-building movement. LEED became a global phenomenon, green buildings went mainstream, and sustainability became part of corporate vocabulary. But David eventually came to a startling conclusion: maybe making individual buildings greener wasn't enough. Maybe the problem was the oper...

Send us Fan Mail For decades we've heard that our DNA determines our health, but scientists are increasingly realizing that's only part of the story. Every day, from before we're born until the day we die, we're exposed to thousands of chemicals, pollutants, particles, microbes, foods, medications, consumer products, building materials, and environmental factors that continuous...

Send us Fan Mail There aren't enough mental-health professionals to assess everyone who needs help - and the people who need help most may sometimes be the least willing to ask for it. Now an Israeli AI platform called LIV is trying to change both sides of that equation: using an empathetic AI conversation to identify PTSD and other mental-health risks, triage patients, and give clinicians a...

Send us Fan Mail The United States wants more nuclear power. AI companies want enormous amounts of electricity. And policymakers want greater energy independence. But there's a surprisingly basic question underneath all three ambitions: where are we going to get the uranium? Corey Dias is Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Director of Anfield Energy ( https://anfieldenergy.com/ ), a comp...

Send us Fan Mail The world produces and consumes roughly 374 million metric tons of meat every year. But what if we could produce the same thing people love about meat - without raising the animal? Today we're asking whether biotechnology could fundamentally reinvent one of humanity's oldest industries. Bruce Friedrich ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Friedrich ) is Founder and Pres...

Send us Fan Mail Every year, hundreds of thousands of people around the world receive life-saving organ transplants - new hearts, kidneys, lungs, and livers that offer patients a second chance at life. But transplantation is only the beginning of the journey. Because preventing organ rejection requires suppressing the immune system, transplant recipients become vulnerable to infections that most h...

Send us Fan Mail Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) has undergone one of the most remarkable transformations in modern medicine. A disease that once carried devastating consequences, particularly in its most severe forms, can now be treated with therapies designed to dramatically alter its course - especially when treatment begins early. But medical progress creates a fascinating new question. What hap...

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the biggest problems in cancer isn't that we don't have enough drugs to kill cancer cells - it's that the immune system sometimes can't see the cancer in the first place? There's a fascinating new strategy trying to change that: using a virus to make tumors more visible to the immune system. Today we're going to explore a fascinating an...

Send us Fan Mail In biotech, discovering a drug is only half the battle. You have to understand the science, raise the capital, design the right clinical trials and convince the world that your hypothesis is worth pursuing. Today I'm joined by someone who has spent more than three decades at the intersection of science, medicine, business, and capital markets. Dr. David Crean, Ph. D. is the C...

Send us Fan Mail Cancer doesn't just sit there while we attack it. It evolves. We give a patient a powerful drug. The tumor shrinks. It looks like we've won. But somewhere inside that tumor may be a small population of cells that figured out how to survive. Those cells can eventually multiply, the cancer returns, and the drug that once worked no longer works. So what if, instead of conti...

Send us Fan Mail What if your dog or cat could tell you how they're feeling? Today, artificial intelligence may be giving us a new way to listen. By continuously monitoring things like activity, eating, sleep, elimination and other behaviors, AI can begin to establish what's normal for an individual animal - and potentially detect subtle changes that humans would never notice. Dr. Ragen...

Send us Fan Mail What if the biggest threat to scientific integrity isn't bad science - but the system we use to decide what gets called science in the first place? Every year, millions of scientific papers enter the literature. But behind those papers is an increasingly complicated ecosystem of peer review, Open Access, publication fees, citation metrics, academic incentives, paper mills - a...

Send us Fan Mail What if we could take something as simple - and seemingly ordinary - as a urine sample, measure thousands of chemical signals within it, and use artificial intelligence to recognize the metabolic fingerprint of disease? And what if, instead of looking for one specific biomarker, we could train an algorithm to recognize the complex pattern created by an entire disease state? That i...

Send us Fan Mail We tend to think that a new medicine's journey begins in the laboratory and ends when the FDA approves it. But there's an enormous part of that journey that most people never see: Who decides which medicines a company should acquire? Which ones are worth billions of dollars? How do you turn an approved drug into a successful commercial product - and ultimately get it int...

Send us Fan Mail Most of us think of medicine as something we take every day - a statin, a blood pressure pill, or perhaps a monthly injection. But what if those lifelong treatments eventually become obsolete? What if one carefully targeted gene edit could dramatically reduce your risk of heart disease for decades?  Dr. Trevor Martin, Ph. D. is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mammoth...

Send us Fan Mail The same technologies that could transform medicine, agriculture, and manufacturing could also reshape global security. Understanding the future of biotechnology requires scientists who can bridge discovery, engineering, and responsibility. Today on Progress, Potential, and Possibilities, we’re joined by a true pioneer at the nexus of biotechnology and national security. Dr. Jessi...

Send us Fan Mail We spend billions of dollars each year funding scientific discovery - but what happens if the people making those discoveries can't communicate them? Today we're exploring why communication may be just as important as innovation itself, and why some of the world's brightest scientists never receive the recognition their work deserves. Nancy Ancowitz ( https://www.na...

Send us Fan Mail For most of human history, scientists believed that once a cell became a skin cell, a neuron, or a heart cell, that identity was permanent. Then a group of researchers discovered something extraordinary: cells could be reset. My guest today was there when that discovery happened. Dr. Koji Tanabe, Ph. D. is Founder and CEO of I Peace ( https://ipeace.com/en/ ), one of the world&apo...

Send us Fan Mail What happens when you step back from individual biotech companies and look at the entire industry? Today's guest has spent decades connecting biotech CEOs, investors, pharmaceutical leaders, and innovators from around the world - giving her a rare front-row seat to the trends shaping the future of medicine. From AI and TechBio to venture capital, partnering, and breakthrough...

Send us Fan Mail Heart disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide, and one of its most important modifiable risk factors is elevated LDL cholesterol - the so-called "bad cholesterol." While statins have transformed cardiovascular care for decades, and newer therapies like injectable PCSK9 inhibitors have provided additional options, millions of patients still struggle to achiev...

Send us Fan Mail What if I told you there is a major genetic risk factor for heart attacks and strokes that affects roughly one in five people worldwide - but most people have never heard of it, and it isn't measured on a standard cholesterol test? Today we're exploring Lp(a), the hidden cardiovascular risk factor that could reshape the future of heart disease prevention. Dr. Paul Burton...

Send us Fan Mail For decades we've measured obesity using one simple number on a scale - but what if that's the wrong metric? Today, one of the world's leading experts in genetics explains why the future of obesity medicine may not be about losing more weight, but about losing the right kind of fat while preserving the muscle that keeps us healthy. Dr. Erik Ingelsson, MD, PhD is a p...

Send us Fan Mail When most people hear the word "nuclear," they think of power plants and clean energy production. But every day, nuclear science is helping diagnose and treat millions of cancer patients around the world. Today, we're exploring one of the powerful new tools in our fight against cancer: medical isotopes.  Our guest today is James Scongack, Chair of the Canadian Nucle...

Send us Fan Mail Every year, nearly 700 million people around the world are infected by norovirus. Most people know it as a miserable few days of vomiting and diarrhea - but for transplant patients, cancer patients, and other immunocompromised individuals, it can become a chronic and potentially life-threatening infection. And despite decades of research, we still have no approved antiviral treatm...

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the most intriguing Alzheimer’s interventions isn’t a drug…but light? Light has long been recognized as essential for vision, sleep, and circadian rhythms - but could certain wavelengths of light actually influence the biology of the brain itself? Recent research into photobiomodulation is exploring whether carefully delivered near-infrared and red light can improve...