Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show

Send us Fan Mail We've been automating laboratories for decades. Robots can pipette, instruments can run assays, and computers can analyze enormous datasets. But that's not necessarily an autonomous laboratory. The really interesting question is: what happens when the system itself can decide what experiment should come next? AI proposes. Robots execute. Instruments measure. The data goe...

Send us Fan Mail What if you could treat a genetic disease without actually fixing the defective gene? That's the fascinating idea behind a new approach being developed for devastating pediatric lysosomal storage disorders. These diseases can have completely different genetic causes - but ultimately disrupt some of the same cellular machinery. So instead of trying to correct every individual...

Send us Fan Mail Cancer treatment can save a patient's life - but what happens when the treatment itself leaves them struggling with pain, fatigue, weakness, limited mobility, or other lasting physical effects? Cancer rehabilitation is changing how we think about recovery, helping patients prepare for treatment, maintain their function, and regain their independence. Cancer treatment has made...

Send us Fan Mail We have some of the most powerful AI systems in history - but what if one of the biggest obstacles to using AI to solve biology isn't the algorithms? What if it's the data? There are enormous amounts of biological data sitting inside pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies and research institutions. The problem is that much of it is proprietary - and the organization...

Send us Fan Mail What if we could look inside the breast without X-rays, without compression, and without injecting a contrast agent - and instead use sound to create a three-dimensional map of the tissue? Dr. Raluca Dinu, Ph. D. is Chief Executive Officer of QT Imaging ( https://www.qtimaging.com/ ), a medical technology company developing quantitative, three-dimensional breast imaging using tran...

Send us Fan Mail There are tens of millions of Americans quietly caring for a parent, spouse, child or loved one - often while trying to maintain a career and a normal life. Yet much of that work is essentially invisible to our healthcare system, our economy and even our data infrastructure. Richard Lui ( https://richardlui.com/ ) is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, author, entrepreneur, an...

Send us Fan Mail A robot can see you. It can recognize you. It can track where you're moving. But can it understand what you're trying to do? Because humans don't simply move through the world - we constantly interpret one another's intentions, expectations, emotions and behavior. And as AI-powered robots move from factories into restaurants, hospitals, hotels, stores and event...

Send us Fan Mail Your face can now be turned into a mathematical representation, searched against enormous databases, and potentially matched in fractions of a second. But what happens when AI moves beyond recognizing your face - and starts understanding everything happening around you? B. Scott Swann is CEO of ROC ( https://roc.ai/ ), formerly known as Rank One Computing, a company developing AI-...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine being exhausted all the time, dealing with an itch that can become unbearable, and worrying about progressive liver damage - yet having everyone around you tell you that you look perfectly healthy. That's the reality for many people living with Primary Biliary Cholangitis, or PBC. But here's the fascinating question: if PBC is fundamentally an autoimmune disease,...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine walking into a major hotel or casino and discovering that the building already has a workforce you barely notice. Robots are cleaning floors, navigating around people, responding to changing conditions and reporting back on what they've accomplished. Now imagine those robots aren't operating independently - they're being coordinated by an AI system that can...

Send us Fan Mail We've made extraordinary progress against breast cancer - better screening, targeted therapies, immunotherapy, antibody-drug conjugates and increasingly sophisticated molecular profiling. But one uncomfortable question remains: Why haven't all women benefited equally from that progress? Today we're going inside that question with two physician-scientists from City o...

Send us Fan Mail We normally think of a CT scan as a picture that a doctor looks at. But what if that picture is actually an enormous dataset containing thousands of quantitative measurements about what's happening inside your body? And what if AI could extract information from those images that humans simply can't measure by looking at them? Today we're going to explore how that co...

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the biggest assumptions in modern drug development is wrong? For decades, we've tried to find the one molecule responsible for a medicine's effects, purify it, manufacture it and throw away everything else. But what if, in some cases, the complexity is actually the medicine? Today we're exploring a very different approach to drug development - one tha...

Send us Fan Mail What if the problem isn't that your immune system can't see the cancer - but that the cancer has effectively reprogrammed the immune cells around it? Faron Pharmaceuticals is pursuing a very different strategy: using an antibody called bexmarilimab to target Clever-1 on macrophages and potentially change an immunosuppressive tumor environment into one that can support an...

Send us Fan Mail For centuries, surgeons have learned by watching other surgeons. But what happens when we can record virtually every movement, every instrument, every decision - and then have AI analyze millions of operations? Could we create a new “language of surgery”? Could AI become a surgical copilot? And as brain-computer interfaces begin generating entirely new forms of neurological data,...

Send us Fan Mail What if you could have an infection, already be experiencing symptoms, and yet the diagnostic test could still tell you that you're negative? That's one of the central challenges of Lyme disease - and today we're going inside the biology and technology behind the race to detect it earlier. Dr. Joseph J. Burrascano Jr., M.D., is a physician and longtime researcher wh...

Send us Fan Mail We spend roughly a third of our lives in bed. But what if the sheets, pajamas and bedding surrounding your body aren't just making you comfortable - what if they're actually affecting your physiology and your sleep? Today we're going to explore a surprisingly important question: can what we wear - and what we sleep on - actually change the quality of our sleep? Lara...

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the most unconventional ideas in Alzheimer's research began with scientists asking a completely different question: Can the radio-frequency radiation from cell phones damage the brain? Instead of finding that it harmed cognition, researchers stumbled upon something they didn't expect - mice actually appeared to perform better on cognitive tests. That surpr...

Send us Fan Mail What if you could take 25 years of experience navigating the halls of Congress - and turn that knowledge into a toolkit that anyone could use? My guest today spent decades on the inside of government, including serving as Chief of Staff to Congressman Luis Gutiérrez. But after Hurricane Maria, she came to a very different realization: maybe ordinary citizens don't need to hav...

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the answers to America's drug-shortage problem isn't another pharmaceutical factory - but a genetically engineered yeast cell? For centuries, we've gone to nature to get many of our most valuable medicines - growing poppies, harvesting plants, extracting molecules and building global supply chains around them. But what if we could take the biological...

Send us Fan Mail We like to think that modern healthcare gives patients more control than ever before. But what if having more choices doesn't actually mean having more control? And what if, at the end of life, the healthcare system can quietly steer you toward choices you never intended to make? Today we're going to tackle a subject that most of us would rather not think about — until w...

Send us Fan Mail CAR-T therapy can be extraordinarily powerful against cancer - but there's a catch. We currently have to take a patient's T cells out of their body, genetically engineer them in a laboratory, manufacture billions of cells, and then put them back. But what if we could skip the factory entirely - and genetically program the T cells inside the patient's body? Dr. Luke...

Send us Fan Mail What if the future of regenerative medicine isn't simply making the body grow more tissue - but teaching it exactly WHERE to grow it? That's the idea behind NELL-1, a naturally occurring protein being developed to promote controlled bone formation and potentially transform spinal fusion. Today we're exploring a fascinating area of regenerative medicine: can we make...

Send us Fan Mail For decades, we've thought about space as a place where we put satellites. But what happens when space itself becomes infrastructure - when we can move spacecraft around, refuel them, repair them, and even have robots build enormous structures in orbit? We're entering a very different era of space. Today we’re joined by someone who has spent more than three decades at th...

Send us Fan Mail The battlefield of the future may look almost nothing like the battlefield of today. AI could make decisions at machine speed. Autonomous drones could operate in enormous numbers. Electronic warfare could turn the electromagnetic spectrum into a battlefield. And quantum sensors could eventually allow military systems to navigate and operate even when GPS is completely denied. So w...