Podcasts about Genentech

Good morning from Pharma and Biotech Daily: the podcast that gives you only what's important to hear in Pharma e Biotech world.The CDC has reinstated around 460 employees who were previously fired, with the rehired staff working on viral disease prevention efforts and sexual health testing labs. This comes amid protests and shake-ups at the agency, including the overhaul of the vaccine advisory committee. Experts are concerned about newly appointed members, some of whom are known anti-vaxxers, potentially relitigating recommendations. Sen. Bill Cassidy is being urged to step up in response to these concerns.In other news, NuVation has received FDA approval for its oral lung cancer drug, Biontech has acquired CureVac in a $1.25 billion all-stock deal, and RFK Jr. has named new CDC vaccine advisors following a "clean sweep." Additionally, InVitro Cell Research is focused on discovering interventions to slow aging and prevent age-related diseases and is hiring scientists. The newsletter also includes information on layoffs at Genentech and Vertex.RFK Jr. has named eight new members to the CDC vaccine committee, replacing the 17 members he removed earlier in the week. The new choices seem to align with Kennedy's anti-vaccine views, causing concern among analysts. The HHS secretary's decision to appoint these scientists has raised questions about the committee's future direction.

Good morning from Pharma and Biotech Daily: the podcast that gives you only what's important to hear in Pharma and Biotech world.The American Medical Association is calling for a Senate probe into RFK Jr. after he removed all 17 members of the CDC's vaccine advisory board. They are also urging an immediate reversal of the HHS Secretary's decision. In other news, FDA leaders promise support for gene therapy as it faces challenges, Novo Nordisk invests over $800 million in discovering oral obesity drugs, and a new company, InVitro Cell Research, focuses on interventions to slow aging and prevent age-related diseases. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary and CBER Director Vinay Prasad published an article outlining the FDA's priorities, including accelerating cures and deploying artificial intelligence quickly. Other news includes Lilly's muscle-preserving treatment pact, Vertex laying off staff after axing a diabetes asset, and Genentech reshuffling in South San Francisco. Recursion cuts workforce by 20%.FDA leaders have pledged support to gene therapy makers as the industry faces challenges in commercialization. Despite huge valuations, gene therapies are struggling to reach the market. Poor communication about the value of groundbreaking treatments is hindering their prospects. Right of first negotiation deals do not always lead to mergers and acquisitions, as found by Jefferies in their analysis of licensing deals. Trilink's new comprehensive IVT kit simplifies the production of mRNAs. In other news, Lilly strikes a $650 million deal for a muscle-preserving treatment, Odyssey ends its quest for Nasdaq, BMS expands its radiopharma presence, and SpliceBio secures $135 million in funding for protein splicing medicines. Novo ups its obesity efforts with an $800 million pact, while Cullinan makes a $700 million deal for autoimmune T cell engager in China.Thank you for listening to Pharma and Biotech Daily.

Dr. Nathan Pennell and Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis discuss challenges in lung cancer screening and potential solutions to increase screening rates, including the use of AI to enhance risk prediction and screening processes. Transcript Dr. Nate Pennell: Hello, and welcome to By the Book, a monthly podcast series for ASCO Education that features engaging discussions between editors and authors from the ASCO Educational Book. I'm Dr. Nate Pennell, the co-director of the Cleveland Clinic Lung Cancer Program and vice chair of clinical research for the Taussig Cancer Center. I'm also the editor-in-chief for the ASCO Educational Book.  Lung cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality worldwide, and most cases are diagnosed at advanced stages where curative treatment options are limited. On the opposite end, early-stage lung cancers are very curable. If only we could find more patients at that early stage, an approach that has revolutionized survival for other cancer types such as colorectal and breast cancer.  On today's episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis, a professor of medicine and thoracic medical oncologist at the University of Wisconsin Carbone Cancer Center, to discuss her article titled, "Broadening the Net: Overcoming Challenges and Embracing Novel Technologies in Lung Cancer Screening." The article was recently published in the ASCO Educational Book and featured in an Education Session at the 2025 ASCO Annual Meeting. Our full disclosures are available in the transcript of this episode.  Cheryl, it's great to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for being here. Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: Thanks, Nate. It's great to be here with you. Dr. Nate Pennell: So, I'd like to just start by asking you a little bit about the importance of lung cancer screening and what evidence is there that lung cancer screening is beneficial. Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: Thank you. Lung cancer screening is extremely important because we know that lung cancer survival is closely tied to stage at diagnosis. We have made significant progress in the treatment of lung cancer, especially over the past decade, with the introduction of immunotherapies and targeted therapies based on personalized evaluation of genomic alterations. But the reality is that outside of a lung screening program, most patients with lung cancer present with symptoms related to advanced cancer, where our ability to cure the disease is more limited.  While lung cancer screening has been studied for years, the National Lung Screening Trial, or the NLST, first reported in 2011 a significant reduction in lung cancer deaths through screening. Annual low-dose CT scans were performed in a high-risk population for lung cancer in comparison to chest X-ray. The study population was comprised of asymptomatic persons aged 55 to 74 with a 30-pack-year history of smoking who were either active smokers or had quit within 15 years. The low-dose CT screening was associated with a 20% relative risk reduction in lung cancer-related mortality. A similar magnitude of benefit was also reported in the NELSON trial, which was a large European randomized trial comparing low-dose CT with a control group receiving no screening. Dr. Nate Pennell: So, this led, of course, to approval from CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) for lung cancer screening in the Medicare population, probably about 10 years ago now, I think. And there are now two major trials showing an unequivocal reduction in lung cancer-related mortality and even evidence that it reduces overall mortality with lung cancer screening. But despite this, lung cancer screening rates are very low in the United States. So, first of all, what's going on? Why are we not seeing the kinds of screening rates that we see with mammography and colonoscopy? And what are the barriers to that here? Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: That's a great question. Thank you, Nate. In the United States, recruitment for lung cancer screening programs has faced numerous challenges, including those related to socioeconomic, cultural, logistical, and even racial disparities. Our current lung cancer screening guidelines are somewhat imprecise and often fail to address differences that we know exist in sex, smoking history, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity. We also see underrepresentation in certain groups, including African Americans and other minorities, and special populations, including individuals with HIV. And even where lung cancer screening is readily available and we have evidence of its efficacy, uptake can be low due to both provider and patient factors. On the provider side, barriers include having insufficient time in a clinic visit for shared decision-making, fear of missed test results, lack of awareness about current guidelines, concerns about cost, potential harms, and evaluating both true and false-positive test results.  And then on the patient side, barriers include concerns about cost, fear of getting a cancer diagnosis, stigma associated with tobacco smoking, and misconceptions about the treatability of lung cancer. Dr. Nate Pennell: I think those last two are really what make lung cancer unique compared to, say, for example, breast cancer, where there really is a public acceptance of the value of mammography and that breast cancer is no one's fault and that it really is embraced as an active way you can take care of yourself by getting your breast cancer screening. Whereas in lung cancer, between the stigma of smoking and the concern that, you know, it's a death sentence, I think we really have some work to be made up, which we'll talk about in a minute about what we can do to help improve this.  Now, that's in the U.S. I think things are probably, I would imagine, even worse when we leave the U.S. and look outside, especially at low- and middle-income countries. Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: Yes, globally, this issue is even more complex than it is in the United States. Widespread implementation of low-dose CT imaging for lung cancer screening is limited by manpower, infrastructure, and economic constraints. Many low- and middle-income countries even lack sufficient CT machines, trained personnel, and specialized facilities for accurate and timely screenings. Even in urban centers with advanced diagnostic facilities, the high screening and follow-up care costs can limit access. Rural populations face additional barriers, such as geographic inaccessibility of urban centers, transportation costs, language barriers, and mistrust of healthcare systems. In addition, healthcare systems in these regions often prioritize infectious diseases and maternal health, leaving limited room for investments in noncommunicable disease prevention like lung cancer screening. Policymakers often struggle to justify allocating resources to lung cancer screening when immediate healthcare needs remain unmet. Urban-rural disparities exacerbate these challenges, with rural regions frequently lacking the infrastructure and resources to sustain screening programs. Dr. Nate Pennell: Well, it's certainly an intimidating problem to try to reduce these disparities, especially between the U.S. and low- and middle-income countries. So, what are some of the potential solutions, both here in the U.S. and internationally, that we can do to try to increase the rates of lung cancer screening? Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: The good news is that we can take steps to address these challenges, but a multifaceted approach is needed. Public awareness campaigns focused on the benefits of early detection and dispelling myths about lung cancer screening are essential to improving participation rates. Using risk-prediction models to identify high-risk individuals can increase the efficiency of lung cancer screening programs. Automated follow-up reminders and screening navigators can also ensure timely referrals and reduce delays in diagnosis and treatment. Reducing or subsidizing the cost of low-dose CT scans, especially in low- or middle-income countries, can improve accessibility. Deploying mobile CT scanners can expand access to rural and underserved areas.  On a global scale, integrating lung cancer screening with existing healthcare programs, such as TB or noncommunicable disease initiatives, can enhance resource utilization and program scalability. Implementing lung cancer screening in resource-limited settings requires strategic investment, capacity building, and policy interventions that prioritize equity. Addressing financial constraints, infrastructure gaps, and sociocultural barriers can help overcome existing challenges. By focusing on cost-effective strategies, public awareness, and risk-based eligibility criteria, global efforts can promote equitable access to lung cancer screening and improve outcomes.  Lastly, as part of the medical community, we play an important role in a patient's decision to pursue lung cancer screening. Being up to date with current lung cancer screening recommendations, identifying eligible patients, and encouraging a patient to undergo screening often is the difference-maker. Electronic medical record (EMR) systems and reminders are helpful in this regard, but relationship building and a recommendation from a trusted provider are really essential here. Dr. Nate Pennell: I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, there are technology improvements. For example, our lung cancer screening program at The Cleveland Clinic, a few years back, we finally started an automated best practice alert in our EMR for patients who met the age and smoking requirements, and it led to a six-fold increase in people referred for screening. But at the same time, there's a difference between just getting this alert and putting in an order for lung cancer screening and actually getting those patients to go and actually do the screening and then follow up on it. And that, of course, requires having that relationship and discussion with the patient so that they trust that you have their best interests. Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: Exactly. I think that's important. You know, certainly, while technology can aid in bringing patients in, there really is no substitute for trust-building and a personal relationship with a provider. Dr. Nate Pennell: I know that there are probably multiple examples within the U.S. where health systems or programs have put together, I would say, quality improvement projects to try to increase lung cancer screening and working with their community. There's one in particular that you discuss in your paper called the "End Lung Cancer Now" initiative. I wonder if you could take us through that. Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: Absolutely. "End Lung Cancer Now" is an initiative at the Indiana University Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center that has the vision to end suffering and death from lung cancer in Indiana through education and community empowerment. We discuss this as a paradigm for how community engagement is important in building and scaling a lung cancer screening program.  In 2023, the "End Lung Cancer Now" team decided to focus its efforts on scaling and transforming lung cancer screening rates in Indiana. They developed a task force with 26 experts in various fields, including radiology, pulmonary medicine, thoracic surgery, public health, and advocacy groups. The result of this work is an 85-page blueprint with key recommendations that any system and community can use to scale lung cancer screening efforts. After building strong infrastructure for lung cancer screening at Indiana University, they sought to understand what the priorities, resources, and challenges in their communities were. To do this, they forged strong partnerships with both local and national organizations, including the American Lung Association, American Cancer Society, and others. In the first year, they actually tripled the number of screening low-dose CTs performed in their academic center and saw a 40% increase system-wide. One thing that I think is the most striking is that through their community outreach, they learned that most people prefer to get medical care close to home within their own communities. Establishing a way to support the local infrastructure to provide care became far more important than recruiting patients to their larger system.  In exciting news, "End Lung Cancer Now" has partnered with the IU Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center and IU Health to launch Indiana's first and only mobile lung screening program in March of 2025. This mobile program travels around the state to counties where the highest incidence of lung cancer exists and there is limited access to screening. The mobile unit parks at trusted sites within communities and works in partnership, not competition, with local health clinics and facilities to screen high-risk populations. Dr. Nate Pennell: I think that sounds like a great idea. Screening is such an important thing that it doesn't necessarily have to be owned by any one particular health system for their patients. I think. And I love the idea of bringing the screening to patients where they are. I can speak to working in a regional healthcare system with a main campus in the downtown that patients absolutely hate having to come here from even 30 or 40 minutes away, and they'd much rather get their care locally. So that makes perfect sense.  So, under the current guidelines, there are certainly things that we can do to try to improve capturing the people that meet those. But are those guidelines actually capturing enough patients with lung cancer to make a difference? There certainly are proposals within patient advocacy communities and even other countries where there's a large percentage of non-smokers who perhaps get lung cancer. Can we expand beyond just older, current and heavy smokers to identify at-risk populations who could benefit from screening? Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: Yes, I think we can, and it's certainly an active area of research interest. We know that tobacco is the leading cause of lung cancer worldwide. However, other risk factors include secondhand smoke, family history, exposure to environmental carcinogens, and pulmonary diseases like COPD and interstitial lung disease. Despite these known associations, the benefit of lung cancer screening is less well elucidated in never-smokers and those at risk of developing lung cancer because of family history or other risk factors. We know that the eligibility criteria associated with our current screening guidelines focus on age and smoking history and may miss more than 50% of lung cancers. Globally, 10% to 25% of lung cancer cases occur in never-smokers. And in certain parts of the world, like you mentioned, Nate, such as East Asia, many lung cancers are diagnosed in never-smokers, especially in women. Risk-prediction models use specific risk factors for lung cancer to enhance individual selection for screening, although they have historically focused on current or former smokers.  We know that individuals with family members affected by lung cancer have an increased risk of developing the disease. To this end, several large-scale, single-arm prospective studies in Asia have evaluated broadening screening criteria to never-smokers, with or without additional risk factors. One such study, the Taiwan Lung Cancer Screening in Never-Smoker Trial, was a multicenter prospective cohort study at 17 medical centers in Taiwan. The primary outcome of the TALENT trial was lung cancer detection rate. Eligible patients aged 55 to 75 had either never smoked or had a light and remote smoking history. In addition, inclusion required one or more of the following risk factors: family history of lung cancer, passive smoke exposure, history of TB or COPD, a high cooking index, which is a metric that quantifies exposure to cooking fumes, or a history of cooking without ventilation. Participants underwent low-dose CT screening at baseline, then annually for 2 years, and then every 2 years for up to 6 years. The lung cancer detection rate was 2.6%, which was higher than that reported in the NLST and NELSON trials, and most were stage 0 or I cancers. Subsequently, this led to the Taiwan Early Detection Program for Lung Cancer, a national screening program that was launched in 2022, targeting 2 screening populations: individuals with a heavy history of smoking and individuals with a family history of lung cancer.  We really need randomized controlled trials to determine the true rates of overdiagnosis or finding cancers that would not lead to morbidity or mortality in persons who are diagnosed, and to establish whether the high lung detection rates are associated with a decrease in lung cancer-related mortality in these populations. However, the implementation of randomized controlled low-dose CT screening trials in never-smokers has been limited by the need for large sample sizes, lengthy follow-up, and cost.  In another group potentially at higher risk for developing lung cancer, the role of lung cancer screening in individuals who harbor germline pathogenic variants associated with lung cancer also needs to be explored further. Dr. Nate Pennell: We had this discussion when the first criteria came out because there have always been risk-based calculators for lung cancer that certainly incorporate smoking but other factors as well and have discussion about whether we should be screening people based on their risk and not just based on discrete criteria such as smoking. But of course, the insurance coverage for screening, you have to fit the actual criteria, which is very constrained by age and smoking history. Do you think in the U.S. there's hope for broadening our screening beyond NLST and NELSON criteria? Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: I do think at some point there is hope for broadening the criteria beyond smoking history and age, beyond the criteria that we have typically used and that is covered by insurance. I do think it will take some work to perhaps make the prediction models more precise or to really understand who can benefit. We certainly know that there are many patients who develop lung cancer without a history of smoking or without family history, and it would be great if we could diagnose more patients with lung cancer at an earlier stage. I think this will really count on there being some work towards trying to figure out what would be the best population for screening, what risk factors to look for, perhaps using some new technologies that may help us to predict who is at risk for developing lung cancer, and trying to increase the group that we study to try and find these early-stage lung cancers that can be cured. Dr. Nate Pennell: Part of the reason we, of course, try to enrich our population is screening works better when you have a higher pretest probability of actually having cancer. And part of that also is that our technology is not that great. You know, even in high-risk patients who have CT scans that are positive for a screen, we know that the vast majority of those patients with lung nodules actually don't have lung cancer. And so you have to follow them, you have to use various models to see, you know, what the risk, even in the setting of a positive screen, is of having lung cancer.  So, why don't we talk about some newer tools that we might use to help improve lung cancer screening? And one of the things that everyone is super excited about, of course, is artificial intelligence. Are there AI technologies that are helping out in early detection in lung cancer screening? Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: Yes, that's a great question. We know that predicting who's at risk for lung cancer is challenging for the reasons that we talked about, knowing that there are many risk factors beyond smoking and age that are hard to quantify. Artificial intelligence is a tool that can help refine screening criteria and really expand screening access. Machine learning is a form of AI technology that is adept at recognizing patterns in large datasets and then applying the learning to new datasets. Several machine learning models have been developed for risk stratification and early detection of lung cancer on imaging, both with and without blood-based biomarkers. This type of technology is very promising and can serve as a tool that helps to select individuals for screening by predicting who is likely to develop lung cancer in the future.  A group at Massachusetts General Hospital, represented in our group for this paper by my co-authors, Drs. Fintelmann and Chang, developed Sybil, which is an open-access 3D convolutional neural network that predicts an individual's future risk of lung cancer based on the analysis of a single low-dose CT without the need for human annotation or other clinical inputs. Sybil and other machine learning models have tremendous potential for precision lung cancer screening, even, and perhaps especially, in settings where expert image interpretation is unavailable. They could support risk-adapted screening schedules, such as varying the frequency and interval of low-dose CT scans according to individual risk and potentially expand lung cancer screening eligibility beyond age and smoking history. Their group predicts that AI tools like Sybil will play a major role in decoding the complex landscape of lung cancer risk factors, enabling us to extend life-saving lung cancer screening to all who are at risk. Dr. Nate Pennell: I think that that would certainly be welcome. And as AI is working its way into pretty much every aspect of life, including medical care, I think it's certainly promising that it can improve on our existing technology.  We don't have to spend a lot of time on this because I know it's a little out of scope for what you covered in your paper, but I'm sure our listeners are curious about your thoughts on the use of other types of testing beyond CT screening for detecting lung cancer. I know that there are a number of investigational and even commercially available blood tests, for example, for detection of lung cancer, or even the so-called multi-cancer detection blood tests that are now being offered, although not necessarily being covered by insurance, for multiple types of cancer, but lung cancer being a common cancer is included in that. So, what do you think? Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: Yes, like you mentioned, there are novel bioassays such as blood-based biomarker testing that evaluate for DNA, RNA, and circulating tumor cells that are both promising and under active investigation for lung cancer and multi-cancer detection. We know that such biomarker assays may be useful in both identifying lung cancers but also in identifying patients with a high-risk result who should undergo lung cancer screening by conventional methods. Dr. Nate Pennell: Anything that will improve on our rate of screening, I think, will be welcome. I think probably in the future, it will be some combination of better risk prediction and better interpretation of screening results, whether those be imaging or some combination of imaging and biomarkers, breath-based, blood-based. There's so much going on that it is pretty exciting, but we're still going to have to overcome the stigma and lack of public support for lung cancer screening if we're going to move the needle. Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: Yes, I think moving the needle is so important because we know lung cancer is still a very morbid disease, and our ability to cure patients is not where we would like it to be. But I do believe there's hope. There are a lot of motivated individuals and groups who are passionate about lung cancer screening, like myself and my co-authors, and we're just happy to be able to share some ways that we can overcome the challenges and really try and make an impact in the lives of our patients. Dr. Nate Pennell: Well, thank you, Dr. Czerlanis, for joining me on the By the Book Podcast today and for all of your work to advance care for patients with lung cancer. Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: Thank you, Dr. Pennell. It's such a pleasure to be with you today. Thank you. Dr. Nate Pennell: And thank you to our listeners for joining us today. You'll find a link to Dr. Czerlanis' article in the transcript of this episode.  Please join us again next month for By the Book's next episode and more insightful views on topics you'll be hearing at the education sessions from ASCO meetings throughout the year, and our deep dives on approaches that are shaping modern oncology. Disclaimer: The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Follow today's speakers:     Dr. Nathan Pennell    @n8pennell   @n8pennell.bsky.social Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis Follow ASCO on social media:     @ASCO on X (formerly Twitter)     ASCO on Bluesky    ASCO on Facebook     ASCO on LinkedIn     Disclosures:    Dr. Nate Pennell:        Consulting or Advisory Role: AstraZeneca, Lilly, Cota Healthcare, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Genentech, Amgen, G1 Therapeutics, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Viosera, Xencor, Mirati Therapeutics, Janssen Oncology, Sanofi/Regeneron       Research Funding (Institution): Genentech, AstraZeneca, Merck, Loxo, Altor BioScience, Spectrum Pharmaceuticals, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Jounce Therapeutics, Mirati Therapeutics, Heat Biologics, WindMIL, Sanofi    Dr. Cheryl Czerlanis: Research Funding (Institution): LungLife AI, AstraZeneca, Summit Therapeutics

Stepping into young adulthood also means stepping up as the primary manager of your food allergies. For teens and young adults with food allergies, early adulthood is an exciting but challenging shift. It's the first time you're the primary communicator, managing everything from dining halls to doctor's appointments on your own. Add in new living spaces, new friends, and a growing social life, and there's a lot to navigate. Dr. Theresa Bingemann joins Kortney and Dr. Payel Gupta to unpack how food allergy management changes as you step into early adulthood. We cover self-advocacy skills, emergency preparedness, how to create allergy-friendly spaces in shared housing, and tips for navigating social life safely. Plus, we dive into practical advice for managing stress, staying emotionally healthy, and finding your footing in this new phase of life. What we cover in our episode about managing food allergies in young adults: Self-advocacy matters. Learn how to speak up about your allergies with confidence. Planning ahead for emergencies. Practicing with an epinephrine device is not just for kids! Plus, knowing the available campus resources is key to feeling secure in your food allergy management. Creating a safe living space. Tips for setting up allergy-friendly dorm rooms and kitchens with roommates. Navigating social life. How to handle parties, dating, and dining out while staying safe. Managing emotional well-being. Support strategies for handling anxiety, stress, and the transition to independence. Episode 6 in our “Food Allergies: Ages & Stages” series  Across six episodes, we explore how food allergies show up and shift through different phases of life, from introducing solids in infancy to navigating school and adapting in adulthood. We're here with evidence-based info, expert insights, and lived experience to guide you through it all. Episode 110: Early Allergen Introduction Episode 111: Food Allergy Basics for Newly Diagnosed Families Episode 112: Managing Food Allergies in Babies and Toddlers Episode 113: Managing Food Allergies in School-Age Children Episode 114: Managing Food Allergies in Teens AAAAI Ages & Stages PDFs Food Allergy Stages: Young Adults (18–21 years) Thanks to Genentech and Aquestive for sponsoring this episode. This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not substitute professional medical advice. Always consult with your healthcare provider for any medical concerns.

Dr. Laura welcomes Mike Horne PhD, author of The People Dividend and an executive and organization development coach, to the show to talk about his book and why he's drawn to making people and organizations better versions of who and what they currently are. Mike began his career in labour management relations, which led him into the world of learning and development. Mike's driving question has always been about how he could live out his humanistic values and help people. As he says “I'm not afraid to be called a helper.”Mike and Dr. Laura discuss organizational culture, remote and hybrid work, and the impact of helping professions. Mike describes his book, The People Dividend, as being about humanistic values as a way of creating engagement. The words he says are the most important are dignity, kindness, and respect. Dr. Laura learns how Mike guides people through growth, the impact his book is having, and how leaders can unlock the potential in people and find the best talent for the job.“I'm working on a very big project right now on Civility in an organization for a very large health care system. And I think it's just another way that we're talking about differences in the workplace. There's all kinds of backlash around diversity, equity and inclusion. It's very difficult for me to understand that, given that we have enough research that tells us that diverse teams understanding diverse customers helps you make money.” Mike Horne, Ph.D.About Mike Horne, Ph.D.:Mike Horne, Ph. D., is a highly experienced global corporate human resources and organization development leader, distinguished executive coach, best-selling author, and sought-after speaker. He is dedicated to empowering aspiring leaders, executives, and teams to navigate transitions, excel in new roles, and increase their effectiveness and influence. He hosts The People Dividend Podcast, which ranks in the top 10% of all podcasts globally.Previously, for nearly three decades, Dr. Horne held pivotal human resources and organization development roles, including the Head of Human Resources for Gilead Sciences' Research Division, Global Leader of Talent and Development for Brocade, and Head of Organization Development for Genentech. Before these positions, he served 15 years in human resources leadership roles for Nortel Networks, Marriott International, Towers Watson, and NLRB. He is the chairperson for the graduate Human Resources and Leadership Studies programs at Golden Gate University in San Francisco.In November 2024, Dr. Horne released The People Dividend: Leadership Strategies for Unlocking Employee Potential, which outlines the “people dividend” philosophy and identifies key areas for investment, such as building trust, encouraging motivation, ensuring open communication, retaining employees, making better decisions, and enhancing the organization's reputation. He is also the author of Integrity by Design: Working and Living Authentically, which calls readers to their higher purpose and to the aspiration to work and live authentically.Resources:Website: Mike-Horne.comLinkedInInstagramYoutubePodcast: The People Dividend Podcast“The People Dividend” by Mike HorneThe Immunity to Change method by Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey“The Science of Change” by Richard E. Boyatzis“supercommunicators” by Charles DuhiggLearn more about Dr. Laura on her website: https://drlaura.liveFor more resources, look into Dr. Laura's organizations: Canada Career CounsellingSynthesis Psychology

Independence, risk-taking, and peer pressure. Welcome to the teenage years with food allergies! Managing food allergies during the teen years poses new challenges. Tweens and teens are gaining independence, navigating social pressures, and taking more responsibility for their health. But this is also the stage where risky behavior peaks, and the risk for severe allergic reactions is highest. That's why clear communication and trust matter more than ever. In this episode of our Food Allergy Stages Series, Dr. Travis Miller joins Kortney and Dr. Payel Gupta to unpack how food allergy management changes from ages 12 to 18. We talk about empowering teens through shared decision-making, building trust between parents and teens, and developing essential life skills like label reading, restaurant communication, and self-advocacy. We also dive into difficult topics like bullying, alcohol, and mental health. Finally, we address why emotional support is just as important as carrying an epinephrine auto-injector. What we cover in our episode about managing food allergies in teens: Why trust matters. Teens are more likely to follow allergy routines when they feel heard and involved. Empowering independence. From grocery shopping to reading labels, this is the age to start turning over the reins. Talking about risky behavior. Alcohol and dating can put teens with food allergies at higher risk. Bullying and boundaries. Learn how to spot signs of bullying and who can help your teen feel safe and supported. Mental health and identity. Food allergies can affect confidence. We share ways to support emotional wellness and self-esteem. Episode 5 in our “Food Allergies: Ages & Stages” series  Across six episodes, we explore how food allergies show up and shift through different phases of life, from introducing solids in infancy to navigating school and adapting in adulthood. We're here with evidence-based info, expert insights, and lived experience to guide you through it all. Episode 110: Early Allergen Introduction Episode 111: Food Allergy Basics for Newly Diagnosed Families Episode 112: Managing Food Allergies in Babies and Toddlers Episode 113: Managing Food Allergies in School-Age Children Thanks to Genentech and Aquestive for sponsoring this episode. This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not substitute professional medical advice. Always consult with your healthcare provider for any medical concerns.

Dr. Shalabh Gupta, founder and CEO of Unicycive Therapeutics, shares his inspiring journey from practicing medicine to leading groundbreaking innovations in kidney disease treatment. Dr. Gupta discusses his comprehensive framework for identifying and developing medical solutions, his vision for Unicycive's future, and the importance of focus and execution in medical startups. He reveals the challenges and triumphs of bringing life-changing products to market and offers profound advice for new entrepreneurs in the industry.   Guest links: https://unicycive.com/  Charity supported: Feeding America Interested in being a guest on the show or have feedback to share? Email us at theleadingdifference@velentium.com.  PRODUCTION CREDITS Host: Lindsey Dinneen Editing: Marketing Wise Producer: Velentium   EPISODE TRANSCRIPT Episode 056 - Dr. Shalabh Gupta [00:00:00] Lindsey Dinneen: Hi, I'm Lindsey and I'm talking with MedTech industry leaders on how they change lives for a better world. [00:00:09] Diane Bouis: The inventions and technologies are fascinating and so are the people who work with them. [00:00:15] Frank Jaskulke: There was a period of time where I realized, fundamentally, my job was to go hang out with really smart people that are saving lives and then do work that would help them save more lives. [00:00:28] Diane Bouis: I got into the business to save lives and it is incredibly motivating to work with people who are in that same business, saving or improving lives. [00:00:38] Duane Mancini: What better industry than where I get to wake up every day and just save people's lives. [00:00:42] Lindsey Dinneen: These are extraordinary people doing extraordinary work, and this is The Leading Difference. Hello, and welcome back to another episode of The Leading Difference podcast. I'm your host, Lindsey, and today I am so excited to introduce you to my guest, Dr. Shalabh Gupta. Dr. Gupta is the founder and CEO of Unicycive Therapeutics. He is a visionary in healthcare, leading groundbreaking efforts to design innovative therapies and reimagine how we approach unmet medical needs. His work goes beyond the lab as he's driving a healthcare revolution by developing innovative therapies addressing critical gaps in treatment. His perspective combines decades of experience and expertise in drug design with a deep commitment to equity in health care. Well, welcome to the show, Shalabh. I'm so excited that you're here with me today. [00:01:35] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: Thank you. Thank you for hosting me. [00:01:36] Lindsey Dinneen: Of course. I'd love if you wouldn't mind just telling us a little bit about yourself, your background, and what led you to MedTech. [00:01:45] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: By way of background, I'm a physician, trained, practiced, did my medical training in internal medicine, residency in physical medicine and rehab, research fellowship in cardiac and pulmonary rehabilitation, board certified physician, practice in New York at NYU hospital, NYU Medical Center. This is where I did my medical training for roughly decade after finishing medical school. I also have a graduate degree in finance management from NYU. While I was doing my residency training, I realized that I wanted to find a way to have a broader impact on society as well as what we were working on in learning medicine. So, I started my career working initially with a biotechnology company at the time to help them get their drug with FDA through a regulatory approval process. The beginning of the process is called IND following a investigation new drug application, IND application. I actually visited FDA on their behalf, met with FDA back in the time when everything used to be in person. Built from there onward, joined Wall Street from working as a stock analyst. So I covered biotech companies as a stock analyst, and the weekend and holidays that were available, I worked to continue to practice the medicine at NYU as an attending physician, and then joined another bank and covered pharmaceutical stocks and worked covering six of the largest pharma companies that include Pfizer, Merck, Viacom, Selling Power, Eli Lilly, Bristol Myers Squibb. From there, I moved to California. I worked for Genentech in corporate strategy. Genentech, at the time, and continues to be, one of the largest biotechnology companies. And from working at Genentech, I got my inspiration to start my own companies. So I founded two companies prior to finding starting Unicycive. All my companies are focused on aesthetic therapeutic area. Unicycive is focused on nephrology, treatment of kidney diseases, and we have two drugs in development. We have a lead drug that is pending approval from the US FDA in June of 2025 this year. And the second, I guess, finish phase 1 clinical trial in the UK. And we are in discussion with the agency to proceed with the next stage of clinical trial in the US. So that's a quick background. [00:04:14] Lindsey Dinneen: Wow. That's incredible. Thank you for sharing your story. Yeah. So let's talk about your company now. You've become CEO of this company. You're developing these products that are going to change lives. What first made you realize that there was a gap that needed to be filled in the market for this? And then, what prompted you to go, "You know what? Hey, I think I can have the solution for this or I can have the answer to this." [00:04:38] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: The first question that you ask, understanding the unmet need in medicine, there are a lot of problems that you can address. So, to give you a framework, if I am thinking about a problem, I want to understand if a couple of things, and in order of priorities, these are: can I find a solution that with my resources-- resources is time, energy, and money-- can I create a product that will truly make it to the market? Number two is that I also feel that one can get very blindsided that "I have a solution," but not understand what other solutions exist in the market. So understanding the competitive landscape. If I create this drug, this device, this product, and it is going to take three to four years in the market to come to the market-- which, by the way, in medical word is a still very fast track because it takes much longer-- what will the competitive landscape look like for 5 years down the road? So that's the second part. And third is that what is the solution that I'm developing? Is it unique in terms of having a novel, either as a drug device or drug device combination, or as a patented drug, patented device, because in our industry, it's not really possible to scale up something until unless you have an IP or intellectual property protection. And then from there onward, the last thing is also, who's going to fund me, how I think about funding, not for next six months a year, but also a continuum of the product development. If I think about all these 4-5 problems, then you start to narrow it down. There are some problems that are very much worthy of exploration. For example, treatment of Alzheimer's, we all know it's a big unmet need, we all know there's a big market opportunity. But I realized that was something we couldn't do it with the products or the development candidates that I had seen. So, being able to define where is the end point and goal. Being able to understand, can I make an impact? And when I say I, I speak for myself, but each one of us, I always remind entrepreneurs, we each one of us have our own deck of cards. We have to play with our cards, we can't compare ourselves with somebody else, or we can compare some other cases study. So understanding more about what is so unique that I can bring to table that can I make a difference and then making a business around this where the thesis lies. Once you identify that, then there's a question about continuing to execute and keep changing your plan as you go along. [00:07:11] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I love your framework for thinking through all of those things. And so of course you use that when you thought, "Hey, here's this issue. I could potentially have a solution," and you went through this process. And then can you tell us about your innovation now and how that is helping and how you expect it to help change all these wonderful lives? [00:07:33] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: So, so for treatment of kidney diseases, first of all, it has been one area of development that has not had that much of innovation. And, and I think that is where the initial part of the thesis was that focusing on nephrology of kidney diseases is not same as developing a drug for cancer treatment. Cancer treatment changes every six months a year. The standard of care continues to evolve. Is there an unmet need in cancer treatment? A hundred percent, but the part is that the pace of innovation is very rapid. Is it same in nephrology? It's getting there, but it's still the development of a new products in nephrology still is not at the same pace. So I thought there was something we could make a difference by a small company. The drug that I acquired from another company was a drug that had finished a clinical trial. So it had shown that the drug is safe. It had also shown some signal of it working in healthy volunteers. That's a phase one trial. And the innovation came from a car battery company that had figured out how to make a big, large size pill to make it smaller. And sometimes greatest innovation, greatest insight come from the fact that when I talk to the kidney doctors, the physicians who take care of these patients there with the treatment of kidney diseases, they said the problem for these patients are the patients have to take 12 to 15 pills per day. And this innovation allowed us to be able to make that number of pills go down from 13 to 12 or 15 to three pills per day, one pill with each meal. And then the regulatory pathway became a bit more clear that if I can show that our drug is similar to the drug that was in the market, maybe there was an opportunity to go through expedited pathway, which is what we did. And I acquired the drug in 2018, went to FDA right after acquiring the drug to expedite the pathway again, thinking about de risking the development pathway. And as I mentioned in 2025, we are expecting the approval. So that is the process about it. And that's the story behind the lead drug. [00:09:51] Lindsey Dinneen: Great. Excellent. So that is really exciting. And as you continue to go forward with this company and the innovations that you're creating, what is your ultimate goal or dream that you're really striving for? [00:10:06] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: So, the focus for Unicycive is building new novel treatment for kidney diseases. Our lead drug is expecting approval in June 2025. But we have a second drug in development, and we continue to think about what will be something that we as a small company can bring to market. There are other areas of unmet need in kidney treatment. But instead of doing too many things at the same time, we continue to think, "How do we grow our company? What will be the vision for the company three years down the road, five years down the road?" And what we want to continue doing is to develop the drug candidates, advance them. Right now, after the first drug we get through approval, it will be the second drug. There is a thought process behind it. One of the biggest challenges that I've seen for smaller companies and startups is that they end up in doing too many things at the same time, which is difficult to do, even for big companies. You know, big companies, they have a one product that is a marquee product, they launch that and then they develop other things. So, being able to stay focused is also key because you can have a lot of energy, you can have a lot of ideas, but you have to focus on which one you can do first. [00:11:22] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, that is so true. It's such great advice, a good reminder. Yes, focus is so important. You know, honestly, that's probably one of the tricky things that startups in this particular field might struggle with is that focus. So I'm wondering what kind of advice do you have for say a brand new entrepreneur in the industry who has these great ideas, but you know, maybe has so many that they're a little too scattered. [00:11:52] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: Right. So, I think you may start with 10 ideas but the framework I gave you that: can this idea in this given timeframe with my resources and the funds that I can raise, can it make a difference? So you start to narrow it down. You start with a big funnel, narrow it down. And then maybe you have two or three ideas. Instead of thinking to yourself that "No, I'm not going to tell my idea to anyone because somebody else can take it away," find people who will be willing to pressure test those ideas. Then you will have identified something, maybe one Idea that is worth the pursuit. So then you focus on that. So that's one part of how to triage it because we all have ideas, but those ideas may not be worth developing once you go and talk to the marketplace. And marketplace is your investors, the physicians, and the patients. I keep saying about these three stakeholders, because if physicians cannot prescribe what you are developing, then it's of no use. If patients don't necessarily benefit, then it's of no use. And if you cannot get insurance companies a reimbursement for that means the product will never get here. So it's a process, but nobody can come up with an idea. And there is no great idea. There are ideas that you have to, and then once you find that one idea that resonates with all the stakeholders, physicians are excited about it. If you talk to patients, and you want to do that early on, you don't want to develop an idea and then go, you know, that is the greatest idea but nobody really perceives it that way that except you and a couple of your friends and people who work with you. I don't mean in a bad way. I mean, that you want to be able to test this idea very quickly. So once you get that idea, once you identify what is that the company should be focused on, then the question about is actually building an execution plan. And the only advice I can give is that at any given day for a company, startup, especially whether you're a founder or you're a founding team member, the list of priorities is 50, 5, 0, or maybe 100. It takes time to figure out of those 50, which are the top three that are most important and then being able to focus on those three. You know, the reason I say that no one can work on 50 priorities at the same time. But we all can take two or three priorities and say, "These are the three things that I'm going to work on today. That is this week. Those are the things I'm going to do this month." And therefore you start to develop identifying priorities. The right ones takes time. Sometimes it is a fundraising. Sometimes it's a building a team. Sometimes it's a product development. Sometimes it's all three of them, but being able to allocate your time and energy and focus is a key. People say it's the question of money. I don't think it's a question of money. Money is one of the resources, but the biggest resource we all have is a time and energy and focus. In a company of our size, we are a publicly listed company, and we now have grown from where we used to be, and it's still small. Even today, there are a lot of things we choose not to do. We choose not to go to conferences. We choose not to publish papers. If something is a priority to us, we say, "This is the only thing we're going to focus on. This is the next three months, this is our main goal." And every team meeting I have, I always remind people, three priorities. More than three, way too many. One may not be enough. But because if you can't remind people, what is the priority for the company, then you will not succeed. It is a very challenging environment to think about a startup company or companies in general. And when you have too many priorities, you tend to lose focus on. By building priorities, having priorities, executing them. You create momentum, you create confidence. They create success and you keep climbing the ladder. But truly the biggest challenge for us in the beginning of the career is that identifying which are those three priorities that matter. And once you have had some experience, then the challenge is to keep those priorities and change them as you go along, right? As you go along, you have to continue to grow. For example, in the beginning, it may be the five people you have and that may be enough. But as where we are in the company, it's a question about growth of the organization, right size, not too many people, not too little, hiring enough people so we can continue to execute on our vision and the promises that we made to ourself and to our investors. [00:16:27] Lindsey Dinneen: Thank you for that advice. That was fantastic. And such a great way to narrow it down and help people understand how to narrow down so that they can actually focus and succeed before moving on. I love that. Thank you. So, you know, looking back over your life, and of course, you've had such an incredible career that has really taken you in a lot of different directions. Could 10 year old you have ever anticipated where you'd be today? [00:16:54] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: I don't think so. I think I think we all have a what I call a true north compass. What I did think at the 10 years of age, if I can go back, maybe 10 is too early but maybe 15 or 16 or 17, that hasn't changed. Let me tell you 2 things that I always felt most inspired and excited about. Number one was that I wanted to be in healthcare because, intellectually, I like biological sciences. I felt, "My gosh, what could I do with that if I could make a difference?" And number two was that I, from very early on, I wanted to be something which could help people directly. As you know, there are many ways you can help people, but being in medicine or healthcare, I felt there was a direct impact. Now, looking back after several decades, I feel that part of the influence was my dad. My dad is a physician, continues to see patients and do pro bono work. So that had a very lasting influence on me. That helped me to think about, okay, this is what I want to do. Then being trained as a physician, then going to work on Wall Street, then there was a question about understanding how the impact can be broadened, if you will. The way to think about what I do today versus what I did, say, as a physician, physicians see, say, 10 patients, maybe 12 patients if you're seeing an outpatient basis per day. And if you're in an ICU or ICU doctor, an ER doctor, you could see more number of patients, but then smaller time. And you multiply that impact that many patients, let's just say 10 patients per day, and you work at 300, 350 days, 360 days, 365 days, don't take any break, but that is that many patients a year. What we do today has a potential to impact hundreds and thousands and millions of patients and not just in the U S, globally. So from one vantage point is just magnifying the impact. And the other vantage point is doing what I would have done before. I still love sciences every day. My job is to not just talk about business, but also think about, "How do we fundamentally solve the problem?" And having had those experiences you know, it helps you to keep yourself grounded. One part, I know this wasn't your question, but one advice I can give people who are thinking about developing their careers as an entrepreneur, if you are a founder and CEO, especially think about your career or skill set as I spoke, a wheel, a circle. Every skill that you have, some of us start with more technical background, like me and MD. Then you have to develop their finance and business skills and the business development skills. So sometimes people say, "Well, you know, ABC went to grad school and they dropped out of grad school and they started a company." That's wonderful, but think about much longer beyond a two-year, three-year, five-year time horizon. And that's what helped me to think about my career. So I worked on the Wall Street, but that gave me a finance and understanding about how public companies are valued, not just by the company, but how stock analysts value the company, how investors value the company, what moves the stock, what did Genentech to understood. That gave me the chance to understand how a big biopharma company thinks about their product development. And at Genentech, in some interactions we have had, we were looking at the products from other smaller companies, either to collaborate with them or to acquire those products. So that's a different skill set. I went very early on, as I said, in my career, I went to FDA. So even though I'm not regulatory expert, but I understand how agencies think about the product approval so that helps you to make a more of a holistic viewpoint because the business has become more complex, and you cannot just have a only business degree and you say, "Well, I'm going to succeed." Some people have rounded that up by years and years of experiences. And then there is also innate desire to learn. I learned from not just doing the work I do every day, but my, my, you know, talked a lot about it. I read anytime I get I read books that are not related to medicine, that are not necessarily related to health care, because you have to understand how to grow a revolution. You have to understand leadership skills that are not necessarily taught in schools. So, you have to find a way to continue to refine yourself, because the only way you can create a great company is to become a better version of yourself. [00:21:31] Lindsey Dinneen: Thank you so much for talking about that and for sharing your advice. And I love that image of the wheel. It's a good reminder that sometimes life takes you on very interesting tangents, but sometimes they all do merge at some point. You've got this little sliver of this knowledge that you're working on, and then this experience, and then they start building and I really love that, that, that way of thinking about it and also remembering that It's very useful. So, so like even earlier, I was struck, you talked about how there was inspiration from car batteries, right? And so how interesting is that to go from, what you might expect within your industry, here's how to solve a problem. But then you guys went outside and said, how do other people solve problems? Like maybe we can borrow from that. And I think that's really cool. [00:22:21] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: And I also think that if you stop focusing on only in your industry, learn from anywhere. Some of the best learnings that I have personally, that felt inspirational to me, did not come from biotech companies. They come from tech companies, truly. When you think about the worst, most successful tech companies like Amazon, Apple. I can go on and on, but there are things that you can learn from them. There are things you can learn from the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos. He talks about building Amazon and he talks about doing many experiments at a smaller scale that fail at Amazon in order for them to succeed at a few that really work. And this is where I was saying that culling the ideas, you may start with 10 ideas, but no one can develop 10 ideas, no one. And it's not because of money. People say, "Well, that if I had money." There have been numerous examples where companies have been funded with lots of money and the companies fail. Part of the problem is that when you get too much money, I think you may not realize that you still have to deliver. Because focus and execution takes really knowing what the target is, and then hitting the target and not one time and time again. Targets may change, but the companies cannot focus in 20 different things. In the beginning, you have to start with a very key thesis. [00:23:39] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And yeah, so learning from other industries, and that actually kind of also brings up a thought. So as you've gone along in your career and you've had many different iterations of who you are and what you bring to the world, now, are there any moments that really stand out to you as affirming, "Yes, I am in the right place at the right time?" [00:24:04] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: Yeah, that's a very good question. And I have had a chance to think about it every now and then. So there are there, there are certain observations I'll make. You know, people always say, " What will be your dream job?" And I think the dream job for someone is the job that which you will do any given day, and you will feel a joy that you're doing it and you're not doing for remuneration. You're not doing because you're going to get paid. And we all have those different moments in time. People talk about "flow" where the time stops because you're doing something so deeply engaging that you lost track of time. You forgot where you are. You're not feeling tired. For me building of this company and the team that we have assembled at Unicycive is that flow. Any day that I'm not traveling, I am in my office. I don't work from home. I am every single day in my office. And sure we have a small team, but when we work with the team, these are motivated, driven people with decades of experiences. We feel that we are in a common mission, like we are solving the world's greatest problem. And I know that may be exaggeration, but that's how it feels. And being with them in a room and thinking about a complex problem-- and not just thinking of a problem like how big companies think about it-- but thinking of the problem in a scientific way, but delivering it a solution that only a small company can do that to me is a joy. Number two part is that as I've gone further on my career, I, I am a mentor to a number of startups from Stanford and UCSF, and many Stanford companies, many of them come with a very different problem than purely a biotech company. Since the pro bono work, I do this because I find by telling other people from their problem, I get to reflect on my own problem, and I do that on every quarter. There's one or two companies and I've been really privileged. I feel one of the greatest joys to meet with these great CEOs and Stanford has been a great collaborator. They have a program called Start X in which they have these companies that are participating in a accelerator program. And Stanford's accelerator is different and unique that they don't take any equity. They provide you the opportunity for mentorship. I was part of that program many years ago. So I meet with the CEOs and many of these CEOs will come very different problem. As an example, there is a company that's focused on artificial intelligence using interaction between a physician or healthcare provider and patient, and being able to use AI to streamline that interaction. That is a point that I saw of 10 years of clinical practice, how that communication is broken, literally is broken. Patients go to doctors, not because doctors are the world's greatest knowledge source, but patients at the end of day, they need someone to help them feel better, help them understand the problem that the physician can solve it. What ended up in being in today's healthcare system in the U. S. is that doctors have become mechanical and not because doctors are bad, because we are given these many things to document these many things to chart. If you talk to a physician, a primary care physician, many times the physician is sitting behind the computer screen. Those bedside manners are gone, like literally they are not there until you go into concierge medicine because the physician has to fill up this chart. I practice medicine. So understanding how this company and this CEO, this entrepreneur is trying to solve that problem, I lean back to the years of clinical practice. Then I lean back to the building the company. They're prioritizing it, having three priorities, having five priorities, and then being able to understand. And every company has some things which are similar, growth of your product development, continuing to advance the company, continuing to tell the story, attracting the right team members. It just gets magnified at a broader level. But the problems start similar, very similar. You know, think about when we talk about tech companies, Apple, the first thing they had to do, develop a product, then build a team, then sell the product, tell the, sell the vision, you know, and then continue to raise money. And that part is seems sometime very lonely. It also seems that I am uniquely burdened with these problems. And I always remind people, "You know, as much as you would like to think that you are unique. I assure you, it is not a problem that we are gifted with. We all have to face the same set of problems, sometimes more, sometimes less." So then you start to take them less personally. You start to say, "Okay, I'm not the first one to face this problem. These problems have happened to people like me before and they will overcome. How can I do it?" Then you'd become safe, a solution based thinking versus a place where you get overwhelmed with the problem because problems exist. And if anyone is listening to this podcast and if they've developed a started a company, I can assure you the problems come with a flood. They are not going to end ever. So it is disappointing. Sometime it feels that, "Oh my gosh, it is me versus the world," but it is not so. If you have good set of mentors, people who are not directly involved in day to day in your business, there are people who can help you think through it. And that is something that I find a great joy in talking to these CEOs, being able to help them understand the problem. And I say, you know, a couple of hours a month, but then when I go back to my own work, one that I realized this was the same problem I faced a few years ago. Two, it's a similar version of the problem I face at a slightly larger scale today. And three, being able to step out of from your own narrow zone, it gives you perspective. Then what I said to you about that problems are not, these are not personal problems. These are the problems we all face developing a product. It doesn't matter whether you healthcare. People tell me health care or product development is really hard. You talk to my colleagues, our CEOs who are running tech companies. Products in development and tech companies may seem easier, but to create a great product that truly solves customers problem, it's not easy. [00:30:30] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah, and well, I love that mentorship and sort of teaching and guiding, giving advice to the next generation is something is of a core value of yours and something you really care about. And it actually is a great segue into my next question, which is just pivoting the conversation for fun, imagine that you were to be offered a million dollars to teach a masterclass on anything you want. It can be within your industry, what you're doing right now, but it doesn't have to be. What would you choose to teach? [00:31:02] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: I think as much as we all feel that entrepreneurship is an external game, I think it's a lot of internal mindset, being able to understand yourself better. Being able to understand who you are, what are your true core values, what really drives you. It takes time and it requires a continuous interrogation, asking yourself, "Is this really what I enjoy?" Some of us feel it's a glamour that we feel like we want to be CEO. Some of us would be better off as a CTO, Chief Technology Officer. Some of us would not want to do startups. It's not for everybody. And it's okay because you can work in a bigger company and can be, you know, people talk about entrepreneurial pursued within a large organization. Maybe that's what for you. But being able to understand yourself, it's a very important part. And I think unfortunately, formal education does not help us no matter what degrees and which schools. And it really doesn't matter whether you a science degree, MD, PhD, or your business school degree like MBA, we're all very uniquely different, and we have different values. What one person sees inspired by, for somebody else, it may be a nightmare, you know. It's a thing that people think that startups are so much fun. I read a joke. It says, "People leave 9 to 5 job to work from 5 to 9, which is 5 a. m. to 9 p. m." So I think that's because this is some truth to it. And I've said to people again and again that if making money is your objective, please don't go as to run a startup. It is probably the worst way to think about pursuing the financial part. You do something because you have a faith and belief in something. And it doesn't have to be the faith about changing humanity. It's about something that you have a unique skill set or unique product idea that you believe you can bring to the marketplace. The biggest focus we all can have is making an impact. If I can serve a large number of patients, I can serve a large physician, I will have a product that will make money, therefore, that will make money for enterprise that will make money for investors. And therefore, as a company, we will make money. It's a very simple truth, but we like to make it complicated. I really mean it. The more I got to understand this part of the process better, which goes back to the basic thing that I said to you, if you said that you have a master class, the one thing I will say to you, it's spend time to understand yourself. And it's okay to realize that what I thought I like, I don't like it. The part that I talked to you about flow, it takes efforts. I've had many careers, but when I work in my company, the time can stop for four or five hours, literally we can be working on something. And I have a team and it's not just me alone. I have a team that when we think about a problem, these are people who have spent three decades in working in different companies, large, small, many size companies, we could work cohesively, collectively, think about a problem. And that to me, it's a joy. For me, that is a creation, right? You know, we're thinking about the problem, which may be a design of a clinical trial, because we have to think we have to use brains. And I always say, "God gave us a gift, which is a neuron. So use it, let's use them." And challenge yourself, right? And the challenge in a good way, not be a condescending ending jerk and say "No, how could you do it?" I try to say to people, "Look, I understand this is how it is done, but I want to do two things. Number one, please believe me that we can do better, faster, cheaper. And number two, I promise you that whatever I'm telling you, I'm not going to tell you and walk out of the conference room. I will work hand to hand." We call it a hand to hand combat is essentially that I'm not just telling you I'm going to work with you. I want to find the solution, but we can't do that thing that are you used to. Every trial, people tell me it's going to take 18 months, 12 months, it's going to cost as much. We shrink that thing timeline cost by not 10, 20%. We talking 50%. And these are people have done this before. So, so I need the courage to be honest and say, "No, we can't do it. We have to do it faster, better, cheaper, but how?" And then asking them. So, I say, "It's okay that we walk away and we don't have a clue. It's okay. Today's Thursday. Let's come back. Take three days to think about it." But the reason is that because when you ask yourself from a place that I can't do it, the mind is start to find solution versus when you say, no, I can't do it. Because in that case, it's a subconscious mind that keeps on giving you 15 reasons why you can't do it. People talk about growth mindset. I've always said to people, "We may not be able to do this thing today, but the understanding that with a little bit of help, a little bit of patience, a little bit of it, making ourself better, we can become that company, we can become that organization." And that really requires challenging ourself. And that's where I went back to. I want to go back to this question you asked earlier. People talk a lot about entrepreneurship as if it is some very specific skill set. I think because if you know yourself, you know what is your true zone is, then you want to surround yourself places that you are either not good at, or you don't enjoy doing it, right? In the beginning, it is just you and a vast amount of problems to face. Then you start to build your team. Then you start to see yourself, "You know, maybe Bob can do this work. I really, I'm not that good at it. I don't like doing it." Then you start to rely and surround yourself with not same skill set, but the people who are complementary skill set. And that's how you build a team. That's the foundation of team. Then you build trust and you say to Bob, "Whatever you do, it's not your fault. I'm here to protect you." You don't point fingers at each other. We always remind the example of Navy SEAL. You know, I've never worked in the US Army. I was not an Army veteran, but the ethos that Navy SEAL uses where the team wins, I always tell people we are a winning team. We are not looking for MVPs, you know, because the teams win. Teams create products, teams create value. Individual glories is not useful and this is something you have to keep reminding us that we keep drilling it down and say " No, it's not Bob. It's not John. It's not James. It's us. It's as a team." Again, as you grow through the company stages, your skill set has to continue to evolve and people always say, "Well, how do you lead a team?" The first thing that I always said, "Every single person in my team, you are a leader. Why? You wake up in the morning, brush your teeth. You're leading yourself." Really! Like, what do you do with your day? If you happen to be a parent or partner, a spouse or somebody, you have people you influence around yourself, right? So instead of worrying about, "Oh, you know, I want to lead a company." First, you have to lead yourself and you have to lead with courage. It's starting a company, building a company, right? Yeah. No matter what the media tells you, it is hard. It's hard to develop a product. It's hard because the challenges are not one or two. There are many. Being able to drill down, saying "These are the three things I'll focus on. These are the only things that matter." And then if something new comes up, you have to face that challenge and put the third in your list. It comes in a different page. You know, I use this basic exercise. I have a notebook, a physical notebook and not electronic one, and a piece of paper. What are the top three priorities? And then the other part is that I've asked people to do this exercise when startup companies, CEOs come and tell me all their problems, all the things they want to do. I said, "Humor me if you will. This is the end of the year. And let's say today is we are in 2025. What would you like to tell yourself a year from now? If everything happened the best you could imagine, how many customers, how many products, what will be the stage of product, who would have funded you? Who are the people behind you?" And I asked him to write in a whiteboard. And I say, imagine, no, this is the five thing. If they write 25 things, I say, "No, this is down to five things. What are those five things you would like?" And again, everything has just gone and you can't believe you're sitting there. What will it take? Is it this? And then you start to have a goalpost, right? It's a target. Then you work backward. [00:39:37] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's great. That is such great advice. So thank you, first of all, for sharing, but I think in general, your masterclass would be so much-- you'd have to have a full day or more. That's great though. I love that. How would you wish to be remembered after you leave this world? [00:39:57] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: That's a very good question. That's one that I ask myself every day. The most important thing for me is to be who I am to make a difference for people who are around me. For me, my family is very important. I have kids and I always think about it. What will my children remember? Then it comes down to people who work with me. We want to give an experience to people. I've had people who have worked for I keep saying it two or three decades. My true wish is that I always say for whatever time they work at Unicycive, I want them to be remembering this is the best time they work for a company and that is the best hope we can do it. Because as a entrepreneur, if I can make our company the best experience, best environment, then that creates the best products. And a company like us, we realize that we are going to face challenges and it's not a question of this, the question is how many challenges. The question is not going to be, "Will the challenge defeat us?" The question is, "How do we overcome the challenges?" So it's about growth mindset, having a very distinct, clear vision and empowering people. And last thing is that what we do in healthcare affects millions of people people. Our drug is not going to be just in the U. S. We have partnerships outside U. S. We think about patients in China, South Korea, Southeast Asia. We are talking to companies in Europe. It's an opportunity to make a difference globally. And that is what keeps us going. That's what, you know, when that's when I talk with flow, that is what makes you want to work, whether it's a weekend or whether it's a late evening. And I think that is something which we all need to do to find something that is meaningful. And meaning means different things to different people in different phases of life. So it doesn't have to be, you know, I tell even my own team member, " Unicycive does not have to be the purpose of your life, but let me help you to manifest your best version so you can work well, because you are working here, you are spending your time, might as well make it meaningful for you and for the company." So finding that balance is key and it's a constant challenge. I never take anything for granted. It's a constant to my own team members. How can we make it better? You know, people always say the company grows and we started with the company. We went to IPO with one person. That was just me as an employee, which is not a common thing. I frankly don't know any other company that I've ever seen that went to a straight IPO with one employee. But that wasn't about me. It was about building the company, building the team. Today, we have 25 or so more, but it's still a small team. And people always ask me, "How do we go from 25 to 50 and it still remain the same." I said "Exactly how we became 5 to 10 to 15, 15 to 20." Because if you keep the culture same, focus same, and you remind people that it's not about who we are individually, but it's what we could be collectively. And you have it going and you know, something you're passionate about, you will give all that you got and then some more or else there is not worth fighting for because life is hard and building a product developing a technology or running a company is hard. So, either you are a full believer or else you can't do it. I mean, if you can do it, it's going to be miserable on both front. You want to do a good job and you will find it very difficult. So. [00:43:24] Lindsey Dinneen: Yeah. Indeed. Yeah. Excellent. Well, and then final question. What is one thing that makes you smile every time you see or think about it? [00:43:36] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: I think when you look back on the challenges that you once thought were unsurmountable, and then you say to yourself, "Huh, that was just a curve in the road, not a roadblock." Then you start to smile because of not because how smart you are, but how much together a team can accomplish. And you start to find, if you're working in a company setting, you start to feel that people start to feel empowered. My team says that you did it. I said, "No, we did it. I just showed you a judicious path, but you did it. I didn't do it. All I said to you is to change your framework." Because it's a framework. It's a mindset. And I keep saying about mindset because if you come with the idea that " No, I only, I need this much money, this much time, these many resources," you'll find you the subconscious mind keeps on validating those challenges. But if you say, "No, people like us have done it before I can do it, we can do it." And give them the time and space and say, "Look, you don't have to have an answer right now, but please go back and just think about it." Then they come back with the answer and they themselves surprised. But it truly requires a authenticity, a vulnerability, and being absolutely willing to fall on your face and get up and just fight again. And that's part people don't realize. People think about that every company is a smooth road up, but the companies go through the cycle. It's not when you're going up, it's what happens when you fall down. Can you pick yourself up? And it's not just with your team, but with your investors too. You know, we thought that we're going to file an NDA in 2020. You know, 2024, we had planned for everything and the whole thing was there, but we ended up in having to run an additional trial and then you have to communicate with integrity through transparency. This is what happened. This is what is there, but we can accomplish that. So then that all of all that helps you to look back a smile, laugh and say, "Okay, I accomplished that. We can do the next one." And that keeps the growth happening. And at the end of the day, we are not happy because we accomplished small things by doing small effort. Most of us as human beings want to be challenged in the right way and we feel joy in doing hard things that take a lot of efforts and once seemed just impossible to do it. And the question is, can you do it with your entire team, not just personally? And that's what inspires people. We want to be that company that people want to work for not because they need a job, not because we can take care of their 401k. I mean, those are a wonderful thing and I'm blessed that we can do all of that, because once upon a time, we didn't have any of that. So I don't take it for granted, it is something. But the fact is that what was the mission hasn't changed ever. And you know, that that is something which is worth pursuing it. And I think if people start to see that they can accomplish that, these challenges are not personal, that they are bound to come. And then they have a support group, you know, we all need somebody other than ourselves and people whom we are surrounded with somebody to hold our hand and say no, you fell down, but it's okay. You can get up. I think it's that support system, right? The more you can have it, the more different types of people you can relate to and call them friends, mentors, that helps. And I have tons and tons of them because my gosh, I mean, there are days seems like, how would I ever get out of this? As much as you may think that I have all the source of inspiration, but then if somebody else holds your hand, they say, no, you can do it. That is what gets you going to the next step. [00:47:25] Lindsey Dinneen: Absolutely. Well, goodness, this has been an amazing conversation, just packed full of incredible, helpful advice, and just very practical down to earth sharing. So thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate everything you're doing to, to make an impact. So thanks again for your time. [00:47:44] Dr. Shalabh Gupta: Thank you very much. Thank you for hosting me and thank you for your time and interest. Really appreciate it. [00:47:49] Lindsey Dinneen: Of course. We are so honored to be making a donation on your behalf today to Feeding America, which works to end hunger in the United States by partnering with food banks, food pantries, and local food programs to bring food to people facing hunger. And also they advocate for policies that create long term solutions to hunger. So thank you so much for choosing that charity to support, and we just wish you the most continued success as you work to change lives for a better world. And thank you also to our listeners for tuning in. And if you're feeling as inspired as I am right now, I'd love it if you'd share this episode with a colleague or two, and we will catch you next time. [00:48:31] Ben Trombold: The Leading Difference is brought to you by Velentium. Velentium is a full-service CDMO with 100% in-house capability to design, develop, and manufacture medical devices from class two wearables to class three active implantable medical devices. Velentium specializes in active implantables, leads, programmers, and accessories across a wide range of indications, such as neuromodulation, deep brain stimulation, cardiac management, and diabetes management. Velentium's core competencies include electrical, firmware, and mechanical design, mobile apps, embedded cybersecurity, human factors and usability, automated test systems, systems engineering, and contract manufacturing. Velentium works with clients worldwide, from startups seeking funding to established Fortune 100 companies. Visit velentium.com to explore your next step in medical device development.

Dr. Shalabh Gupta is the founder of Unicycive, a biotech company working to simplify treatment for dialysis patients. He's also a physician, former Genentech executive, and someone who thinks deeply about careers, leadership, and the role of AI in healthcare. In this episode, we cover the problem of pill burden, how to reverse engineer your ... Read more The post Dr. Shalabh Gupta | Unicycive Founder on Biotech, Careers, Pill Burden, AI in Healthcare | EP188 appeared first on KazSource.

"Every technology has a shelf life. It's just true, right? And, so, is that shelf life years? Is it months? Is it weeks? Is it days? You know, has it actually already been surpassed? That's just progress, right? That's great” In this episode, Johnny Hu, Principal at Menlo Ventures, unpacks his journey through neuroscience research at Genentech and Cambridge, the electrifying early days of CRISPR, and the fast-moving Boston biotech scene, revealing how academic culture, tool-building, and intentional company culture fuel breakthrough innovation. He offers a candid look at bridging academia and industry, the realities of risk and execution in biotech startups, and the collaborative and competitive dynamics of venture investing—showing what it really takes to thrive where science, startups, and investment meet.

Editor's Note: This interview was recorded shortly before the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting. Big questions associated with ESR1 mutations in patients with hormone receptor–positive breast cancer may soon have answers. New data are “going to take the whole breast oncology field from one place and put it in a different place. It's going to be an inflection point in our history of treating breast cancer,” says Jason Aboudi Mouabbi, MD, assistant professor in the Department of Breast Medical at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Speaking with Robert A. Figlin, MD, the interim director of Cedars-Sinai Cancer in Los Angeles and Steven Spielberg Family Chair in Hematology-Oncology, Dr. Mouabbi outlined current challenges in identifying and responding to the development of ESR1 mutations. Dr. Figlin and Dr. Mouabbi also discussed how eagerly anticipated findings may transform practice and important aspects of mutational testing to consider. Dr. Mouabbi reported consulting fees from GE Healthcare, Genentech, AstraZeneca, Gilead, Novartis, Fresenius Kabi, BostonGene, and Cardinal Health. Dr. Figlin reported various financial relationships.

“Every startup starts the journey at zero, and you're just building from scratch. Day by day, you do a little bit better, and eventually, you look back and realize how far you've come.” In this episode of The Biotech Startups Podcast, we dive into the formative journey of Johnny Hu, Principal at Menlo Ventures, tracing his path from a childhood spent on a UK university campus to the heart of biotech investing. Johnny shares how early exposure to academia, a move to Alabama near NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, and a deep curiosity for science and business shaped his worldview. He reflects on pivotal moments—from hands-on research in structural biology at Harvard and a summer at Genentech, to witnessing the evolution of biotech tools and infrastructure. Throughout, Johnny offers candid insights on the power of mentorship, the non-linear nature of discovery, and the incremental progress that fuels both scientific breakthroughs and startup success.

Welcome to HCPLive's 5 Stories in Under 5—your quick, must-know recap of the top 5 healthcare stories from the past week, all in under 5 minutes. Stay informed, stay ahead, and let's dive into the latest updates impacting clinicians and healthcare providers like you! Interested in a more traditional, text rundown? Check out the HCPFive! Top 5 Healthcare Headlines for May 12-18, 2025. FDA Approves Once-Daily Roflumilast (ZORYVE) Foam 0.3% for Scalp and Body Psoriasis The FDA approved once-daily roflumilast (Zoryve) foam 0.3% for treating plaque psoriasis on the scalp and body in patients aged 12 and older. This marks the fifth overall indication for roflumilast, adding to its existing approvals in psoriasis and atopic dermatitis. FDA Warns About Rare, Severe Itching After Stopping Cetirizine or Levocetirizine The FDA issued a warning about severe pruritus that can occur after stopping long-term cetirizine or levocetirizine use. Manufacturers will be required to add a label warning noting that symptoms may improve if the medications are restarted. FDA Approves Susvimo for Treatment of Diabetic Retinopathy The FDA approved Genentech's Susvimo, a ranibizumab delivery system, as the first continuous refillable treatment for diabetic retinopathy. Susvimo offers sustained vision maintenance with refills needed only once every nine months. Olezarsen Cuts Triglyceride Levels at 6 Months in Essence Study The Essence study showed olezarsen significantly reduced triglyceride levels in patients with moderate hypertriglyceridemia at ASCVD risk. Monthly doses achieved about 60% reductions, with most patients reaching normal triglyceride levels after six months. Ruxoprubart Shows Efficacy for PNH in Interim Phase 2 Trial Results Interim Phase 2 results showed ruxoprubart met all primary efficacy endpoints in adults with paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria. The therapy led to transfusion avoidance, improved hemoglobin, reduced LDH, and increased PNH clone size at 12 weeks.

How do you help your child go from knowing they have a food allergy to actually managing it in everyday life? This is the stage when everything starts to shift. Between the ages of 5 and 11, your child is learning how to describe symptoms, speak up at school, and navigate birthday parties. They're also watching you closely and picking up how to talk about food allergies based on how you do it. In this episode of our Food Allergy Stages & Stages Series, pediatric allergist and immunologist Dr. Dave Stukus joins Kortney and Dr. Payel Gupta to talk about how food allergy care changes in the early school years.  What we cover in our episode about managing food allergies in ages 5 to 11: Build awareness early. Teach kids to name their allergens, recognize symptoms, and use simple words to describe how they feel. Model safe behavior. Kids learn by watching you read labels, ask questions, and stay calm. Normalize epinephrine. Practice with a trainer and talk about it openly so it feels familiar, not scary. Prepare for real-life situations. From school to parties, give kids scripts and strategies to feel confident and included. Support emotional wellness. Watch for signs of anxiety and help your child feel empowered, not afraid. Episode 4 in our “Food Allergies: Ages & Stages” series  Across six episodes, we explore how food allergies show up and shift through different phases of life, from introducing solids in infancy to navigating school and adapting in adulthood. We're here with evidence-based info, expert insights, and lived experience to guide you through it all. Episode 1: Early Allergen Introduction (Ep. 110) Episode 2: Food Allergy Basics for Newly Diagnosed Families (Ep. 111) Episode 3: Managing Food Allergies in Babies and Toddlers (Ep. 112) Made in partnership with the Allergy & Asthma Network. Thanks to Genentech and Aqestive for sponsoring today's episode. This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not substitute professional medical advice. Always consult with your healthcare provider for any medical concerns.   Timestamps 01:42 Breaking down food allergy care by age group 02:58 What kids need to know about living with food allergies 04:47 Sharing allergy information without creating fear 06:40 Talking to children about symptoms 08:40 What to tell kids about epinephrine 11:04 Helping kids without passing on fear or anxiety 13:18 Mental health signs related to food allergies 16:04 Managing allergens in the home environment 19:50 The pros and cons of allergy tables at school 21:42 Communicating with schools and daycares 25:29 Preparing for parties and sleepovers 27:33 Final tips for parenting kids with food allergies (ages 5–11)

Next-generation anti-VEGF agents are designed for durability. But does that actually change the rate at which they're administered? David Miller, MD, joins us to review a pair of ARVO 2025 presentations that examined his clinic's real-world administration patterns for bevacizumab (Avastin, Genentech), faricimab (Vabysmo, Genentech/Roche), and high-dose aflibercept (Eylea HD, Regeneron). What were the differences—and did they really matter?  Also, Robert Wang, MD, helped us understand the state of play in the TKI pipeline as he shared data from the phase 2b ODYSSEY study. What are the latest data on CLX-AX (Clearside Biomedcial)? And where does it stack up against the other TKIs in the pipeline? Stick with us to find out. 

Good morning from Pharma and Biotech daily: the podcast that gives you only what's important to hear in Pharma and Biotech world.Moderna has withdrawn its application for a combination flu and COVID-19 vaccine after discussions with the FDA. The vaccine had shown efficacy in eliciting antibodies, but the company decided to pull the application. In the biotech market, executives from NextGen companies discussed strategies for surviving in what they described as a "moribund" market during a webinar. Biospace's nextgen companies are thriving in a challenging biotech market. Executives discuss survival strategies in the webinar "Are We There Yet?" Pfizer's $6 billion China deal stands out in a competitive market, with Novartis' $4 billion partnership following closely. Biopharma companies are facing pressure to cut assets early due to rising development costs and regulatory hurdles. Lotte Biologics offers specialized end-to-end services at its ADC facility in Syracuse, NY. Other top stories include the FDA's new risk-based approach to COVID-19 vaccines, Genentech's investment in Orionis, and Bio-Rad's new center for excellence for biotherapeutic antibody discovery. Roche's Genentech recently did not win adcomm backing for an expansion. Pfizer has made a deal in China, and RFK claims ignorance about HHS research cuts during a hearing. The top 5 most active corporate VCs in pharma are also highlighted. Additionally, upcoming events and job opportunities in the biotech industry are featured.In conclusion, the biotech market is presenting challenges for companies, but there are opportunities for growth and strategic partnerships. Stay tuned for more updates on regulatory changes, investment deals, and industry trends in the world of Pharma and Biotech. Thank you for listening to Pharma and Biotech daily.

This featured podcast includes a discussion with 3 experts on managing patients with hormone receptor–positive/HER2-negative (HR+/HER2–) metastatic breast cancer (mBC) from a satellite symposium held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual Miami Breast Cancer Conference® in March 2025. In observational studies of treatment patterns in older women with mBC, approximately half of the patients were undertreated, and only half received a CDK4/6 inhibitor (CDK4/6i)-based regimen in the first-line setting. Reasons for undertreatment include concerns about the patient's age, perceived frailty, and underlying health issues. Aging is a heterogeneous process; older patients must receive individualized treatment that is not based solely on their age but on a comprehensive assessment that objectively assesses their overall health and ability to tolerate treatment. This program is designed to help clinicians assess the fitness of older patients with HR+/HER2– mBC, review the efficacy and safety of CDK4/6i in this patient population, and individualize treatment decision-making appropriately. Acknowledgment of Educational Grant Support This activity is supported by an educational grant from Pfizer Inc. Today's faculty are: Hope S. Rugo, MD Director, Women's Cancers Program Division Chief, Breast Medical Oncology Professor, Department of Medical Oncology & Therapeutics Research City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center Duarte, CA Professor Emeritus, UCSF Disclosures: Grant/Research Support: Ambrx; AstraZeneca; Daiichi Sankyo, Inc; F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG/Genentech, Inc; Gilead Sciences, Inc; Lilly; Merck & Co., Inc; Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation; OBI Pharma; Pfizer; Stemline Therapeutics. Consultant: Napo Therapeutics; Puma Biotechnology; Sanofi. Honoraria: Chugai; Mylan/Viatris. Neil M. Iyengar, MD Associate Attending, Breast Medicine Service Program Lead, MSK Healthy Living Department of Medicine Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Associate Professor of Medicine Weill Cornell Medical College New York, NY Disclosures: Consultant/Adviser: Arvinas, AstraZeneca, BD Life Sciences, Daiichi Sankyo, Genentech/Roche, Gilead, Menarini-Stemline, Novartis, Pfizer, Puma, Seagen, TerSera Therapeutics. Speaker: Cardinal Health, Curio Sciences, DAVA Oncology, IntrinsiQ Health. Editorial Position: npj Breast Cancer, Oncology®. Equity/Ownership: Complement Theory, Bettering Company. Research Support (to institution): American Cancer Society, Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Conquer Cancer Foundation, Kat's Ribbon of Hope, National Cancer Institute/National Institutes of Health. Contracted Research: Novartis, SynDevRx. Komal Jhaveri, MD, FACP Patricia and James Cayne Chair for Junior Faculty Associate Attending Physician, Breast Medicine Service and Early Drug Development Service Section Head, Endocrine Therapy Research Program Clinical Director, Early Drug Development Service Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine Weill Cornell Medical College New York, NY Disclosures: Consultant/Advisory Board: AbbVie Inc, AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP, Blueprint Medicines, Bristol Myers Squibb, Daiichi Sankyo Inc, Eisai Inc, Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, Gilead Sciences Inc, Jounce Therapeutics, Loxo Oncology Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of Eli Lilly & Company, Menarini Group, Novartis, Olema Oncology, Pfizer Inc, Scorpion Therapeutics, Seagen Inc, Stemline Therapeutics Inc, Sun Pharma Advanced Research Company Ltd, Taiho Oncology Inc. Research Funding: AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP, Debiopharm, Genentech, a member of the Roche Group, Gilead Sciences Inc, Loxo Oncology Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of Eli Lilly & Company, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer Inc, Puma Biotechnology Inc, Scorpion Therapeutics, Zymeworks Inc. The staff of Physicians' Education Resource®, LLC, have no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies. PER® mitigated all COI for faculty, staff, and planners prior to the start of this activity by using a multistep process. Off-Label Disclosure and Disclaimer This activity may or may not discuss investigational, unapproved, or off-label use of drugs. Learners are advised to consult prescribing information for any products discussed. The information provided in this accredited activity is for continuing education purposes only and is not meant to substitute for the independent clinical judgment of a health care professional relative to diagnostic, treatment, or management options for a specific patient's medical condition. The opinions expressed in the content are solely those of the individual faculty members and do not reflect those of PER® or any company that provided commercial support for this activity.

How do you keep a baby or toddler safe with food allergies when they put everything in their mouths and can't yet explain how they feel? This stage of life is full of firsts, not just for your child, but for you as a parent managing food allergies. From introducing new foods to navigating daycare and watching for reactions in a child who can't speak yet, there are countless moments you'll need to manage. This episode focuses on building safe habits early, empowering caregivers, and showing how simple routines (like label reading or toy wiping) can make a big difference. Allergist Dr. Basil Kahwash joins Kortney and Dr. Payel Gupta to explore how food allergy care evolves from infancy through preschool. They cover real-life, practical strategies from wiping toys and watching for symptoms to managing daycare risks and building early self-advocacy skills. What we cover in our episode about managing food allergies in toddlers: Why age matters. Babies, toddlers, and preschoolers each need different safety strategies. What symptoms look like. Learn how reactions can show up in babies who can't talk. Introducing new foods. Why early introduction still matters even after a new food allergy diagnosis. Daycare safety tips. How to prep caregivers and keep your child protected. Building habits early. From label reading to toy wiping, young kids learn by watching you. Episode 3 in our “Food Allergies: Ages & Stages” series  Across six episodes, we explore how food allergies show up and shift through different phases of life, from introducing solids in infancy to navigating school and adapting in adulthood. We're here with evidence-based info, expert insights, and lived experience to guide you through it all. Episode 1: Early Allergen Introduction (Ep. 110) Episode 2: Food Allergy Basics for Newly Diagnosed Families (Ep. 111) Episodes to build a better food allergy foundation: Episode 59: What is Anaphylaxis and When to Use Epinephrine Episode 95: The Science Behind Allergic Reactions Episode. 97: The Nuances of Food Allergy Testing  Episode 98: Food Allergy Treatment and Management   Made in partnership with The Allergy & Asthma Network. Thanks to Genentech and Acuqestive for sponsoring today's episode.  This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not substitute professional medical advice. Always consult with your healthcare provider for any medical concerns.

This Oncology PER®Spectives™ podcast explores the role of EZH2 in metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (mCRPC) progression and its synergy with androgen receptor inhibitors. In this podcast, experts Neeraj Agarwal, MD, FASCO; Himisha Beltran, MD; and Maha Hussain, MD, FACP, FASCO, discuss the management of mCRPC. Acknowledgment of Educational Grant Support This activity is supported by an educational grant from Pfizer Inc. Accreditation/Credit Designation Physicians' Education Resource®, LLC, is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing medical education for physicians. Physicians' Education Resource®, LLC, designates this enduring material for a maximum of 1.5 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity. Physicians' Education Resource®, LLC is approved by the California Board of Registered Nursing, Provider #16669, for 1.5 Contact Hours. Instructions on How to Receive Credit Listen to this podcast in its entirety. Go to gotoper.com/credit and enter code: 6947 Answer the evaluation questions. Request credit using the drop-down menu. You may immediately download your certificate. Today's faculty are: Neeraj Agarwal, MD, FASCO Professor of Medicine Senior Director for Clinical Research HCI Presidential Endowed Chair of Cancer Research Director, Center of Investigational Therapeutics Director, Genitourinary Oncology Program Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah (NCI-CCC) Salt Lake City, UT Disclosures: Grant/Research Support (paid to institution): Arvinas, Astellas, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Bristol Myers Squibb, Calithera, Celldex, Clovis, Crispr, Eisai, Eli Lilly, EMD Serono, Exelixis, Genentech, Gilead, GlaxoSmithKline, Immunomedics, Janssen, Lava, Merck, Nektar, Neoleukin, Novartis, Oric, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, Seagen, Takeda, Tra-con Himisha Beltran, MD Associate Professor of Medicine Director of Translational Research Within Medical Oncology Harvard Medical School Lank Center for Genitourinary Oncology and the Division of Molecular and Cellular Oncology Dana Farber Cancer Institute Boston, MA Disclosures: Grant/Research Support: Circle Pharma, Daiichi Sankyo, Novartis; Adviser: Amgen, AstraZeneca, Daiichi Sankyo, Novartis Maha Hussain, MD, FACP, FASCO Genevieve E. Teuton Professor of Medicine Professor, Medicine (Hematology/Oncology) Deputy Director Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine Chicago, IL Disclosures: Advisory Board: AstraZeneca, Bayer, Convergent Therapeutics, Honoraria: AstraZeneca, Bayer The staff of Physicians' Education Resource®, LLC, have no relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies. PER® mitigated all COI for faculty, staff, and planners prior to the start of this activity by using a multistep process. Off-Label Disclosure and Disclaimer This activity may or may not discuss investigational, unapproved, or off-label use of drugs. Learners are advised to consult prescribing information for any products discussed. The information provided in this accredited activity is for continuing education purposes only and is not meant to substitute for the independent clinical judgment of a health care professional relative to diagnostic, treatment, or management options for a specific patient's medical condition. The opinions expressed in the content are solely those of the individual faculty members and do not reflect those of PER® or any company that provided commercial support for this activity. Release Date May 14, 2025 Expiration Date May 14, 2026

Good morning from Pharma and Biotech daily: the podcast that gives you only what's important to hear in Pharma e Biotech world.Bayer has announced a restructuring that will result in 2,000 job cuts and a reduction in management layers. CEO Bill Anderson believes Trump's most favored nations policy could provide an opportunity for European countries to contribute more to biopharma innovation. Galapagos has abandoned plans for a spinout and cell therapy, causing a stir in the industry. Trump's most favored nation policy has led to a sell-off of PBMs, but analysts believe it may not have a significant impact without further congressional action. Sino Biological offers solutions for autoimmune diseases, with reagents for nearly 50 different conditions. In other news, CMS is preparing for a new cycle of drug negotiations, Azafaros has raised $150 million for rare neuro-metabolic diseases, and Roche's Genentech is investing $700 million in a North Carolina plant. 10x Genomics has cut 8% of its workforce, and there are upcoming webinars on biotech downturns and AI in life science R&D. Job opportunities include positions at 4D Molecular Therapeutics, Takeda, and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals.

Tessa Faye Flores, MD, Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Buffalo, NY Recorded on April 24, 2025 Tessa Faye Flores, MD Medical Director, Cancer Screening and Survivorship Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center Buffalo, NY We are pleased to celebrate the 100th episode of Treating Blood Cancers with Dr. Tessa Flores from Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, as she shares insights into survivorship care. In this episode, Dr. Flores explores the different phases of survivorship and the psychosocial challenges that accompany each stage. She highlights the vital role of a collaborative care team, including primary care practitioners, in supporting survivors of cancer to achieve and maintain a healthy post-treatment life. As the number of survivors continues to grow, the focus on long-term wellness becomes increasingly important. Dr. Flores emphasizes, “A tenet of survivorship care is preventive care”. Tune in for this special episode and join the conversation today! This episode is supported by Genentech, A Member of the Roche Group. Additional Episodes on Survivorship Care:

Just diagnosed with a food allergy and feeling lost? You're not alone and don't have to figure out food allergy life by yourself. We're here to help you understand food allergy basics: what causes allergic reactions, how to recognize symptoms, and how to manage your allergy safely, every day. This is the second episode in our Food Allergies: Ages & Stages, and it's all about building a strong foundation after a new diagnosis. Whether it's your child, your partner, or you who was recently diagnosed, Kortney and Dr. Payel Gupta walk through everything you need to know in those early days. From understanding how allergic reactions work to learning about life-saving tools like epinephrine, and new management options like OIT and omalizumab. Dr. G explains what causes your immune system to misfire, how fast symptoms can appear, and why no two reactions are the same. We also dive into real-life strategies like carrying your epinephrine device, knowing when and how to use it, and navigating social situations. Plus, Kortney shares personal tips that have helped her live safely with food allergies for over 30 years. What we cover in our episode about managing a new food allergy diagnosis What just happened?! We explain what causes allergic reactions, including the roles of IgE, histamine, and mast cells. Are all allergic reactions the same? Learn how quickly reactions can occur and why symptoms aren't always predictable. Why is epinephrine so important? When to use epinephrine, how to use it, and why antihistamines aren't enough. New options to help manage food allergies. A look at treatments like OIT and omalizumab (Xolair) and why you still need to carry your epi. Peace of mind with an action plan. What to include in a Food Allergy Action Plan and how to help others take your allergy seriously. Episode 2 in our “Food Allergies: Ages & Stages” series  Across six episodes, we explore how food allergies show up and shift through different phases of life, from introducing solids in infancy to navigating school and adapting in adulthood. We're here with evidence-based info, expert insights, and lived experience to guide you through it all. Episodes mentioned to help build your foundation: Episode 59: What is Anaphylaxis and When to Use Epinephrine Episode 95: The Science Behind Allergic Reactions Episode 98: Food Allergy Treatment and Management Ep. 110: Early Introduction of Allergenic Foods – Preventing Food Allergies Before They Start Made in partnership with The Allergy & Asthma Network. Thanks to Genentech and Acuqestive for sponsoring today's episode.  This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not substitute professional medical advice. Always consult with your healthcare provider for any medical concerns.

Host Dr. Nate Pennell and his guest, Dr. Chloe Atreya, discuss the ASCO Educational Book article, “Integrative Oncology: Incorporating Evidence-Based Approaches to Patients With GI Cancers,” highlighting the use of mind-body approaches, exercise, nutrition, acupuncture/acupressure, and natural products. Transcript Dr. Nate Pennell: Welcome to ASCO Education: By the Book, our new monthly podcast series that will feature engaging discussions between editors and authors from the ASCO Educational Book. We'll be bringing you compelling insights on key topics featured in Education Sessions at ASCO meetings and some deep dives on the approaches shaping modern oncology.  I'm Dr. Nate Pennell, director of the Cleveland Clinic Lung Cancer Medical Oncology Program as well as vice chair of clinical research for the Taussig Cancer Institute. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Chloe Atreya, a professor of Medicine in the GI Oncology Group at the University of California, San Francisco, Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Health, to discuss her article titled, “Integrative Oncology Incorporating Evidence-Based Approaches to Patients With GI Cancers”, which was recently published in the ASCO Educational Book. Our full disclosures are available in the transcript of this episode.  Dr. Atreya, it's great to have you on the podcast today. Thanks for joining me. Dr. Chloe Atreya: Thanks Dr. Pennell. It's a pleasure to be here. Dr. Nate Pennell: Dr. Atreya, you co-direct the UCSF Integrative Oncology Program with a goal to really help patients with cancer live as well as possible. And before we dive into the review article and guidelines, I'd love to just know a little bit about what inspired you to go into this field? Dr. Chloe Atreya: Yeah, thank you for asking. I've had a long-standing interest in different approaches to medicine from global traditions and I have a degree in pharmacology, and I continue to work on new drug therapies for patients with colorectal cancer. And one thing that I found is that developing new drugs is a long-term process and often we're not able to get the drugs to the patients in front of us. And so early on as a new faculty member at UCSF, I was trying to figure out what I could do for the patient in front of me if those new drug therapies may not be available in their lifetime. And one thing I recognized was that in some conversations the patient and their family members, even if the patient had metastatic disease, they were able to stay very present and to live well without being sidelined by what might happen in the future. And then in other encounters, people were so afraid of what might be happening in the future, or they may have regrets maybe about not getting that colonoscopy and that was eroding their ability to live well in the present.  So, I started asking the patients and family members who were able to stay present, “What's your secret? How do you do this?” And people would tell me, “It's my meditation practice,” or “It's my yoga practice.” And so, I became interested in this. And an entry point for me, and an entry point to the Osher Center at UCSF was that I took the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program to try to understand experientially the evidence for this and became very interested in it. I never thought I would be facilitating meditation for patients, but it became a growing interest. And as people are living longer with cancer and are being diagnosed at younger ages, often with young families, how one lives with cancer is becoming increasingly important.   Dr. Nate Pennell: I've always been very aware that it seemed like the patients that I treated who had the best quality of life during their life with cancer, however that ended up going, were those who were able to sort of compartmentalize it, where, when it was time to focus on discussing treatment or their scans, they were, you know, of course, had anxiety and other things that went along with that. But when they weren't in that, they were able to go back to their lives and kind of not think about cancer all the time. Whereas other people sort of adopt that as their identity almost is that they are living with cancer and that kind of consumes all of their time in between visits and really impacts how they're able to enjoy the rest of their lives. And so, I was really interested when I was reading your paper about how mindfulness seemed to be sort of like a formal way to help patients achieve that split. I'm really happy that we're able to talk about that. Dr. Chloe Atreya: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. So, each of our patients is more than their cancer diagnosis. And the other thing I would say is that sometimes patients can use the cancer diagnosis to get to, “What is it that I really care about in life?” And that can actually heighten an experience of appreciation for the small things in life, appreciation for the people that they love, and that can have an impact beyond their lifetime. Dr. Nate Pennell: Just in general, I feel like integrative medicine has come a long way, especially over the last decade or so. So, there's now mature data supporting the incorporation of elements of integrative oncology into comprehensive cancer care. We've got collaborations with ASCO. They've published clinical practice guidelines around diet, around exercise, and around the use of cannabinoids. ASCO has worked with the Society for Integrative Oncology to address management of pain, anxiety, depression, fatigue – lots of different evidence bases now to try to help guide people, because this is certainly something our patients are incredibly interested in learning about. Can you get our listeners up to speed a little bit on the updated guidelines and resources supporting integrative oncology? Dr. Chloe Atreya: Sure. I can give a summary of some of the key findings. And these are rigorous guidelines that came together by consensus from expert panels. I had the honor of serving on the anxiety and depression panel. So, these panels will rate the quality of the evidence available to come up with a strength of recommendation. I think that people are at least superficially aware of the importance of diet and physical activity and that cannabis and cannabinoids have evidence of benefit for nausea and vomiting. They may not be aware of some of the evidence supporting these other modalities. So, for anxiety and depression, mindfulness-based interventions, which include meditation and meditative movement, have the strongest level of evidence. And the clinical practice guidelines indicate that they should be offered to any adult patient during or after treatment who is experiencing symptoms of anxiety or depression. Other modalities that can help with anxiety and depression include yoga and Tai Chi or Qigong. And with the fatigue guidelines, mindfulness-based interventions are also strongly recommended, along with exercise and cognitive behavioral therapy, Tai Chi and Qigong during treatment, yoga after treatment.  And some of these recommendations also will depend on where the evidence is. So, yoga is an example of an intervention that I think can be helpful during treatment, but most of our evidence is on patients who are post-treatment. So, most of our guidelines separate out during treatment and the post-treatment phase because the quality of evidence may be different for these different phases of treatment.  With the pain guidelines, the strongest recommendation is for acupuncture, specifically for people with breast cancer who may be experiencing joint pain related to aromatase inhibitors. However, acupuncture and other therapies, including massage, can be helpful with pain as well. So those are a few of the highlights. Dr. Nate Pennell: Yeah, I was surprised at the really good level of evidence for the mindfulness-based practices because I don't think that's the first thing that jumps to mind when I think about integrative oncology. I tend to think more about physical interventions like acupuncture or supplements or whatnot. So, I think this is really fantastic that we're highlighting this.  And a lot of these interventions like the Qigong, Tai Chi, yoga, is it the physical practice of those that benefits them or is it that it gives them something to focus on, to be mindful of? Is that the most important intervention? It doesn't really matter what you're doing as long as you have something that kind of takes you out of your experience and allows you to focus on the moment. Dr. Chloe Atreya: I do think it is a mind, body and spirit integration, so that all aspects are important. We also say that the best practice is the one that you actually practice. So, part of the reason that it's important to have these different modalities is that not everybody is going to take up meditation. And there may be people for whom stationary meditation, sitting and meditating, works well, and other people for whom meditative movement practices may be what they gravitate to. And so, I think that it's important to have a variety of options. And one thing that's distinct from some of our pharmacologic therapies is that the safety of these is, you know, quite good. So, it becomes less important to say, “Overall, is Tai Chi better or is yoga better?” for instance. It really depends on what it is that someone is going to take up. Dr. Nate Pennell: And of course, something that's been really nice evidence-based for a long time, even back when I was in my training in the 2000s with Jennifer Temel at Massachusetts General Hospital, was the impact of physical activity and exercise on patients with cancer. It seems like that is pretty much a universally good recommendation for patients. Dr. Chloe Atreya: Yes, that's absolutely right. Physical activity has been associated with improved survival after a cancer diagnosis. And that's both cancer specific survival and overall survival.  The other thing I'll say about physical activity, especially the mindful movement practices like Tai Chi and Qigong and yoga, is that they induce physiologic shifts in the body that can promote relaxation, so they can dampen that stress response in a physiologic way. And these movement practices are also the best way to reduce cancer-associated fatigue. Dr. Nate Pennell: One of the things that patients are always very curious about when they talk to me, and I never really feel like I'm as well qualified as I'd like to be to advise them around dietary changes in nutrition. And can you take me a little bit through some of the evidence base for what works and what doesn't work? Dr. Chloe Atreya: Sure. I do think that it needs to be tailored to the patient's needs. Overall, a diet that is plant-based and includes whole grains is really important. And I often tell patients to eat the rainbow because all of those different phytochemicals that cause the different colors in our fruits and vegetables are supporting different gut microbiota. So that is a basis for a healthy gut microbiome. That said, you know, if someone is experiencing symptoms related to cancer or cancer therapy, it is important to tailor dietary approaches. This is where some of the mindful eating practices can help. So, sometimes actually not just focusing on what we eat, but how we eat can help with symptoms that are associated with eating. So, some of our patients have loss of appetite, and shifting one's relationship to food can help with nutrition. Sometimes ‘slow it down' practices can help both with appetite and with digestion. Dr. Nate Pennell: One of the things that you said both in the paper and just now on our podcast, talking about how individualized and personalized this is. And I really liked the emphasis that you had on flexibility and self-compassion over rigid discipline and prescriptive recommendations here. And this is perhaps one of the real benefits of having an integrative oncology team that can work with patients as opposed to them just trying to find things online. Dr. Chloe Atreya: Yes, particularly during treatment, I think that's really important. And that was borne out by our early studies we called “Being Present.” So, after I was observing the benefits anecdotally among my patients of the ability to be present, we designed these pilot studies to teach meditation and meditative practices to patients. And in these pilot studies, the original ones were pretty prescriptive in a way that mindfulness-based stress reduction is fairly prescriptive in terms of like, “This is what we're asking you to do. Just stick with the program.” And there can be benefits if you can stick with the program. It's really hard though if someone is going through treatment and with GI cancers, it may be that they're getting chemotherapy every two weeks and they have one week where they're feeling really crummy and another week where they're trying to get things done. And we realized that sometimes people were getting overwhelmed and feeling like the mindfulness practice was another thing on their to-do list and that they were failing if they didn't do this thing that was important for them. And so, we've really kind of changed our emphasis. And part of our emphasis now is on incorporating mindfulness practices into daily life. Any activity that doesn't require a lot of executive function can be done mindfully, meaning with full attention. And so, especially for some of our very busy patients, that can be a way of, again, shifting how I'm doing things rather than adding a new thing to do. Dr. Nate Pennell: And then another part I know that patients are always very curious about that I'm really happy to see that we're starting to build an evidence base for is the use of supplements and natural products. So, can you take us a little bit through where we stand in terms of evidence behind, say, cannabis and some of the other available products out there? Dr. Chloe Atreya: Yeah, I would say that is an area that requires a lot more study. It's pretty complicated because unlike mindfulness practices where there are few interactions with other treatments, there is the potential for interactions, particularly with the supplements. And the quality of the supplements matters. And then there tends to be a lot of heterogeneity among the studies both in the patients and what other treatments they may be receiving, as well as the doses of the supplements that they're receiving.  One of my earliest mentors at Yale is someone named Dr. Tommy Chang, who has applied the same rigor that that we apply to testing of biomedical compounds to traditional Chinese medicine formulas. And so, ensuring that the formulation is stable and then formally testing these formulations along with chemotherapy. And we need more funding for that type of research in order to really elevate our knowledge of these natural products. We often will direct patients to the Memorial Sloan Kettering ‘About Herbs, Botanicals, and Other Products' database as one accessible source to learn more about the supplements. We also work with our pharmacists who can provide the data that exists, but we do need to take it with a grain of salt because of the heterogeneity in the data. And then it's really important if people are going to take supplements, for them to take supplements that are of high quality. And that's something in the article that we list all of the things that one should look for on the label of a supplement to ensure that it is what it's billed to be. Dr. Nate Pennell: So, most of what we've been talking about so far has really been applying to all patients with cancer, but you of course are a GI medical oncologist, and this is a publication in the Educational Book from the ASCO GI Symposium. GI cancers obviously have an incredibly high and rising incidence rate among people under 50, representing a quarter of all cancer incidence worldwide, a third of cancer related deaths worldwide. Is there something specific that GI oncologists and patients with GI cancers can take home from your paper or is this applicable to pretty much everyone? Dr. Chloe Atreya: Yeah, so the evidence that we review is specifically for GI cancers. So, it shows both its strengths and also some of the limitations. So many of the studies have focused on other cancers, especially breast cancer. In the integrative oncology field, there are definitely gaps in studying GI cancers. At the same time, I would say that GI cancers are very much linked to lifestyle in ways that are complicated, and we don't fully understand. However, the best ways that we can protect against development of GI cancers, acknowledging that no one is to blame for developing a GI cancer and no one is fully protected, but the best things that we can do for overall health and to prevent GI cancers are a diet that is plant-based, has whole grains. There's some data about fish that especially the deep-water fish, may be protective and then engaging in physical activity.  One thing I would like for people to take away is that these things that we know that are preventative against developing cancer are also important after development of a GI cancer. Most of the data comes from studies of patients with colorectal cancer and that again, both cancer specific and overall mortality is improved with better diet and with physical activity. So, this is even after a cancer diagnosis. And I also think that, and this is hard to really prove, but we're in a pretty inflammatory environment right now. So, the things that we can do to decrease stress, improve sleep, decrease inflammation in the body, and we do know that inflammation is a risk factor for developing GI cancers. So, I think that all of the integrative modalities are important both for prevention and after diagnosis. Dr. Nate Pennell: And one of the things you just mentioned is that most of the studies looking at integrative oncology and GI cancers have focused on colorectal cancer, which of course, is the most common GI cancer. But you also have pointed out that there are gaps in research and what's going on and what needs to be done in order to broaden some of this experience to other GI cancers. Dr. Chloe Atreya: Yeah, and I will say that there are gaps even for colorectal cancer. So right now, some of the authors on the article are collaborating on a textbook chapter for the Society for Integrative Oncology. And so, we're again examining the evidence specifically for colorectal cancer and are in agreement that the level of evidence specific to colorectal cancer is not as high as it is for all patients with adult cancers. And so even colorectal cancer we need to study more.  Just as there are different phases of cancer where treatments may need to be tailored, we also may need to tailor our treatments for different cancer types. And that includes what symptoms the patients are commonly experiencing and how intense the treatment is, and also the duration of treatment. Those are factors that can influence which modalities may be most important or most applicable to a given individual. Dr. Nate Pennell: So, a lot of this sounds fantastic. It sounds like things that a lot of patients would really appreciate working into their care. Your article focused a little bit on some of the logistics of providing this type of care, including group medical visits, multidisciplinary clinics staffed by multiple types of clinicians, including APPs and psychologists, and talked about the sustainability of this in terms of increasing the uptake of guideline-based integrative oncology. Talk a little bit more about both at your institution, I guess, and the overall health system and how this might be both sustainable and perhaps how we broaden this out to patients outside of places like UCSF. Dr. Chloe Atreya: Yes, that's a major focus of our research effort. A lot of comprehensive cancer centers and other places where patients are receiving care, people may have access to dietitians, which is really important and nutritionists. In the article we also provide resources for working with exercise therapists and those are people who may be working remotely and can help people, for instance, who may be in, in rural areas. And then our focus with the mind-body practices in particular has been on group medical visits. And this grew out of, again, my ‘being present' pilot studies where we were showing some benefit. But then when the grant ends, there isn't a way to continue to deliver this care. And so, we were asking ourselves, you know, is there a way to make this sustainable? And group medical visits have been used in other settings, and they've been working really well at our institution and other institutions are now taking them up as well. And this is a way that in this case it's me and many of my colleagues who are delivering these, where I can see eight or ten patients at once. In my case, it's a series of four two-hour sessions delivered by telehealth. So, we're able to focus on the integrative practices in a way that's experiential. So, in the clinic I may be able to mention, you know, after we go over the CT scans, after we go over the labs and the molecular profiling, you know, may be able to say, “Hey, you know, meditation may be helpful for your anxiety,” but in the group medical visits we can actually practice meditation, we can practice chair yoga. And that's where people have that experience in their bodies of these different modalities. And the feedback that we're receiving is that that sticks much more to experience it then you have resources to continue it. And then the group is helpful both in terms of delivery, so timely and efficient care for patients. It's also building community and reducing the social isolation that many of our patients undergoing treatment for cancer experience. Dr. Nate Pennell: I think that makes perfect sense, and I'm glad you brought up telehealth as an option. I don't know how many trained integrative oncologists there are out there, but I'm going to guess this is not a huge number out there. And much like other specialties that really can improve patients' quality of life, like palliative medicine, for example, not everyone has access to a trained expert in their cancer center, and things like telemedicine and telehealth can really potentially broaden that. How do you think telehealth could help broaden the exposure of cancer patients and even practitioners of oncology to integrative medicine? Dr. Chloe Atreya: Yes, I think that telehealth is crucial for all patients with cancer to be able to receive comprehensive cancer care, no matter where they're receiving their chemotherapy or other cancer-directed treatments. So, we will routinely be including patients who live outside of San Francisco. Most of our patients live outside of San Francisco. There's no way that they could participate if they had to drive into the city again to access this. And in the group setting, it's not even safe for people who are receiving chemotherapy to meet in a group most times. And with symptoms, often people aren't feeling so well and they're able to join us on Zoom in a way that they wouldn't be able to make the visit if it was in person. And so, this has really allowed us to expand our catchment area and to include patients, in our case, in all of California. You also mentioned training, and that's also important. So, as someone who's involved in the [UCSF] Osher Collaborative, there are faculty scholars who are at universities all over the US, so I've been able to start training some of those physicians to deliver group medical visits at their sites as well via telehealth. Dr. Nate Pennell: I'm glad we were able to make a plug for that. We need our political leadership to continue to support reimbursement for telehealth because it really does bring access to so many important elements of health care to patients who really struggle to travel to tertiary care centers. And their local cancer center can be quite a distance away.  So, sticking to the theme of training, clinician education and resources are really crucial to continue to support the uptake of integrative oncology in comprehensive cancer care. Where do you think things stand today in terms of clinician education and professional development in integrative oncology. Dr. Chloe Atreya: It's growing. Our medical students now are receiving training in integrative medicine, and making a plug for the Educational Book, I was really happy that ASCO let us have a table that's full of hyperlinks. So that's not typical for an article. Usually, you have to go to the reference list, but I really wanted to make it practical and accessible to people, both the resources that can be shared with patients that are curated and selected that we thought were of high-quality examples for patients. At the bottom of that table also are training resources for clinicians, and some of those include: The Center for Mind-Body Medicine, where people can receive training in how to teach these mind-body practices; The Integrated Center for Group Medical Visits, where people can learn how to develop their own group medical visits; of course, there's the Society for Integrative Oncology; and then I had just mentioned the Osher Collaborative Faculty Fellowship. Dr. Nate Pennell: Oh, that is fantastic. And just looking through, I mean, this article is really a fantastic resource both of the evidence base behind all of the elements that we've discussed today. Actually, the table that you mentioned with all of the direct hyperlinks to the resources is fantastic. Even recommendations for specific dietary changes after GI cancer diagnosis. So, I highly recommend everyone read the full paper after they have listened to the podcast today.  Before we wrap up, is there anything that we didn't get a chance to discuss that you wanted to make sure our listeners are aware of? Dr. Chloe Atreya: One thing that I did want to bring up is the disparities that exist in access to high quality symptom management care. So, patients who are racial and ethnic minorities, particularly our black and Latinx patients, the evidence shows that they aren't receiving the same degree of symptom management care as non-Hispanic White patients. And that is part of what may be leading to some of the disparities in cancer outcomes. So, if symptoms are poorly managed, it's harder for patients to stay with the treatment, and integrative oncology is one way to try to, especially with telehealth, this is a way to try to improve symptom management for all of our patients to help improve both their quality of life and their cancer outcomes. Dr. Nate Pennell: Well, Dr. Atreya, it's been great speaking with you today and thank you for joining me on the ASCO Education: By the Book Podcast and thank you for all of your work in advancing integrative oncology for GI cancers and beyond. Dr. Chloe Atreya: Thank you, Dr. Pennell. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. Dr. Nate Pennell: And thank you to all of our listeners who joined us today. You'll find a link to the article discussed today in the transcript of the episode. We hope you'll join us again for more insightful views on topics you'll be hearing at the Education Sessions from ASCO meetings throughout the year and our deep dives on approaches that are shaping modern oncology. Disclaimer: The purpose of this podcast is to educate, educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Follow today's speakers:    Dr. Nathan Pennell   @n8pennell  @n8pennell.bsky.social  Dr. Chloe Atreya  Follow ASCO on social media:    @ASCO on X (formerly Twitter)    ASCO on Bluesky   ASCO on Facebook    ASCO on LinkedIn    Disclosures:   Dr. Nate Pennell:       Consulting or Advisory Role: AstraZeneca, Lilly, Cota Healthcare, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Genentech, Amgen, G1 Therapeutics, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Viosera, Xencor, Mirati Therapeutics, Janssen Oncology, Sanofi/Regeneron      Research Funding (Institution): Genentech, AstraZeneca, Merck, Loxo, Altor BioScience, Spectrum Pharmaceuticals, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Jounce Therapeutics, Mirati Therapeutics, Heat Biologics, WindMIL, Sanofi   Dr. Chloe Atreya: Consulting or Advisory Role: Roche Genentech, Agenus Research Funding (Institution): Novartis, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Guardant Health, Gossamer Bio, Erasca, Inc.

Drs. Safa Rahmani, Jesse Sengillo, and Kat Talcott join for a journal club episode. Faricimab Switch Study (https://www.ophthalmologyretina.org/article/S2468-6530(25)00124-1/abstract) Gender Differences in Communication (https://www.ajo.com/article/S0002-9394(25)00133-3/fulltext) PE Acquisitions and Industry Payments (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaophthalmology/article-abstract/2830815) Sustainability and Cataract Surgery (https://www.aaojournal.org/article/S0161-6420(25)00135-6/abstract) Relevant Financial Disclosures: Dr. Sridhar is a consultant for Genentech and Regeneron. You can claim CME credits for prior episodes via the AAO website. Visit https://www.aao.org/browse-multimedia?filter=Audi

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qaQuestions include: Do you know anything about the history of vaccines? When was the first vaccine developed and for what? - Isn't some important part of how vaccines were discovered completely lost to history? - When was the crucial importance of epigenetics discovered or realized? - What have been your interactions with early-day or notable biotech people & companies (Genentech etc.) and interplay between your own projects/techs and their development if any? - I had no idea Alan Turing was the progenitor of morphogenesis!

Join us for this two-episode mini-series featuring lead study authors, Mario Castro and Njira Lugogo, as they discuss key findings from the VESTIGE trial and their implications on asthma care.  Uncover: ·      The importance of patient phenotyping: How can biomarkers and imaging improve asthma management? ·      Mucus plugging and airflow obstruction: What does the latest research reveal? ·      Biologics and airway remodeling: What did the VESTIGE trial reveal about biologics and airway remodeling? ·      The role of imaging in clinical practice: How can CT scans provide new insights into asthma care? Speakers Mario Castro, University of Kansas School of Medicine, United States Njira Lugogo, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States Disclaimers: ·      This program is non-promotional and is sponsored by Sanofi and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ·      The speakers are being compensated and/or receiving an honorarium from Sanofi and Regeneron in connection with this program ·      The content contained in this program was jointly developed by AMJ, the speakers, and Sanofi and Regeneron, and is not eligible for continuing medical education (CME) credits ·      See full US Prescribing Information for dupilumab ·      MAT-US-2412937 v2.0 - Pro1 Expiration Date: 04/21/2026 Speaker disclosures: ·      MC reports research support from the American Lung Association, AstraZeneca, Gala Therapeutics, Genentech, GSK, NIH, Novartis, PCORI, Pulmatrix, sanofi-aventis, Shionogi, and Theravance Biopharma, consultancy fees from Allakos, Amgen, Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals, Blueprint Medicines, Connect BioPharma, Genentech, GSK, Merck, Novartis, OM Pharma, Pfizer, Pioneering Medicines, sanofi-aventis, Teva, Third Rock Ventures, and Verona Pharmaceuticals, speaker fees from Amgen, AstraZeneca, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., and Sanofi, and royalties from Aer Therapeutics. ·      NLL reports research support paid to institution from Amgen, AstraZeneca, Avillion, Genentech, Gossamer Bio, GSK, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., Sanofi, and Teva, consultancy fees from and participation on advisory boards with Amgen, AstraZeneca, Genentech, GSK, Novartis, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., Sanofi, and Teva, travel support from AstraZeneca, and honoraria for non-speaker bureau presentations from AstraZeneca and GSK. References: 1.        Castro M et al. Effect of dupilumab on exhaled nitric oxide, mucus plugs, and functional respiratory imaging in patients with type 2 asthma (VESTIGE): a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 4 trial. Lancet Respir Med. 2025;13:208-20. doi: 10.1016/S2213-2600(24)00362-X.

Join us for this two-episode mini-series featuring lead study authors, Mario Castro and Njira Lugogo, as they discuss key findings from the VESTIGE trial and their implications on asthma care.  Uncover: ·      The importance of patient phenotyping: How can biomarkers and imaging improve asthma management? ·      Mucus plugging and airflow obstruction: What does the latest research reveal? ·      Biologics and airway remodeling: What did the VESTIGE trial reveal about biologics and airway remodeling? ·      The role of imaging in clinical practice: How can CT scans provide new insights into asthma care? Speakers Mario Castro, University of Kansas School of Medicine, United States Njira Lugogo, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States Disclaimers: ·      This program is non-promotional and is sponsored by Sanofi and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc. ·      The speakers are being compensated and/or receiving an honorarium from Sanofi and Regeneron in connection with this program ·      The content contained in this program was jointly developed by AMJ, the speakers, and Sanofi and Regeneron, and is not eligible for continuing medical education (CME) credits ·      See full US Prescribing Information for dupilumab ·      MAT-US-2412937 v2.0 - Pro1 Expiration Date: 04/21/2026 Speaker disclosures: ·      MC reports research support from the American Lung Association, AstraZeneca, Gala Therapeutics, Genentech, GSK, NIH, Novartis, PCORI, Pulmatrix, sanofi-aventis, Shionogi, and Theravance Biopharma, consultancy fees from Allakos, Amgen, Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals, Blueprint Medicines, Connect BioPharma, Genentech, GSK, Merck, Novartis, OM Pharma, Pfizer, Pioneering Medicines, sanofi-aventis, Teva, Third Rock Ventures, and Verona Pharmaceuticals, speaker fees from Amgen, AstraZeneca, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., and Sanofi, and royalties from Aer Therapeutics. ·      NLL reports research support paid to institution from Amgen, AstraZeneca, Avillion, Genentech, Gossamer Bio, GSK, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., Sanofi, and Teva, consultancy fees from and participation on advisory boards with Amgen, AstraZeneca, Genentech, GSK, Novartis, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc., Sanofi, and Teva, travel support from AstraZeneca, and honoraria for non-speaker bureau presentations from AstraZeneca and GSK. References: 1.        Castro M et al. Effect of dupilumab on exhaled nitric oxide, mucus plugs, and functional respiratory imaging in patients with type 2 asthma (VESTIGE): a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled, phase 4 trial. Lancet Respir Med. 2025;13:208-20. doi: 10.1016/S2213-2600(24)00362-X.

BrainStorm wants to hear from you! Send us a text.in this episode of the "BrainStorm" by UsAgainstAlzheimer's, George Vradenburg, Co-founder and Chairman of UsAgainstAlzheimer's, and Russ Paulsen, the organization's Chief Operating Officer, discuss the impact of the Trump administration's policies on Alzheimer's research with host Meryl Comer. The conversation highlights the systematic dismantling of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other critical agencies, which threatens to undermine Alzheimer's research and public health. Vradenburg and Paulsen express concerns about the lack of transparency in the reorganization and the potential negative effects on drug reviews and approvals due to significant cuts at the FDA. They highlight the importance of protecting key programs that support seniors and the potential global impact of these policy changes. Despite the challenges, both Paulsen and Vradenburg are optimism about scientific advances in diagnosing and treating Alzheimer's, including the development of blood tests and new treatments. Hear the call to action for listeners to advocate for continued support for Alzheimer's research and to contact their members of Congress to ensure that funding remains a priority. This is a must listen episode!  This episode is sponsored by Genentech.Support the show

Del 5 al 9 de mayo de 2025 celebramos la Semana Nacional de Agradecimiento a los Maestros, ¡y el martes 6 de mayo es el Día Nacional de los Maestros! Durante todo el año, pero especialmente esta semana, nos gustaría expresar nuestro más profundo agradecimiento a los increíbles maestros que dan lo mejor de sí todos los días para asegurarse de que los estudiantes reciban una educación de alta calidad, interactiva y que los prepare para sus próximos pasos en la vida.Unas cuantas palabras o una nota de agradecimiento serían de gran ayuda para que sus maestros favoritos sepan el impacto positivo que han tenido en la vida de sus estudiantes. Si desea compartir algunas de estas amables palabras o una historia en línea, no olvide utilizar el hashtag #ThankATeacher.¡Apreciamos a nuestros maestros! ¡Son GENIALES y nos hacen sentir orgullosos de ser HSD!¡Nuestro evento destacado tiene que ver con helicópteros y el Espectáculo Aéreo de Hillsboro! Gracias a la asociación con Oregon International Air Show Charitable Foundation (OASCF), Oregon National Guard y Genentech, los estudiantes de HSD han disfrutado (¡y disfrutarán!) de una experiencia de aviación inolvidable. Al momento de esta publicación, Glencoe y Hilhi han sido sede del aterrizaje de un helicóptero Lakota de la Guardia Nacional, y el aterrizaje en Century y Liberty fue reprogramado debido a las condiciones climáticas. Los estudiantes tuvieron la oportunidad de conocer a miembros de la Guardia Nacional, explorar el helicóptero de cerca y aprender más sobre profesiones relacionadas con la aviación y el servicio público. Gracias a una generosa subvención de Genentech, todos los estudiantes de las escuelas preparatorias de HSD recibirán boletos de entrada para el Espectáculo Aéreo Internacional de Oregón, del 16 al 18 de mayo en el Aeropuerto de Hillsboro. Además, todos los estudiantes de 3.er grado de HSD asistirán a una excursión enfocada en STEAM al Aeropuerto de Hillsboro antes del festival aéreo, gracias a Oregon International Air Show Charitable Foundation y al trabajo de exploración de profesiones aeroespaciales de HSD.  La publicación de Noticias de la Semana se elabora y se envía por correo electrónico a las familias y a los miembros del personal de HSD cada semana durante el año escolar. Por favor, agregue esta dirección de correo electrónico a su lista de «remitentes seguros» para asegurarse de recibir siempre la publicación más reciente. Además, por favor no deje de agregar a sus enlaces favoritos el sitio web de nuestro distrito (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠hsd.k12.or.us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠) para mantenerse informado sobre lo que está sucediendo en nuestro distrito y en las escuelas.

May 5-9, 2025, is National Teacher Appreciation Week, and Tuesday, May 6, is National Teacher Day! All year long, but especially this week, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to the amazing teachers who give their best every day to ensure students receive a high quality, engaging education that prepares them for their next steps in life.  A few words or a note of thanks would go a long way toward letting your favorite teachers know what a positive impact they've had on your life. If you'd like to share some of these kind words or a story online, don't forget to use #ThankATeacher.We love our Teachers! You ROCK and you make us Proud to be HSD!Our featured event is all about helicopters and the Hillsboro Air Show! Thanks to the partnership of the Oregon International Air Show Charitable Foundation, the Oregon National Guard, and Genentech, students across HSD have been - and will be! - treated to an unforgettable aviation experience. At press time, Glencoe and Hilhi have hosted on-site landings of a National Guard Lakota helicopter, with landings at Century and Liberty rescheduled due to weather. Students had the chance to meet with Guard members, explore the helicopter up close, and learn more about careers in aviation and public service. Thanks to a generous grant from Genentech, all HSD high school students will receive tickets to the Oregon International Air Show, May 16 through 18 at the Hillsboro Airport. In addition, all third grade HSD students will attend a STEAM-focused field trip to the Hillsboro Airport leading up to the Air Show, thanks to the OASCF and in alignment with HSD's aerospace career exploration work. Hot News is produced and emailed to HSD families and staff each week school is in session. Please add the address to your “safe sender” list to make sure you always receive the latest issue. Please also bookmark our district website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠hsd.k12.or.us⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to stay informed about what's happening in our district and schools.

Join us for a special discussion on clinical trials for macular degeneration. Experts from Genentech will provide an overview of the company's work in age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and geographic atrophy, including the role of clinical trials and how they work. They will also share details about an upcoming clinical trial for geographic atrophy, an advanced form of dry AMD, and what potential participants can expect.

View the Show Notes Page for This Episode Become a Member to Receive Exclusive Content Sign Up to Receive Peter's Weekly Newsletter Susan Desmond-Hellmann is a physician and scientist whose remarkable career has spanned clinical medicine, oncology, biotech innovation, and global health leadership. In this episode, Susan shares insights from her journey training in internal medicine during the early AIDS crisis, treating HIV-related cancers in Uganda, and developing groundbreaking cancer therapies like Herceptin and Avastin. She reflects on her leadership roles at UCSF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, offering lessons on guiding large-scale health initiatives, navigating uncertainty, and fostering scientific innovation. The conversation explores the promise of precision medicine, the integration of patient care and policy, and the evolving role of artificial intelligence in transforming diagnostics, drug development, and global access to care. We discuss: Susan's medical training, the start of the AIDS epidemic, and the transformative experiences that shaped her career [3:00]; Susan's experience working on the frontlines of the HIV/AIDS crisis in Uganda [12:30]; Susan's time working in general oncology and her transition to biotech where she helped develop taxol—a top-selling cancer drug [26:30]; Genentech's origins, and its groundbreaking use of recombinant DNA to develop biologic drugs [33:45]; Susan's move to Genentech, and her pivotal role in the development and success of Herceptin as a groundbreaking therapy in targeted oncology [44:00]; The rise of antibody-based cancer therapies: the development of Rituxan and Avastin [52:15]; The step-by-step drug development process and the scientific and strategic challenges involved [1:01:30]; The ethical and economic controversy surrounding Avastin's high cost and limited survival benefit [1:12:30]; Susan's tenure as chancellor at UCSF: leading during a financially strained period, and her strategic approach to fundraising and institutional development [1:14:45]; What Susan learned as CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation: strategic processes and decision-making frameworks [1:26:00]; Susan's philosophy of leadership and how she sought to build an empowering, values-driven culture at the Gates Foundation [1:35:15]; The erosion of public trust in science during COVID, the communication failures around controversial treatments like ivermectin, and the need for better public health engagement and transparency [1:39:30]; The role of AI in transforming medicine: from drug development to cancer detection and beyond [1:53:00]; and More. Connect With Peter on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube

We want to hear from you! Send us a text.Journalist and author Greg O'Brien, diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's over a decade ago, shares with BrainStorm host Meryl his determination to be heard at the Washington D.C. rally at the Lincoln Memorial to protest proposed cuts to NIH biomedical research funding that would critically affect Alzheimer's disease research.  Greg also candidly shares what it takes for him to navigate at this late stage in the disease.This episode also features a TopLine commentary by George Vradenburg, founder and chair of UsAgainstAlzheimer's, on the mobilization of patient advocacy organizations across diseases fighting to maintain the integrity of America's biomedical and scientific research.This episode is sponsored by Genentech.Support the show

This podcast is the first episode in a series featuring companies I am eager to explore and share with my community. Today, I am thrilled to welcome Dr. Andrew Salzman, a Harvard-trained medical doctor, pioneering scientist, and esteemed inventor. Dr. Salzman is the Chief Medical Officer at Wonderfeel, where he applies over three decades of medical innovation. His research into DNA repair with NAD-activated enzymes led the way for a groundbreaking treatment for BRCA-related breast and ovarian cancers, which he licensed to Genentech. Dr. Salzman was among the first researchers to publish papers on the gut microbiome and leaky gut syndrome in the 1980s, and he has published over 170 peer-reviewed papers and holds more than 50 patents. In our conversation today, we dive into what NAD is, its significance, why it matters, and how it impacts fertility, menopause, and sexual health. Dr. Salzman walks us through the symptoms of NAD deficiency and explains how an enzyme called CD38 can emerge when NAD levels are low, triggering inflammation and oxidative stress. We explore the difference between pharmaceutical agents and nutraceuticals, examining why oral NMN is preferable and how sleep and alcohol can influence NAD levels. We cover the risk factors for breast, ovarian, and uterine cancers, looking at what we can do to reduce them, and we also talk about Wonderfeel and how their supplements and botanicals enhance wellness for women.  This is an invaluable discussion with Dr. Salzman, so you will likely want to listen to it more than once. IN THIS EPISODE YOU WILL LEARN: How our NAD levels change as we get older The role of NAD in energy production  How oxidative stress and inflammation affect NAD levels in the ovaries Why NAD is essential for sexual health Lifestyle choices that could affect NAD levels How inflammation can increase CD 38 levels and deplete NAD Why oral administration of NMN or NR is the most practical and effective method for maintaining NAD levels How alcohol affects NAD levels and increases the risk of cancer How, with Dr. Salzman's input, Wonderfeel developed a product combining NMN with botanicals to enhance NAD levels Connect with Cynthia Thurlow   Follow on Twitter Instagram LinkedIn Check out Cynthia's website Submit your questions to support@cynthiathurlow.com Connect with Dr. Andrew Salzman On the Wonderfeel website .

“Collaboration isn't just for mega-projects.”

On the inaugural episode of ASCO Education: By the Book, Dr. Nathan Pennell and Dr. Don Dizon share reflections on the evolution of the ASCO Educational Book, its global reach, and the role of its new companion podcast to further shine a spotlight on the issues shaping the future of modern oncology. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Nathan Pennell: Hello, I'm Dr. Nate Pennell, welcoming you to the first episode of our new podcast, ASCO Education: By the Book. The podcast will feature engaging discussions between editors and authors from the ASCO Educational Book. Each month, you'll hear nuanced views on key topics in oncology featured in Education Sessions at ASCO meetings, as well as some deep dives on the advances shaping modern oncology. Although I am honored to serve as the editor-in-chief (EIC) of the ASCO Educational Book, in my day job, I am the co-director of the Cleveland Clinic Lung Cancer Program and vice chair for clinical research for the Taussig Cancer Center here in Cleveland. I'm delighted to kick off our new podcast with a discussion featuring the Ed Book's previous editor-in-chief. Dr. Don Dizon is a professor of medicine and surgery at Brown University and works as a medical oncologist specializing in breast and pelvic malignancies at Lifespan Cancer Institute in Rhode Island. Dr. Dizon also serves as the vice chair for membership and accrual at the SWOG Cancer Research Network. Don, it's great to have you here for our first episode of ASCO Education: By the Book. Dr. Don Dizon: Really nice to be here and to see you again, my friend. Dr. Nathan Pennell: This was the first thing I thought of when we were kicking off a podcast that I thought we would set the stage for our hopefully many, many listeners to learn a little bit about what the Ed Book used to be like, how it has evolved over the last 14 years or so since we both started here and where it's going. You started as editor-in-chief in 2012, is that right? Dr. Don Dizon: Oh, boy. I believe that is correct, yes. I did two 5-year stints as EIC of the Educational Book, so that sounds about right. Although you're aging me very clearly on this podcast. Dr. Nathan Pennell: I had to go back in my emails to see if I could figure out when we started on this because we've been working on it for some time. Start out a little bit by telling me what do you remember about the Ed Book from back in the day when you were applying to be editor-in-chief and thinking about the Ed Book. What was it like at that time? Dr. Don Dizon: You know, it's so interesting to think about it.  Ten years ago, we were both in a very different place in our careers, and I remember when the Ed Book position came up, I had been writing a column for ASCO. I had done some editorial activities with other journals for sure, but what always struck me was it was very unclear how one was chosen to be a part of the education program at ASCO. And then it was very unclear how those faculty were then selected to write a paper for the Educational Book. And it was back in the day when the Educational Book was completely printed. So, there was this book that was cherished among American fellows in oncology. And it was one that, when I was newly attending, and certainly two or three years before the editor's position came up, it was one that I referenced all the time. So, it was a known commodity for many of us. And there was a certain sense of selectivity about who was invited to write in it. And it wasn't terribly transparent either. So, when the opportunity to apply for editor-in-chief of the Educational Book came up, I had already been doing so much work for ASCO. I had been on the planning committees and served in many roles across the organization, and editing was something I found I enjoyed in other work. So, I decided to put my name in the ring with the intention of sort of bringing the book forward, getting it indexed, for example, so that there was this credit that was more than just societal credit at ASCO. This ended up being something that was referenced and acknowledged as an important paper through PubMed indexing. And then also to provide it as a space where we could be more transparent about who was being invited and broadening the tent as to who could participate as an author in the Ed Book. Dr. Nathan Pennell: It's going to be surprising to many of our younger listeners to learn that the Educational Book used to be just this giant, almost like a brick. I mean, it was this huge tome of articles from the Education Sessions that you got when you got your meeting abstracts book at the annual meeting. And you can always see people on the plane on the way out of Chicago with their giant books. Dr. Don Dizon: Yes. Dr. Nathan Pennell: That added lots of additional weight to the plane, I'm sure, on the way out. Dr. Don Dizon: And it was not uncommon for us to be sitting at an airport, and people would be reading those books with highlighters. Dr. Nathan Pennell: I fondly remember being a fellow and coming up and the Ed Book was always really important to me, so I was excited. We'll also let the listeners in on that. I also applied to be the original editor-in-chief of the Ed Book back in 2012, although I was very junior and did not have any real editorial experience. I think I may have been section editor for The Oncologist at that point. And I had spoken to Dr. Ramaswamy Govindan at WashU who had been the previous editor-in-chief about applying and he was like, “Oh yeah. You should absolutely try that out.” And then when Dr. Dizon was chosen, I was like, “Oh, well. I guess I didn't get it.” And then out of the blue I got a call asking me to join as the associate editor, which I was really always very thankful for that opportunity. Dr. Don Dizon: Well, it was a highly fruitful collaboration, I think, between you and I when we first started. I do remember taking on the reins and sort of saying, “You know, this is our vision of what we want to do.” But then just working with the authors, which we did, about how to construct their papers and what we were looking for, all of that is something I look back really fondly on. Dr. Nathan Pennell: I think it was interesting too because neither one of us had really a lot of transparency into how things worked when we started. We kind of made it up a little bit as we went along. We wanted to get all of the faculty, or at least as many of them as possible contributing to these. And we would go to the ASCO Education Committee meeting and kind of talk about the Ed Book, and we were thinking about, you know, how could we get people to submit. So, at the time it wasn't PubMed indexed. Most people, I think, submitted individual manuscripts just from their talk, which could be anywhere from full length review articles to very brief manuscripts. Dr. Don Dizon: Sometimes it was their slides with like a couple of comments on it. Dr. Nathan Pennell: And some of them were almost like a summary of the talk. Yeah, exactly. And so sort of making that a little more uniform. There was originally an honorarium attached, which went away, but I think PubMed indexing was probably the biggest incentive for people to join. I remember that was one of the first things you really wanted to get. Dr. Don Dizon Yeah. And, you know, it was fortuitous. I'd like to take all the credit for it, but ASCO was very forward thinking with Dr. Ramaswamy and the conversations about going to PubMed with this had preceded my coming in. We knew what we needed to do to get this acknowledged, which was really strengthening the peer review so that these papers could meet the bar to get on PubMed. But you know, within the first, what, two or three years, Nate, of us doing this, we were able to get this accepted. And now it is. If you look at what PubMed did for us, it not only increased the potential of who was going to access it, but for, I think the oncology community, it allowed people access to papers by key opinion leaders that was not blocked by a paywall. And I thought that was just super important at the time. Social media was something, but it wasn't what it is now. But anybody could access these manuscripts and it's still the case today. Dr. Nathan Pennell: I think it's hard to overstate how important that was. People don't realize this, but the Ed Book is really widely accessed, especially outside the US as well. And a lot of people who can't attend the meeting to get the print, well, the once print, book could actually get access to essentially the education session from the annual meeting without having to fly all the way to the US to attend. Now, you know, we have much better virtual meeting offerings now and whatnot. But at the time it was pretty revolutionary to be able to do that. Dr. Don Dizon: Yeah, and you know, it's so interesting when I think back to, you know, this sort of evolution to a fully online publication of the Ed Book. It was really some requests from international participants of the annual meeting who really wanted to continue to see this in print. At that time, it was important to recognize that access to information was not uniform across the world. And people really wanted that print edition, maybe not for themselves, but so that access in more rural areas or where access in the broadband networks were not established that they still could access the book. I think things have changed now. We were able, I think, in your tenure, to see it fully go online. But even I just remember that being a concern as we went forward. Dr. Nathan Pennell: Yeah, we continued with the print book that was available if people asked for it, but apparently few enough people asked for it that it moved fully online. One of the major advantages of being fully online now is of course, it does allow us to publish kind of in real time as the manuscripts come out in the months leading up to the meeting, which has been, I think, a huge boon because it can build momentum for the Education Sessions coming in. People, you know, really look forward to it. Dr. Don Dizon: Yeah, that was actually a concern, you know, when we were phasing out Ed Book and going to this continuous publication model where authors actually had the ability to sort of revise their manuscript and that would be automatically uploaded. You had a static manuscript that was fully printed, and it was no longer an accurate one. And we did have the ability to fix it. And it just goes to show exactly what you're saying. This idea that these are living papers was really an important thing that ASCO embraced quite early, I think. Dr. Nathan Pennell: And with the onset of PubMed indexing, the participation from faculty skyrocketed and almost within a couple of years was up to the vast majority of sessions and faculty participating. Now I think people really understand that this is part of the whole process. But at the time I remember writing out on my slides in all caps, “THIS IS AN EXPECTATION.” And that's about the best word I could give because I asked if we could make people do it, and they were like, no, you can't make people do it. Dr. Don Dizon: So right.  Actually, I don't think people are aware of the work on the back end every year when I was on as EIC, Nate and myself, and then subsequently Dr. Hope Rugo would have these informational sessions with the education faculty and we would tout the Ed Book, tout the expectation, tout it was PubMed indexed and tout multidisciplinary participation. So, we were not seeing four manuscripts reflecting one session. You know, this encouragement to really embrace multidisciplinary care was something that very early on we introduced and really encouraged people not to submit perspective manuscripts, but to really get them in and then harmonize the paper so that it felt like it was, you know, one voice. Dr. Nathan Pennell: I consider that after PubMed indexing, the next major change to the Ed Book, that really made it a better product and that was moving from, you know, just these short individual single author manuscripts to single session combined manuscript that had multiple perspectives and topics, really much more comprehensive review articles. And I don't even remember what the impetus was for that, but it was really a success. Dr. Don Dizon: Yeah, I mean, I think in the beginning it was more of a challenge, I think, because people were really not given guidance on what these papers were supposed to look like. So, we were seeing individual manuscripts come forward. Looking back, it really foreshadowed the importance of multidisciplinary management. But at the time, it was really more about ensuring that people were leaving the session with a singular message of what to do when you're in clinic again. And the goal was to have the manuscripts reflect that sort of consensus view of a topic that was coming in. There were certain things that people still argued would not fit in a multidisciplinary manuscript. You know, if you have someone who's writing and whose entire talk was on the pathology of thyroid cancer. Another topic was on survivorship after thyroid cancer. It was hard to sort of get those two to interact and cover what was being covered. So, we were still getting that. But you're right, at the end of my tenure and into yours, there were far fewer of those individual manuscripts. Dr. Nathan Pennell: And I think it's even made it easier to write because now, you know, you just have to write a section of a manuscript and not put together an entire review. So, it has helped with getting people on board. Dr. Don Dizon: Well, the other thing I thought was really interesting about the process is when you're invited to do an Education Session at ASCO, you're either invited as a faculty speaker or as the chair of the session. And the responsibility of the chair is to ensure that it flows well and that the talks are succinct based on what the agenda or the objectives were as defined by the education committee for that specific group. But that was it. So really being named “Chair” was sort of an honor, an honorific. It really didn't come with responsibility. So, we use the Ed Book as a way to say, “As chair of the session, it is your responsibility to ensure A, a manuscript comes to me, but B, that the content of that paper harmonizes and is accurate.” And it was very rare, but Nate, I think we got dragged into a couple of times where the accuracy of the manuscript was really called into question by the chair. And those were always very, very tricky discussions because everyone that gets invited to ASCO is a recognized leader in their field. Some of us, especially, I would probably say, dating back 10 years from today, the data behind Standards of Care were not necessarily evidence-based. So, there were a lot of opinion-based therapies. You know, maybe not so much in the medical side, but certainly some of it. But when you went to, you know, surgical treatments and maybe even radiotherapy treatments, it was really based on, “My experience at my center is this and this is why I do what I do.” But those kinds of things ended up being some of the more challenging things to handle as an editor. Dr. Nathan Pennell: And those are the– I'll use “fun” in a broad sense. You know, every once in a while, you get an article where it really does take a lot of hands-on work from the editor to work with the author to try to revise it and make it a suitable academic manuscript. But you know what? I can't think, at least in recent years, of any manuscripts that we turned down. They just sometimes needed a little TLC. Dr. Don Dizon: Yeah. And I think the other important thing it reminds me of is how great it was that I wasn't doing this by myself. Because it was so great to be able to reach out to you and say, “Can you give me your take on this paper?” Or, “Can you help me just join a conference call with the authors to make sure that we're on the same page?” And then on the rare example where we were going to reject a paper, it was really important that we, as the editorial team, and I include our ASCO shepherder, through the whole process. We had to all agree that this was not salvageable. Fortunately, it happened very rarely. But I've got to say, not doing this job alone was one of the more important facets of being the EIC of ASCO's Educational Book. Dr. Nathan Pennell: Well, it's nice to hear you say that. I definitely felt that this was a partnership, you know, it was a labor of love. So, I want to go to what I consider sort of the third major pillar of the changes to the Ed Book during your tenure, and that was the introduction of a whole new kind of manuscript. So up to, I don't know, maybe seven or eight years ago, all the articles were authored just by people who were presenting at the Annual Meeting. And then you had an idea to introduce invited manuscripts. So take me through that. Dr. Don Dizon: Yeah, well, you know, again, it went to this sort of, what can people who are being asked to sort of lead ASCO for that year, what can they demonstrate as sort of a more tangible contribution to the Society and to oncology in general? And I think that was the impetus to use the Ed Book for everyone who was in a leadership position to make their mark. That said, I was here, and I was either president of the society or I was Education Program Chair or Scientific Program Chair, and they got to select an article type that was not being covered in the annual meeting and suggest the authors and work with those authors to construct a manuscript. Never did any one of those folks suggest themselves, which I thought was fascinating. They didn't say, “I want to be the one to write this piece,” because this was never meant to be a presidential speech or a commemorative speech or opportunity for them as leaders. But we wanted to ensure that whatever passion they had within oncology was represented in the book. And again, it was this sort of sense of, I want everyone to look at the Ed Book and see themselves in it and see what they contributed. And that was really important for those who were really shepherding each Annual Meeting each year for ASCO that they had the opportunity to do that. And I was really pleased that leadership really took to that idea and were very excited about bringing ideas and also author groups into the Educational Book who would not have had the opportunity otherwise. I thought that was just really nice. It was about inclusiveness and just making sure that people had the opportunity to say, “If you want to participate, we want you to participate.” Dr. Nathan Pennell: Yeah, I agree. I think the ASCO leadership jumped on this and continues to still really appreciate the opportunity to be able to kind of invite someone on a topic that's meaningful to them. I think we've tried to work in things that incorporate the presidential theme each year in our invited manuscript, so it really allows them to put kind of a stamp on the flavor of each edition. And the numbers reflect that these tend to be among our more highly read articles as well. Dr. Don Dizon: You know, looking back on what we did together, that was something I'm really, really quite proud of, that we were able to sort of help the Educational Book evolve that way. Dr. Nathan Pennell: I agree. You brought up briefly a few minutes ago about social media and its role over time. I think when we started in 2012, I had just joined Twitter now X in 2011, and I think we were both sort of early adopters in the social media. Do you feel like social media has had a role in the growth of the Ed Book or is this something that you think we can develop further? Dr. Don Dizon: When we were doing Ed Book together, professional social media was actually a quite identified space. You know, we were all on the same platform. We analyzed what the outcomes were on that platform and our communities gathered on that platform. So, it was a really good place to highlight what we were publishing, especially as we went to continuous publishing.  I don't remember if it was you or me, but we even started asking our authors for a tweet and those tweets needed work. It was you. It was you or I would actually lay in these tweets to say, “Yeah, we need to just, you know, work on this.” But I think it's harder today. There's no one preferred platform. Alternate platforms are still evolving. So, I think there are opportunities there. The question is: Is that opportunity meaningful enough for the Ed Book to demonstrate its return on an investment, for example? What I always thought about social media, and it's still true today, is that it will get eyes on whatever you're looking at far beyond who you intended to see it. So, you know, your tweets regarding a phase 3 clinical trial in lung cancer, which were so informative, were reaching me, who was not a lung oncologist who doesn't even see lung cancer and getting me more interested in finding that article and more and more pointing to the Educational Book content that speaks to that piece, you know. And I think coupling an impression of the data, associating that with something that is freely accessed is, I think, a golden opportunity not only for our colleagues, but also for anyone who's interested in a topic. Whether you are diagnosed with that cancer or you are taking care of someone with that cancer, or you heard about that cancer, there are people who would like to see information that is relevant and embedded and delivered by people who know what they're talking about. And I think our voices on social media are important because of it. And I think that's where the contribution is. So, if we had to see what the metric was for any social media efforts, it has to be more of the click rates, not just by ASCO members, but the click rates across societies and across countries. Dr. Nathan Pennell: Yeah, social media is, I mean, obviously evolving quite a bit in the last couple of years. But I do know that in terms the alt metrics for the track access through social media and online, the ones that are shared online by the authors, by the Ed Book team, do seem to get more attention. I think a lot of people don't like to just sit with a print journal anymore or an email table of contents for specific journals. People find these articles that are meaningful to them through their network and oftentimes that is online on social media. Dr. Don Dizon: Yes, 100%. And you know what I think we should encourage people to do is look at the source. And if the Ed Book becomes a source of information, I think that will be a plus to the conversations in our world. We're still dealing with a place where, depending on who sponsored the trial, whether it was an industry-sponsored trial, whether it was NCI sponsored or sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, for example, access to the primary data sets may or may not be available across the world, but the Ed Book is. And if the Ed Book can summarize that data and use terms and words that are accessible no matter what your grade level of education is. If we can explain the graphs and the figures in a way that people can actually easily more understand it. If there's a way that we structure our conversations in the Ed Book so that the plethora of inclusion/exclusion criteria are summarized and simplified, then I think we can achieve a place where good information becomes more accessible, and we can point to a summary of the source data in places where the source is not available. Dr. Nathan Pennell: One of the other things that I continue to be surprised at how popular these podcasts are. And that gives you an opportunity pretty much the opposite. Instead of sort of a nugget that directs you to the source material, you've got a more in-depth discussion of the manuscript. And so, I'm delighted that we have our own podcast. For many years, the Ed Book would sort of do a sort of a “Weird Al takeover” of the ASCO Daily News Podcast for a couple of episodes around the Annual Meeting, and I think those were always really popular enough that we were able to argue that we deserved our own podcast. And I'm really looking forward to having these in-depth discussions with authors. Dr. Don Dizon: It's an amazing evolution of where the Ed Book has gone, right? We took it from print only, societally only, to something that is now accessed worldwide via PubMed. We took it from book to fully online print. And now I think making the content live is a natural next step. So, I applaud you for doing the podcast and giving people an opportunity actually to discuss what their article discusses. And if there's a controversial point, giving them the freedom and the opportunity to sort of give more nuanced views on what may not be something that there's 100% consensus over. Dr. Nathan Pennell: Yes. Well, I hope other people enjoy these as well. Just want to highlight a few of the things that have happened just in the couple years since you stepped down as editor-in-chief. One of them, and I don't know if you noticed, but last year we started adding manuscripts from the ASCO thematic meetings, so ASCO GI and ASCO GU, something we had certainly talked about in the past, but had lacked bandwidth to really do. And they seem to be pretty widely accessed. Dr. Don Dizon: That's fantastic. Yes, I do remember talking about the coverage of the thematic meetings and you're right, this takes a long time to sort of concentrate on the Annual Meeting. It may seem like everything happens in the span of like eight weeks. Dr. Nathan Pennell: It does feel like that sometimes. Dr. Don Dizon: Right? But this is actually something that starts a year before, once the education program is set. We're in the room when they set it. But then it's really chasing down manuscripts and then making sure that they're peer reviewed because the peer review is still really important, and then making sure that any revisions are made before it's finalized and goes to press. That is a many months process. So, when we're trying to introduce, “Oh, we should also do ASCO GU or-,” the question was, how do you want to do that given this very, very involved process going forward? So, I'm glad you were able to figure it out. Dr. Nathan Pennell: Well, it's challenging. I don't think people realize quite the compressed timeline for these. You know, the Education Session and authors and invited faculty are picked in the fall, and then basically you have to start turning in your manuscripts in February, March of the following year. And so, it's a really tight turnaround for this. When we talk about the ASCO thematic meetings, it's an even tighter window. Dr. Don Dizon: Right, exactly. Dr. Nathan Pennell: And so, it's challenging to get that moving, but I was really, really proud that we were able to pull that off. Dr. Don Dizon: Well, congratulations again. And I think that is a necessary step, because so much of what's going on in the various disease management sites is only covered cursorily through the Annual Meeting itself. I mean, there's just so much science breaking at any one time that I think if we want to comprehensively catalog the Year in Review in oncology, it kind of behooves us to do that. Dr. Nathan Pennell: Some other things that are coming up because we now have manuscripts that are going to be coming in year-round, and just to kind of make it easier on the editorial staff, we're going to be forming an editorial board. And in addition to our pool of reviewers who get ASCO points, please feel free to go online to the ASCO volunteer portal and sign up if you are interested in participating. So, moving forward, I'm really excited to see where things are going to go. Dr. Don Dizon: Well, that's great. That's great. And I do remember talking about whether or not we needed to have an editorial board. At least when I was there, having this carried by three people was always better than having it carried by one person. And I think as you expand the potential for submissions, it will be very helpful to have that input for sure. And then it gives another opportunity for more members to get involved in ASCO as well. Dr. Nathan Pennell: Absolutely. People want involvement, and so happy to provide that. Dr. Don Dizon: Yes. Dr. Nathan Pennell: Is there anything we didn't cover that you would like to mention before we wrap up? Dr. Don Dizon: Well, I will say this, that ASCO and through its publications not only has had this real emphasis on multidisciplinary management of cancers, especially where it was relevant, but it also always had a stand to ensure representation was front and center and who wrote for us. And I think every president, every chair that I've worked with naturally embraced that idea of representation. And I think it has been a distinct honor to say that during my tenure as EIC, we have always had a plethora of voices, of authors from different countries, of genders, that have participated in the construction of those books. And it stands as a testament that we are a global community and we will always be one. Dr. Nathan Pennell: Well, thank you for that. And I'm happy to continue that as we move forward. Well, Don, thank you. It's been great speaking with you. You played such a pivotal role in the Ed Book's evolution and I'm so glad you were able to join me for our inaugural episode. Dr. Don Dizon: Well, I'm just tickled that you asked me to be your first guest. Thank you so much, Nate. Dr. Nathan Pennell: And I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today. We hope you'll join us again for more insightful views on topics you'll be hearing at the Education Sessions from ASCO meetings throughout the year, as well as our periodic deep dives on advances that are shaping modern oncology. Have a great day. Disclaimer: The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Follow today's speakers:   Dr. Nathan Pennell  @n8pennell @n8pennell.bsky.social   Dr. Don Dizon @drdondizon.bsky.social  Follow ASCO on social media:   @ASCO on X (formerly Twitter)   ASCO on Bluesky  ASCO on Facebook   ASCO on LinkedIn   Disclosures:  Dr. Nathan Pennell:      Consulting or Advisory Role: AstraZeneca, Lilly, Cota Healthcare, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Genentech, Amgen, G1 Therapeutics, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Viosera, Xencor, Mirati Therapeutics, Janssen Oncology, Sanofi/Regeneron     Research Funding (Inst): Genentech, AstraZeneca, Merck, Loxo, Altor BioScience, Spectrum Pharmaceuticals, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Jounce Therapeutics, Mirati Therapeutics, Heat Biologics, WindMIL, Sanofi  Dr. Don Dizon: Stock and Other Ownership Interests: Midi, Doximity Honoraria: UpToDate, American Cancer Society Consulting or Advisory Role: AstraZeneca, Clovis Oncology, Kronos Bio, Immunogen Research Funding (Institution): Bristol-Myers Squibb          

In this episode of HR Like a Boss, host John Bernatovicz is joined by leadership and HR expert Dr. Mike Horne, author of The People Dividend. Together, they explore the shifting role of human resources as a force for alignment and engagement in today's organizations. From executive conflict resolution to the challenges of promoting technical experts into leadership roles, Mike shares how organizations can thrive by embracing humanistic values and purpose-driven leadership. Whether you're in HR, OD, or executive leadership, this episode offers grounded wisdom for creating high-impact, people-centered workplaces.ABOUT MIKE HORNEMike Horne, Ph. D., is a highly experienced global corporate human resources and organization development leader, distinguished executive coach, best-selling author, and sought-after speaker. He is dedicated to empowering aspiring leaders, executives, and teams to navigate transitions, excel in new roles, and increase their effectiveness and influence. He hosts The People Dividend Podcast, which ranks in the top 10% of all podcasts globally. Previously, for nearly three decades, Dr. Horne held pivotal human resources and organization development roles, including the Head of Human Resources for Gilead Sciences' Research Division, Global Leader of Talent and Development for Brocade, and Head of Organization Development for Genentech. Before these positions, he served 15 years in human resources leadership roles for Nortel Networks, Marriott International, Towers Watson, and NLRB. He is the chairperson for the graduate Human Resources and Leadership Studies programs at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. In November 2024, Dr. Horne released The People Dividend: Leadership Strategies for Unlocking Employee Potential, which outlines the “people dividend” philosophy and identifies key areas for investment, such as building trust, encouraging motivation, ensuring open communication, retaining employees, making better decisions, and enhancing the organization's reputation. He is also the author of Integrity by Design: Working and Living Authentically, which calls readers to their higher purpose and to the aspiration to work and live authentically.

LIVE from Transform 2025 in Las Vegas! Amira Barger is an award-winning Executive Vice President of Communications and Head of DEI Advisory at Edelman, providing senior reputation management and polycultural counsel to clients across the globe. Recently named Woman of the Year by Women Health Care Executives, Top 100 Executives by Involve People, Top CMOs of 2024 by the CMO Alliance, Top 50 Global DEI Professionals by OnConferences, Top 100 People Leaders by Mogul, Fearlessly Authentic Leader by Leaderology, and 30 under 40 in Healthcare Innovation by Business Insider – Amira is a scholar, practitioner and thought leader who brings more than 20 years of experience in strategic communications that reach stakeholders, mobilize the community and inspire action. Amira has global experience in pharma/healthcare communications, corporate branding, web and social media, M&A experience, media relations, team management, sustainability/social impact, reputation management, and DEI. Throughout her career, Amira has utilized these competency areas for clients such as: CVS Health, Eli Lilly, Walgreens, Hologic, Genentech, Pfizer, GSK/Haleon, BMS, Zoetis, Alkermes, Regeneron, Amgen, Medtronic, Children's Miracle Network, Kaiser Permanente, First 5 Los Angeles, Covered California, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, FEMA, and California Community Colleges. Adam and Amira discuss: - How does “niceness” in workplace culture hold back real DEI progress, and what should leaders do instead? - Challenging Workplace Norms to Advance DEI and Justice - Empowering Women in Leadership - Valuing the Whole Human - "How can leaders move beyond surface-level well-being initiatives to truly create workplaces that honor employees as whole humans, not just workers? Connect with Amira: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amirabarger/ Live from Transform 2025, we're bringing you an exclusive podcast series packed with insights from some of the brightest minds in hiring, talent strategy, and workforce transformation! In this series, we've got incredible guests from Okta, Tubi, Edelman, Greenhouse, Findem, and more, sharing how top organizations are rethinking hiring, culture, and talent acquisition in today's fast-changing world. Greenhouse combines a structured, data-driven hiring approach with AI-embedded workflows that empower recruiters to focus on strategic, high-impact work. From sourcing top talent to personalizing the candidate experience, Greenhouse streamlines and optimizes the entire hiring process. This ensures that every hire is the right hire—eliminating bias, creating fairness, and helping teams make smarter, faster decisions. Over 7,500 companies, including HubSpot, Duolingo, and J.D. Power, trust Greenhouse to build better teams and turn talent into a strategic advantage. Want to learn how today's top companies are winning the talent game? Tune in now and visit Greenhouse.com to transform the way you hire. Thanks for listening. Please follow us on Instagram @NHPTalent and X @AdamJPosner. Visit www.thePOZcast.com for all episodes

Dr. Vamsi Velcheti and Dr. Charu Aggarwal discuss the evolution of ctDNA as a critical tool in precision oncology and its implications for lung cancer management, including its potential role in the early-stage setting. TRANSCRIPT Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: Hello. I am Dr. Vamsi Velcheti, your guest host for the ASCO Daily News Podcast today. I am a professor of medicine and director of thoracic medical oncology at the Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health.  The management of small cell lung cancer has rapidly evolved over the past few decades, and today, molecular testing and biomarker testing for lung cancer are absolutely critical in terms of designing treatment options for our patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Charu Aggarwal for a discussion on ctDNA (circulating tumor DNA) and the role of ctDNA in lung cancer management. Dr. Aggarwal is the Leslye Heisler Professor of Lung Cancer Excellence and section chief of thoracic and head and neck oncology at University of Pennsylvania Abramson Cancer Center.  You'll find our full disclosures in the transcript of that episode.  Dr. Agrawal, it's great to have you on the podcast today. Thank you for being here. Dr. Charu Aggarwal: Thank you for having me. Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: Let's start off with setting the stage for ctDNA technology. These technologies have rapidly evolved from experimental conceptual stage to essential clinical tools for day-to-day clinical practice. Could you briefly discuss how recent advancements in ctDNA technologies are shaping our approach to precision medicine, especially in lung cancer? Dr. Charu Aggarwal: Absolutely. And you know, I think we need to just level set a little bit. What exactly is circulating tumor DNA? This is a way to assess exactly that. Every tumor sheds little pieces of tumor-derived DNA into the bloodstream, and this occurs in a variety of solid tumors. But now we have the technology to be able to derive this DNA that's actually being shed from the tumor into the bloodstream, these minute fragments of DNA, take them out, amplify them and sequence them with a variety of different mechanisms. They can be DNA sequencing alone, they can be DNA and RNA sequencing, they can be whole transcriptome sequencing. The technology, as you rightly pointed out, Dr. Velcheti, has significantly improved from just being able to look at circulating tumor DNA to now being able to amplify it, sequence it, and use it to offer personalized therapy. I think lung cancer is definitely the poster child for such an approach as we have a lot of data that has shown clinical utility and validity of being able to use circulating tumor DNA next-generation gene sequencing to guide therapy. Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: There have been so many technological leaps. It's really impressive how far we've come to advance these sequencing platforms. Recent advances with AI and machine learning are also playing important roles in interpreting ctDNA data. How are these computational advances really enhancing clinical decision-making in day-to-day clinical practice? Dr. Charu Aggarwal: I think while we have firmly established the role of ctDNA in the management of patients with metastatic lung cancer, some of the approaches that you talked about are still experimental. So let me backtrack a little bit and set the stage for how we use ctDNA in clinical practice right now. I think most patients, when they come in with a new diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer, we want to test for biomarkers. And this should actually be the established standard. Now included in the NCCN guidelines and actually also international guidelines, is to consider using blood-based testing or plasma-based testing to look for biomarkers, not just tissue-based testing which had been our historical standard, but to use these plasma guided approaches to identify the seven to nine biomarkers that may be truly implicated in either first- or second-line therapy that are called as your immediately actionable mutations.  What you're talking about is AI computational methods. I think there's a lot of excitement about how we can use genomic signatures that are derived from either tissue or ctDNA-based biomarker testing, combine it with radiomic features, combine it with histologic features, look at H & E patterns, use AI algorithmic learning to be able to actually predict recurrence scores, or can we actually come up with predictive signatures that may be extremely helpful?  So, I think some of the techniques and technologies that you're talking about are incoming. They are provocative. I think they're very exciting, but very early. Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: I think it's really amazing how many advances we have with these platforms. You know, the challenge really is the significant gap in terms of uptake of molecular testing. Even today, in 2025, there are significant gaps in terms of all metastatic lung cancer patients being tested for all biomarkers.  So, why do you think there's such a challenge in testing patients with lung cancer? In most academic practices, we try to achieve 100% testing for all our patients, but we know from recent studies that that's not the case across the country. What do you think the gaps are? Dr. Charu Aggarwal: Biomarker testing is so essential, like you pointed out, for us to be able to guide the right therapy for our patients. And we see this in our practice every day as you and I see patients with lung cancer, that a large proportion of our patients either don't get tested or they start therapy before their test results come back. So, I think this is a real problem.  However, to add some optimism to this problem, I do think that we are making a move in the right direction. So, four or five years ago, there was a lot of data being presented at national meetings, including ones from the American Society of Clinical Oncology, where we saw that, nationally, the rates of biomarker testing were probably in the rate of 40 to 50%. However, now with the availability of both tissue and plasma, I do think that the rates of biomarker testing are increasing. And if you were to survey a sample or even perform retrospective data research, I believe that the number is closer to 70% of all patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer.  And you know, you asked why is it not 100%? I think there are many reasons. I think the number one reason is tissue availability. Many times, the biopsies are small, or the tumor is very necrotic. So, either the tissue quantity itself is small, or the tissue quantity is insufficient to perform gene sequencing. And that's exactly where plasma comes in. When you don't have tissue availability, we have shown, as have others, that you can use plasma effectively to increase the proportion of patients who are not only tested but also receive the right therapy. I think there are also other barriers, including inertia. You know, I think this is both patient and physician inertia, where patients want to get started quickly, they don't want to wait. Physicians are very busy and sometimes want to be able to deliver treatment as soon as possible. We have seen there are some institutional barriers. Not every institution has in-house gene sequencing testing. So how do you really operationalize, send out these tests in a fast, efficient manner so that you get results back? Is it a pathologist who sends out the test? Is it the medical oncologist? Is it the pulmonologist or the interventionalist? I think there is this need to develop reflex testing mechanisms which some institutions do really well and some don't. And then finally, there are financial implications as well. How do we do this in a most cost-efficient fashion?  So there are many barriers, but I'm happy to say that we are making a move in the right direction as we are understanding that it's important to do it, it's easy to do it maybe with a value add of plasma, and finally, as you said, you know, as these technologies become more available, they're actually getting more cost-effective. Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: Dr. Aggarwal, you've been at the cutting edge of these advanced platforms and testing. So, what do you do in UPenn? How do you handle all these barriers and what is your workflow for patients in University of Pennsylvania? Dr. Charu Aggarwal: One of the things that I mentioned to you was there may be institutional barriers when it comes to gene sequencing. So, we actually, several years ago now, instituted a very robust reflex testing paradigm where almost all of our patients, regardless of stage, with a non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer diagnosis, would automatically be reflexively sent to our molecular pathology lab where they would get gene sequencing both for the DNA as well as with an RNA fusion-based platform. And the reason we did this was because we wanted to expedite and reduce the turnaround time. We also wanted to ensure that we were not just doing DNA testing, which I think is really important for our listeners here. There are many fusions as well as certain skipping mutations like MET exon 14 that may be missed on DNA testing alone. So, it's really incredibly important to run both DNA and RNA samples.  So, we do this routinely, and based on our research and others, what we also do routinely is that we send concurrent tissue and liquid biopsies or plasma MGS testing upon initial diagnosis. For example, if a patient comes in with a diagnosis of stage IV non-small cell lung cancer, their tissue might already be at my molecular pathology lab based on the reflex mechanism that I just described to you. But upon their initial meeting with me, we will send off plasma. And I will tell you this, that Penn is not just one institution, right? We have a large network of sites. And as part of my research, one of the things that we wanted to do was implement wide scale means to improve biomarker testing. And we have done this with the use of technology like you mentioned, Dr. Velcheti: How can we actually use AI? How can we leverage our electronic medical record to identify these patients? So, we have a nudge-based mechanism which actually facilitates the pending of orders for biomarker testing for patients with new diagnosis of metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. And we are looking at our rates of biomarker testing but also rates of completion of biomarker testing before first-line therapy started. So many of our participating sites are clusters for our randomized control trial to increase molecular testing. And I'm really excited about the fact that we're able to implement it not just at our main satellite, downtown Penn Hospital, but also across our community. Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: I think that's great. Thank you so much for those insights, Dr. Aggarwal. I think it's so important because having the best technology is just not enough. I think implementation science is actually a real thing. And I think we need to all learn from each other, advance these things.  So, I want to ask you about the new emerging paradigm in terms of using ctDNA. Of course, in the metastatic setting, we've been using ctDNA for molecular profiling for a while now. But the recent data around monitoring early-stage disease, especially post-operative monitoring, is an exciting area. There are a lot of opportunities there. Could you please talk us through the emerging data in lung cancer and how do we incorporate ctDNA-based monitoring MRD or should we even do that right now? Is the data ripe enough for us to kind of deploy this in a clinical setting? Dr. Charu Aggarwal: I think using ctDNA in the early-stage setting is our next frontier in lung cancer. I think naturally we have been able to successfully deploy this in the stage 4 setting. It made a meaningful difference in the lives of our patients, and we are a little bit behind the A ball in terms of how MRD is used in lung cancer. Because, you know, colorectal cancer has already done large-randomized trials based on ctDNA and MRD. It's routinely used in hematological malignancy. So, it makes sense that we should start to use it.  However, when I say this, I say this with excitement, but also a little bit of gentle caution saying that we actually don't quite have the prospective randomized data just yet on how to deploy. Yes, intuitively we would say that if you detect ctDNA and MRD, that patient is at higher risk. So, we identify that, but we actually don't know what to do with the second part of that information once you identify a patient with high risk. Are there other techniques that we can then come in with or other drugs that we can come in with to modify that risk? And that's the thing that I think we don't have right now. The other thing that we don't have right now is the timing of the assay, when to use it. Is it to be tested in the pre-op setting? Is the post-op test the best timing, or is it monitoring and dynamics of ctDNA that are most important? And the third thing I will say in terms of precautionary cause is that we don't know which test just yet. There are actually a few commercially available tests out in the market right now. We know about them and I'm sure our community colleagues know about them. Some of them even have Medicare approval. However, many of these tests are currently tissue informed. We don't have tissue uninformed tests. And what does that mean? Tissue uninformed means that you actually take a piece of tumor tissue, you sequence that tumor and based on the gene profile of that tumor, you actually design a panel that can then be used to track the mutations in the blood-based pack. This requires, as the name implies, a tumor. So can this be used in the pre-op setting is a large question. Because coming back to the idea of tissue availability, you and I both know that when we get FNAS and we use it for PDL-1 testing and we use it for gene sequencing, there often isn't enough tissue left for us to then either do whole genome sequencing or even whole transcriptome sequencing, which may be required to build some of these assays.  I think the future lies in this idea of tumor uninformed assays because if we could go to a blood only or a plasma only approach using novel signatures like proteomics or methylation, I think that's where the future is. But we're still a little bit early in the discovery stages of those, as well as to come are the validation stages so that we can be confident that these blood-only assays may actually give us an answer.  So, with those three cautionary notes, I would say that optimism is still very high. I think ctDNA MRD is the right place to think about. We need to do this for our patients to better identify high-risk patients and to think about means to escalate treatment for them. Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: Yeah, I completely agree, and I think with all the changes and evolution of treatments in the management of early-stage lung cancer now with neoadjuvant and adjuvant, there's really a need for an escalation and de-escalation of therapies post-operatively. And I think it's a huge opportunity. I think we all could learn from our colorectal colleagues. I think they've done a really good job at actually doing prospective trials in this setting. I think we're kind of a little behind here.  Dr. Charu Aggarwal: I think in the metastatic setting there are ongoing trials to look at this exact question. How do you choose an appropriate first-line therapy, a monitor ctDNA at the six-week trial? It's being evaluated in a trial called the “Shedders” trial, where if patients are still ctDNA positive at six weeks, then you can escalate treatment because they haven't “cleared” their ctDNA. There has been a lot of research that has shown that lack of ctDNA clearance in the metastatic setting may be a poor prognostic factor. We and others have shown that if you do clear your ctDNA or if you have a reduction in ctDNA load overall, that that is directly related to both an improved progression-free survival and overall survival. This has been shown with both tissue informed and uninformed assays. So I think it's very clear that yes, you can track it. I think the question is: Can you apply that data to the early-stage setting? And that's an open research question. A lot of groups are looking at that and I think it's completely reasonable, especially to determine duration of therapy, to determine optimal timing, optimal timing of scans even. And I think these are just such interesting questions that will be answered in the future. Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: And also like a kind of early detection of resistance patterns that might inform early initiation of combination strategies. And I think it's a lot of opportunities I think yet to be explored. A lot of exciting things to come and I'm sure we'll kind of see more and more data in the next few years.  Dr. Aggarwal, thank you so much for sharing your fantastic insights today on the ASCO Daily News Podcast. It's been a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Hope to see you at ASCO. Dr. Charu Aggarwal: Thank you so much. This was great and I remain so excited by all of the possibilities to improve outcomes for our patients. Dr. Vamsi Velcheti: Thank you to all the listeners for your time today. If you value the insights that you hear from the ASCO Daily News Podcast, please take a moment to rate, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Thank you so much. Disclaimer: The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions. Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement. Follow today's speakers:  Dr. Vamsidhar Velcheti  @VamsiVelcheti  @vamsivelcheti.bsky.social Dr. Charu Aggarwal @CharuAggarwalMD   Follow ASCO on social media:  @ASCO on X (formerly Twitter)  ASCO on Bluesky ASCO on Facebook  ASCO on LinkedIn    Disclosures: Dr. Vamsidhar Velcheti:  Honoraria: Glavanize Therapeutics Consulting or Advisory Role: Bristol-Myers Squibb, Merck, AstraZeneca/MedImmune, GSK, Amgen, Taiho Oncology, Novocure, Takeda, Janssen Oncology, Picture Health, Regeneron Research Funding (Inst.): Genentech, Trovagene, Eisai, OncoPlex Diagnostics, Alkermes, NantOmics, Genoptix, Altor BioScience, Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Atreca, Heat Biologics, Leap Therapeutics, RSIP Vision, GlaxoSmithKline  Dr. Charu Aggarwal: Consulting or Advisory Role: AstraZeneca, Daiichi Sankyo/AstraZeneca, Regeneron/Sanofi, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, Takeda, Arcus Biosciences, Gilead Sciences, Novocure, Abbvie Speakers' Bureau: AstraZeneca (an immediate family member) Research Funding (Inst): Merck Sharp & Dohme, AstraZeneca/MedImmune, Daiichi Sankyo/AstraZeneca, Lilly@Loxo, Candel Therapeutics  

Drs. Akshay Thomas and Priya Vakharia join to preview the April 2025 edition of Retinal Physician, focusing on current and future therapies for neovascular AMD.Relevant Financial Disclosures: Dr. Sridhar has consulted for Genentech, Regeneron, and Eyepoint. Dr. Vakharia has consulted for Regeneron, Ocular Therapeutix, and Eyepoint.You can claim CME credits for prior episodes via the AAO website. Visit https://www.aao.org/browse-multimedia?filter=Audi

Productivity isn't just “doing more”; it's accomplishing what truly matters with mindful intention and strategic focus. Productivity guru Tiago Forte joins us in this episode of Marketing Speak to share his PARA method for effortless organization. He shares his insights on using intuition in business, combating information overload, and the inherently creative process of knowledge work. Tiago Forte is a global authority on productivity. He has guided thousands worldwide to successfully leverage timeless principles and cutting-edge technology to accomplish revolutionary productivity, creativity, and personal effectiveness changes. He has lent his expertise to renowned organizations like Genentech, Toyota Motor Corporation, and the Inter-American Development Bank. Featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, and Harvard Business Review, Tiago Forte is a true luminary in the productivity space. Don't miss the game-changing lessons that will transform your approach to productivity! The show notes, including the transcript and checklist to this episode, are at marketingspeak.com/495.

In this episode of BrainStorm, host Meryl Comer continues explore the challenges of dementia diagnosis in her interview with Doreen Monks, a former neuroscience nurse practitioner, who initially received an Alzheimer's diagnosis that was revised eight years later. The conversation highlights issues in the dementia diagnosis process, the gap between scientific advances and clinical practice, and the emotional journey of living with a neurodegenerative condition. Doreen Monks' personal journey offers both practical advice and emotional support for others facing similar challenges, emphasizing hope, proactive health management, and the importance of scientific advances reaching clinical practice more efficiently.This episode provides valuable insights for patients and caregivers navigating dementia diagnoses while highlighting the rapidly evolving understanding of neurodegenerative diseases. Take a listen!BrainStorm by UsAgainstAlzheimer's is sponsored by Genentech (gene.com)Produced by Susan Quirk and Amber RonigerSupport the show

On this episode of Food Allergy Talk, I welcome Dr. Ahmar Iqbal is a physician and senior leader at Genentech, a pharmaceutical company. At Genentech, Dr. Iqbal is the Therapeutic Area Lead for Respiratory and Influenza, where he has been leading medical initiatives for nearly a decade. Recently, he worked closely with the National Institutes of Health and the Consortium for Food Allergy Research (CoFAR) on the Phase 3 clinical trial called OUtMATCH that supported the FDA approval for Xolair in food allergies in 2024.With a career spanning GSK, Pfizer, and Eli Lilly, he has played a key role in advancing patient-centered care focusing on immunology/allergy/respiratory care and in clinical research and medical affairs. Dr. Iqbal earned his medical degree from Karachi University in Pakistan and an MBA in Healthcare Management from Boston University. Before joining the pharmaceutical industry, he practiced as an internist and worked on healthcare quality initiatives. Dr. Iqbal is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and enjoys watching sports especially at the stadium/arena, volunteering, and reading (paper books still). In this episode we discuss how Dr. Iqbal entered the medical field, and how that path led to working with food allergy related studies. We delve into what is Xolair and how can it be used in food allergy management? For more info: Xolair.comJoin My Private Facebook Group to connect, support and share: https://www.facebook.com/groups/FoodAllergyPI/Read My Articles on WebMD: https://blogs.webmd.com/food-allergies/lisa-horneThe Everything Nut Allergy Cookbook: https://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Lisa-Horne/190009636The Food Allergy Talk Podcast: https://foodallergypi.com/the-food-allergy-talk-podcast/Food Allergy P.I. Blog: https://foodallergypi.comX: @foodallergypi & @fatalkpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/foodallergypi/ and https://www.instagram.com/foodallergytalk/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@foodallergypiEmail: foodallergypi@gmail.com

What are the real-world safety data following administration of faricimab (Vabysmo, Genentech)? Maura Di Nicola, MD, and guests Sruthi Arepalli, MD, and Barton Blackorby, MD, review data from a real-world, single-center, retrospective study of approximately 4500 injections of faricimab in over 700 patients at Wills Eye Hospital. What did the data show? And do these data effect the clinical patterns of Drs. Di Nicola, Arepalli, and Blackorby? 

Genentech VP, CMO Erica Taylor joins The Current Podcast to share her unique journey from immunology to biotech marketing, and the evolving role of biotech brands in mainstream media.  Episode TranscriptPlease note, this transcript  may contain minor inconsistencies compared to the episode audio.Kat Vesce (00:00):I'm Kat Vesce. And I'm Ilyse Liffreing and welcome to this edition of The Current Podcast. In honor of International Women's Day and Women's Month, we're spotlighting trailblazing women in marketing at this year's South by Southwest.Ilyse Liffreing (00:16):For this episode, we're excited to be joined by Erica Taylor, vice president and chief marketing Officer at Genentech, a company at the forefront of biotech innovation for over 40 years.Kat Vesce (00:28):Erica has a unique background transitioning from a PhD in immunology and a product development into the world of marketing, bringing a scientific perspective to how Genentech connects with global healthcare providers and patients.Ilyse Liffreing (00:41):We'll dive into how that background informs her approach to marketing, the game changing campaign she's led, and how the biotech industry is evolving to embrace more creative, emotionally driven storytelling.Kat Vesce (00:54):Plus Erica will share her perspective on how women in STEM can break barriers and what the future of healthcare marketing holds. Let's get started.Ilyse Liffreing (01:01):So Erica, thanks for being here at South by Southwest. Thanks for having me. Of course. So you have a unique background for a CMO growing part of your career on the product development side of biotech. After earning your PhD from Stanford Medical School, what drew you to the marketing side of biotech and why don't we see more medical students transition into heading up marketing departments?Erica Taylor (01:25):Yeah, I sometimes think that I have the habit of just showing up in places I'm not supposed to be, and so I certainly didn't go into my studies in immunology with the idea that I was going to end up in marketing. I would've never have thought that that would be the case. It really sort of became apparent to me that I was very much interested in the intersection of business and science when I was nearing the end of my graduate program, but I wasn't really sure how to do that or how to get there. So I explored a lot and I often share when I do development conversations with folks in the industry that I've probably not gotten more jobs than I've gotten in my life trying to figure out how to be in these other spaces. But for me, the journey really started in consulting.(02:07):I was in management consulting for biotech and pharma industry, and that is what led me to Genentech. And at my career there I have had roles in analytics and in sales, and it was probably my time in sales that really got me interested in marketing. And so I was able to sort of land a role in marketing and to do so at a company that innovates on science. I think they were able to sort of see, okay, she maybe doesn't have a background in marketing, but she understands the science, she understands how to communicate it and what actually moves markets when you're in the sales field.Ilyse Liffreing (02:38):How has that background informed your approach as a CMO? Why is that scientific medical knowledge and maybe even sales knowledge so valuable?Erica Taylor (02:48):Yeah, I think one of the things that was a bit of an aha for me in my sales role was I'll say one of the most professionally transformative experiences I had, which is code for saying it was the hardest thing I've ever done. And you learn a lot about what actually motivates people in the decisions that they make. And marketing is really focused on influencing a decision that people make and you realize even though I have a background in science and people very much need to understand why they're making the decision they're making. If you're a provider making a prescribing decision or a patient choosing between options for medicines available to you, you need to understand the why of that. But really there has to be some kind of emotional pull there. And I was really fascinated with that because I sort of come from a very cerebral training of like, well, we've got this data and here are the patients for which benefit the most, and so therefore this is the natural conclusion of the decision you would make. In fact, it's far more complex than that and it's that complexity of human behavior that I got really interested in as I grew in the marketing organization. So I try to bring both the left and right brain such as it were to that thinking.Kat Vesce (03:53):As the best marketers do. We ask everyone this question, I want to go a little bit deeper. Is there a specific moment that changed the game for you as a marketer? Tell us your most defining career moment or pivot to date and what the obstacles were there.Erica Taylor (04:10):Yeah, I could probably name a few. I get the most depth in moments and insights when I actually get to interact with patients and with providers and sort of understand deeply their experiences. And one of the ahas that I got actually both in my sales and then later in my marketing role is that yes, Genentech, you guys have been trailblazing and biotech and you have been innovating, but the data is so complex even though I'm trained in this field with the patient loads that I see every day, I don't have time and you guys don't make it simple for us. And so the aha there is like, okay, then marketing campaigns have to really focus on taking very complex science, which I feel fortunate to understand, but boil it down to something that's very simple, that's very memorable. And the same for patients. Very often when I'm in conversations with providers, I have the patient in mind when I'm thinking about how I would want this medicine explained to me, and that is how I explain it to the provider thinking maybe if a couple of my phrasing or words sort of land, well then that's what gets repeated to the patient so that they understand the choices that they have before them.Kat Vesce (05:17):I love that. And as a biotech company now over 40 years old, how would you say your approach to campaign strategy differs from typical healthcare campaigns?Erica Taylor (05:25):Yeah, well for one,Kat Vesce (05:26):A little bit of that patient in mind.Erica Taylor (05:28):Yeah, the patient for sure in mind. And one of the things that I'm very happy to spearhead as the chief marketing officer is really thinking about how do we make that more and more personal? It's not the patient, it is the patient that may be a single parent that lives 45 minutes from their local healthcare system. How do I speak to that patient just as much as I speak to the patient that has a high powered career and really doesn't have the time to focus on themselves and needs something to be quick and convenient? And so really the opportunity before us is to figure out how to become more nuanced, relevant and personalized when we tell the stories of our medicines. What I love about Genentech and our ability to do that is we've always been focused on two things, patience and science. And as long as we keep those two centered in everything that we do, I think we're able to kind of meet that mark.(06:14):Maybe the other thing I'll add, because the idea of speaking in personalized ways is not new. It's not rocket science, it's not even the more complex things that we do, but the technology and the capabilities that exist maybe outside of healthcare are now being applied in our space. And so very excited about what things like generative AI can do for us and really being able to personalize our stories around our medicines and our development. But at scale, we market over 40 medicines, and so it's great to do this in one or two places, but imagine doing that across the full breadth of our portfolio.Kat Vesce (06:47):And I imagine that 40 medications or medicines times however many profiles fit the many faces of patients.Erica Taylor (06:57):Exactly.Kat Vesce (06:58):Yeah, you really need some automation there.Erica Taylor (07:00):Absolutely. The scale of the problem is impossible, and unless I'm getting sort of a complete blank check to build all the resources that I need, we've got to find ways to be more efficient with that.Ilyse Liffreing (07:09):So that has really got me thinking because as much as the customer is number one and everything, but you also have to speak to the provider and they're the ones who are going to be really selling your medicine to the patient themselves. How do you solve, I guess, for your need to resonate with both the customer provider and then who would you consider highest priority in those campaigns?Erica Taylor (07:34):No, it's a really, really great question. One of the things that I love about the healthcare space is that your decision maker and your end user are almost never the same person. And that's not totally unique. It's uncommon. But you could imagine parents buying baby formula are also decision makers, but generally not. And users, unless you were like me and got desperate and ran out of half and half and put baby formula in, coffee works great. Extra nutrients. Exactly. Yeah, life hack. So it's not totally unique, but you have to kind of speak to two audiences. So because of the breadth of our portfolio, we really do think about this disease state by disease state. So there are some disease states where really the provider is the driving decision maker. Examples of this can be if you're having a stroke and you're in the hospital, you're probably not deciding between which medications are right for now, you're really driven by the provider's decision maker.(08:31):You can think about that in some of our later line cancer portfolios. When you're in your past, your first two lines of treatment, you're really going to be relying on your provider to understand what are the next, so in those cases, we tend to focus more on the provider and the prescribing decision maker. There are other parts of our portfolio where it's really very much patient driven. We have a medicine that treats food allergy, and that really then tends to involve in some cases, adolescents, their parents. And so we really need to elevate their voices when we're thinking about how we make sure they have the right information. So it really can span the gamut, and it's about taking a specific view of that particular disease state and how decision-making is made.Ilyse Liffreing (09:09):That's amazing. Now the biotech category is not known for being exactly sexy when it comes to creative marketing. It's bogged down with side effects and similar storylines usually. How are you guys moving the needle in terms of creating those powerful maybe storytelling campaigns?Erica Taylor (09:30):Yeah, I mean, we are a regulated industry and I'll state first. It's actually really important that we give that information. Any medicine that anyone is going to take, you have to weigh the benefits and the risks, and it is on us to communicate that fairly. And so I very much stand behind that. As a scientist, we really have to do that, but that can also make it really hard to know what's what we're trying to do this. So for me, I always try to root in the emotion and what I tell my teams all the time at the end of everything we do is someone who is sick and scared and how do we really tap into that? What do they need in that moment of diagnosis? What do they need in that moment when they're a week out from treatment and they're not really sure if what they're experiencing is normal?(10:14):Really kind of capturing those moments along the patient's journey. And similarly for the provider's journey, if I were to be oversimplified providers saying 15, 20 patients a day, how do we find ways to make their challenging lives as easy as possible, as simple as possible? And so we kind of think of that almost in two tracks. Some of the best creative that I see really speaks to that emotion. We did a campaign in our ophthalmology franchise last year called A Beautiful Site, which really chronicles a parent watching their child go through the education and then that parent one day becoming a patient. And it's really a motive. We actually don't talk a ton about the medicine itself, but more the experience of what it's like when you're struggling with your eyesight and it's gotten a lot of traction just by speaking to that lived experience.Kat Vesce (11:03):We're going to shift the conversation and zoom out a little bit.Erica Taylor (11:05):Okay.Kat Vesce (11:05):Though biotech is not new by any means, the category was catapulted into the spotlight in mainstream media during the height of COVID-19 something very intimately a thing or two. Yes. Yeah. Gilead at the time, you saw this firsthand with your previous role. And tell us a little bit about that experience. What do you think has changed for the industry as a whole since then?Erica Taylor (11:27):Oh wow. So many things. I had so many reactions kind of experiencing as we all did. The sort of the Covid Ovid 19 crisis, the first among them is that science really became front and center. And as a scientist, I get excited, finally, we're getting the credit we deserve, but so much about it was what I understand is science. Science is slow and painstaking. It's a step forward, it's a step to the right, it's a step back. It's two steps forward. That is how science happens. The lay public for the most part just sees it at the end. And so you get to tell this story, but that's not actually how it went down. Think about your vaccines for things like polio. We weren't following the day to day of that. We just had it. And we go, great. That's wonderful science. So when looking through the vaccine development for Covid, we're kind of watching day by day, is it six feet?(12:17):What kind of mask? How do I do this? And so we got, I think people lost trust in science and that really was heartbreaking because that's actually how it is. And for me it's the resilience of the people that continue to pursue when you get up and the thing you thought was going to work didn't work today, and you get up tomorrow and go do it. And we were able to break through in that way. That's the one thing on the science side, on the marketing side, we now know names of biotech companies. No one generally does know that I get true. My branded medication, I get this branded, that branded medication. Now the names of the companies that produced the vaccines, you would go in and say, I want the Moderna one or the Pfizer one. That has never really happened before in our industry.(13:03):And we've had to go from being a sort of what I'll call a house of brands, the branded medication, to really thinking about, well, what is the worth in branding the house, the Genentechs of the world? We're actively thinking about how we do that, especially as we come to our 50th anniversary as a company next year. So I know there's a lot of activity and thinking, how do we strategically do this that is authentic to who we are as an organization and elevates all of the work that we do, all of the scientists that pursue day in and day out, all of the patients that we've been able to help improve the lives of.Kat Vesce (13:39):So in a world that we've been talking about has changed so much since Covid. Absolutely. People also expect more from companies than ever before. How do you align your corporate positioning with Genentech, with your creative output?Erica Taylor (13:51):Yeah. I think to me this is about relevance and authenticity. I think there's so much content in your life in and out of healthcare to consume, and I think people are far more discerning of what feels authentic to them, what feels true, what feels pandered to right today is International Women's Day. There's lots of celebrations around Women's Day. Not everyone has been consistent about really centering women and thinking about what are the things that women could benefit from and could use, I think, and the women walking around here today, they know the difference. And so I think for us, the onus is being true to who we are, being authentic, really, and as relevant as we can. And I think about that just sort of from the broader Genentech, but also how do we think about this product by product? What is the authentic experiences and where do we show up really matters? One of the things that I tell my teams all the time, I'm like, we'd say the word patient. They are people, which sounds obvious, but you can easily lose sight of the fact that the fact that someone is a patient is probably in the bottom five of the top 100 things they like about their life. So you want to be there when needed and the hell out of their lives when not. Right. And so how do we thread that line appropriately,Ilyse Liffreing (15:13):Right? Yeah,Erica Taylor (15:14):It's hard. It's hard. It's hard.Ilyse Liffreing (15:16):You could argue it's harder than your average CPG brandErica Taylor (15:19):ForIlyse Liffreing (15:19):Instance.Erica Taylor (15:20):Absolutely.Ilyse Liffreing (15:21):Absolutely.Erica Taylor (15:22):So it keeps it interesting for sureIlyse Liffreing (15:23):Yeah. Now, I know we kind of talked about this a little bit, but I wanted to zoom out here a little bit because of this trend, it seems like it's a trend anyway, and I'm curious what you think, but during the Super Bowl, there were stronger examples of creative lead pharma and biotech ads competing against the typical ads you would see during the Super Bowl usually. What do you think about this? Is that where we're moving as an industry?Erica Taylor (15:51):I think it's interesting. I feel like I'm a student of commercials. I actually personally love football, so I consume every second of the Super Bowl bowls for the game and then the ads that show. I think it's interesting and I think it's a space worth exploring as an industry. And I think we've seen, there's a Pfizer ad that was released this year. I think they did one last year as well. I think we're still trying to figure out how to land the mark. And Super Bowl is an interesting venue to do that. Most people don't want to see a drug commercial. They're eating nachos, they're watching a game, they're maybe cheering on a team, they're waiting for the halftime show, whatever. But how do you land in a space that is supposed to be celebratory in light with something that's relevant and important? I think it's worth exploring personally. I'm sort of like, let's see where there might be a relevant kind of meeting of the moment. And it might be specific to just that year, right? Or just this particular thing that we have in our portfolio that's innovative that we want to make sure people know about.(16:54):I don't know that I'd paint a brush and do it everywhere for all things personally, a hundredKat Vesce (16:58):Percent. ButErica Taylor (16:59):I'm sure there's probably other marketers on this listening here that'll say, no, you should be pushing. And I'm curious, sort of very curious about where this could go and interested to see,Ilyse Liffreing (17:10):Since we're at South by Southwest and this is International Women's Day, I'd love to get your take on some of these female focused questions. Sure. So first of all, what inspired you to pursue a career in marketing and how has your journey been as a woman in the industry? I know with your strong STEM background especially, do you feel like there's still a much needed boost in how women pursue stem?Erica Taylor (17:34):Well, I am particularly passionate about STEM fields and as a self-proclaimed and bonafide nerd, I think the more in which ways in which we can celebrate that the better. I think it is interesting. We've seen increasing percentages of women pursuing STEM careers, which I applaud. It's not even the painted, I think more in medicine and healthcare related fields, I think there's still more gains to be had in fields like engineering and computer science. And one of the things that are very critical if we want to truly unlock things like artificial intelligence, I think there's more to do there. But I feel very much the, I feel like I'm coming behind women that have gone before and have really blazed trails, and I feel the same responsibility to make sure that whatever trail someone believes I've blazed or not is easier for whoever comes behind me. And I feel a deep obligation that I spend a good amount of my time mentoring and developing everyone, not just women, but folks that are interested in, as I call it, being in places you're not supposed to be. I think it just makes for a an interesting career path and journey. And I don't know what I'll do in the future. I still dunno what I want to do when I grow up. I'm having a great time now. And so I look to mentors that help see, oh, okay, that's how you did that.Kat Vesce (18:59):Can we better support women in leadership roles? You mentioned mentorship. What are some other ways you're leaning into that?Erica Taylor (19:06):Yeah, I think it can come up in both direct ways, like mentorship. I think those programs benefit everyone. And both I learned from them and I learn a lot about some of the challenges that people face in their careers now. I think there's subtle ways. One of, I think the most powerful things that we can do is as leaders show up honestly and authentically and not be afraid of showing moments of vulnerability. And I think it humanizes you. I had an experience last year where my husband got very, very ill and I needed to have a pretty major surgery. He's doing great now. But sort of living through that and thinking about how do I do the job? I've asked, I've been asked to do, but show up authentically with my team and let them know, Hey, I've got kind of a lot going on at home right now and I don't even know that I navigated that line well. But more recently actually got up on stage in front of my full organization and kind of shared the story. And I did it in the context of marketing and what it meant to have healthcare providers sort give me exactly what I need in the moment to help support him through this.Kat Vesce (20:22):What a full circle moment.Erica Taylor (20:24):It was somewhat of a spontaneous decision, but I think as certainly women leaders as leaders, your podcasters don't know this, but I'm a woman of color, so a lot of things that are not typical about where I show up in spaces. And the more that I can make it that I'm still human, I'm still me, and I go through life the same way you do, you never know what people are walking around with kind of position. I think that helps invite others to say, okay, maybe I didn't get a PhD. Maybe I don't have these things, but I am as human as she is and maybe I can make it there too. I think there's value in that, even though I was literally shaking in my boots to tell that story to one stage, that's a hard thing to do. And fighting to keep my composure and be as authentic as I could. Well,Kat Vesce (21:13):That's the most humanErica Taylor (21:14):Response ever. Yeah.Kat Vesce (21:15):So inspiring. What advice would you give to the next generation of marketing leaders, including we talked about not just young women, but everyone looking to grow into that leadership role?Erica Taylor (21:29):Yeah, I usually give, and there's a couple schools of thought on this, so this is sort of Erica's school of thought on this, right? I think that you have to strike this balance between having depth of knowledge but getting breadth of experience. And it's a really hard one to thread, especially if you're doing something you love. You just want to do more and more and more and more. And there may be great growth paths to be had in that. But a lot of the advice that I give to folks, it's like every time you think about pursuing another role, I am going to apply for this role. It's a promotion, it's a lateral, it think two moves ahead. Does it unlock more options for you? And be very aware, my more senior leaders, I'm like, you have to understand you're at a point in your seniority where making lateral moves gets harder.(22:12):And so you want to make them in your earlier points in your career when you can. Because one, there's just more of those roles. I'm a vice president, there's not a lot of us at Genentech. And so if I want to move laterally, I have fewer options. I have to be that much more thoughtful about it. But I feel like I come at this with the space of a more breadth of experience, but you still got to know the job. So you kind of have to navigate this sort of, as I call it, the difference between scuba and snorkel. If you can scuba dive and go deep, understand that that has ramifications for your career development. If you only snorkel, also ramifications for your career development. And then the other piece of advice I give folks is try not to plan more than a couple of years ahead because 10 years from now, you're going to do a job that doesn't exist today.(22:59):So I'm first CMO, so I couldn't have won this job. It didn't exist until three years ago, right? Plan for a couple of years at a time. And if you're weighing a couple of options that are otherwise equal to you go with the team you'd rather have more fun with, go with the team. You want to come hang out in Austin, Texas with, right? And you're never going to go wrong. Working on teams that you enjoy with each other. We have a really great and strong culture at Genentech, and I'm always like, if you see a leader you want to go work with, find a way to get on that person's team. So those are usually the kinds of advice I give to everyone. And then maybe the other, and this is more, I'm of a certain age wouldn'tKat Vesce (23:41):Know it. PodcastersErica Taylor (23:43):Of a certain age worry a lot less, and someone gave me this advice, what am I going to do? How am I going to get that job? Blah, blah, blah. You've got to work a long time. Most if you're lucky, and many people do, and so worry a lot less about what's going to happen in a decade, worry a lot less about that person that's your peer that just got that promotion and they're going to go farther than you. Career path is their own and everything happens kind of exactly as it should. And so I try really hard to, especially for folks that I get the sort of fresh from business school and they're like, I've got to be CEO in five years. And I'm like, I don't dunno. Let's worry a little less about the timing and worry much more about the kinds of experiences you get to have along the way, what you get to learn and who you get to meet.Kat Vesce (24:37):Well,Erica Taylor (24:37):Erica, thank youKat Vesce (24:38):So much and thanks for your vulnerability and sharing those tidbits and stories. I so appreciate this time. I know we're both leaving really inspired soErica Taylor (24:46):Much. Thank you. I'm so happy to do this. I appreciate the invite. I hope it's helpful for your listeners. Yeah, no, it great. I'm sure it will be. Thank you so much. Thanks.Kat Vesce (24:55):Wow. I am blown away. I am walking away from that conversation with Erica Taylor. So inspired. I don't know about you.Ilyse Liffreing (25:02):Oh my gosh, yes. I love how vulnerable she was about talking about her husband, and not only to, I mean us, but to her whole company. And it takes a very brave and smart woman to be able to be open like that.Kat Vesce (25:17):And also what a full circle moment. I mean to be the CMO of a company that is marketing, I think she said 40 different medications, and then to be on the receiving end of that and navigating as your own family is going through the fear and intensity of recovering from an ailment.Ilyse Liffreing (25:40):As she said, everybody has their own stuff they're going through.Kat Vesce (25:43):Yeah. Yeah. That was really inspiring. I also just loved how she went into the tension that she faces as a marketer, which I can't think of any other category that has this same predicament of wanting to stay relevant and be top of mind for the inpatient or the provider, but also not wanting to be there all the time, and to be able to dip in and out when needed. Because ultimately her end goal she was saying was to keep people healthy. And so I think that's a really refreshing take, especially hearing it from a biotech company like Genentech, that you could hear horror stories about companies being incentivized to keep people sick. And I just loved that as a marketer. She's thinking through it from a place of just being authentic to getting people healthyIlyse Liffreing (26:35):Completely. And she also mentioned in a world like Post Covid, everybody now has their eyes on those companies, which is huge because pre covid, nobody knew what shots you were getting from whom. And now it's like, what shot did you get? The Pfizer or the Moderna.Kat Vesce (26:55):Yeah. And there was even some kind of ranking around them at one point. Yeah, totally. So yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting how biotech and pharma are now getting into the brand marketing side of the house. And I liked her answer that she's trepidatious about how and when to deploy that. So overall, just super inspiring conversation. I'm walking away just beaming talking to all these amazing women. That's wonderful. And that's it for this edition of the current podcast. Be sure to tune in this whole month as we release all the recordings from South by Southwest. See you next time.

What if your life and career were upended with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's only to learn eight years later that the diagnosis was wrong?  In this BrainStorm episode, host Meryl Comer talks with Doreen Monks, a former neuroscience nurse practitioner, who was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's at 63 years old. Doreen shares her emotional and professional experiences, the frustration of misdiagnoses, and the advice she has for others navigating similar challenges. They also discuss the crucial role physicians and caregivers have in empowering those with dementia.Tune in to hear real, raw conversations about ways the stigma of Alzheimer's trends younger and how to adjust to find purpose and support along the way.Produced by Susan Quirk and Amber RonigerSupport the show

“Eventually, my dream would be to simulate a virtual cell.”—Demis HassabisThe aspiration to build the virtual cell is considered to be equivalent to a moonshot for digital biology. Recently, 42 leading life scientists published a paper in Cell on why this is so vital, and how it may ultimately be accomplished. This conversation is with 2 of the authors, Charlotte Bunne, now at EPFL and Steve Quake, a Professor at Stanford University, who heads up science at the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative The audio (above) is available on iTunes and Spotify. The full video is linked here, at the top, and also can be found on YouTube.TRANSCRIPT WITH LINKS TO AUDIO Eric Topol (00:06):Hello, it's Eric Topol with Ground Truths and we've got a really hot topic today, the virtual cell. And what I think is extraordinarily important futuristic paper that recently appeared in the journal Cell and the first author, Charlotte Bunne from EPFL, previously at Stanford's Computer Science. And Steve Quake, a young friend of mine for many years who heads up the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) as well as a professor at Stanford. So welcome, Charlotte and Steve.Steve Quake (00:42):Thanks, Eric. It's great to be here.Charlotte Bunne:Thanks for having me.Eric Topol (00:45):Yeah. So you wrote this article that Charlotte, the first author, and Steve, one of the senior authors, appeared in Cell in December and it just grabbed me, “How to build the virtual cell with artificial intelligence: Priorities and opportunities.” It's the holy grail of biology. We're in this era of digital biology and as you point out in the paper, it's a convergence of what's happening in AI, which is just moving at a velocity that's just so extraordinary and what's happening in biology. So maybe we can start off by, you had some 42 authors that I assume they congregated for a conference or something or how did you get 42 people to agree to the words in this paper?Steve Quake (01:33):We did. We had a meeting at CZI to bring community members together from many different parts of the community, from computer science to bioinformatics, AI experts, biologists who don't trust any of this. We wanted to have some real contrarians in the mix as well and have them have a conversation together about is there an opportunity here? What's the shape of it? What's realistic to expect? And that was sort of the genesis of the article.Eric Topol (02:02):And Charlotte, how did you get to be drafting the paper?Charlotte Bunne (02:09):So I did my postdoc with Aviv Regev at Genentech and Jure Leskovec at CZI and Jure was part of the residency program of CZI. And so, this is how we got involved and you had also prior work with Steve on the universal cell embedding. So this is how everything got started.Eric Topol (02:29):And it's actually amazing because it's a who's who of people who work in life science, AI and digital biology and omics. I mean it's pretty darn impressive. So I thought I'd start off with a quote in the article because it kind of tells a story of where this could go. So the quote was in the paper, “AIVC (artificial intelligence virtual cell) has the potential to revolutionize the scientific process, leading to future breakthroughs in biomedical research, personalized medicine, drug discovery, cell engineering, and programmable biology.” That's a pretty big statement. So maybe we can just kind of toss that around a bit and maybe give it a little more thoughts and color as to what you were positing there.Steve Quake (03:19):Yeah, Charlotte, you want me to take the first shot at that? Okay. So Eric, it is a bold claim and we have a really bold ambition here. We view that over the course of a decade, AI is going to provide the ability to make a transformative computational tool for biology. Right now, cell biology is 90% experimental and 10% computational, roughly speaking. And you've got to do just all kinds of tedious, expensive, challenging lab work to get to the answer. And I don't think AI is going to replace that, but it can invert the ratio. So within 10 years I think we can get to biology being 90% computational and 10% experimental. And the goal of the virtual cell is to build a tool that'll do that.Eric Topol (04:09):And I think a lot of people may not understand why it is considered the holy grail because it is the fundamental unit of life and it's incredibly complex. It's not just all the things happening in the cell with atoms and molecules and organelles and everything inside, but then there's also the interactions the cell to other cells in the outside tissue and world. So I mean it's really quite extraordinary challenge that you've taken on here. And I guess there's some debate, do we have the right foundation? We're going to get into foundation models in a second. A good friend of mine and part of this whole I think process that you got together, Eran Segal from Israel, he said, “We're at this tipping point…All the stars are aligned, and we have all the different components: the data, the compute, the modeling.” And in the paper you describe how we have over the last couple of decades have so many different data sets that are rich that are global initiatives. But then there's also questions. Do we really have the data? I think Bo Wang especially asked about that. Maybe Charlotte, what are your thoughts about data deficiency? There's a lot of data, but do you really have what we need before we bring them all together for this kind of single model that will get us some to the virtual cell?Charlotte Bunne (05:41):So I think, I mean one core idea of building this AIVC is that we basically can leverage all experimental data that is overall collected. So this also goes back to the point Steve just made. So meaning that we basically can integrate across many different studies data because we have AI algorithms or the architectures that power such an AIVC are able to integrate basically data sets on many different scales. So we are going a bit away from this dogma. I'm designing one algorithm from one dataset to this idea of I have an architecture that can take in multiple dataset on multiple scales. So this will help us a bit in being somewhat efficient with the type of experiments that we need to make and the type of experiments we need to conduct. And again, what Steve just said, ultimately, we can very much steer which data sets we need to collect.Charlotte Bunne (06:34):Currently, of course we don't have all the data that is sufficient. I mean in particular, I think most of the tissues we have, they are healthy tissues. We don't have all the disease phenotypes that we would like to measure, having patient data is always a very tricky case. We have mostly non-interventional data, meaning we have very limited understanding of somehow the effect of different perturbations. Perturbations that happen on many different scales in many different environments. So we need to collect a lot here. I think the overall journey that we are going with is that we take the data that we have, we make clever decisions on the data that we will collect in the future, and we have this also self-improving entity that is aware of what it doesn't know. So we need to be able to understand how well can I predict something on this somewhat regime. If I cannot, then we should focus our data collection effort into this. So I think that's not a present state, but this will basically also guide the future collection.Eric Topol (07:41):Speaking of data, one of the things I think that's fascinating is we saw how AlphaFold2 really revolutionized predicting proteins. But remember that was based on this extraordinary resource that had been built, the Protein Data Bank that enabled that. And for the virtual cell there's no such thing as a protein data bank. It's so much more as you emphasize Charlotte, it's so much dynamic and these perturbations that are just all across the board as you emphasize. Now the human cell atlas, which currently some tens of millions, but going into a billion cells, we learned that it used to be 200 cell types. Now I guess it's well over 5,000 and that we have 37 trillion cells approximately in the average person adult's body is a formidable map that's being made now. And I guess the idea that you're advancing is that we used to, and this goes back to a statement you made earlier, Steve, everything we did in science was hypothesis driven. But if we could get computational model of the virtual cell, then we can have AI exploration of the whole field. Is that really the nuts of this?Steve Quake (09:06):Yes. A couple thoughts on that, maybe Theo Karaletsos, our lead AI person at CZI says machine learning is the formalism through which we understand high dimensional data and I think that's a very deep statement. And biological systems are intrinsically very high dimensional. You've got 20,000 genes in the human genome in these cell atlases. You're measuring all of them at the same time in each single cell. And there's a lot of structure in the relationships of their gene expression there that is just not evident to the human eye. And for example, CELL by GENE, our database that collects all the aggregates, all of the single cell transcriptomic data is now over a hundred million cells. And as you mentioned, we're seeing ways to increase that by an order of magnitude in the near future. The project that Jure Leskovec and I worked on together that Charlotte referenced earlier was like a first attempt to build a foundational model on that data to discover some of the correlations and structure that was there.Steve Quake (10:14):And so, with a subset, I think it was the 20 or 30 million cells, we built a large language model and began asking it, what do you understand about the structure of this data? And it kind of discovered lineage relationships without us teaching it. We trained on a matrix of numbers, no biological information there, and it learned a lot about the relationships between cell type and lineage. And that emerged from that high dimensional structure, which was super pleasing to us and really, I mean for me personally gave me the confidence to say this stuff is going to work out. There is a future for the virtual cell. It's not some made up thing. There is real substance there and this is worth investing an enormous amount of CZIs resources in going forward and trying to rally the community around as a project.Eric Topol (11:04):Well yeah, the premise here is that there is a language of life, and you just made a good case that there is if you can predict, if you can query, if you can generate like that. It is reminiscent of the famous Go game of Lee Sedol, that world champion and how the machine came up with a move (Move 37) many, many years ago that no human would've anticipated and I think that's what you're getting at. And the ability for inference and reason now to add to this. So Charlotte, one of the things of course is about, well there's two terms in here that are unfamiliar to many of the listeners or viewers of this podcast, universal representations (UR) and virtual instrument (VIs) that you make a pretty significant part of how you are going about this virtual cell model. So could you describe that and also the embeddings as part of the universal representation (UR) because I think embeddings, or these meaningful relationships are key to what Steve was just talking about.Charlotte Bunne (12:25):Yes. So in order to somewhat leverage very different modalities in order to leverage basically modalities that will take measurements across different scales, like the idea is that we have large, may it be transformer models that might be very different. If I have imaging data, I have a vision transformer, if I have a text data, I have large language models that are designed of course for DNA then they have a very wide context and so on and so forth. But the idea is somewhat that we have models that are connected through the scales of biology because those scales we know. We know which components are somewhat involved or in measurements that are happening upstream. So we have the somewhat interconnection or very large model that will be trained on many different data and we have this internal model representation that somewhat capture everything they've seen. And so, this is what we call those universal representation (UR) that will exist across the scales of biology.Charlotte Bunne (13:22):And what is great about AI, and so I think this is a bit like a history of AI in short is the ability to predict the last years, the ability to generate, we can generate new hypothesis, we can generate modalities that we are missing. We can potentially generate certain cellular state, molecular state have a certain property, but I think what's really coming is this ability to reason. So we see this in those very large language models, the ability to reason about a hypothesis, how we can test it. So this is what those instruments ultimately need to do. So we need to be able to simulate the change of a perturbation on a cellular phenotype. So on the internal representation, the universal representation of a cell state, we need to simulate the fact the mutation has downstream and how this would propagate in our representations upstream. And we need to build many different type of virtual instruments that allow us to basically design and build all those capabilities that ultimately the AI virtual cell needs to possess that will then allow us to reason, to generate hypothesis, to basically predict the next experiment to conduct to predict the outcome of a perturbation experiment to in silico design, cellular states, molecular states, things like that. And this is why we make the separation between internal representation as well as those instruments that operate on those representations.Eric Topol (14:47):Yeah, that's what I really liked is that you basically described the architecture, how you're going to do this. By putting these URs into the VIs, having a decoder and a manipulator and you basically got the idea if you can bring all these different integrations about which of course is pending. Now there are obviously many naysayers here that this is impossible. One of them is this guy, Philip Ball. I don't know if you read the language, How Life Works. Now he's a science journalist and he's a prolific writer. He says, “Comparing life to a machine, a robot, a computer, sells it short. Life is a cascade of processes, each with a distinct integrity and autonomy, the logic of which has no parallel outside the living world.” Is he right? There's no way to model this. It's silly, it's too complex.Steve Quake (15:50):We don't know, alright. And it's great that there's naysayers. If everyone agreed this was doable, would it be worth doing? I mean the whole point is to take risks and get out and do something really challenging in the frontier where you don't know the answer. If we knew that it was doable, I wouldn't be interested in doing it. So I personally am happy that there's not a consensus.Eric Topol (16:16):Well, I mean to capture people's imagination here, if you're successful and you marshal a global effort, I don't know who's going to pay for it because it's a lot of work coming here going forward. But if you can do it, the question here is right today we talk about, oh let's make an organoid so we can figure out how to treat this person's cancer or understand this person's rare disease or whatever. And instead of having to wait weeks for this culture and all the expense and whatnot, you could just do it in a computer and in silico and you have this virtual twin of a person's cells and their tissue and whatnot. So the opportunity here is, I don't know if people get, this is just extraordinary and quick and cheap if you can get there. And it's such a bold initiative idea, who will pay for this do you think?Steve Quake (17:08):Well, CZI is putting an enormous amount of resources into it and it's a major project for us. We have been laying the groundwork for it. We recently put together what I think is if not the largest, one of the largest GPU supercomputer clusters for nonprofit basic science research that came online at the end of last year. And in fact in December we put out an RFA for the scientific community to propose using it to build models. And so we're sharing that resource within the scientific community as I think you appreciate, one of the real challenges in the field has been access to compute resources and industry has it academia at a much lower level. We are able to be somewhere in between, not quite at the level of a private company but the tech company but at a level beyond what most universities are being able to do and we're trying to use that to drive the field forward. We're also planning on launching RFAs we this year to help drive this project forward and funding people globally on that. And we are building a substantial internal effort within CZI to help drive this project forward.Eric Topol (18:17):I think it has the looks of the human genome project, which at time as you know when it was originally launched that people thought, oh, this is impossible. And then look what happened. It got done. And now the sequence of genome is just a commodity, very relatively, very inexpensive compared to what it used to be.Steve Quake (18:36):I think a lot about those parallels. And I will say one thing, Philip Ball, I will concede him the point, the cells are very complicated. The genome project, I mean the sort of genius there was to turn it from a biology problem to a chemistry problem, there is a test tube with a chemical and it work out the structure of that chemical. And if you can do that, the problem is solved. I think what it means to have the virtual cell is much more complex and ambiguous in terms of defining what it's going to do and when you're done. And so, we have our work cut out for us there to try to do that. And that's why a little bit, I established our North Star and CZI for the next decade as understanding the mysteries of the cell and that word mystery is very important to me. I think the molecules, as you pointed out earlier are understood, genome sequenced, protein structure solved or predicted, we know a lot about the molecules. Those are if not solved problems, pretty close to being solved. And the real mystery is how do they work together to create life in the cell? And that's what we're trying to answer with this virtual cell project.Eric Topol (19:43):Yeah, I think another thing that of course is happening concurrently to add the likelihood that you'll be successful is we've never seen the foundation models coming out in life science as they have in recent weeks and months. Never. I mean, I have a paper in Science tomorrow coming out summarizing the progress about not just RNA, DNA, ligands. I mean the whole idea, AlphaFold3, but now Boltz and so many others. It's just amazing how fast the torrent of new foundation models. So Charlotte, what do you think accounts for this? This is unprecedented in life science to see foundation models coming out at this clip on evolution on, I mean you name it, design of every different molecule of life or of course in cells included in that. What do you think is going on here?Charlotte Bunne (20:47):So on the one hand, of course we benefit profits and inherit from all the tremendous efforts that have been made in the last decades on assembling those data sets that are very, very standardized. CELLxGENE is very somehow AI friendly, as you can say, it is somewhat a platform that is easy to feed into algorithms, but at the same time we actually also see really new building mechanisms, design principles of AI algorithms in itself. So I think we have understood that in order to really make progress, build those systems that work well, we need to build AI tools that are designed for biological data. So to give you an easy example, if I use a large language model on text, it's not going to work out of the box for DNA because we have different reading directions, different context lens and many, many, many, many more.Charlotte Bunne (21:40):And if I look at standard computer vision where we can say AI really excels and I'm applying standard computer vision, vision transformers on multiplex images, they're not going to work because normal computer vision architectures, they always expect the same three inputs, RGB, right? In multiplex images, I'm measuring up to 150 proteins potentially in a single experiment, but every study will measure different proteins. So I deal with many different scales like larger scales and I used to attention mechanisms that we have in usual computer vision. Transformers are not going to work anymore, they're not going to scale. And at the same time, I need to be completely flexible in whatever input combination of channel I'm just going to face in this experiment. So this is what we right now did for example, in our very first work, inheriting the design principle that we laid out in the paper AI virtual cell and then come up with new AI architectures that are dealing with these very special requirements that biological data have.Charlotte Bunne (22:46):So we have now a lot of computer scientists that work very, very closely have a very good understanding of biologists. Biologists that are getting much and much more into the computer science. So people who are fluent in both languages somewhat, that are able to now build models that are adopted and designed for biological data. And we don't just take basically computer vision architectures that work well on street scenes and try to apply them on biological data. So it's just a very different way of thinking about it, starting constructing basically specialized architectures, besides of course the tremendous data efforts that have happened in the past.Eric Topol (23:24):Yeah, and we're not even talking about just sequence because we've also got imaging which has gone through a revolution, be able to image subcellular without having to use any types of stains that would disrupt cells. That's another part of the deep learning era that came along. One thing I thought was fascinating in the paper in Cell you wrote, “For instance, the Short Read Archive of biological sequence data holds over 14 petabytes of information, which is 1,000 times larger than the dataset used to train ChatGPT.” I mean that's a lot of tokens, that's a lot of stuff, compute resources. It's almost like you're going to need a DeepSeek type of way to get this. I mean not that DeepSeek as its claim to be so much more economical, but there's a data challenge here in terms of working with that massive amount that is different than the human language. That is our language, wouldn't you say?Steve Quake (24:35):So Eric, that brings to mind one of my favorite quotes from Sydney Brenner who is such a wit. And in 2000 at the sort of early first flush of success in genomics, he said, biology is drowning in a sea of data and starving for knowledge. A very deep statement, right? And that's a little bit what the motivation was for putting the Short Read Archive statistic into the paper there. And again, for me, part of the value of this endeavor of creating a virtual cell is it's a tool to help us translate data into knowledge.Eric Topol (25:14):Yeah, well there's two, I think phenomenal figures in your Cell paper. The first one that kicks across the capabilities of the virtual cell and the second that compares the virtual cell to the real or the physical cell. And we'll link that with this in the transcript. And the other thing we'll link is there's a nice Atlantic article, “A Virtual Cell Is a ‘Holy Grail' of Science. It's Getting Closer.” That might not be quite close as next week or year, but it's getting close and that's good for people who are not well grounded in this because it's much more taken out of the technical realm. This is really exciting. I mean what you're onto here and what's interesting, Steve, since I've known you for so many years earlier in your career you really worked on omics that is being DNA and RNA and in recent times you've made this switch to cells. Is that just because you're trying to anticipate the field or tell us a little bit about your migration.Steve Quake (26:23):Yeah, so a big part of my career has been trying to develop new measurement technologies that'll provide insight into biology. And decades ago that was understanding molecules. Now it's understanding more complex biological things like cells and it was like a natural progression. I mean we built the sequencers, sequenced the genomes, done. And it was clear that people were just going to do that at scale then and create lots of data. Hopefully knowledge would get out of that. But for me as an academic, I never thought I'd be in the position I'm in now was put it that way. I just wanted to keep running a small research group. So I realized I would have to get out of the genome thing and find the next frontier and it became this intersection of microfluidics and genomics, which as you know, I spent a lot of time developing microfluidic tools to analyze cells and try to do single cell biology to understand their heterogeneity. And that through a winding path led me to all these cell atlases and to where we are now.Eric Topol (27:26):Well, we're fortunate for that and also with your work with CZI to help propel that forward and I think it sounds like we're going to need a lot of help to get this thing done. Now Charlotte, as a computer scientist now at EPFL, what are you going to do to keep working on this and what's your career advice for people in computer science who have an interest in digital biology?Charlotte Bunne (27:51):So I work in particular on the prospect of using this to build diagnostic tools and to make diagnostics in the clinic easier because ultimately we have somewhat limited capabilities in the hospital to run deep omics, but the idea of being able to somewhat map with a cheaper and lighter modality or somewhat diagnostic test into something much richer because a model has been seeing all those different data and can basically contextualize it. It's very interesting. We've seen all those pathology foundation models. If I can always run an H&E, but then decide when to run deeper diagnostics to have a better or more accurate prediction, that is very powerful and it's ultimately reducing the costs, but the precision that we have in hospitals. So my faculty position right now is co-located between the School of Life Sciences, School of Computer Science. So I have a dual affiliation and I'm affiliated to the hospitals to actually make this possible and as a career advice, I think don't be shy and stick to your discipline.Charlotte Bunne (28:56):I have a bachelor's in biology, but I never only did biology. I have a PhD in computer science, which you would think a bachelor in biology not necessarily qualifies you through. So I think this interdisciplinarity also requires you to be very fluent, very comfortable in reading many different styles of papers and publications because a publication in a computer science venue will be very, very different from the way we write in biology. So don't stick to your study program, but just be free in selecting whatever course gets you closer to the knowledge you need in order to do the research or whatever task you are building and working on.Eric Topol (29:39):Well, Charlotte, the way you're set up there with this coalescence of life science and computer science is so ideal and so unusual here in the US, so that's fantastic. That's what we need and that's really the underpinning of how you're going to get to the virtual cells, getting these two communities together. And Steve, likewise, you were an engineer and somehow you became one of the pioneers of digital biology way back before it had that term, this interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary. We need so much of that in order for you all to be successful, right?Steve Quake (30:20):Absolutely. I mean there's so much great discovery to be done on the boundary between fields. I trained as a physicist and kind of made my career this boundary between physics and biology and technology development and it's just sort of been a gift that keeps on giving. You've got a new way to measure something, you discover something new scientifically and it just all suggests new things to measure. It's very self-reinforcing.Eric Topol (30:50):Now, a couple of people who you know well have made some pretty big statements about this whole era of digital biology and I think the virtual cell is perhaps the biggest initiative of all the digital biology ongoing efforts, but Jensen Huang wrote, “for the first time in human history, biology has the opportunity to be engineering, not science.” And Demis Hassabis wrote or said, ‘we're seeing engineering science, you have to build the artifact of interest first, and then once you have it, you can use the scientific method to reduce it down and understand its components.' Well here there's a lot to do to understand its components and if we can do that, for example, right now as both of AI drug discoveries and high gear and there's umpteen numbers of companies working on it, but it doesn't account for the cell. I mean it basically is protein, protein ligand interactions. What if we had drug discovery that was cell based? Could you comment about that? Because that doesn't even exist right now.Steve Quake (32:02):Yeah, I mean I can say something first, Charlotte, if you've got thoughts, I'm curious to hear them. So I do think AI approaches are going to be very useful designing molecules. And so, from the perspective of designing new therapeutics, whether they're small molecules or antibodies, yeah, I mean there's a ton of investment in that area that is a near term fruit, perfect thing for venture people to invest in and there's opportunity there. There's been enough proof of principle. However, I do agree with you that if you want to really understand what happens when you drug a target, you're going to want to have some model of the cell and maybe not just the cell, but all the different cell types of the body to understand where toxicity will come from if you have on-target toxicity and whether you get efficacy on the thing you're trying to do.Steve Quake (32:55):And so, we really hope that people will use the virtual cell models we're going to build as part of the drug discovery development process, I agree with you in a little of a blind spot and we think if we make something useful, people will be using it. The other thing I'll say on that point is I'm very enthusiastic about the future of cellular therapies and one of our big bets at CZI has been starting the New York Biohub, which is aimed at really being very ambitious about establishing the engineering and scientific foundations of how to engineer completely, radically more powerful cellular therapies. And the virtual cell is going to help them do that, right? It's going to be essential for them to achieve that mission.Eric Topol (33:39):I think you're pointing out one of the most important things going on in medicine today is how we didn't anticipate that live cell therapy, engineered cells and ideally off the shelf or in vivo, not just having to take them out and work on them outside the body, is a revolution ongoing, and it's not just in cancer, it's in autoimmune diseases and many others. So it's part of the virtual cell need. We need this. One of the things that's a misnomer, I want you both to comment on, we keep talking about single cell, single cell. And there's a paper spatial multi-omics this week, five different single cell scales all integrated. It's great, but we don't get to single cell. We're basically looking at 50 cells, 100 cells. We're not doing single cell because we're not going deep enough. Is that just a matter of time when we actually are doing, and of course the more we do get down to the single or a few cells, the more insights we're going to get. Would you comment about that? Because we have all this literature on single cell comes out every day, but we're not really there yet.Steve Quake (34:53):Charlotte, do you want to take a first pass at that and then I can say something?Charlotte Bunne (34:56):Yes. So it depends. So I think if we look at certain spatial proteomics, we still have subcellular resolutions. So of course, we always measure many different cells, but we are able to somewhat get down to resolution where we can look at certain colocalization of proteins. This also goes back to the point just made before having this very good environment to study drugs. If I want to build a new drug, if I want to build a new protein, the idea of building this multiscale model allows us to actually simulate different, somehow binding changes and binding because we simulate the effect of a drug. Ultimately, the redouts we have they are subcellular. So of course, we often in the spatial biology, we often have a bit like methods that are rather coarse they have a spot that averages over certain some cells like hundreds of cells or few cells.Charlotte Bunne (35:50):But I think we also have more and more technologies that are zooming in that are subcellular where we can actually tag or have those probe-based methods that allow us to zoom in. There's microscopy of individual cells to really capture them in 3D. They are of course not very high throughput yet, but it gives us also an idea of the morphology and how ultimately morphology determine certain somehow cellular properties or cellular phenotype. So I think there's lots of progress also on the experimental and that ultimately will back feed into the AI virtual cell, those models that will be fed by those data. Similarly, looking at dynamics, right, looking at live imaging of individual cells of their morphological changes. Also, this ultimately is data that we'll need to get a better understanding of disease mechanisms, cellular phenotypes functions, perturbation responses.Eric Topol (36:47):Right. Yes, Steve, you can comment on that and the amazing progress that we have made with space and time, spatial temporal resolution, spatial omics over these years, but that we still could go deeper in terms of getting to individual cells, right?Steve Quake (37:06):So, what can we do with a single cell? I'd say we are very mature in our ability to amplify and sequence the genome of a single cell, amplify and sequence the transcriptome of a single cell. You can ask is one cell enough to make a biological conclusion? And maybe I think what you're referring to is people want to see replicates and so you can ask how many cells do you need to see to have confidence in any given biological conclusion, which is a reasonable thing. It's a statistical question in good science. I think I've been very impressed with how the mass spec people have been doing recently. I think they've finally cracked the ability to look at proteins from single cells and they can look at a couple thousand proteins. That was I think one of these Nature method of the year things at the end of last year and deep visual proteomics.Eric Topol (37:59):Deep visual proteomics, yes.Steve Quake (38:00):Yeah, they are over the hump. Yeah, they are over the hump with single cell measurements. Part of what's missing right now I think is the ability to reliably do all of that on the same cell. So this is what Charlotte was referring to be able to do sort of multi-modal measurements on single cells. That's kind of in its infancy and there's a few examples, but there's a lot more work to be done on that. And I think also the fact that these measurements are all destructive right now, and so you're losing the ability to look how the cells evolve over time. You've got to say this time point, I'm going to dissect this thing and look at a state and I don't get to see what happens further down the road. So that's another future I think measurement challenge to be addressed.Eric Topol (38:42):And I think I'm just trying to identify some of the multitude of challenges in this extraordinarily bold initiative because there are no shortage and that's good about it. It is given people lots of work to do to overcome, override some of these challenges. Now before we wrap up, besides the fact that you point out that all the work has to be done and be validated in real experiments, not just live in a virtual AI world, but you also comment about the safety and ethics of this work and assuming you're going to gradually get there and be successful. So could either or both of you comment about that because it's very thoughtful that you're thinking already about that.Steve Quake (41:10):As scientists and members of the larger community, we want to be careful and ensure that we're interacting with people who said policy in a way that ensures that these tools are being used to advance the cause of science and not do things that are detrimental to human health and are used in a way that respects patient privacy. And so, the ethics around how you use all this with respect to individuals is going to be important to be thoughtful about from the beginning. And I also think there's an ethical question around what it means to be publishing papers and you don't want people to be forging papers using data from the virtual cell without being clear about where that came from and pretending that it was a real experiment. So there's issues around those sorts of ethics as well that need to be considered.Eric Topol (42:07):And of those 40 some authors, do you around the world, do you have the sense that you all work together to achieve this goal? Is there kind of a global bonding here that's going to collaborate?Steve Quake (42:23):I think this effort is going to go way beyond those 40 authors. It's going to include a much larger set of people and I'm really excited to see that evolve with time.Eric Topol (42:31):Yeah, no, it's really quite extraordinary how you kick this thing off and the paper is the blueprint for something that we are all going to anticipate that could change a lot of science and medicine. I mean we saw, as you mentioned, Steve, how that deep visual proteomics (DVP) saved lives. It was what I wrote a spatial medicine, no longer spatial biology. And so, the way that this can change the future of medicine, I think a lot of people just have to have a little bit of imagination that once we get there with this AIVC, that there's a lot in store that's really quite exciting. Well, I think this has been an invigorating review of that paper and some of the issues surrounding it. I couldn't be more enthusiastic for your success and ultimately where this could take us. Did I miss anything during the discussion that we should touch on before we wrap up?Steve Quake (43:31):Not from my perspective. It was a pleasure as always Eric, and a fun discussion.Charlotte Bunne (43:38):Thanks so much.Eric Topol (43:39):Well thank you both and all the co-authors of this paper. We're going to be following this with the great interest, and I think for most people listening, they may not know that this is in store for the future. Someday we will get there. I think one of the things to point out right now is the models we have today that large language models based on transformer architecture, they're going to continue to evolve. We're already seeing so much in inference and ability for reasoning to be exploited and not asking for prompts with immediate answers, but waiting for days to get back. A lot more work from a lot more computing resources. But we're going to get models in the future to fold this together. I think that's one of the things that you've touched on the paper so that whatever we have today in concert with what you've laid out, AI is just going to keep getting better.Eric Topol (44:39):The biology that these foundation models are going to get broader and more compelling as to their use cases. So that's why I believe in this. I don't see this as a static situation right now. I just think that you're anticipating the future, and we will have better models to be able to integrate this massive amount of what some people would consider disparate data sources. So thank you both and all your colleagues for writing this paper. I don't know how you got the 42 authors to agree to it all, which is great, and it's just a beginning of something that's a new frontier. So thanks very much.Steve Quake (45:19):Thank you, Eric.**********************************************Thanks for listening, watching or reading Ground Truths. Your subscription is greatly appreciated.If you found this podcast interesting please share it!That makes the work involved in putting these together especially worthwhile.All content on Ground Truths—newsletters, analyses, and podcasts—is free, open-access, with no ads..Paid subscriptions are voluntary and all proceeds from them go to support Scripps Research. They do allow for posting comments and questions, which I do my best to respond to. Many thanks to those who have contributed—they have greatly helped fund our summer internship programs for the past two years. And such support is becoming more vital In light of current changes of funding by US biomedical research at NIH and other governmental agencies.Thanks to my producer Jessica Nguyen and to Sinjun Balabanoff for audio and video support at Scripps Research. Get full access to Ground Truths at erictopol.substack.com/subscribe

Recorded live at the Medical Alley 2025 Summit, this panel discussion explores the landscape of women's health from many angles and how it goes far beyond so-called bikini medicine.Featuring: Roberta Antoine Dressen (President & CEO, Medical Alley), Stephanie Sassman (Portfolio Leader, Women's Health, Genentech), Kathy Tune (Co-Founder & Board Chair of Marani Health, Managing Partner at Capita3), and Joe Connolly (Co-Founder & CEO, Visana Health).Send us a message! Follow Medical Alley on social media on LinkedIn, Facebook, X and Instagram.

Welcome to this special episode of the NeurologyLive® Mind Moments® podcast. Tune in to hear leaders in neurology sound off on topics that impact your clinical practice. For major FDA decisions in the field of neurology, we release short special episodes to offer a snapshot of the news, including the main takeaways for the clinical community, as well as highlights of the efficacy and safety profile of the agent in question. In this episode, we cover the recent approval of Genentech's tenecteplase, marketed as TNKase, as a new treatment for adults with acute ischemic stroke (AIS). The thrombolytic medicine is an intravenous tissue plasminogen activator that is clot-dissolving, administered as a single 5-second intravenous bolus. Tenecteplase is only the second such approval for this indication, following the 2015 approval of alteplase (Activase; Genentech); however, tenecteplase is considered faster and more simply administered than alteplase. To better understand the implications of this approval, NeurologyLive sat down with stroke expert Bijoy Menon, MD, MSc, FRCPC, a professor of neurology at the University of Calgary. In the interview, Menon talked about the downstream impacts of having another approved therapy, how tenecteplase differs from other thrombolytic agents, and the efficacy and safety that supported its approval. Furthermore, he provided commentary on how the approval continues to chip away toward the idea of precision medicine and personalizing treatments for patients with AIS.  For more of NeurologyLive's coverage of sodium oxybate's (Lumryz) expanded indication, head here: FDA Approves Tenecteplase for Acute Ischemic Stroke Episode Breakdown: 1:40 – Immediate reaction and significance of tenecteplase approval 5:30 – Safety considerations and administration when prescribing tenecteplase 10:20 – Supportive efficacy and safety, phase 3 AcT trial, and other supplementary studies 14:50 – Advancing precision medicine, treatment personalization with new approval Thanks for listening to the NeurologyLive Mind Moments podcast. To support the show, be sure to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. For more neurology news and expert-driven content, visit neurologylive.com.

Liz is joined by Dr. Varun Malhotra on the podcast this month to discuss clinical competency exams for clinical support reps. As both a practicing physician and an industry leader, he shares invaluable perspective on both how a rep should act in the OR and how companies should prepare reps to do so. In 2025, we're embarking on a MedDevice Training Journey: From clinical trials to standard of care. Join us all year long as we explore training at each stage of the product life cycle.Related Resources:Dr. Varun Malhotra is an ophthalmologist with specialized training in glaucoma who has successfully bridged the worlds of clinical practice and biotechnology innovation.Dr. Malhotra completed his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College before earning his medical degree from New York University School of Medicine. He continued at NYU for his ophthalmology residency, gaining comprehensive training in diagnosing and treating various eye conditions. His education was further enhanced with a specialized fellowship in glaucoma at the prestigious Illinois Eye and Ear Infirmary, where he developed expertise in managing this complex eye disease.With additional credentials including an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Dr. Malhotra cultivated a multifaceted career spanning both academic and private practice settings before making a strategic transition to the biotechnology sector with a role at Genentech, where he was the clinical lead for the Port Delivery System Diabetic Macular Edema program. He also served as the global surgical lead for the entire Port Delivery System, where he oversaw the expansion and surgical training for all internal and external stakeholders of ophthalmic clinical trials from the United States to encompass countries in Europe, South America, and Asia.Dr. Malhotra is currently the Vice President of Clinical Development for Ollin Bioscience, an ophthalmic biotech company. He still practices ophthalmology and trains resident physicians in clinical and surgical skills on a weekly basis. Subscribe to our newsletter to hear more about the journey from clinical trials to standard of care! Click here to subscribe!Connect with us on LinkedIn:   ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Varun MalhotraCumby Consulting⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Rachel Medeiros⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Liz Cumby⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠About Cumby Consulting:   Cumby Consulting's team of professionals deliver innovative MedTech training services for physicians, sales representatives, teaching faculty, key opinion leaders and clinical development teams. Whether you need a complete training system developed to deliver revenue sooner or a discrete training program for a specific meeting, Cumby Consulting will deliver highly strategic, efficient programs with uncompromising standards of quality."

When Bill Anderson became CEO of the German pharmaceutical conglomerate Bayer AG in 2023, he found a company with a long history and a robust corporate bureaucracy. The company handbook was 1,300 pages, and layer after layer of management too easily stifled innovation. Anderson, who worked at Genentech earlier in his career, wanted to instill more of an ownership culture, where decisions and information moved more nimbly. Almost two years in, the changes have been significant: The entire company now runs on 90-day review cycles—allowing for quicker course correction and more of a startup feel for the 161-year-old firm. Anderson is this week's guest on Leadership Next. He spoke to Diane and Kristin about the current state of the health care system, the U.S. regulatory environment, and Bayer's newest advancements in Parkinson's treatment, as well as the company's own complicated history. Leadership Next is powered by Deloitte.