While growing up during the polio era, Arthur Caplan, PhD, saw doctors hide painful truths from families and children, which sparked his lifelong questions about power, protection, and inequality in medicine. In this episode, Caplan claims that bioethics has changed from marginalizing or abandoning disabled people to genetic testing, parental perfectionism, and personal autonomy over collective responsibility. Caplan predicts that extreme individualism will endanger public health and that the next ethical frontier will be the brain and how far humans should alter identity.

Produced and hosted by Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD

Audio mixed and mastered by Erick Ziegler

Brought to you by Inside Precision Medicine (SAGE Publishing)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Brain-computer interfaces have gained widespread attention largely for assistive applications, but Carolina Aguilar sees their greatest potential in directly treating neurological disease. Through INBRAIN Neuroelectronics, she is developing graphene-based implants designed to read and stimulate neural activity with far greater precision than conventional devices, building on insights from her 13 years at Medtronic and earlier neuroscience research. In this conversation, Aguilar explains why INBRAIN prioritizes therapeutic BCIs, how graphene could advance personalized neurotechnology and AI-driven therapies, and why conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy, and cardiometabolic disorders are central to the company’s long-term vision.

Produced and hosted by Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD

Audio mixed and mastered by Erick Ziegler

Brought to you by Inside Precision Medicine (SAGE Publishing)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Matthew Rabinowitz, PhD, moved from engineering to medicine after his Human Genome Project work, motivated by both scientific insight and personal loss that exposed the limits of existing genetic diagnostics. He founded Natera and later Myome, building genomic and AI-driven tools to improve disease detection, risk assessment, and prevention. In the episode, he highlights challenges. such as regulatory barriers, fragmented data, and translating genetics into clinical decisions, while aiming to develop predictive blood tests that enable proactive care.

Produced and hosted by Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD

Audio mixed and mastered by Erick Ziegler

Brought to you by Inside Precision Medicine (SAGE Publishing)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Precision medicine promises individualized care through data, but progress remains fragmented. Clinical, genomic, and imaging data are siloed, limiting real-world use. Jurgi Camblong, PhD, founded SOPHiA Genetics to integrate multimodal data into actionable insights, yet variability in technologies and evolving biology complicate standardization. In this episode of Behind the Breakthroughs, Camblong discusses how effective solutions require combining diverse AI methods grounded in context and longitudinal feedback loops. To Camblong, the challenge is not data quantity but making existing information usable in patient care.

Produced and hosted by Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD

Audio mixed and mastered by Erick Ziegler

Brought to you by Inside Precision Medicine (SAGE Publishing)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

As an Origination Partner at Flagship Pioneering, Molly Gibson, PhD, co-founded her first company, Generate:Biomedicines, in 2018, where she made her mark by developing models that design novel proteins—work that has already led to a Phase 3 asthma drug. Since then, she has gone on to co-found two additional companies: Expedition Medicines and Lila Biosciences. In this episode, Molly explains why the anticipated boom in AI-guided drug development hasn’t fully materialized and how she’s tackling the challenge by modeling complex chemistry to synthesize novel small molecules at Expedition Medicines. She also discusses building "superintelligence" and closed-loop systems in which AI can autonomously generate, test, and refine scientific ideas at Lila Biosciences.

Produced and hosted by Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD

Audio mixed and mastered by Erick Ziegler

Brought to you by Inside Precision Medicine (SAGE Publishing)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Xenotransplantation has long been a scientifically promising but ethically complex field, overshadowed by its limited practicality despite the growing shortage of transplantable organs and the urgent needs of patients. Recent breakthroughs, including genetically modified pig heart transplants in 2022 and 2023, have demonstrated its feasibility, marking a turning point even though long-term survival has not yet been achieved. In this episode of Behind the Breakthroughs, Mike Curtis, PhD, President and CEO of eGenesis, explains how the company is building on this success to advance xenotransplantation as a scalable clinical strategy, emphasizing that even temporary extensions of life—such as a recent nine-month kidney transplant case—can provide meaningful outcomes and bridge patients to future treatments.

Produced and hosted by Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD

Audio mixed and mastered by Erick Ziegler

Brought to you by Inside Precision Medicine (SAGE Publishing)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Traditional drugs usually inhibit specific protein sites, but many disease-causing proteins lack accessible or unique motifs, leaving them “undruggable.” Targeted Small-molecule drugs have long been the quiet workhorses of modern medicine, slipping inside cells to target disease-driving proteins, even as biologics, immunotherapies, and genetic medicines have taken center stage in recent years. Yet thousands of disease-related proteins remain “undruggable” because they lack the structural pockets needed for traditional inhibitors to bind. In this episode, Markus Warmuth, MD, CEO of Monte Rosa Therapeutics, explains how molecular glue degraders harness the cell’s protein-disposal machinery to eliminate harmful proteins entirely, and how the company’s QUEEN discovery platform is advancing new therapies in cancer and autoimmune disease.

Produced and hosted by Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD

Audio mixed and mastered by Erick Ziegler

Brought to you by Inside Precision Medicine (SAGE Publishing)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cancer Research Institute CEO Alicia Zhou, PhD, traces her path from teenage lab technician to leader in cancer immunotherapy. Trained at MIT and Dana-Farber, she worked on The Cancer Genome Atlas before moving to industry at Color Genomics, expanding access to clinical sequencing. Zhou champions applying advanced genomics to immunotherapy through CRI’s Discovery Engine, an open dataset mapping tumor–immune interactions. She argues nonprofits uniquely fund shared infrastructure and standardization efforts. By supporting collaboration, young scientists, and patient resources, Zhou aims to accelerate breakthroughs and ultimately make cancer solvable.

Produced and hosted by Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD

Audio mixed and mastered by Erick Ziegler

Brought to you by Inside Precision Medicine (SAGE Publishing)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

CRISPR has crossed a turning point, evolving from an experimental tool into a platform delivering FDA-approved therapies and on-demand patient treatments that correct disease at its source. Brad Ringeisen, a former DARPA office director and leader at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), has been at the center of that transition, helping guide CRISPR from early promise toward scalable clinical impact. Ringeisen discusses in this episode how he is collaborating with CRISPR pioneer and Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna, PhD, at the IGI to address rare, complex, and underserved diseases, going beyond isolated successes. Accessibility, durability, and worldwide benefit, Ringeisen believes, will be the real indicators of CRISPR's success.

Produced and hosted by Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD

Audio mixed and mastered by Erick Ziegler

Brought to you by Inside Precision Medicine (SAGE Publishing)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cancer immunotherapy evolved through decades of research, with watershed moments like checkpoint inhibitor approvals and the first CAR T trial results reshaping expectations. For Zachary Roberts, MD, PhD, witnessing CAR T-induced remissions as a Mass General resident convinced him of the field’s future and drew him from academia into drug development. Now as CMO and EVP of R&D at Allogene Therapeutics, he’s focused on the next inflection point: transforming CAR T into scalable, off-the-shelf therapies that could broaden access and extend impact beyond cancer to autoimmune disease.

Produced and hosted by Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD

Audio mixed and mastered by Erick Ziegler

Brought to you by Inside Precision Medicine (SAGE Publishing)

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.