Coming from the field of digital pathology, Joachim Schmid has a unique perspective on the evolution of multi-omics.  Schmid was recently appointed as Vice President of Multiomics Data Solutions at Illumina.In this episode, Theral dives into the burgeoning field of multi-omics—integrating data from various omic layers such as genomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics—and the massive data challenges that come with it. Schmid discusses how sequencing costs are plummeting, leading to an...

Dr. Mark Lewis is a well known GI oncologist at Intermountain Health in Salt Lake City, Utah. Gifted with a passionate communication style, he has over 93,000 Twitter followers. Next month, he will live-tweet his upcoming colonoscopy.   In this episode, Dr. Lewis joins Theral in our ongoing series on minimal residual disease (MRD) testing, a revolutionary blood test that is helping detect residual cancer causing a paradigm shift in patient management. Dr. Lewis belongs to a pioneering group...

When Bill Clinton announced the sequencing of the human genome in 2000, the New York Times ran the following headline on the front page: "Genetic Code of Human Life is Cracked By Scientists.”We’re still living up to that headline. Ed Abrahams has led the Personalized Medicine Coalition (PMC) for twenty years. Before his retirement in December, we asked him to join us to reflect on his tenure and take stock of the field. PMC was established as a “catalyst” and organizer to bring the various...

In this episode, Theral delves into the groundbreaking role of microRNA as a cancer biomarker with Tim Williams, professor of clinical pathology at the University of Cambridge Veterinary School, and Paola Ulivi, a leading researcher at the Instituto Romagnolo Per Lo Studio Dei Tumori Dino Amadori (IRST) in Italy. MicroRNA, which recently garnered its discoverers a Nobel Prize, has emerged as a powerful tool for detecting and tracking cancer progression. Williams and Ulivi share their latest...

Jacob Rubens is having quite a career.  Studying at  MIT in the Synthetic Biology Center with Professor Tim Lu, he invented gene circuits that allow engineered cells to do novel analog, digital, and hybrid computations, enabling the emerging field of “intelligent” cell therapies. In 2017, he was honored in Forbes 30 under 30 and, in 2021, in Business Insider’s list of 12 young serial entrepreneurs building the next generation of biotech. He has co-founded Kaleidoscope Biosciences, Sana...

Human genomics is complex. With new, scalable tools, we are unraveling that complexity. For example, we don’t just each have one genome; we have trillions, as each cell has a unique genome. Analyzing biology at the single-cell level continues to be one of the major frontiers in research. To learn how Single Cell Discoveries (SCD), a contract research organization in Utrecht, the Netherlands, has scaled and innovated in this field, Theral sits down with Mauro Muraro, cofounder and CEO of SCD....

Vik Bajaj is bullish on genomics in the age of artificial intelligence. A pioneering figure in biotech—co-founder of Verily and Grail—Bajaj now leads Xaira Therapeutics, where he's exploring how AI can revolutionize drug development. In today’s episode, he joins Theral to break down how the intersection of AI and genomics is unlocking new possibilities in drug development, with the potential to accelerate every stage of drug discovery. Bajaj explains that at Xaira, machine learning and...

Singular Genomics launched its fast and flexible mid-throughput sequencing platform, the G4, in the heady days of the pandemic when we saw a renaissance in new technologies and companies. At AGBT earlier this year, the company unveiled its latest offering in development, the G4X Spatial Sequencer, an upgrade to the G4 that unlocks the system to perform high-throughput in situ multiomics.  The platform will be capable of simultaneous direct RNA sequencing, targeted transcriptomics, proteomics,...

Ellen Matloff is back on the show today to discuss the changing landscape of genetic testing and counseling in 2024. She is the founder and CEO of MyGeneCounsil and a strong advocate for the critical role of genetic counselors in healthcare. She also writes a regular column for Forbes magazine.In 2024, we’ve seen a dramatic transformation of the genetic testing landscape, with big labs buying the small ones. Ellen says this is “forcing genetic testing to go mainstream.”Surely that’s a good...

Depending on your age, DNA sequencing is experiencing a second or third renaissance. New sequencing tools continue to make genomics one of the fastest-growing industries of all time. All this scaling can create a bottleneck in sample prep. Volta Labs, a company founded out of the MIT Media Lab by Udayan Umapathi, has just commercialized a new instrument for sample prep called Callisto. The instrument manipulates samples with electric, magnetic, and acoustic fields.    Udayan joins us today to...

Genetic studies of human populations have become a major tool for drug development. In the last few years, these studies have moved toward comprehensive proteomics profiling as well. In late 2023, a paper was published in Nature by the Pharma Proteomics Project, which characterized the plasma proteomic profiles of 54,219 UK Biobank participants. This was a precompetitive biopharmaceutical consortium that sought to provide a mapping of 2,923 proteins that identified 14,287 primary genetic...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com A new blood collection device offered by startup company Tasso is a blood lancet that collects whole liquid blood samples. Its ease of use for at-home collection could dramatically improve patient testing compliance and impact the scale of clinical trials.Ben Casavant is the co-founder and CEO of Tasso. He joins us to discuss the possibilities for at-home testing.  Ben and the company have raised over $100...

Today, we continue “The New Biology” series with a non-reductive geneticist from Trinity College in Dublin.  Kevin Mitchell is the author of Free Agents: How Evolution Gave Us Free Will.The problem of free will has dogged philosophers and scientists as much as any question going back to the Greeks.  Determinism, typically argued by physicists, usually goes something like: the laws of physics predict the future, and therefore, there is no free will. In our lives, however, the experience of...

Today, we go to the frontlines of cancer treatment for a case study on the use of ctDNA testing in the clinic. ctDNA, or circulating tumor DNA, is now used as a biomarker in new testing to detect cancer in a patient’s blood. Oncologists, such as today’s guest, Dr. Ben Weinberg, are increasingly using this testing. Dr. Weinberg is an associate professor of medicine and an attending physician specializing in colorectal cancer at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital.“Even though I give...

For over a hundred years, biologists have been working to fully understand biology at the level of chemistry, in other words unite biology with chemistry. This is considered the reductive approach inspired by the unification of chemistry with physics in the early 20th century with the Periodic Table and the Bohr model of the atom. In the attempt to reduce biology to chemistry, the gene has been the star player.  The gene linked phenotype to the molecules of chemistry and to the more abstract...

Adham Jurdi was an oncologist at the Austin Cancer Center when the pandemic hit. His cancer patients were a doubly vulnerable population. Office visits, follow-up care — every interaction between the patient and the healthcare system put them at risk for COVID-19 infection, which would hit extra hard because of their compromised immunity. It was then that he discovered a blood test that could monitor the patient’s cancer using ctDNA and keep the patient more at home.Jurdi is now the medical...

Alzheimer’s disease is now one of the hottest areas of research despite little progress in the decades up to about five years ago. The disease was proving especially difficult to diagnose early and to treat. Today researchers are largely on board with the amyloid cascade hypothesis. There are several FDA-approved drugs for treating the disease, with another just around the corner. New biomarkers for Alzheimer’s enabled by a new generation of proteomics tools promise to change care by giving...

There’s a new company in the consumer genomics space that last month released results for the first adopters of its new consumer-facing whole genome product. Nucleus Genomics, founded by Kian Sadeghi, aims to reinvent direct-to-consumer genomic testing with "the consumer reach of 23andMe and the clinical consequence of Myriad Genetics.” Kian joins us today to talk about his vision for the company and why consumer genomics is still a great idea.“To know that we can potentially give someone an...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Avi Veidman spent over 20 years in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), leading multi-disciplinary teams in the use of AI, machine learning, and data science.  One of his key projects involved developing systems that mapped the world with satellite images to spot adversaries from space.  Upon retirement, he co-founded Nucleai with a couple of his former defense colleagues, believing that the AI technology they had...

Yuling Luo is a serial entrepreneur who has founded three significant companies in life science tools. Most recently, he is the founder and CEO of Alamar Biosciences which this year commercially launched its ARGO HT instrument as well as a powerful new panel to detect inflammatory proteins called NULISA. Before founding Alamar, Luo was the founder and CEO of Advanced Cell Diagnostics, which was acquired by BioTechne in 2016. He was also a co-founder of Panomics, which was scooped up by...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com One might think the pandemic would have been good for diagnostic companies.  So why the financial hangover?Mara Aspinall has 30 years of leadership in genomics and the diagnostics industry.  This has led her to her current role as a new partner at Illumina Ventures, a venture fund independent from Illumina that is focused on funding diagnostics and tools companies.Mara publishes the fantastic newsletter...

The genome has been the core focus of biomedical research for twenty years. Although the genome is prewritten and predetermined, much biology happens after it appears. One area is epigenomics, which is the modification of genomic outcomes. Bret Barnes has spent his career at Illumina developing the DNA methylation Infinium arrays that have become the workhorse of epigenomic studies around the world. Barnes says he was torn as a young person between biochemistry and computer science. He...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Not content to offer “me too” products, a new company in the prenatal arena, Billion to One (BTO), is reimagining prenatal testing. Last year, their new Unity Fetal Risk Screen was featured in the American Journal of Human Genomics as a top advancement in applying genomics to clinical care. Joining us today is Jennifer Hoskovec, Senior Director of Medical Affairs at BTO. She says the new Unity Screen offers two...

This week, we saw Dr. Anthony Fauci being grilled by an angry congress over, among other things, the origin of COVID-19, which is estimated killed at least 25 million people.  He was asked about how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until 2022, funded risky virus research at the Wuhan lab in China. Ever since the pandemic broke out, scientists, as well as policymakers, have been debating new restrictions on pathogen research, and last month, the...