Progress, Potential, and Possibilities

Send us Fan MailFor 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, who ultimately owns the data generated by the human brain?Dr. Daniel Donoho, MD is a pediatric and adult neurosurgeon at Children's National Hospital ( https://appointments.childrensnational.org/provider/daniel-aharon-donoho/2359746 ) and an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at George Washington University ( https://faculty.smhs.gwu.edu/daniel-donoho ).  He is also Co-Founder of the Foundation for Digital Neurosurgery ( https://www.neurosurgery.foundation/ )Dr. Donoho specializes in some of the most challenging conditions encountered in neurosurgery, including brain and spinal tumors, hydrocephalus, Chiari malformation, spina bifida, craniocervical disorders and complex skull-base disease. Dr. Donoho's training includes neurosurgical residency at USC, fellowship training in skull-base and endoscopic surgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, and pediatric neurosurgery fellowship training at Texas Children's Hospital.Dr. Donoho is also the Founder of the Surgical Data Science Collective ( https://www.surgicalvideo.io/ ), a nonprofit organization building a global ecosystem for collecting, sharing and analyzing surgical data - particularly surgical video - and applying artificial intelligence, machine learning and computer vision to the practice of surgery.Dr. Donoho is also a Principal Investigator on an NIH K23-funded project studying video analysis of neurosurgical technical performance and adverse events, and his academic work encompasses AI, computer vision and data science in surgery.There is also a fascinating global-health dimension to Dr. Donoho's work.Through the Surgical Data Science Collective, he is interested in using shared surgical data and AI to make expertise more accessible across borders and potentially help surgeons in resource-limited environments learn from procedures performed by experts around the world.On today's show we're going from the operating room, to surgical AI, to brain-computer interfaces, to neural privacy - and ultimately to the question of what technology may be doing to the human brain itself.#DanielDonoho #Neurosurgery #SurgicalAI #ArtificialIntelligence #SurgicalDataScience #ComputerVision #DigitalSurgery #Neurotechnology #BCI #BrainComputerInterface #Neuralink #MedicalAI #HealthcareAI #SurgicalInnovation #FutureOfMedicine #PediatricNeurosurgery #BrainHealth #AI #Surgery #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat 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 who has spent more than three decades focused on Lyme disease and other tick-borne infections.A graduate of NYU School of Medicine and trained in internal medicine, Dr. Burrascano spent approximately 25 years in primary care before leaving clinical practice and moving into biotechnology and research. He has been deeply involved in the Lyme disease field since the 1980s, is a founding member of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, or ILADS ( https://www.ilads.org/ ), and has continued to educate physicians around the world about the diagnosis and management of Lyme and associated infections.Dr. Burrascano has also been involved in the development and evaluation of diagnostic technologies and currently serves as a consultant and scientific advisor to IGeneX ( https://igenex.com/ ).And that's particularly relevant to our conversation today.A recently published study in Microbiology Spectrum evaluated FDA-cleared single-step immunoblot tests developed by IGeneX and compared them with conventional standard two-tier testing.In one analysis of early-stage Lyme disease, the immunoblot approach detected antibodies in 58.3% of samples compared with 30.0% for standard two-tier testing. The researchers also reported very high specificity and performed additional discrepancy analysis on samples that produced different results between the methods.So today we're going to step back and ask a fundamental question:How good are we really at detecting Lyme disease - especially during the window when treatment may be most effective?We'll talk about what Lyme actually does inside the body, why early diagnosis can be so difficult, what today's tests are actually measuring, what an immunoblot adds to the diagnostic process, how we should interpret sensitivity versus specificity, and where Lyme diagnostics may be headed next.#LymeDisease #Lyme #LymeDiseaseAwareness #TickBorneDisease #TickBorneIllness #LymeTesting #LymeDiagnostics #Borrelia #InfectiousDisease #MedicalDiagnostics #Biotechnology #Diagnostics #Immunology #PublicHealth #PrecisionMedicine #MedicalResearch #HealthTechnology #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat 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 surprising observation eventually led to a wearable device designed to deliver radio-frequency energy directly to the brain.Today we're going to explore a very different approach to one of the biggest challenges in aging and neuroscience: what if, instead of developing another drug to treat Alzheimer's disease, we could use electromagnetic energy to directly affect the brain?Joining me are Chuck Papageorgiou, Chief Executive and Technical Officer and co-founder of NeuroEM Therapeutics ( https://www.neuroem.com/ ), and Dr. William Scott Burgin, Professor of Neurology and Stroke Division Chief at the University of South Florida ( https://health.usf.edu/medicine/neurology/faculty/wburgin ).NeuroEM is developing a wearable, noninvasive technology called Transcranial Electromagnetic Treatment, or TEMT-RF, designed to deliver radio-frequency energy to the brain. The approach grew out of research that produced a surprising observation: certain electromagnetic exposures appeared not only to be safe in animal models, but to produce improvements in cognitive performance.Chuck brings more than two decades of experience as an entrepreneur, technology executive and business operator. He has founded multiple companies, raised more than $15 million in startup capital, led organizations ranging from startups to large global operations, and worked extensively in M&A, corporate transformation and technology development. He previously co-founded WorldWatch Plus, an AI-driven risk-management company that was acquired by Dun & Bradstreet.Dr. William Scott Burgin is a neurologist, stroke specialist, researcher and educator at the University of South Florida, with extensive experience in both clinical medicine and translational neuroscience. He has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and participated in more than 75 clinical research projects, with particular interests spanning stroke, neuroprotection, biomarkers, artificial intelligence and emerging neurotechnology.Dr. Burgin has also taken his scientific and clinical expertise into entrepreneurship, co-founding companies focused on novel neuroprotective approaches and AI-enabled technologies designed to help patients with communication disorders following neurological injury. That combination of practicing neurologist, researcher and technology entrepreneur gives him a particularly interesting perspective on what it takes to move an unconventional neuroscience technology from the laboratory into the clinic.Today we're going to explore the science behind TEMT-RF, the evidence so far, the enormous challenge of treating Alzheimer's disease, and whether electromagnetic medicine could ultimately become part of a much broader new paradigm for protecting the aging brain.#Alzheimers #AlzheimersDisease #BrainHealth #Neuroscience #Neurotechnology #BrainAging #Longevity #HealthyAging #Dementia #CognitiveHealth #MedicalTechnology #MedTech #BioTechnology #Biotech #ElectromagneticTherapy #RadioFrequency #TEMTRF #NeuroEM #Neurology #BrainScience #Aging #Healthspan #FutureOfMedicine #Innovation #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWe 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 Smith is Founder and CEO of LUSOMÉ ( https://lusome.com/ ), an award-winning technical luxury brand that developed moisture-management technology for women's sleepwear and has since expanded into temperature-regulating bedding and other sleep products.Lara's journey into this space began with a deeply personal experience. Her younger sister was diagnosed with breast cancer and experienced debilitating night sweats during treatment. Lara couldn't find sleepwear that was both effective at managing moisture and temperature and something a woman would actually want to wear - so she decided to build it herself.What began as a personal problem became a technology and consumer-products company that has now been selling globally for more than a decade.Lara brings an unusual combination of experience to the conversation. Before founding LUSOMÉ, she spent years in the apparel and retail industry, including senior executive roles overseeing major women's apparel businesses and developing growth strategies for hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales. She was also a finalist for the Canadian EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award in 2018.But what makes her particularly interesting for us today is what happens when textile technology meets human biology.LUSOMÉ's cooling bedding was recently evaluated in a peer-reviewed study involving researchers from Harvard Medical School's Division of Sleep Medicine and Brigham and Women's Hospital. The study analyzed more than 2,600 nights of sleep and reported an average increase of approximately 26 minutes of sleep per night, improvements in sleep quality, and elimination of night sweats for a subset of participants.So today we're going to go beyond the products and ask some bigger questions:What actually happens to the human body when we overheat during sleep? Can manipulating the tiny thermal environment between our skin and our bedding measurably change sleep? Why are night sweats so common during menopause and certain medical treatments? And could the future of sleep involve intelligent materials and personalized environments that actively respond to our physiology?Lara is also the co-founder of SheWorth, a social-impact brand and mental-health platform focused on women's worth, and hosts The Sweaty Pillow ( https://www.thesweatypillow.com/ ), where she speaks with physicians, researchers and experts in women's health, sleep and longevity.Exclusive 25% off Discount Code for Progress, Potential, And Possibilities community -POTENTIAL25 #SleepScience #SleepHealth #Thermoregulation #Menopause #NightSweats #HotFlashes #WomensHealth #SleepTechnology #SleepBetter #TextileTechnology #Longevity #HealthTechnology #Cancer #CancerTreatment #Innovation #Science #FutureOfHealth #FutureOfSleep #Biotechnology #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat 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 have access to power - they need to understand how to use the power they already have.So can civic power actually be taught?That's what we're going to explore today with Jennice Fuentes.Jennice Fuentes is the founder and CEO of BoricuActivatEd ( https://boricuactivated.org/ ), a nonprofit focused on teaching people the fundamentals of civic engagement, advocacy, storytelling and community change. She is also the founder and managing partner of Fuentes Strategies ( https://fuentesstrategies.com/ ), a government-relations firm focused on strategic guidance and access involving Congress, federal agencies and Puerto Rico.Before founding these organizations, Jennice spent 25 years working in the U.S. House of Representatives, including more than 20 years as Chief of Staff to Congressman Luis Gutiérrez, where she served as a principal advisor, strategist and manager - helping move legislative initiatives from concept to law. She began her congressional career working in the Office of Puerto Rico's Resident Commissioner.But the experience that ultimately changed the direction of her career came in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017.As Puerto Rico struggled through the disaster, Jennice saw something beyond the devastating infrastructure crisis: a profound gap in people's ability to navigate government, communicate their needs and advocate effectively for their communities.And that led to a fascinating question:What if ordinary citizens didn't need a congressional insider to make their voices heard?That question became BoricuActivatEd - an organization whose philosophy is essentially: Educate. Activate. Empower. Advocate.Today, Jennice is working to give communities something that can be just as important as money or infrastructure - the knowledge and confidence to understand how government works and participate effectively in it.#JenniceFuentes #BoricuActivatEd #CivicEngagement #CivicPower #Democracy #PublicPolicy #Government #Congress #Advocacy #CommunityEngagement #PuertoRico #HurricaneMaria #CivicEducation #Leadership #PublicService #PoliticalScience #SocialImpact #CitizenEngagement #Storytelling #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat 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 instructions that make those molecules and put them into a microorganism?That's the idea behind Antheia - and they've now taken engineered biology all the way to a 116,000-liter production scale.Dr. Christina Smolke, Ph.D. is a pioneer in synthetic biology and metabolic engineering, with more than 20 years of experience engineering biological systems. She is the co-founder and CEO of Antheia ( https://antheia.bio/ ), and is also an Adjunct Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University. Her laboratory pioneered the engineering of baker's yeast to produce complex plant-derived pharmaceutical compounds - work that helped lay the scientific foundation for what Antheia is doing today.Dr. Kristy Hawkins, Ph.D. is Antheia's co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer. She has more than 20 years of experience in synthetic biology and yeast metabolic engineering, with expertise in pathway engineering, high-throughput screening and engineering microbial hosts to produce complex small molecules. Before Antheia, she worked at synthetic-biology companies Amyris and Lygos.Together, Dr. Smolke and Dr. Hawkins founded Antheia around a remarkably ambitious idea: instead of depending on farms, overseas factories and fragile global supply chains to produce the molecules we need for essential medicines, why not program biology itself to manufacture them?Antheia is now using advanced biosynthesis, genomics, computational biology and fermentation to produce pharmaceutical key starting materials and active pharmaceutical ingredients - including thebaine, an important starting material for several essential medicines.And this isn't simply a laboratory experiment anymore. The company has moved its technology toward commercial-scale manufacturing and has received substantial U.S. government support aimed specifically at strengthening domestic pharmaceutical supply chains.Today we're going to explore why the U.S. drug supply chain is so vulnerable, what it would actually take to bring essential medicine manufacturing back home, and whether engineered biology could become part of the infrastructure of American healthcare.#Antheia #SyntheticBiology #Biomanufacturing #DrugShortages #PharmaceuticalManufacturing #DrugSupplyChain #Biotechnology #Biotech #Pharma #AdvancedBiosynthesis #EngineeringBiology #SyntheticBiology #DrugDiscovery #Thebaine #EssentialMedicines #HealthcareInnovation #Manufacturing #SupplyChain #FutureOfMedicine #Science #Technology #Innovation #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailCAR-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 Russell, Ph.D. is President of Vyriad ( https://vyriad.com/ ), a biotechnology company developing viral therapies designed to deliver genetic payloads directly to cells in the body.Dr. Russell has spent much of his career at the intersection of cancer immunotherapy, oncolytic virotherapy, gene delivery, and biotechnology strategy. Before moving into executive leadership, his research focused on using viruses to attack tumors and stimulate antitumor immunity. He earned his PhD in Neuroscience from The Ohio State University, where his work included developing an immunostimulatory oncolytic herpesvirus for brain cancer, and later earned an MBA in Finance and Strategy from Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business.Dr. Russell joined Vyriad in 2018 and has held increasingly senior roles spanning research, alliance management, business development, operations and corporate strategy. During that time, he has helped build strategic relationships with major pharmaceutical companies including Novartis, Regeneron and Merck KGaA.And now, as President, Dr. Russell is helping lead Vyriad's effort to develop a new generation of viral medicines - including VV169, the company's third clinical program, and its G-Link platform, which is designed to give viral vectors a modular, “plug-and-play” ability to retarget which cells they deliver their genetic payloads to.At the center of today's conversation is a particularly provocative possibility: in-vivo CAR-T - using a targeted viral vector to genetically reprogram a patient's own T cells inside the body.#CAR T #CAR TCellTherapy #Cancer #CancerResearch #Immunotherapy #ImmunoOncology #GeneTherapy #GeneDelivery #CellTherapy #InVivoCAR T #CAR TResearch #TCells #ViralVectors #OncolyticVirotherapy #Biotechnology #Biotech #PrecisionMedicine #MedicalInnovation #DrugDevelopment #FutureOfMedicine #Vyriad #LukeRussell #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities #PPPSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWe 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 we're suddenly forced to.We all like to believe that when the end of life comes, we will be able to make informed decisions about the care we receive: where we want to be, how aggressively we want to be treated, how much medical intervention we want, and what matters most to us and our families.But what if having a choice isn't the same thing as actually having control?My guest today argues that many of the decisions surrounding the end of life are shaped not just by patients and families, but by the architecture of the healthcare system itself - by fragmented care, medical culture, financial incentives, insurance policies, physician training, family dynamics, and the powerful default toward treatment and intervention.Dr. Karen Lutfey Spencer, Ph.D. ( https://www.karenlutfeyspencer.com/ ) is a medical sociologist and Professor of Health and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Colorado Denver ( https://clas.ucdenver.edu/hbsc/karen-lutfey-spencer ). For more than 25 years, her research has examined doctor-patient relationships, medical decision-making, healthcare inequality, and the ways in which patients and providers navigate complex medical systems. Her NIH-funded research has been published extensively in peer-reviewed journals.For more than a decade, Dr. Lutfey Spencer has focused specifically on end-of-life healthcare, conducting more than 120 in-depth interviews with patients, families, caregivers, physicians, hospice and palliative-care professionals, death doulas, funeral directors, and other experts.That work has now become her first book for a general audience, Your Good Death: Why End-of-Life Healthcare Is So Difficult and How to Make It Work for You ( https://www.amazon.com/Your-Good-Death-End-Life-ebook/dp/B0GZ87LTYS ).And one of the most provocative ideas in the book is that the question may not simply be, "What do you want at the end of your life?" It may be, "What is standing between what you want and the care you're actually likely to receive?"#KarenLutfeySpencer #YourGoodDeath #EndOfLifeCare #PalliativeCare #Hospice #Caregiving #Healthcare #PatientChoice #PatientAdvocacy #MedicalSociology #HealthcareSystem #EndOfLife #Aging #QualityOfLife #SharedDecisionMaking #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities #PPPSupport the show

Send us Fan MailThe 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 what does warfare look like when all of these technologies converge?Our guest today is Matt Milas, President of Defense & Space at Honeywell Aerospace ( https://www.honeywellaerospace.com/us/en/company/leadership/matt-milas ), where he leads a global business generating more than $7 billion annually across electronic solutions, navigation and sensor systems, engines and power systems, software and connected technologies, microelectronics, electronic warfare capabilities, satellite systems, launch vehicles, and human spaceflight programs serving U.S. and allied customers around the world.Over the course of a remarkable two-decade career, Matt has held leadership roles at Honeywell, L3Harris, Raytheon Technologies, Collins Aerospace, Spirit AeroSystems, and Lockheed Martin, contributing to some of the world's most sophisticated aerospace and defense ecosystems, including the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and advanced space systems.Known for driving organizational transformation and operational excellence, Matt has built a reputation for turning complex challenges into scalable solutions-  leading global supply chains, integrating breakthrough technologies, and helping position next-generation platforms across autonomous systems, sixth-generation aircraft, electronic warfare, and space infrastructure.At a time when artificial intelligence, autonomy, cyber resilience, advanced sensing, and the growing importance of space are reshaping both national security and modern civilization itself, Matt finds himself at the center of one of the most consequential technological transitions in history.Today, we explore the future of aerospace and defense, the evolution of autonomous systems and space infrastructure, the changing nature of industrial resilience, and what the next several decades may hold for the technologies that protect and connect our world.#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #DefenseTechnology #MilitaryTechnology #Aerospace #Defense #FutureOfWarfare #Drones #AutonomousSystems #ElectronicWarfare #QuantumTechnology #QuantumSensing #QuantumNavigation #Hypersonics #MissileDefense #GoldenDome #SpaceTechnology #NationalSecurity #DefenseInnovation #ArsenalOfDemocracy #HoneywellAerospace #Honeywell #Technology #Innovation #FutureTechnology #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailFor 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 the intersection of space, national security, aerospace, defense, and geopolitics.John Rood is Chairman and CEO of Momentus ( https://momentus.space/ ), a U.S. commercial space company developing the infrastructure needed to move, deploy, operate and ultimately service spacecraft in orbit.But John's background is almost as fascinating as the technology he's now helping build.Before entering the commercial space industry, he served as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, where he was the Pentagon's principal advisor on defense policy and helped oversee issues ranging from national defense strategy and missile defense to space, nuclear weapons, cyber policy and America's relationships with allies.Earlier in his government career, he served at the National Security Council and the State Department, including as Acting Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, and he has also held senior business-development and international leadership positions at Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.Today, at Momentus, he's working on a very different - but increasingly important - frontier: building the infrastructure of the space economy.Momentus operates spacecraft such as its Vigoride Orbital Service Vehicle, which can transport and support satellites and hosted payloads in orbit. The company is also moving toward more ambitious capabilities involving orbital infrastructure, servicing and in-space manufacturing.And perhaps most fascinatingly, Momentus is involved in a DARPA program investigating whether large structures can actually be assembled in space by autonomous robotic systems - potentially laying the groundwork for enormous communications antennas, manufacturing platforms and other infrastructure that would be extremely difficult or expensive to launch from Earth in one piece. DARPA describes the current demonstration as an autonomous robotic assembly of a lightweight truss in low Earth orbit.Today we're going to talk about the rapidly changing economics of space, the rise of commercial space infrastructure, why national security is becoming increasingly dependent on space, what it means to actually build things in orbit - and ultimately, what the infrastructure of a civilization beyond Earth might look like.#Space #SpaceX #SpaceEconomy #SpaceInfrastructure #CommercialSpace #SpaceTechnology #Aerospace #SatelliteTechnology #OrbitalInfrastructure #SpaceExploration #SpaceInnovation #NASA #DARPA #MissileDefense #GoldenDome #NationalSecurity #DefenseTechnology #SpaceRace #Robotics #InSpaceManufacturing #SpaceServicing #SatelliteServicing #Vigoride #Momentus #JohnRood #FutureOfSpace #FutureOfTechnology #STEM #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat 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 the body build new bone - but do it more precisely, more predictably, and with fewer of the complications associated with today's approaches?My guest is Jeffrey Frelick, President and CEO of Bone Biologics ( https://www.bonebiologics.com/ ), a clinical-stage medtech company developing a new approach to bone regeneration based on a proprietary recombinant protein called NELL-1.NELL-1 is particularly intriguing because it is an osteogenic growth factor that appears to act more selectively on cells involved in bone formation than traditional bone morphogenetic proteins such as BMP-2. Preclinical studies have demonstrated significant increases in bone formation and spinal fusion, including studies in large-animal models.Bone Biologics is now taking that science toward the clinic with its NB1 bone graft device combined with NELL-1, currently being evaluated in a first-in-human pilot clinical study.Jeffrey brings more than 25 years of experience across the medical-device and healthcare industries. Before becoming CEO of Bone Biologics in 2019, he served as the company's COO. Earlier in his career, he was a medical-technology equity research analyst at Canaccord Genuity, ThinkEquity and Lazard, following the industry from the Wall Street perspective. He also worked in strategic consulting at Boston Biomedical Consultants and began his career in diagnostics and medical technology, including roles at Becton Dickinson.Jeffrey holds a B.S. in Biology from the University of Pittsburgh and an MBA from Suffolk University's Sawyer Business School.Today we're going to talk about the science of NELL-1, the future of spinal fusion and bone grafting, why precision may be so important in regenerative medicine, and what it takes to move a promising bone-growth technology from the laboratory into actual patients.#BoneRegeneration #NELL1 #SpinalFusion #RegenerativeMedicine #Orthopedics #BoneHealth #MedicalInnovation #MedTech #Biotechnology #Biotech #StemCells #TissueEngineering #SpineSurgery #Orthobiologics #BoneBiologics #MedicalDevices #PrecisionMedicine #RegenerativeMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #FutureOfMedicine #Science #Technology #Innovation #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities #PPPSupport the show

Send us Fan MailDavid 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 operating system underneath civilization itself. So what exactly is wrong with that operating system - and can we actually rewrite it ( https://regen360.net/ )?Today we're going to tackle a question that is both enormous and surprisingly practical: What if humanity's biggest problem isn't a lack of technology, money, or even scientific knowledge - but the operating system we've built underneath civilization itself?My guest today is someone uniquely qualified to ask that question.David Gottfried ( https://davidagottfried.substack.com/ ) is the founder of the U.S. Green Building Council ( https://www.usgbc.org/people/david-gottfried/0000012600 ) and the World Green Building Council ( https://worldgbc.org/article/the-making-of-a-movement/ ) - organizations that helped launch what became a global green-building movement.David founded the U.S. Green Building Council in the early 1990s and wrote the white paper that ultimately became the foundation for the LEED green-building rating system. Today, LEED spans 186 countries, with more than 29 billion square feet of certified green building space and hundreds of thousands of accredited professionals.  He subsequently helped create the World Green Building Council, which now connects green-building organizations across more than 85 countries.David has spent four decades working at the intersection of engineering, real estate, sustainability, entrepreneurship and systems change. He's also taught at Stanford for three decades, advised major corporations and governments, and worked directly on technologies ranging from carbon capture and mineralization to regenerative building systems.But after helping build the modern sustainability movement, David began asking a much harder question:What if sustainability itself isn't enough?What if the problem isn't simply the technologies we use, but the incentives, measurements and assumptions that determine how those technologies are deployed?That's the question at the heart of his new book, Regen360: An Operating System for a Regenerative Earth ( https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/regen360-david-gottfried/1150108833?ean=9798895741368 ).David proposes something he calls RegenOS - an attempt to rethink the rules by which organizations, markets, technologies and individuals make decisions - and a framework called HOPE: Health on Planet Earth.And because this is Progress, Potential and Possibilities, we're also going to talk about something particularly fascinating: artificial intelligence.David argues that AI isn't inherently good or bad - it's an amplifier of whatever objectives and incentives we give it. So if we're going to build increasingly powerful AI systems, perhaps the question isn't simply what can AI do?Perhaps it's: What should we be asking AI to optimize for?These are all pretty ambitious ideas.But if David is right, maybe changing the world begins by changing the rules by which we define success.#DavidGottfried #Regen360 #RegenerativeEarth #RegenerativeDesign #Sustainability #GreenBuilding #LEED #USGBC #ClimateChange #ClimateAction #Regeneration #HOPE #HealthOnPlanetEarth #RegenOS #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #SustainableTechnology #SystemsThinking #FutureOfEarth #FutureOfCivilization #EnvironmentalInnovation #GreenTechnology #PlanetaryHealth #CircularEconomy #Innovation #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailFor 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 continuously interact with our biology.Scientists now refer to this lifetime collection of exposures as the human exposome, and many believe it may ultimately become as important as the Human Genome Project in understanding why we develop cancer, Alzheimer's disease, autoimmune disorders, infertility, asthma, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and countless other chronic illnesses.But measuring something as vast as every exposure throughout a lifetime sounds almost impossible.Today we're joined by three scientists from UL Research Institutes ( https://ul.org/ ) helping make that possible.Dr. Heather Whitehead, Ph.D. ( https://chemicalinsights.ul.org/our-people/heather-whitehead-phd/ ) is an analytical chemist developing cutting-edge methods to detect both known and previously unknown environmental contaminants, including PFAS and emerging chemicals.Dr. Kristin Isaacs, Ph.D. ( https://chemicalinsights.ul.org/our-people/kristin-isaacs-phd/ ) is one of the world's leading computational exposure scientists, building mathematical models that predict how people encounter complex mixtures of chemicals across their daily lives.Dr. John Wambaugh, Ph.D. ( https://chemicalinsights.ul.org/our-people/john-wambaugh-phd/ ) is a physicist and computational toxicologist whose work helps determine what actually happens once those chemicals enter the human body, transforming massive datasets into meaningful predictions about health.Together, we'll explore one of the biggest frontiers in environmental health - how understanding the exposome could fundamentally change medicine, public health, and even how each of us lives our daily lives.UL Research Institutes is a leading independent safety science organization with global reach, pursuing and applying science-driven knowledge to meet their mission of working for a safer world.#HumanExposome #Exposome #EnvironmentalHealth #ExposureScience #PFAS #Toxicology #Chemistry #PublicHealth #PrecisionMedicine #PreventiveMedicine #HumanHealth #EnvironmentalScience #ComputationalToxicology #Pharmacokinetics #AI #Science #Biotechnology #FutureOfMedicine #Healthcare #DiseasePreventionSupport the show

Send us Fan MailThere 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 structured picture before they ever enter the room.Iris Shtein is Co-Founder and CEO of Mentaily ( https://mentaily.com/ ), an Israeli health-tech company developing AI-powered tools for mental-health assessment and clinical decision support.Iris comes to this problem from a remarkably multidisciplinary background. She is a registered nurse who served in the Israel Defense Forces, including as Deputy Head of Medicine for the Southern Command, before moving into healthcare innovation and digital health at Sheba Medical Center. At Sheba's ARC Innovation Center, she led telemedicine and remote-care initiatives and later strategic partnerships.It was there that Iris became involved in the development of LIV, an AI-powered platform designed to conduct conversational psychiatric intake and triage, generate structured clinical summaries, help assess diagnosis and severity, and identify situations that may require more urgent clinical attention. LIV was developed with Sheba and technology partners including Microsoft, and Sheba says the platform has subsequently received approval from Israel's Ministry of Health as an AI-based psychiatric triage system.Today, Mentaily is taking LIV beyond the Israeli healthcare system, including work involving military and security populations and a collaboration with Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation focused on PTSD assessment.#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MentalHealth #PTSD #PostTraumaticStressDisorder #MilitaryMentalHealth #Veterans #VeteranHealth #MentalHealthAwareness #Psychiatry #DigitalHealth #HealthTech #MedTech #HealthcareAI #GenerativeAI #AIHealthcare #MentalHealthTech #Trauma #PTSDTreatment #MilitaryMedicine #VeteransHealth #PsychologicalHealth #HealthcareInnovation #FutureOfHealthcare #IsraeliInnovation #WalterReed #ShebaMedicalCenter #Mentaily #LIVSupport the show

Send us Fan MailThe 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 company focused on developing uranium and vanadium resources in the United States.At the center of Anfield's strategy is the Shootaring Canyon Mill in Utah, which the company describes as one of only three licensed, permitted and constructed conventional uranium mills in the United States. Anfield is pursuing a hub-and-spoke model in which uranium and vanadium from multiple nearby mining projects can be processed through this centralized facility.Corey brings an interesting perspective to the business. Before co-founding and leading Anfield, he spent roughly two decades in capital markets, including institutional equity research at CIBC, equity research and institutional sales roles in Toronto, and a stint as a Vice President at Fortress Investment Group, where he was involved with a $400 million investment portfolio. He also worked in management consulting in Stockholm.Today, we're going to talk about the nuclear fuel supply chain, why uranium milling is such an important piece of that puzzle, how a hub-and-spoke model could accelerate domestic production, and what it will take to responsibly bring legacy uranium infrastructure back into operation.#NuclearEnergy #NuclearPower #Uranium #NuclearRenaissance #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #DataCenters #Energy #EnergySecurity #CleanEnergy #NuclearFuel #UraniumMining #NuclearIndustry #EnergyTransition #GridEnergy #Vanadium #EnergyStorage #AdvancedReactors #SMR #SmallModularReactors #ClimateTechnology #CleanTechnology #EnergyInnovation #AnfieldEnergy #CoreyDias #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailThe 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 President of the Good Food Institute ( https://gfi.org/ ), a global nonprofit network of science think tanks working to accelerate innovation in plant-based and cultivated meat. GFI now has more than 240 full-time team members around the world, with scientists making up the plurality of its team.Bruce's journey to food innovation is anything but conventional. He grew up in Oklahoma surrounded by cattle ranches and oil wells, spent six years running a homeless shelter and soup kitchen in Washington, D.C., taught in inner-city Baltimore through Teach For America - where he was named his school's Teacher of the Year - and later earned a law degree from Georgetown, graduating magna cum laude.Bruce went on to spend more than a decade working in animal welfare and public policy before founding the Good Food Institute in 2016. His basic insight was that trying to persuade billions of people simply to stop eating meat was unlikely to work. What if, instead, science could produce the meat people love - same taste, texture and functionality - without requiring animals?That idea is the subject of Bruce's fascinating new book, Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity's Favorite Food - and Our Future ( https://meatbook.org/ ). The book argues that alternative proteins could become much more than an environmental or animal-welfare story. Bruce makes the case that they could have implications for global hunger, climate change, deforestation, antimicrobial resistance, pandemic prevention, food security, national security, economic competitiveness, and even the future of agriculture itself.And importantly, Bruce isn't arguing that everyone needs to become vegetarian or vegan. As he puts it, the book is about meat “at the macro level” - how meat is made and how it can be made better.Bruce is also a TED Fellow and Y Combinator alum, and his TED talk has been viewed more than 2.5 million times and translated into 30 languages. His writing has appeared in publications including The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Nature, and Wired, and he has appeared on programs and podcasts including PBS NewsHour, TED Radio Hour, The Ezra Klein Show, and Making Sense.#Meat #FutureOfFood #AlternativeProtein #CultivatedMeat #PlantBasedMeat #FoodTechnology #FoodScience #Biotechnology #SyntheticBiology #Agriculture #FoodSecurity #ClimateChange #Sustainability #Protein #AnimalAgriculture #CultivatedMeat #FoodInnovation #GoodFoodInstitute #BruceFriedrich #Science #Technology #Innovation #FutureOfFood #ClimateTech #GlobalFoodSystemSupport the show

Send us Fan MailEvery 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 healthy people never even notice.One of the most important - and least understood - is cytomegalovirus, or CMV.More than half of adults worldwide carry this virus, often for life, without ever knowing it. Yet in patients who have undergone organ transplantation, CMV can reactivate and become one of the leading infectious complications, threatening not only a patient's health, but also the long-term success of the transplanted organ itself.Fortunately, advances in virology, immunology, and antiviral drug development are opening new possibilities for managing this complex disease.My guest today is Dr. Neil Inhaber, MD - Head, Marketed Products and Neuroscience, Global Medical Affairs at Takeda ( https://www.takeda.com/ ).Dr. Inhaber is a physician specializing in pulmonary and critical care medicine whose career uniquely bridges frontline patient care with the development of innovative therapies. Over the past three decades, he has held senior medical leadership positions at Takeda, Shire, Boston Scientific, Baxter, Novartis, and other leading healthcare organizations, guiding clinical development, global medical strategy, and life-cycle management across rare diseases, respiratory medicine, immunology, oncology, and transplantation. Today, he helps shape Takeda's global medical strategy for some of medicine's most challenging diseases, working closely with clinicians, researchers, and regulatory agencies around the world.Today we'll discuss why cytomegalovirus remains one of the greatest infectious threats facing organ transplant recipients, what we've learned from the latest research presented at the American Transplant Congress, how new antiviral therapies are changing the treatment landscape for patients with resistant or refractory CMV, and where the future of transplant medicine and infectious disease management is headed next.Important Episode Link -  LIVTENCITY® (maribavir) for Healthcare Professionalshttps://www.livtencity.com/#CMV #Cytomegalovirus #OrganTransplant #TransplantMedicine #Transplantation #Immunology #Virology #InfectiousDisease #Antiviral #DrugResistance #RareDisease #Biotechnology #Biotech #Pharmaceuticals #DrugDevelopment #PrecisionMedicine #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareInnovation #LifeSciences #MedicalResearch #AmericanTransplantCongress #ATC2026 #Maribavir #Takeda #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailSpinal 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 happens when you don't just change the disease - you change what's possible for the person living with it?Because today's SMA community includes children treated before symptoms emerge, young adults who have grown up in this new treatment era, and adults who have lived with SMA for decades and carry the consequences of disease that occurred before these therapies existed.And that's where our conversation today gets particularly interesting. Because the next challenge may not simply be developing better medicines. It may be helping people take full advantage of the lives those medicines make possible.My guest is Dr. Tracey Dawson, Ph.D., Senior Vice President and U.S. Therapeutic Area Head of Neuroscience at Novartis ( https://www.novartis.com/ ). Dr. Dawson brings more than 25 years of experience across neuroscience, rare diseases, biotechnology and pharmaceutical leadership - and today we're going to talk about the changing face of SMA, the evolution of the SMAshing My Limits initiative ( https://www.smashingmylimits.com/ ), and why Novartis is now turning its attention to something that might seem very different from drug development: helping people with SMA actually get out into the world.#SMA #SpinalMuscularAtrophy #SMAAwareness #SMAshingMyLimits #GeneTherapy #GeneTherapyRevolution #Neuroscience #RareDisease #RareDiseases #NeuromuscularDisease #Biotechnology #Biotech #Pharma #LifeSciences #PatientAdvocacy #AccessibleTravel #DisabilityInclusion #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareInnovation #Novartis #SMAResearch #FutureOfMedicine #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat 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 and potentially transformative area of cancer medicine: oncolytic immunotherapy - using viruses or other immune-stimulating mechanisms to turn tumors from immunologically "cold" environments into tumors that the immune system can actually recognize and attack.Jared Kelly is the Chief Executive Officer and a Director of Oncolytics Biotech ( https://oncolyticsbiotech.com/ ), a company developing pelareorep, an investigational, intravenously delivered double-stranded RNA immunotherapy designed to activate the immune system and remodel the tumor microenvironment.Unlike many targeted cancer therapies that depend upon finding a particular mutation or surface antigen, pelareorep is designed to exploit a different vulnerability - using double-stranded RNA to trigger an inflammatory response, generate and activate tumor-reactive immune cells, and help those cells penetrate the tumor. The company's goal is ultimately to make the tumor more receptive to multiple other therapies.And Jared brings a rather unusual perspective to this story.  He's not a traditional biotech CEO who came up exclusively through drug discovery. He's an attorney and corporate strategist who spent years advising public companies and biotech companies on capital markets, M&A and corporate transactions before moving into biotech leadership.Previously at Ambrx, Jared served as Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary and played a central role in the company's transformation, financing, licensing activities and eventual $2 billion acquisition by Johnson & Johnson. He subsequently became CEO of Oncolytics in June 2025.Today we're going to talk about the science of oncolytic immunotherapy, why the field may finally be reaching an inflection point, how pelareorep works, why the tumor microenvironment is so important, and perhaps most importantly - whether oncolytic immunotherapy could become the next major platform technology in oncology, in the same way that antibody-drug conjugates have rapidly moved from niche technology to mainstream cancer treatment.#Cancer #CancerResearch #CancerTreatment #CancerImmunotherapy #Immunotherapy #Oncology #OncolyticVirus #OncolyticViruses #Pelareorep #OncolyticsBiotech #Biotech #Biotechnology #DrugDevelopment #Pharma #PrecisionMedicine #TumorMicroenvironment #ImmunoOncology #KRAS #KRASCancer #ClinicalTrials #CancerScience #MedicalResearch #HealthcareInnovation #Science #Innovation #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities #PPPSupport the show

Send us Fan MailIn 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 Chief Business Officer of MediciNova ( https://medicinova.com/ ), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing small-molecule therapies for neurodegenerative, inflammatory, fibrotic and other difficult-to-treat diseases. At MediciNova, Dr. Crean leads corporate development, partnering, investor relations and capital-markets strategy, and he has played a central role in communicating the company's scientific and strategic vision to investors and the broader life-sciences community.And Dr. Crean brings a pretty unusual perspective to that job.  He's not simply a business executive who entered biotech from the financial world. He holds a Ph.D. in Biophysics, began his career doing biomedical research, spent years involved in drug development and portfolio management, and then moved into corporate development and strategic transactions.At Allergan, Dr. Crean spent more than a decade working across neurology, medical aesthetics, dermatology, ophthalmology and other therapeutic areas, ultimately negotiating and closing more than 30 strategic transactions involving acquisitions, licensing, partnerships and equity investments.Since then, Dr. Crean has advised more than 250 life-science and healthcare companies and been involved in more than 50 transactions representing more than a billion dollars in aggregate value.But what is particularly fascinating about Dr. Crean's career is that he's repeatedly occupied the space between science and capital - helping scientists and entrepreneurs translate great science into something that can actually be financed, developed, partnered, commercialized and delivered to patients.And that brings us to MediciNova.The company's lead program is MN-166, or ibudilast, an orally available small molecule with anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties that is being developed across several neurological diseases, including ALS, progressive multiple sclerosis and degenerative cervical myelopathy, with additional investigations in areas including glioblastoma, Long COVID and chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy.The ALS program is especially interesting because MediciNova has now completed enrollment in its Phase 2b/3 COMBAT-ALS study, while a separate NIH-supported expanded-access study, SEANOBI-ALS, reached its target enrollment of 200 patients this summer.And Dr. Crean has another fascinating project underway: his forthcoming book, Dual Fluency: How Life Sciences Leaders Master the Language of Science and Capital ( https://dual-fluency.com/ ), which explores the idea that leaders in biotech need to be fluent in both the language of scientific discovery and the language of investors, partners and business.So today we're going to talk about ALS and the science behind MediciNova - but also about something much bigger: What does it actually take to turn scientific potential into a successful medicine and a successful company?#ALS #AmyotrophicLateralSclerosis #Ibudilast #MediciNova #NeurodegenerativeDisease #Neuroscience #Neuroinflammation #Microglia #DrugRepurposing #Biotechnology #Biotech #Pharmaceuticals #DrugDevelopment #ClinicalTrials #Neurology #MotorNeurons #BrainHealth #MedicalResearch #Science #Innovation #LifeSciences #Healthcare #Pharma #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailCancer 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 continually chasing cancer with newer and newer drugs, we could turn off the biological escape routes that allow cancer to become resistant in the first place?Dr. John Yu, MD is the Founder and CEO of Kairos Pharma ( https://kairospharma.com/ ), a clinical-stage oncology company spun out of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center that is developing therapies designed to overcome cancer drug resistance and immune suppression.Dr. Yu is also Professor and Clinical Chief of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai and Director of Surgical Neuro-Oncology ( https://www.cedars-sinai.org/provider/john-yu-2181236.html ). His career sits at a fascinating intersection of neurosurgery, immunology and cancer biology.Dr. Yu earned undergraduate degrees in biology and French from Stanford University, his MD from Harvard Medical School through the Harvard-MIT program, completed his neurosurgery residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, and pursued immunology research at the Institut Pasteur in Paris.Over the course of his career, Dr. Yu has developed eight FDA investigational drugs and holds multiple patents spanning immunotherapy and nanotechnology.At Kairos, that scientific journey has led to a particularly interesting strategy: targeting CD105, also known as endoglin, a protein that appears to become elevated as tumors develop resistance to certain cancer therapies.The company's lead candidate, ENV105, is an antibody designed to inhibit CD105 and potentially re-sensitize resistant tumors to therapies that had stopped working. Kairos is currently evaluating ENV105 in Phase 2 prostate cancer and Phase 1 lung cancer studies.On this episode we talk about one of the great challenges in modern oncology - why cancer becomes resistant, whether that resistance can actually be reversed, and whether we can turn some of our existing cancer drugs back into powerful weapons against the disease.#Cancer #CancerResearch #CancerTreatment #CancerDrugResistance #Oncology #Immunotherapy #PrecisionMedicine #Biotechnology #Biotech #DrugDevelopment #CancerTherapy #ProstateCancer #LungCancer #LungCancerResearch #ProstateCancerResearch #ImmunoOncology #TargetedTherapy #DrugResistance #CancerBiology #CD105 #Endoglin #ENV105 #KairosPharma #JohnYu #MedicalResearch #Pharma #HealthcareInnovation #CancerScience #ClinicalTrials #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat 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 McGowan, Ph.D. is Director of Global Digital & AI Product Development at Nestlé Purina ( https://www.purina.com/pet-experts/rm-pet-expert ).Dr. McGowan has spent more than twenty-five years studying animal behavior and cognition, including research ranging from grizzly bears and laying hens to dogs and cats. She earned her Ph.D. in Applied Ethology from Washington State University before conducting postdoctoral research in Sweden focused on measuring positive emotional states in dogs.Today Dr. McGowan leads Purina's Global Digital and AI Product Development organization, where her team combines artificial intelligence, connected sensors, behavioral science, physiology and nutrition to better understand what pets are experiencing - and ultimately to give pets something they've never truly had before: a voice ( https://www.petivity.com/ ).Dr. McGowan's work spans smart pet technologies, digital biomarkers, predictive AI models capable of detecting disease before clinical symptoms appear, and pioneering research into the gut-brain axis and animal emotional health.Today we'll explore how artificial intelligence is transforming veterinary medicine, how connected devices are changing the future of pet care, and what studying animal cognition may teach us about intelligence, emotion and even ourselves.#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #AnimalBehavior #PetHealth #DigitalPhenotyping #PetTech #IoT #AnimalCognition #VeterinaryMedicine #PredictiveHealth #GutBrainAxis #Petivity #Cats #Dogs #AnimalScience #MachineLearning #PrecisionMedicine #Biotech #Science #Technology #Innovation #FutureOfHealth #PetCare #NestlePurinaSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat 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 - and now artificial intelligence.And some experts believe we're reaching a point where the scientific literature itself is becoming contaminated with so much questionable material that separating signal from noise is becoming extraordinarily difficult.Joining us today are two people who have spent decades inside the world's scientific publishing ecosystem and who have written a fascinating new book, How the Internet Disrupted Science ( https://www.disruptedscience.com/ ), examining how digital technology, changing business models, artificial intelligence, and perverse incentives have transformed the scientific literature itself.Kent Anderson has spent more than thirty years at the highest levels of scholarly publishing, serving as Publishing Director at the New England Journal of Medicine, Publisher at Science magazine, CEO of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Director of Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics, and founder of two of the publishing industry's most influential publications, The Scholarly Kitchen and The Geyser.Joining him is Joy Moore, whose career spans virtually every major corner of scientific publishing - from Nature Publishing Group, Blackwell, Wiley, the American Medical Association, Silverchair, EBSCO and many more - helping shape how scientific knowledge is created, distributed, discovered and trusted in the digital age.Together they argue that the Internet didn't simply change how science is communicated - it fundamentally changed the incentives behind scientific publishing itself, opening the door to paper mills, fake journals, AI-generated research, and a growing crisis of trust.#Science #ScientificResearch #SciencePublishing #ScientificPublishing #PeerReview #OpenAccess #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ScienceCommunication #ResearchIntegrity #ScientificIntegrity #PaperMills #ResearchFraud #AcademicPublishing #PublishOrPerish #Misinformation #FakeScience #ScienceAndTechnology #Innovation #ArtificialIntelligence #FutureOfScience #TrustInScience #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat 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 is the premise behind Luventix ( https://www.luventix.com/ ), a technology company developing AI and machine-learning diagnostic models based on quantitative analysis of urine.Today's guest, Dejan Nenov, comes to this problem from a somewhat unusual direction.He's not a traditional biotech entrepreneur.Dejan is a computer engineer, technology entrepreneur, investor and longtime software executive who has spent more than three decades building companies across fields ranging from telecommunications and cybersecurity to enterprise software, consumer electronics and data architecture.Dejan has been involved with companies that have collectively returned more than $3.5 billion to investors - and he's now turned his attention to one of the most complicated systems imaginable:the human body.At Luventix, the idea is to use gas chromatography to generate a quantitative representation of the metabolic state contained within a urine sample, and then use machine learning to identify patterns associated with disease, treatment response, and potentially treatment-related toxicity.Today on Progress, Potential, and Possibilities, we're going to explore whether the next generation of medical diagnostics may be less about finding a single molecule - and more about teaching machines to recognize the incredibly complex biological patterns hidden in our own chemistry.#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #HealthcareAI #MedicalAI #Diagnostics #HealthTech #DigitalHealth #Biotechnology #Biotech #PrecisionMedicine #UrineDiagnostics #DiseaseDetection #MachineLearning #Metabolomics #Biomarkers #MedicalInnovation #FutureOfHealthcare #HealthInnovation #ClinicalDiagnostics #Luventix #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWe 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 into the hands of patients? Today we're going behind the scenes of that process.Jane Gonnerman is Executive Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development at Collegium Pharmaceutical ( https://www.collegiumpharma.com/ ), a leading biopharmaceutical company focused on improving the lives of people living with serious and often misunderstood conditions, where she is helping guide the company's long-term growth strategy and business development initiatives.Before joining Collegium in 2025, Jane served as Senior Vice President of Rare Disease at Amgen following the landmark $28 billion acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics - one of the largest biotechnology acquisitions in recent history. Prior to that, she served as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief of Staff to Horizon's CEO, playing a central role in the company's corporate strategy, partnerships, acquisitions, and ultimately its successful sale to Amgen.Earlier in her career, Jane spent more than fifteen years at Bain & Company, becoming a Partner in the firm's healthcare practice where she advised many of the world's leading life science organizations on strategy, growth, organizational transformation, and innovation.Jane holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business along with dual bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Florida.Today we'll explore what it really takes to build successful biopharmaceutical companies, how commercialization has become as innovative as science itself, and why strategy may ultimately determine which medical breakthroughs change patients' lives.#CollegiumPharmaceutical #JaneGonnerman #PharmaceuticalIndustry #Biotech #Biopharma #Pharma #DrugDevelopment #DrugCommercialization #PharmaInnovation #CorporateStrategy #CorporateDevelopment #BusinessDevelopment #PharmaMergers #HealthcareInnovation #DrugDiscovery #RareDisease #ADHD #PainManagement #DrugDelivery #JORNAYPM #AZSTARYS #XtampzaER #Belbuca #Nucynta #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailMost 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 Biosciences ( https://mammoth.bio/ ), a pioneering biotechnology company developing next-generation CRISPR genome editing technologies for potentially curative medicines. He co-founded the company in 2017 alongside Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR pioneer Dr. Jennifer Doudna and an interdisciplinary team of leading scientists with the goal of building more precise, versatile, and clinically practical gene editing systems.Dr. Martin earned his undergraduate degree in Molecular Biology with honors from Princeton University before completing a Ph.D. in Genetics and Statistics at Stanford University, where his research focused on quantitative genetics, genomics, and computational biology. His scientific background in statistics and genetics has shaped Mammoth's unique approach to developing smaller CRISPR enzymes capable of reaching tissues and diseases that have been difficult to target with first-generation technologies.Under Dr. Martin's leadership, Mammoth has grown into one of the world's leading CRISPR companies, raising more than $465 million, achieving a valuation exceeding $1 billion, and establishing strategic collaborations with companies including Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Bayer, and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.Today, Mammoth is advancing a pipeline of in vivo gene editing therapies, including programs targeting cardiovascular disease through permanent editing of the APOC3 gene - a potential one-time treatment approach aimed at dramatically reducing triglycerides and long-term cardiovascular risk. Beyond therapeutics, the company's CRISPR platform also extends into diagnostics and genome engineering technologies that may reshape medicine over the coming decades.Dr. Martin has been recognized as an EY Entrepreneur of the Year®, Forbes 30 Under 30, and Fortune 40 Under 40 honoree for his contributions to biotechnology and scientific entrepreneurship.#CRISPR #GeneEditing #TrevorMartin #MammothBiosciences #JenniferDoudna #Biotechnology #GenomeEditing #HeartDisease #Longevity #FutureOfMedicine #PrecisionMedicine #Genetics #DNA #HealthInnovation #MedicalBreakthrough #CardiovascularDisease #SciencePodcast #Biotech #Innovation #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailThe 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. Jessica Dymond, Ph.D is the Vice President of Technology at In-Q-Tel ( https://www.iqt.org/ ), a not-for-profit venture fund that invests in companies advancing the strategic priorities of U.S. Intelligence Community, where she provides technical and strategic leadership to accelerate emerging biotechnologies that address some of the most critical challenges to national and global security.Before In-Q-Tel, Dr. Dymond served as Chief Scientist for Physical and Life Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where she led an interdisciplinary portfolio spanning biological sensing, genomic surveillance, microbiome engineering, and synthetic biology. She founded the Lab's Biological Sciences group and spearheaded initiatives to anticipate, assess, and mitigate emerging biological threats while strengthening global health security.Formally trained as a synthetic biologist, Dr. Dymond earned her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, completed a postdoctoral fellowship in functional genomics at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and has contributed to groundbreaking research, including the design of synthetic yeast genomes and combinatorial genomic diversity. She also serves on the editorial board of Synthetic Biology from Oxford University Press.Dr. Dymond's career embodies the bridge between cutting-edge science, technology strategy, and real-world impact - protecting health, security, and society through innovation at the molecular frontier.#SyntheticBiology #Biotechnology #Biosecurity #FutureOfBiology #GenomeEngineering #Genomics #DNA #GeneticEngineering #ArtificialBiology #BiologyRevolution #LifeSciences #FutureTechnology #EmergingTechnologies #ScienceInnovation #Innovation #NationalSecurity #GlobalHealthSecurity #PandemicPreparedness #AIandBiology #Bioengineering #SyntheticGenomics #CRISPR #GeneticTechnology #HealthcareInnovation #ScientificDiscovery #TechnologyTrends #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWe 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.nancyancowitz.com/ ) is career strategist, executive presentation coach, author, educator, and one of the country's leading experts on helping professionals communicate their expertise with clarity, confidence, and authenticity.Nancy has spent more than two decades teaching communication, presentation skills, and career strategy at New York University ( https://www.sps.nyu.edu/faculty-directory/10734-nancy-h-ancowitz.html ) while coaching everyone from emerging professionals to CEOs on how to translate knowledge into influence. Nancy is the author of the acclaimed Self-Promotion for Introverts® ( https://www.amazon.com/Self-Promotion-Introverts-Quiet-Guide-Getting-ebook/dp/B00394U8DS?ref_=ast_author_dp&th=1&psc=1 ), recognized by Publishers Weekly as one of the year's best business books, as well as Zoom to Success and Business Writing: Say More With Less.Before launching her coaching practice, Nancy spent twelve years on Wall Street, leading marketing communications for multibillion-dollar businesses as a Vice President at JPMorgan Chase and earlier at Citibank, where she was recognized for innovation in global marketing communications. Along the way, her insights have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Psychology Today, and she has spoken at organizations ranging from the National Institutes of Health to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.Today, we're taking Nancy's work in a slightly different direction. Here on Progress, Potential and Possibilities, we spend much of our time with scientists, physicians, engineers, biotech founders, and technology innovators who are developing extraordinary breakthroughs - but often struggle to communicate those breakthroughs beyond their laboratories, companies, and research institutions.In an age where groundbreaking discoveries compete with endless streams of information, social media, and artificial intelligence, is communication becoming just as important as innovation itself? Can brilliant ideas change the world if their creators never learn to tell their story?We explore why communication, authenticity, and thoughtful self-promotion may be some of the most underrated drivers of scientific and technological progress.#ScienceCommunication #STEM #Innovation #Leadership #PublicSpeaking #CommunicationSkills #Scientists #Biotechnology #ArtificialIntelligence #InnovationLeadership #Entrepreneurship #CareerDevelopment #PresentationSkills #PersonalBranding #AuthenticLeadership #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat 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 therapies, we're exploring where biotech is really headed next.Sara Jane Demy is the Founder and CEO of Demy-Colton ( https://demy-colton.com/ ), one of the most influential organizations in life sciences events and ecosystem connectivity.For more than two decades, Sara has operated at the intersection of biotech innovation, venture capital, and pharma partnering - first at the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), where she helped launch major industry conferences including BIO CEO & Investor Conference, BIO Investor Forum, BIO Asia, and helped develop the partnering systems now widely used across the industry.Sara later founded Demy-Colton, which runs major industry convenings such as Biotech Showcase, BioFuture, and the Global Biotech CEO Summit - bringing together thousands of CEOs, investors, and BD leaders across the global biotech ecosystem.What makes Sara particularly unique is that she doesn't sit inside a single company or investment fund - she sits across the entire system. She has a rare, real-time view of how biotech narratives, capital flows, and strategic priorities are shifting across hundreds of companies and investors at once.And that's what we're going to explore today: not one company, but the state of biotech itself - what's changing, what's breaking, and what's emerging next.#Biotech #HealthcareInnovation #Pharma #DrugDiscovery #Biotechnology #ArtificialIntelligence #TechBio #PrecisionMedicine #LifeSciences #Innovation #MedicalResearch #FutureOfMedicine #Healthcare #Science #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailFor 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's leading companies advancing induced pluripotent stem cell - or iPSC - technology from the research laboratory into scalable clinical manufacturing.Dr. Tanabe occupies a truly unique place in modern biomedical history. He earned his Ph.D. in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Dr. Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University and was the second author on the landmark scientific paper that first demonstrated the successful creation of human induced pluripotent stem cells - a discovery that fundamentally changed regenerative medicine and ultimately earned Dr. Yamanaka the 2012 Nobel Prize.After helping establish one of the most important technologies in modern biology, Dr. Tanabe continued his work at Stanford University in the laboratory of Dr. Marius Wernig, a pioneer of direct cellular reprogramming, where he investigated how mature blood cells can be directly converted into neurons and explored the molecular mechanisms that govern cellular identity.In 2015, Dr. Tanabe founded I Peace with an ambitious vision: to make clinical-grade iPS cells accessible at industrial scale. Today, the company has developed automated GMP manufacturing platforms capable of producing personalized and clinical-grade iPS cells for researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and regenerative medicine programs around the world.On the episode we'll explore how far the field has come since those first groundbreaking experiments nearly two decades ago, where regenerative medicine stands today, the growing role of iPS cells in drug discovery and transplantation, the excitement surrounding in vivo reprogramming and partial cellular rejuvenation, and what may ultimately become possible when every individual has access to their own personalized stem cell bank.Important Episode Links - Future Medicine Lab with Koji Tanabe YouTube Channel -https://www.youtube.com/@FutureMedicineLabMy Peace (a service from I Peace) - Personal iPS Cell Banking Service - https://mypeace-personal-ipscbanking.com/en/#iPSC #StemCells #RegenerativeMedicine #CellularReprogramming #ShinyaYamanaka #NobelPrize #Biotechnology #Biotech #Longevity #AgingResearch #FutureMedicine #PrecisionMedicine #DrugDiscovery #CellTherapy #GeneEngineering #BiomedicalResearch #LifeSciences #HealthcareInnovation #MedicalInnovation #Science #Technology #Innovation #FutureOfMedicine #StemCellResearch #HumanBiology #SyntheticBiology #AIinMedicine #PharmaInnovation #DiseaseModeling #RegenerativeTherapySupport the show

Send us Fan MailHeart 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 achieve recommended LDL cholesterol targets.In fact, despite the availability of effective therapies, roughly seventy percent of patients receiving cholesterol-lowering treatment still fail to reach guideline-recommended LDL cholesterol levels. The reasons are complex - from biology and treatment intensity to adherence and convenience - but the result is the same: preventable heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular deaths continue to occur.Now, a new chapter is beginning. Following years of clinical development, the FDA has approved LIPFENDRA™ (enlicitide), the first oral PCSK9 inhibitor, introducing an entirely new approach to LDL cholesterol reduction ( https://www.lipfendra.com/ ).Joining us today is someone uniquely qualified to help us understand what this approval means for physicians and patients.Dr. Norman Lepor, MD is Founder and Director of the National Heart Institute ( https://nationalheartinstitute.org/about/meet-our-team ), Clinical Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and an Attending Cardiologist at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai ( https://www.cedars-sinai.org/provider/norman-lepor-106852.html ). A graduate of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Dr. Lepor has spent more than four decades advancing cardiovascular medicine through patient care, education, and clinical research. He has served as principal investigator on more than sixty clinical trials, authored dozens of influential scientific publications, and has been recognized by U.S. News & World Report as one of America's leading cardiologists. Throughout his career he has also been a champion for women's cardiovascular health and improving access to cutting-edge care for underserved populations.Today we'll discuss why LDL cholesterol remains such a difficult public health challenge, what we've learned over the past three decades of lipid management, how oral PCSK9 inhibition works, and what this newly approved therapy may mean for the future of preventing heart attacks and strokes.#HeartHealth #Cholesterol #LDL #Cardiology #HeartDisease #Prevention #PreventiveMedicine #LIPFENDRA #Enlicitide #PCSK9 #PrecisionMedicine #Longevity #CardiovascularHealth #MedicalInnovation #Biotech #FutureOfMedicine #HealthyAging #SciencePodcast #ProgressPotentialPossibilities #PPPPodcastSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat 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, M.D., Ph.D., F.A.C.C., M.R.C.S., F.R.C.P., is Senior Vice President and Chief Medical Officer of Amgen ( https://www.amgen.com/about/leadership/senior-management/paul-burton ).Dr. Burton has built one of the most remarkable careers in modern medicine and biotechnology. After training as a physician and cardiovascular surgeon in the United Kingdom and earning a Ph.D. in molecular and cellular biology from Imperial College London, he transitioned into the biotechnology industry, where he has spent more than two decades leading the development of innovative medicines across cardiovascular disease, oncology, infectious disease, metabolic disorders and RNA therapeutics.Before returning to Amgen as Chief Medical Officer in 2023, Dr. Burton served as Chief Medical Officer of Moderna during one of the most consequential periods in modern public health, overseeing global medical strategy and pharmacovigilance. Prior to that he spent sixteen years at Johnson & Johnson, ultimately serving as Chief Global Medical Affairs Officer while helping pioneer digital medicine initiatives, including collaborations exploring virtual clinical trials.Today, Dr. Burton leads Amgen's worldwide medical organization, helping guide one of the industry's broadest research pipelines while translating breakthrough science into therapies that can improve - and potentially save - millions of lives.One of those efforts is Amgen's ambitious work targeting lipoprotein(a), or Lp(a), a genetically inherited cardiovascular risk factor affecting roughly one in five people worldwide. Through its investigational siRNA therapy olpasiran and the expansive OCEAN(a) clinical program, Amgen hopes to answer one of the biggest remaining questions in preventive cardiology: can dramatically lowering Lp(a) prevent heart attacks and strokes?Today we'll explore Dr. Burton's fascinating career, what it means to lead medical strategy at one of biotechnology's largest innovators, and why the next decade may fundamentally reshape how we prevent cardiovascular disease.#Cardiology #HeartDisease #LpA #LipoproteinA #PrecisionMedicine #RNAmedicine #GeneSilencing #Biotechnology #Biotech #Amgen #DrugDiscovery #PharmaceuticalInnovation #FutureOfMedicine #CardiovascularHealth #HeartHealth #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareInnovation #PreventiveMedicine #Genomics #SiRNA #LongevityScience #RegenerativeMedicine #ClinicalTrials #Pharma #LifeSciences #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailFor 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 physician-scientist and internationally recognized leader in human genetics, genomics, and metabolic disease research. He currently serves as Chief Scientific Officer at Wave Life Sciences ( https://wavelifesciences.com/ ), where he leads the development of next-generation RNA medicines designed to address major unmet medical needs.Before joining Wave, Dr. Ingelsson served as Senior Vice President and Head of Target Discovery at GSK, where he led large-scale efforts integrating human genetics, functional genomics, computational biology, and molecular science to discover and validate new drug targets across therapeutic areas.Prior to his transition into industry, Dr. Ingelsson was Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, where his laboratory used human genetics and functional genomics to uncover new biological mechanisms underlying insulin resistance, obesity, metabolic disease, and cardiovascular risk.Over his career, Dr. Ingelsson has authored more than 400 peer-reviewed scientific publications and has become one of the leading voices in translating insights from human genetic variation into new medicines.At Wave, Dr. Ingelsson  is helping pioneer a new approach to obesity treatment: targeting the biology of harmful fat accumulation rather than simply focusing on the number on the scale.Today we'll discuss the genetics behind obesity, the promise of RNA medicines, why visceral fat may be the true therapeutic target, and whether the next generation of obesity treatments will move beyond weight loss toward healthier body composition.#Obesity #GLP1 #WeightLoss #VisceralFat #MetabolicHealth #RNAMedicine #Genetics #PrecisionMedicine #Longevity #HeartHealth #Diabetes #HumanGenetics #Biotechnology #DrugDiscovery #MuscleHealth #BodyComposition #CardiometabolicHealth #WaveLifeSciences #SciencePodcast #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailEvery 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 treatment. Today we're exploring the science behind the race to change that.James Sapirstein is Chief Executive Officer of Cocrystal Pharma ( https://www.cocrystalpharma.com/ ) and one of the biotechnology industry's most experienced commercialization executives.Throughout a career spanning more than four decades, James has participated in or led an extraordinary twenty-three pharmaceutical product launches while building and leading multiple biotechnology companies. He has served as CEO of Cocrystal Pharma, Contravir Pharmaceuticals, Tobira Therapeutics, First Wave BioPharma, and several other innovative life science organizations. Earlier in his career James held senior leadership roles at Bristol-Myers Squibb, Gilead Sciences, Serono Laboratories, Roche, and Eli Lilly, helping bring important therapies for infectious disease and other major conditions to patients around the world. Beyond industry, James has served on numerous biotechnology boards, including the Biotechnology Innovation Organization and BioNJ, making him one of the most respected leaders in the biotechnology ecosystem.James received a BS (Pharmacy) from Rutgers University and an MBA from Fairleigh Dickinson University.Dr. Sam Lee, Ph.D. is President and Chief Scientific Officer of Cocrystal Pharma. Dr. Lee has devoted more than twenty-five years to discovering next-generation antiviral medicines. Before joining Cocrystal, he led anti-infective drug discovery efforts at ICOS Corporation, where he pioneered the integration of protein crystallography and structure-based screening technologies into pharmaceutical research. His scientific work contributed to the development of PI3K delta inhibitors that ultimately led to an FDA-approved therapy. Dr. Lee earned his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from the University of Notre Dame before completing postdoctoral research in viral biochemistry at Stanford University under renowned molecular biologist Dr. I. R. Lehman. His career has focused on understanding viruses at the atomic level to design highly targeted antiviral drugs capable of overcoming viral evolution and resistance.#Norovirus #AntiviralResearch #DrugDiscovery #Biotechnology #Biotech #PharmaInnovation #RNAViruses #ViralDiseases #InfectiousDisease #PublicHealth #StructureBasedDrugDiscovery #PrecisionMedicine #MedicinesOfTheFuture #FutureOfHealthcare #BiomedicalResearch #PharmaceuticalInnovation #ClinicalTrials #PandemicPreparedness #HealthcareInnovation #ScienceAndTechnology #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities #PPPSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhen 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 Nuclear Isotope Council ( https://www.canadianisotopes.ca/ ), a national not-for-profit advocacy organization that supports over 120 members from across science, academia, healthcare, and nuclear-sector organizations dedicated to maintaining Canada's position as a global leader in the production of life-saving isotopes. The CNIC raises awareness and advocates for long-term policies that support health-care innovation and will save countless lives for decades to come. Under James's leadership, the CNIC launched its ambitious "Isotopes for Hope" campaign ( https://www.canadianisotopes.ca/isotopes-for-hope-campaign/ ), with the goal of doubling Canada's isotope production by 2030 while improving cancer care both domestically and internationally.Beyond his work at the CNIC, he also serves as the Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President at Bruce Power ( https://www.brucepower.com/ ), home to one of the world's largest operating nuclear generating facilities and Canada's largest private-sector electricity infrastructure project. During more than two decades at Bruce Power, James has helped lead one of the most remarkable transformations in modern nuclear energy - from extending the operating life of the Bruce site through a multi-billion-dollar refurbishment program, to expanding its role as one of the world's premier producers of medical isotopes that are helping diagnose and treat cancer around the globe.James also serves as Chair of the Pediatric Oncology Group of Ontario ( https://www.pogo.ca/ ) and the Nuclear Innovation Institute ( https://www.nuclearinnovationinstitute.ca/ ), reflecting his deep commitment to improving healthcare through science and innovation.Recognized as one of Canada's Top 40 Under 40, recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal, and honored by The Globe and Mail's Best Executive Awards, James has become one of the leading voices on the future of nuclear energy - not only as a source of clean electricity, but as a platform for advancing medicine, biotechnology, and global health.#NuclearMedicine #MedicalIsotopes #CancerTreatment #PrecisionMedicine #Radiopharmaceuticals #Theranostics #CancerResearch #NuclearEnergy #HealthcareInnovation #Biotechnology #Radiology #Oncology #MedicalInnovation #BrucePower #STEMSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat 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 mitochondrial function, reduce neuroinflammation, enhance blood flow, and potentially slow aspects of cognitive decline.A newly published pilot study in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease ( https://www.vielight.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Vielight-University-of-Toronto-MCI-Publication.pdf ) reported improvements in memory and cognition among individuals with mild cognitive impairment following six weeks of non-invasive light therapy. While the findings are early, they raise fascinating questions about whether non-drug technologies could someday complement traditional Alzheimer's treatments.Today we're joined by two guests approaching this challenge from different perspectives.Dr. Neda Rashidi-Ranjbar, MD, Ph.D. ( https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=4y5SuLYAAAAJ&hl=en) is a physician-scientist, neuroscientist, and clinical research leader at Unity Health Toronto - St. Michael's Hospital ( https://unityhealth.to/locations/st-michaels-hospital/ ), where she leads a major neurodegenerative disease research program focused on mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease. Her work spans clinical trials, biomarkers, neuroimaging, cognitive testing, and translational neuroscience, helping bridge discoveries from the laboratory into patient care.Joining her is Peter Adams, Vice President of Business Development at VieLight ( https://www.vielight.com/ ), who has spent decades commercializing innovative healthcare technologies following leadership roles with Intel, MaRS Discovery District, and numerous international technology companies. His work focuses on bringing photobiomodulation technologies from research into real-world clinical use.Together we'll discuss the emerging science behind photobiomodulation, what we know about using light to influence brain function, how this research fits alongside today's rapidly evolving Alzheimer's therapies, and what the next generation of clinical trials will need to demonstrate as this approach becomes part of mainstream neurological care.#Alzheimers #BrainHealth #DementiaResearch #Neuroscience #Photobiomodulation #LightTherapy #MemoryLoss #CognitiveHealth #AgingBrain #MCI #Neurotechnology #MedicalInnovation #BrainScience #HealthyAging #MedicalResearch #Longevity #Biotech #NeurodegenerationSupport the show

Send us Fan MailFor decades, getting to space has largely meant one thing: launching vertically atop massive rockets from fixed launch pads. But what if the future of space access also includes aircraft capable of flying at more than twice the speed of sound, launching payloads from the edge of the atmosphere, and providing researchers with affordable access to hypersonic flight and microgravity?Joining us today is Tim Franta, Chief Executive Officer of Starfighters Space ( https://starfightersspace.com/ ), an aerospace company operating the world's only commercial fleet of flight-ready Mach 2+ F-104 Starfighters. Based at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, the company is building capabilities that span hypersonic flight testing, airborne research, astronaut and pilot training, and an ambitious air-launch platform known as STARLAUNCH, designed to provide more flexible and responsive access to space.Tim brings an unusual blend of aerospace leadership, public policy, infrastructure development, and strategic finance. Before leading Starfighters Space, he helped shape Florida's modern space ecosystem through leadership roles with Energy Florida and the Florida Space Authority, where he worked on launch infrastructure, legislation, and hundreds of millions of dollars in space-related investment.Today we'll discuss why aircraft may become an increasingly important part of the space economy, how commercial innovation is changing access to orbit, the growing importance of hypersonic technologies, and what the next decade of aerospace infrastructure might look like.#SpaceExploration #CommercialSpace #Aerospace #SpaceTechnology #SpaceInnovation #FutureOfSpace #NASA #Hypersonics #AirLaunch #SatelliteLaunch #ResponsiveSpace #NationalSecurity #DefenseTechnology #RocketScience #SpaceEconomy #NewSpace #AviationTechnology #SupersonicFlight #Mach2 #F104Starfighter #StarfightersSpace #STARLAUNCH #FutureTechnology #Innovation #Engineering #ScienceAndTechnology #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailToday on Progress, Potential and Possibilities, we're exploring one of the most fundamental challenges facing human performance: heat. Whether it's soldiers operating in desert environments, firefighters battling infernos, police officers wearing heavy body armor, construction crews working under extreme summer temperatures, or elite athletes pushing the limits of endurance, excess heat is more than an inconvenience - it can become a life-threatening limitation.Joining us is Justin Li, Co-Founder and CEO of Qore Performance ( https://www.qoreperformance.com/ ), a Tennessee-based company pioneering a new generation of personal thermoregulation technologies. Drawing on his background as a Deputy Sheriff with the San Diego County Sheriff's Office, Justin founded Qore Performance to solve a problem he experienced firsthand - how to keep people cool, hydrated, and performing at their best in the harshest environments imaginable.Under Justin's leadership, Qore Performance has developed patented innovations including the ICEPLATE® and ICEFLASK®, systems that transform the water people already carry into wearable thermal batteries capable of cooling the body while simultaneously providing hydration. Today, Qore's American-made technologies are trusted by military personnel, law enforcement officers, first responders, industrial workers, outdoor professionals, and high-performance athletes across the country.Justin's work brings together physics, engineering, physiology, materials science, and product innovation to rethink how we manage one of the oldest biological challenges facing humanity. We discuss the science of heat transfer, the future of wearable cooling technology, entrepreneurship, and how better thermoregulation may become one of the next great frontiers in human performance.#JustinLi #QorePerformance #Thermoregulation #HeatStress #HumanPerformance #CoolingTechnology #WearableTech #Thermodynamics #Science #Innovation #Engineering #MilitaryTechnology #FirstResponders #OutdoorWorkers #OccupationalSafety #Hydration #ClimateTechnology #HealthTechnology #STEM #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWe spend billions of dollars developing drugs to fight cancer - but what if one of the most powerful therapies begins before treatment even starts? Today we're exploring the rapidly growing field of cancer rehabilitation and the science showing that exercise, nutrition, and personalized recovery plans can dramatically improve life before, during, and after cancer.Today's first guest is Dr. Jessica Cheng, MD ( https://www.cityofhope.org/patients/find-a-doctor/jessica-cheng ) one of the country's very few fellowship-trained physicians specializing in cancer rehabilitation medicine, and currently the only fellowship-trained cancer rehabilitation specialist serving Orange County at City of Hope.Dr. Cheng is a board-certified physiatrist whose work focuses on helping cancer patients maximize their strength, mobility, independence and quality of life before, during and after treatment. Her approach combines exercise medicine, physical rehabilitation, pain management, neurological recovery and supportive care into individualized treatment plans designed to remove barriers to successful cancer therapy.After earning her medical degree from Boston University, Dr. Cheng completed residency training at Loma Linda University Health before pursuing one of the nation's premier fellowships in cancer rehabilitation at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Today she is helping shape the future of this emerging field through clinical care, research and physician education.Our second guest is cancer survivor Sharyn Araki.Sharyn's journey encompasses every stage of breast cancer - from discovering a lump and receiving a life-changing diagnosis, through chemotherapy, surgery, radiation therapy and rehabilitation. Throughout that experience she discovered that recovery wasn't simply about surviving cancer - it was about reclaiming her life.Working alongside Dr. Cheng, Sharyn embraced structured exercise and rehabilitation - including an unexpected passion for pickleball - which helped combat debilitating fatigue, rebuild strength and restore confidence. ( https://www.cityofhope.org/orange-county/talking-hope/physical-medicine-and-rehabilitation )Perhaps most remarkably, Sharyn navigated this entire journey while raising seven children, offering a powerful perspective on resilience, family, faith and what it truly means to recover after cancer treatment.#CancerRehabilitation #CancerSurvivor #BreastCancer #CancerRecovery #ExerciseIsMedicine #Prehabilitation #CancerCare #Oncology #IntegrativeOncology #CancerResearch #Fitness #HealthInnovation #QualityOfLife #Stem #MedicalScience #PhysicalTherapy #Wellness #CancerFatigue #CityOfHope #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailFor decades, the war on cancer has focused on destroying cancer cells directly - with chemotherapy, radiation, and targeted drugs. But what if the future of cancer treatment is not about attacking cancer ourselves...but teaching our own immune system to do it for us?Today we're exploring a new generation of immunotherapies designed to turn the body's own defenses into a precision weapon against cancer.Over the past decade, immunotherapies such as checkpoint inhibitors and CAR-T cell therapies have transformed the treatment landscape for many cancers. But major challenges remain - including limited response rates, treatment resistance, toxicity, and the enormous complexity and cost of manufacturing many next-generation therapies.Our guest today believes the next breakthrough may come from a new generation of personalized immunotherapies designed to activate a patient's own immune system against their cancer - while also being manufactured as an accessible, off-the-shelf treatment.Joining us is Dr. William Williams, MD - President and CEO of BriaCell Therapeutics ( https://briacell.com/ ).Dr. Williams brings more than 35 years of experience spanning academia and the biopharmaceutical industry. He has helped advance numerous medicines from discovery through clinical development, including work contributing to therapies such as Jakafi and Olumiant during his time at Incyte, and multiple oncology programs during his career at GlaxoSmithKline.Before entering industry leadership, Dr. Williams was a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania focused on molecular immunology, receptor biology, and early DNA vaccine approaches.Today we'll discuss the evolution of cancer immunotherapy, BriaCell's Bria-IMT platform, the challenges of treating advanced breast cancer, and whether the future of oncology lies in creating therapies that can truly mobilize each patient's own immune system.#CancerResearch #CancerImmunotherapy #Immunotherapy #CancerTreatment #Oncology #PrecisionMedicine #PersonalizedMedicine #Biotechnology #Biotech #LifeSciences #DrugDiscovery #ClinicalTrials #BreastCancer #MetastaticBreastCancer #CancerVaccine #CellTherapy #TumorImmunology #TCells #ImmuneSystem #MedicalInnovation #FutureOfMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #BiomedicalResearch #Pharma #PharmaceuticalInnovation #SciencePodcast #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities #PPPShowSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWe tend to think of menopause as a personal health issue - but in the workplace it quietly shows up as one of the largest unmodeled productivity shifts in the modern economy.Recent data from the Korn Ferry Institute, in collaboration with Vira Health, suggests nearly half of women report that perimenopause or menopause symptoms impact their work performance. And research cited by the Mayo Clinic estimates menopause-related productivity loss in the U.S. alone at roughly $1.8 billion annually.So the question becomes: what happens when a normal biological transition starts to meaningfully affect workforce participation, retention, and productivity?Karen Bishop, MS is Senior Director of HR Rewards at Astellas Pharma US ( https://www.astellas.com/en ), where she leads global benefits, compensation strategy, and employee well-being programs.Across more than two decades in HR leadership roles at organizations including MilliporeSigma, Shire (now Takeda), Cabot Corporation, and Putnam Investments, Karen has built deep expertise in total rewards strategy, healthcare benefits design, retirement systems, and organizational change.At Astellas, Karen has helped evolve an internal menopause workplace pledge into a broader global initiative focused on manager education, employee support systems, and benefits navigation - positioning menopause as part of a larger conversation around workforce health, retention, and productivity.#menopause #workplacewellbeing #hrleadership #futureofwork #corporatestrategy #workforceanalytics #womenshealth #hrtech #talentmanagement #employeeexperience #healthcareeconomics #productivity #leadershipdevelopment #totalrewards #organizationaldesign #publichealth #biologicalaging #genderequity #workplaceculture #healthpolicySupport the show

Send us Fan MailEvery cup of coffee, every chocolate bar, every loaf of bread has a hidden ingredient you probably never think about: water. But as climate change reshapes where and how we grow food, water is becoming one of the biggest risks facing our global supply chains.We often talk about climate change through the lens of rising temperatures, extreme weather, or carbon emissions — but behind many of these challenges is a resource that determines whether societies can thrive: freshwater.Agriculture accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals, and the systems that produce, transport, and distribute our food depend on reliable access to water. But climate volatility, changing precipitation patterns, drought, and disruptions in global trade are creating new risks throughout the agricultural supply chain.Our guest today is helping organizations understand and address these challenges.Paul Reig is the Founder and CEO of Bluerisk ( https://blueriskintel.com/ ), a company focused on helping businesses identify, assess, and manage water-related risks. Paul brings nearly two decades of experience working at the intersection of water science, corporate strategy, and sustainability.Before founding Bluerisk, Paul spent nine years at the World Resources Institute, where he led the development of the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas - one of the world's leading tools for understanding global water risks - and helped create frameworks for measuring corporate water stewardship.Paul has advised more than 40 major global companies on how to assess water risks, establish resilience strategies, and develop solutions that protect shared water resources.Today we'll discuss why water may become one of the defining challenges of the 21st century, how disruptions in agriculture and trade can amplify water stress, and what companies, governments, and innovators can do to build a more water-resilient future.#WaterRisk #WaterCrisis #ClimateChange #ClimateAdaptation #WaterSecurity #FoodSecurity #SustainableAgriculture #AgricultureTechnology #FutureOfFood #SupplyChainResilience #CorporateSustainability #EnvironmentalScience #ClimateInnovation #RegenerativeAgriculture #PrecisionAgriculture #WaterStewardship #GlobalWaterCrisis #ClimateTech #Sustainability #EarthScience #FoodSystems #Agritech #Innovation #ScienceAndTechnology #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWe usually think of health ministers as politicians. Dr. Evis Sala, MD, PhD is something entirely different. She's one of the world's leading cancer imaging researchers who helped pioneer AI in radiology - and now she's responsible for the healthcare of an entire nation. What happens when a scientist takes the helm of public health?Our guest today is one of the world's leading physician-scientists in medical imaging who has recently taken on one of the biggest leadership challenges in healthcare.Dr. Evis Sala, MD, PhD ( https://www.kryeministria.al/en/ministrat/evis-sala/ ) currently serves as the Minister of Health and Social Protection of Albania  ( https://shendetesia.gov.al/en/hap/ ). Before entering government, Dr. Sala built an extraordinary international career spanning the University of Cambridge, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Weill Cornell Medicine, and Rome's Policlinico Gemelli, while becoming internationally recognized for her pioneering work in advanced cancer imaging, precision diagnostics, women's cancers, and the integration of artificial intelligence into radiology.Holding both an MD from the University of Tirana and a PhD in Epidemiology from the University of Cambridge, Dr. Sala has spent decades helping shape how we detect, diagnose, and ultimately treat cancer. Today, she is applying that scientific rigor and international experience to improving the health of an entire nation.#EvisSala #Healthcare #PublicHealth #Medicine #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #Radiology #CancerResearch #PrecisionMedicine #CancerImaging #MedicalInnovation #DigitalHealth #HealthPolicy #Oncology #MRI #FutureOfMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #MedicalTechnology #SciencePodcast #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailImagine a world where a child with a rare disease in a rural hospital could benefit from the collective intelligence of 500 of the world's best children's hospitals - not years later, but in real time. What if artificial intelligence could connect medical expertise globally while keeping every patient's data private? That is the ambitious vision behind the Pediatric Moonshot ( https://pediatricmoonshot.org/ ).Our guest today has spent more than four decades at the forefront of nearly every major transformation in enterprise computing. Dr. Timothy Chou earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois before beginning his career at Tandem Computers, one of Silicon Valley's pioneering companies in fault-tolerant distributed computing. He later served as President of Oracle On Demand, helping lead Oracle's early cloud computing initiatives years before "the cloud" became part of everyday vocabulary.Alongside his industry career, Dr. Chou has taught at Stanford University since 1982, where he created the university's first course on cloud computing and has inspired generations of entrepreneurs and technology leaders. Today he serves on the Board of Directors of Teradata, chairs the IoT initiative at Alchemist Accelerator, advises emerging enterprise software companies, and was recognized as one of the National Association of Corporate Directors' Directorship 100 honorees.But after what many would consider a complete career, Dr. Chou came out of retirement to pursue perhaps his most ambitious mission yet. Inspired by one of his Stanford students, he founded Pediatric Moonshot, a nonprofit with a bold vision: to reduce healthcare inequity by enabling privacy-preserving artificial intelligence to securely learn from the more than one million medical machines spread across roughly 500 children's hospitals around the world - without requiring patient data to leave those hospitals.Today we're going to explore not only the future of pediatric healthcare and artificial intelligence, but also whether medicine is on the verge of its own Internet moment - where distributed intelligence, rather than centralized data, could fundamentally reshape how care is delivered around the world.#PediatricMoonshot #ArtificialIntelligence #AIHealthcare #HealthcareInnovation #FutureOfMedicine #DigitalHealth #HealthTech #MedicalAI #AIRevolution #EdgeComputing #CloudComputing #FederatedLearning #RareDisease #Pediatrics #ChildrenHealthcare #PrecisionMedicine #HealthcareEquity #Innovation #Technology #SiliconValley #StanfordUniversity #AIAgents #FutureTechnology #MedicineOfTheFuture #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailFor decades, women undergoing mastectomy have largely faced the same choice: reconstruct with permanent implants or use tissue transplanted from another part of the body. But what if there was a third option - not replacing what's been lost, but actually regenerating it? Today we're exploring one of the most ambitious ideas in regenerative medicine: a 3D-bioprinted scaffold designed to help the body rebuild living tissue.Dr. Claudia Chavez-Munoz, MD, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized surgeon-scientist, regenerative medicine innovator, and Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Conexeu Sciences ( https://www.conexeu.com/ ). With a career spanning plastic surgery, wound healing, tissue engineering, and extracellular matrix biology, she has dedicated more than two decades to understanding how the body repairs itself - and how that knowledge can be translated into next-generation therapies.Dr. Chavez-Munoz earned her MD from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, completed her Ph.D. in Plastic Surgery at the University of British Columbia, and pursued postdoctoral training in tissue engineering and reconstructive surgery at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. Her pioneering work has ranged from stem cell biology and skin regeneration to biomaterials and organ reseeding technologies. Throughout her academic career at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver General Hospital, she has mentored future physician-scientists while advancing innovative approaches to tissue regeneration.Today, she leads the scientific development of Conexeu's "10 Minute Tissue™" platform and is spearheading what may become the world's first 3D-bioprinted regenerative breast - a temporary scaffold designed to disappear over time as a patient's own tissue regenerates and replaces it. Her work represents a bold vision for the future of reconstructive surgery: moving beyond permanent implants and toward living, regenerative solutions that harness the body's natural healing capacity.#BreastCancer #BreastReconstruction #RegenerativeMedicine #3DBioprinting #TissueEngineering #Bioprinting #PlasticSurgery #Biotechnology #StemCells #WoundHealing #Biomaterials #PrecisionMedicine #FutureOfMedicine #HealthcareInnovation #MedicalInnovation #ExtracellularMatrix #CancerSurvivorship #Surgery #WomenInSTEM #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWhat if radiation could become one of the most precise medicines ever invented? Long before radiopharmaceuticals became one of the hottest areas in biotech, today's guest was helping pioneer targeted radiation therapies that seek out cancer cells while minimizing damage to healthy tissue. Today, the field is attracting billions in investment and reshaping oncology.Our guest today is one of the true pioneers of modern targeted radiopharmaceutical therapy.Dr. Ebrahim Delpassand, MD is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of RadioMedix ( https://radiomedix.com/ ), a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing next-generation targeted radioactive diagnostics and therapeutics for cancer.Long before radiopharmaceuticals became one of the most exciting areas in precision oncology, Dr. Delpassand was introducing these therapies to patients who had exhausted every other option. As former Deputy Chairman and Chief of Clinical Nuclear Medicine at MD Anderson Cancer Center, Dr. Delpassand served as Principal Investigator on some of the very first FDA Investigational New Drug programs for Lutetium-177 therapies in the United States, including the nation's first INDs for Lu-177 DOTATATE peptide receptor radionuclide therapy and Lu-177 PSMA-617 therapy.Board-certified in Nuclear Medicine and trained in both pathology and nuclear medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, Dr. Delpassand has authored more than ninety peer-reviewed publications and has spent decades advancing therapeutic nuclear medicine through research, clinical care, and education.But perhaps even more remarkable is his entrepreneurial journey. Nearly twenty years ago, convinced that targeted radiopharmaceuticals represented a fundamentally new way to fight cancer, Dr. Delpassand founded RadioMedix and personally sustained the company through its earliest years while helping build not only innovative therapies, but also isotope production capabilities, cGMP manufacturing infrastructure, and broader access to these life-saving treatments.Today, as radiotheranostics transforms cancer care around the world, Dr. Delpassand joins us to discuss where the field began, where it is heading, and what the next generation of precision radiation medicines could mean for patients.#Radiopharmaceuticals #CancerResearch #CancerTherapy #PrecisionMedicine #Oncology #Radiotheranostics #NuclearMedicine #Biotechnology #Biotech #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareInnovation #TargetedTherapy #AlphaTherapy #Lutetium177 #PrecisionOncology #FutureOfMedicine #CancerTreatment #DrugDevelopment #SciencePodcast #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailCan artificial intelligence really think like a physician - or is it simply predicting words?This week we're joined by Dr. Michal Tzuchman-Katz, MD, physician, AI entrepreneur, pediatrician, and Chief Innovation & Research Officer at Maccabi Healthcare, one of the world's most advanced healthcare organizations. We explore why the future of medicine isn't just better AI - it's building healthcare systems that learn from every patient.Dr. Michal Tzuchman-Katz, MD is a physician, technologist, entrepreneur, and healthcare innovation leader who currently serves as Chief Innovation & Research Officer at Maccabi Healthcare Services ( https://www.maccabi4u.co.il/ ), one of Israel's largest and most advanced healthcare organizations.What makes Dr. Tzuchman-Katz's story extraordinary is that she has worked across nearly every layer of modern health technology. She began her career as a software engineer, earned her medical degree with honors, trained as a pediatrician, studied genomics and biomedical informatics, and went on to co-found and lead Kahun, an AI-powered clinical reasoning company that developed a knowledge-graph engine containing more than 30 million evidence-based medical insights.At Kahun, Dr. Tzuchman-Katz became a pioneer in explainable AI for physicians, focusing on making AI-generated recommendations transparent, traceable to medical evidence, and aligned with the way clinicians actually think. Today, at Maccabi, Dr. Tzuchman-Katz oversees innovation and research initiatives that leverage one of the world's richest longitudinal healthcare datasets and biobanks to develop and scale technologies that can improve patient outcomes at population level.Remarkably, while leading innovation for a major healthcare system, Dr. Tzuchman-Katz continues to practice as a pediatrician, giving her a uniquely grounded perspective on the promises and limitations of AI in real clinical care.#HealthcareInnovation #ArtificialIntelligence #MedicalAI #PrecisionMedicine #HealthTech #DigitalHealth #ClinicalAI #Medicine #Healthcare #Biotech #Genomics #Innovation #FutureOfMedicine #HealthcareData #MachineLearning #MedicalResearch #Pediatrics #PreventiveMedicine #PersonalizedMedicine #PPPSupport the show

Send us Fan MailFor decades we've treated autoimmune diseases by suppressing the immune system - but what if we've been approaching the problem all wrong? What if, instead of lifelong immunosuppression, we could selectively eliminate the immune cells causing disease and allow the immune system to rebuild itself? Today we're exploring one of the hottest areas in biotechnology: T-cell engagers and the possibility of an "immune reset."Dr. Jeffrey Jones, MD, MPH is Chief Medical Officer of Cullinan Therapeutics ( https://cullinantherapeutics.com/ ) and one of the leaders helping bring the power of T-cell engager therapies beyond cancer and into autoimmune disease. With more than two decades of experience spanning academia and industry, Dr. Jones has been at the forefront of clinical development in hematology, oncology, and immunology.Prior to joining Cullinan, Dr. Jones served as Vice President of Global Drug Development at Bristol Myers Squibb, leading programs in lymphoma and myeloid diseases and helping guide the lifecycle strategy for Reblozyl®. Earlier, he held leadership positions at Celgene, where he developed clinical strategies across lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia portfolios.Before entering industry, Dr. Jones spent more than a decade at The Ohio State University, where he led the Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia clinical research program and served as Associate Professor of Internal Medicine. Today, he is helping pioneer a new generation of T-cell engagers designed not to continuously suppress the immune system, but potentially to reset it - opening the possibility of durable, treatment-free remission for diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, lupus nephritis, and autoimmune cytopenias.Dr. Jones earned his MD from the University of Michigan Medical School, an MPH from the University of Texas School of Public Health, and an MBA from The Ohio State University Fisher College of Business.#AutoimmuneDisease #Lupus #RheumatoidArthritis #Immunology #TCellEngagers #Biotechnology #DrugDevelopment #PrecisionMedicine #ImmuneSystem #ImmuneReset #ClinicalTrials #Biotech #HealthcareInnovation #FutureOfMedicine #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailFor decades, fusion researchers were chasing a single goal: ignition. But what if ignition isn't the finish line? What if it's only the starting gun? Today we're joined by Dr. Will Regan, Founder and Chief Scientist of Pacific Fusion, a company betting that the future of fusion won't be won by building bigger machines - but by solving one of engineering's toughest manufacturing challenges.Dr. Will Regan, Ph.D. is the Founder and Chief Scientist of Pacific Fusion ( https://www.pacificfusion.com/ ), where he is helping lead one of the most ambitious efforts in advanced inertial fusion energy: developing a practical, scalable pathway to commercial fusion power using pulsed power systems and high-yield target physics.Before founding Pacific Fusion, Will served as a Project Lead and Rapid Evaluator at X, the moonshot factory, where he helped originate and develop breakthrough concepts in agricultural and systems innovation, including early foundational work behind the Mineral initiative focused on sustainable food production at planetary scale.Earlier in his career, he was an ARPA-E Fellow at Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, where he worked at the intersection of high-risk, high-reward energy technologies and national-scale innovation programs—an experience that helped shape his approach to large-scale energy system design and technology acceleration.Will earned his PhD in Physics from University of California, Berkeley, following his undergraduate degree in Physics from Cornell University. Across academia, government, and moonshot industry environments, he has consistently focused on translating frontier physics into real-world systems—now centered on one of the most consequential engineering challenges of the century: fusion energy.At Pacific Fusion, he is working to turn high-gain fusion concepts into repeatable, engineered systems that could fundamentally reshape global energy infrastructure.#FusionEnergy #NuclearFusion #PacificFusion #WillRegan #CleanEnergy #FutureOfEnergy #FusionPower #InertialConfinementFusion #ICF #MagLIF #SandiaLabs #LawrenceLivermore #NIF #AdvancedEnergy #EnergyInnovation #Physics #Engineering #ClimateTech #MoonshotFactory #ARPAE #SciencePodcast #TechnologyPodcast #ProgressPotentialPossibilities #STEM #DeepTechSupport the show

Send us Fan MailEveryone talks about getting humans to Mars. But almost nobody talks about the harder question - how do you keep them alive once they get there? My guest today says the answer isn't bigger rockets - it's plants.Mark Ciotola is CEO and Co-Founder of Sustain Space ( https://www.sustainspace.com/ ), a company focused on developing regenerative life-support technologies for future space missions while translating those innovations to improve agriculture and sustainability on Earth. Through Sustain Space's Orbital Genomics initiative, he is helping advance research into growing plants in space environments - an essential capability for long-duration missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.Mark's career spans entrepreneurship, academia, industry, and government, including work with NASA, Genentech, Applied Biosystems, Intuit, Carnegie Mellon University, Monash University, San Francisco State University, and Singularity University, where he served as Entrepreneur-in-Residence and faculty member in Space and Physical Sciences.A physicist, entrepreneur, educator, and sustainability advocate, Mark is particularly interested in regenerative ecosystems, closed-loop life-support systems, space agriculture, and the broader question of how humanity can build a sustainable future both on Earth and beyond it.Important Episode Link - HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology -https://www.hudsonalpha.org/#MarkCiotola #SustainSpace #SpaceAgriculture #SpaceFarming #MarsColonization #MoonBase #NASA #SpaceBiology #Astrobiology #PlantScience #OrbitalGenomics #ControlledEnvironmentAgriculture #VerticalFarming #Hydroponics #SyntheticBiology #FutureOfFood #SpaceTechnology #SpaceExploration #LifeSupportSystems #ClosedLoopSystems #MarsMission #MoonMission #Humanity #Innovation #SciencePodcast #STEM #FutureOfHumanity #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show

Send us Fan MailWe often assume confusion after surgery is temporary. But what if those few days of delirium are actually a major turning point in the aging brain? New research from Harvard and Hebrew SeniorLife suggests postoperative delirium may be the strongest predictor of long-term cognitive decline - and what we're learning could fundamentally change how we think about dementia and healthy aging.Each year, millions of older adults undergo surgery successfully, only to experience episodes of confusion, disorientation, memory impairment, or altered awareness in the days that follow. For decades, many clinicians viewed postoperative delirium as a temporary complication that resolved once patients left the hospital.But emerging research suggests a much more profound story.Our guest today is Dr. Tammy Hshieh, MD, MPH, is physician-scientist, geriatrician, and internationally recognized expert on delirium, cognitive impairment, and healthy aging. Dr. Hshieh serves as Assistant Scientist at the Hinda and Arthur Marcus Institute for Aging Research at Hebrew SeniorLife ( https://www.marcusinstituteforaging.org/who-we-are/profiles/tammy-hshieh-md-mph ), Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School ( https://connects.catalyst.harvard.edu/Profiles/display/Person/33333 ), and Associate Physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital ( https://physiciandirectory.brighamandwomens.org/Details/12170 ).After earning her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry from Harvard University and her MD from Brown University's Alpert Medical School, Dr. Hshieh completed residency training in Internal Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a fellowship in Geriatric Medicine through Harvard Medical School, and earned a Master of Public Health from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.Dr. Hshieh's research focuses on understanding, preventing, and treating delirium and cognitive decline in older adults - conditions that carry enormous consequences for independence, quality of life, and healthcare systems worldwide.In groundbreaking work recently published in JAMA Internal Medicine, Dr. Hshieh and colleagues demonstrated that postoperative delirium remains the strongest predictor of long-term cognitive decline, even after accounting for rehospitalizations and other markers of illness and frailty. Their findings suggest that delirium may represent far more than a transient hospital complication - it may be a critical turning point in the trajectory of brain aging itself.Clinically, Dr. Hshieh co-manages older surgical patients at Brigham and Women's Hospital in one of the nation's most innovative geriatric-surgical care programs and leads the Older Adult Hematologic Malignancy Clinic at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ( https://www.dana-farber.org/find-a-doctor/tammy-t-hshieh ), where she works to improve outcomes for older adults facing cancer treatment.Today we'll discuss delirium, dementia, cognitive resilience, surgical risk, brain aging, and what patients, families, and healthcare systems can do to better protect the aging brain.#Delirium #Dementia #BrainHealth #HealthyAging #CognitiveDecline #Alzheimers #HarvardMedicine #Geriatrics #Longevity #Surgery #PostoperativeDelirium #AgingResearch #Neuroscience #Healthcare #Medicine #BrainAging #CognitiveHealth #Prevention #Podcast #ProgressPotentialPossibilitiesSupport the show