The DNA of Things with Dr. Jeremy Koenig

Chris Burres has spent over three decades chasing a molecule most people have never heard of, and the story behind it sounds almost too wild to be true. In 2012, a French toxicity study accidentally discovered that Carbon 60 (ESS60) extended rat lifespans by 90%, making it one of the longest mammalian longevity results ever recorded in peer-reviewed research. On this episode of The DNA of Things,...

Jeremy Malecha spent his career building cloud-connected medical devices at ResMed before functional medicine pulled him in through the side door — literally, as his wife's first patient. What he found was a mess: lab results in one place, wearable data in another, supplement protocols scribbled into a Word doc, and zero way to connect any of it. That frustration became Biocanic, a platform n...

Kate Wilson has spent over twenty years watching the genetics field move faster than the people it was built to serve — patients in rural communities who didn't know their tumor could be tested, payers drowning in $60,000 EOBs with no answers, and clinicians too overwhelmed to keep up with next-gen sequencing as it was happening in real time. In this episode, Kate — certified genetic counselo...

Most people know Sleep Cycle as the app that wakes you up at the right time. Erik Jivmark, CEO of Sleep Cycle, is here to tell you it's something much bigger than that. In this episode, Erik breaks down how a shift from motion tracking to audio-based breathing analysis turned a consumer sleep app into one of the most valuable passive health datasets on the planet — 82 million installs, four b...

If you've ever rehabbed an injury only to watch it come back six months later, this episode is going to change how you think about your body. Scott G. Livingston — Master Neuro-Reconditioning Practitioner, Athletic Therapist, Strength & Conditioning Coach, keynote speaker, and host of the Leave Your Mark podcast (now in its 9th season, nearly 500 episodes strong) — joins Dr. Jeremy Koenig...

Most health tech companies are racing to build the insight — Marco Benitez went and built the thing underneath it. Marco is the co-founder and CEO of Rook, the API platform that normalizes and standardizes data from 400+ wearables into one clean, usable signal. In this episode, he breaks down why dirty wearable data is silently corrupting health decisions across insurance, pharma, remote patient m...

Stuart McMillan has coached at 10 Olympic Games, helped athletes from 19 countries medal in Rio, and built ALTIS — one of the most respected human performance organizations in the world — out of a million dollars of debt and what he openly calls "straight-up chaos." In this episode, Stuart breaks down what speed actually is, why almost nobody — including trained athletes — can truly spri...

What if your body already has everything it needs to repair itself — and the real problem is that we've been ignoring it? In this episode of DNA of Things , host Jeremy Koenig sits down with Christian Drapeau, stem cell researcher, neuroscientist, and founder of STEMREGEN®, for a conversation that genuinely shifts how you think about aging, recovery, and chronic disease. Christian breaks down...

Dr. Kelly Haston didn't take the traditional road — she left home at 15, has no high school diploma, and rebuilt her entire life through California's community college system before earning her way to Berkeley, UCSF, and Harvard. Now she's one of the few humans on earth who knows what 378 days inside a sealed Mars simulation actually does to your mind, your relationships, and your s...

What do you do when the healthcare system fails you — for three years straight? If you're Denisa Kim, you build the solution yourself. A chemical engineer turned biotech founder, Denisa spent years battling chronic recurring UTIs before discovering a glaring blind spot in women's health diagnostics: every at-home microbiome test on the market only tests one person. So she founded Anteros...

Roma Van der Walt didn't stumble into women's health — she was forged into it. Raised by a Kenyan father who never owned a car, Roma was logging long-distance walks by age four, quietly building a resting heart rate that would later make elite coaches take notice. By 12 she had found the coach who would shape everything; by 17 she was writing a university-level thesis on anaerobic thresh...

In this insightful conversation, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Dr. Stuart Phillips—one of the world’s leading muscle physiologists—to explore why resistance training isn’t just for athletes anymore. As the first Canadian to lead the American College of Sports Medicine’s position stand on resistance training, Dr. Stu Phillips shares powerful insights on building muscle for healthy aging, longevi...

When college hockey player Garrett Salpeter tore ligaments in his wrist and was told he needed surgery, he discovered a radically different path using targeted direct current electrical stimulation to work with the nervous system instead of fighting it. Weeks later, his wrist healed completely without surgery — and a new mission was born. In this episode, Garrett Salpeter , founder of NeuFit and i...

Dr. Nathan Jones is an ER physician, SWAT medic, and NASA CHAPEA Mission 1 medical officer — and his life reads less like a résumé and more like a dare. In this episode, he traces the thread from a rural Midwest childhood shaped by his father's international eye missions, to overnight shifts in central Illinois, to practicing medicine in the jungles of Honduras, to 378 days sealed inside NASA...

What happens when a Bell Labs engineer who built a $90M software business, raised $70M in wireless tech, and watched Intel acquire his company decides to walk into a hospital — and can't unsee what's broken? In this episode of The DNA of Things , Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Dr. Asif Naseem, CEO of GenoPalate, to trace one of the most unlikely journeys in health tech. Asif pulls from...

Most healthcare innovation never makes it to the patient — not because the science is wrong, but because nobody figured out how to plug it into the real world. In this episode, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Mariano Bendersky, Head of Innovation and Digital Healthcare at Sanofi, to dig into the messy, human side of healthcare transformation. Mariano brings a rare combination of private equity in...

From the fast-paced trading floors of Wall Street to the cutting edge of molecular diagnostics, James York's career path is anything but conventional — and that's exactly what makes his work so powerful. As Chief Commercial Officer at Molecular Testing Labs, James has spent over a decade quietly dismantling one of healthcare's most persistent problems: access. In this episode of The...

What happens when the architect behind one of the world's largest consumer genomics platforms decides to build what comes next? In this episode of The DNA of Things , Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Mike Polcari — former Chief Architect at 23andMe and now founder of Haplotype Labs — to talk about what the $100 genome actually unlocks, why genetics has been stuck in research labs for too long...

In this episode, Dr. Jeremy Koenig talks with biotech leader Vijay Vaswani, co-founder and CEO of Omniscope, about how decoding the immune system at single-cell resolution is changing how we define true health and extend healthspan. ✨ Key takeaways 🧠 True age vs birthday age: Your “real” age is your immune age, and elite athletes and centenarians often have surprisingly youthful immune profiles....

In this episode of The DNA of Things, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Dr. Travis McDonough — serial entrepreneur and CEO of Wellnify AI — for one of the most honest conversations about the future of preventative health you'll hear. Travis spent decades inside professional sports, helping build Conduct Technologies into a human performance platform that supported 650+ pro sports organizations...

In this episode, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with Dr. Quinn Peterson, a Mayo Clinic stem cell biologist, to explore how regenerative medicine could move type 1 diabetes from lifelong management to true biological restoration.​ ✨ Key takeaways: 🔥 From lab curiosity to purpose-driven science: how a cancer drug developer pivoted his entire career after his three-year-old daughter was diagnosed with...

In this episode, Dr. Jeremy sits down with physician-scientist Dr. Helen Messier to unpack how multi-omics, AI, and “upstream medicine” are rewriting the future of healthcare—from managing chronic disease to truly preventing and reversing it. ​ 🧠 Key takeaways: ✨ You have more agency over your biology than you’ve been led to believe—your genes load the gun, but your environment, daily choices, a...

In this episode, we sit down with leading bioethicist Dr. Insoo Hyun to unpack how ethics, politics, AI, stem cells, and the future of human identity are colliding in real time—from embryo models and gene editing to digital twins and data ownership. ✨ Key takeaways 🧬 How stem cell ethics, cloning, and embryo models really work behind the headlines—and why “the best argument” often loses to polit...

In this episode, Dr. Jeremy Koenig sits down with David Lefkovits, visionary CEO and co-founder of WellPro AI, to unpack why personalized, preventative healthcare hasn't scaled yet—and what it's going to take to finally get there. They dig into the broken economics of traditional medicine, why "normal" lab values don't always mean healthy, and how AI-powered systems can tu...

In this episode, Chris Spears, founder of OrderlyMeds, shares his transformative journey from a catastrophic ICU experience to building a human-centered medication management platform that's revolutionizing personalized healthcare. Chris opens up about his frustrating odyssey through the broken healthcare system, the worst telemedicine experience of his life, and how those challenges sparked...