Mendelspod Podcast

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Natural Sciences Science & Medicine

What's Mendelspod Podcast about?

Mendelspod was founded in 2011 by Theral Timpson and Ayanna Monteverdi to advance life science research, connecting people and ideas. Influenced by the thinking tools developed by Eli Goldgratt, the founders bring a unique approach to media in the life sciences. With help from our advisors around the industry, Mendelspod goes beyond quick sound bites to create a space for probing conversations and deep insight into the topics and trends which shape the industry's future and therefore our future as a species.

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March 2020 Review with Nath...

04.02.2020

Laura comes to us from her flat in New York, Nathan is stuck in San Diego, but they are here and ready to discuss what a month ago was a warning and now is a full blown world crisis. What ...

Mendelspod Podcast episodes:

04.02.2020 March 2020 Review with Nathan & Laura: Corona Gets Personal, Where Are the Tests?, the VALID Act, Some non-Corona Science Laura comes to us from her flat in New York, Nathan is stuck in San Diego, but they are here and ready to discuss what a month ago was a warning and now is a full blown world crisis. What ...
03.26.2020 90% Go Undiagnosed, Says Geisinger’s Amy Sturm of FH Patients More than one in two hundred people have an inherited form of heart disease. But most don’t know it. Often on Mendelspod we talk about cancer genomics, but in the area of cardio, too, genetic testing can save lives. Amy ...
03.10.2020 Lisa Alderson on Her Telegenetics Firm, Genome Medical, Also Speaks to the DTC Downturn Lisa Alderson has been helping to build genetic testing companies for a while. In 2016 she co-founded her own company, Genome Medical, a tele-genomics firm to help patients and providers understand genetic testing results. Anyone in the genetic testing industry ...
02.28.2020 February 2020 Review with Nathan and Laura: Coronavirus, Medicare for All, and Live from AGBT What do we actually know about the novel coronavirus, we ask our two monthly commentators at the outset of February’s review show. Then, speaking of pandemics, as Bernie fever sweeps America, we explore the charge that Medicare for All means ...
02.13.2020 Pouria Sanae on the DTC Slowdown and His New Precision Health Testing Platform “To be fully honest, I think some of these tests are scary tests. I’ve had the luxury of testing myself . . . some of this needs to have the physician and the genetic counselor involved.” That’s Pouria Sanae, a ...
01.31.2020 January 2020 Review: Genetic Counselors vs ACMG, 23andMe Layoffs, Privacy 23andMe lays off over 100 employees. Illumina comes to the JP Morgan empty-handed. Has Precision Medicine seen it’s heyday already? Or are we gearing up for another wave of innovation? Nathan and Laura are again ready for the tough questions ...
12.27.2019 End-of-Decade Review, What's Next? with Nathan and Laura It's our special look back over the entire decade which has Nathan and Laura firing on all fours. Not only do we discover their genomic highlights of the last ten years--ups and downs-- they also pull out their special "future ...
12.17.2019 Ewan Birney on Race, UK Genomics Our end-of-year special guest is one of the U.K.’s top genomicists, Ewan Birney, Co-Director of the European Bioinformatics Institute at EMBL. He is also the non-Executive Director for Genomics England. Ewan's perhaps best known for his work with the ENCODE ...
12.02.2019 November 2019 with Nathan and Laura: Happy Birthday CRISPR Babies, 23andMe for Embryo Selection, and Golden Rice, Almost The gene edited babies, Lulu and Nana, turn one. Laura Hercher says it feels like it’s been five years. Nathan says, “Happy Birthday.” Along with our genomics headline party this month, we also discuss a comment that came in from ...
11.26.2019 Learning from the Field's Mistakes, Ancestry.com Rolls out Physician Ordered Health Testing Just in time for Black Friday, Ancestry.com has launched new health testing. Thanksgiving week (the company calls the shopping holidays the “Turkey Five”) has been kind to what is the largest DNA testing company in the world. Back in 2017, ...
11.22.2019 The Gene Edited Babies Saga - A Year Later with Hank Greely On November 25th, 2018, the world was shocked to find out a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, had edited the germline of twin girls-and the twins had been born. Many in the scientific community remember that Sunday afternoon well as the ...
11.14.2019 Improving Quantitative Evidence for Genetic Tests: Carlos Araya, Invitae Warning: the first part of this story can sound quite typical. Three co-founders with backgrounds in genomics and AI found a Stanford spinout. Their goal: to bring the tools of AI and computational modeling to unlock the medical secrets of ...
11.07.2019 The Meteoric Rise of Twist Bioscience and the Wild Demand for DNA: Emily Leproust, CEO In 2013 Twist Bioscience was a newcomer to a market that most of us thought was saturated, cornered, commoditized—that of synthetic DNA. But Emily Leproust and her co-founders saw something different. They saw "a big market with unhappy customers.” Today, ...
11.01.2019 October 2019 Review with Nathan and Laura: Prime Editing, Vertex Win, and ASHG Our Halloween show this year summarizing October’s genomics news has more tricks and treats than spooks and scares. It’s Nathan and Laura back to sift through a big month of happenings from the cool CRISPR upgrade to Inscripta’s bold move ...
10.24.2019 Should We Increase Panel Testing for All Breast Cancer Patients? It’s a hot question in the field today. Recently several studies arguing for increased testing for all breast cancer patients have been published in leading oncology journals. Peter Beitsch is a breast cancer surgeon in Dallas Texas and co-author of ...
10.22.2019 Genomics Going from a Passive to an Active Science: John Stuelpnagel on the “Write” Revolution Not many people have had quite the same view on the genomics revolution as John Stuelpnagel. He co-founded Illumina, Ariosa, and Fabric Genomics (formerly Omicia). And he’s the Chairman of Fabric, 10X Genomics, and Inscripta. And not all had the ...
10.15.2019 Why Isn’t Personalized Medicine Being Mentioned by the Presidential Contenders? Ed Abrahams on Drug Pricing, Genetic Testing, and the State of the Industry in 2019 Ed Abrahams has a message for Nancy Pelosi about HR 3. That’s the new bill in the House to reduce drug pricing. Ed is the President of the Personalized Medicine Coalition, an advocacy organization in Washington representing our industry which ...
10.07.2019 Karen Miga on the Next Era of Genomics "Welcome to the era of T2T genomics,” tweeted UCSC’s Karen Miga on August 16th of this year. Then she linked to a paper on bioRxiv that begins: "After nearly two decades of improvements, the current human reference genome (GRCh38) is ...
10.01.2019 September 2019 Review with Nathan and Laura: Same-Sex Genetics, Mosquitos, and Another DTC Scandal After the summer break, Nathan and Laura, stir from their beach slumbers, to again offer their anything but sleepy opinions on the latest genomics headlines.
09.17.2019 We Can See Tumor Heterogeneity. Now What? We Ask Cathy Smith, UCSF Cathy Smith counts herself among the Gleevec Generation after the landmark targeted cancer therapy. She’s an optimist who believes in the possibilities of precision medicine. “We are outsmarting cancer,” she says. Cathy is an Assistant Professor of Hematology/Oncology at UCSF ...
09.12.2019 Hallelujah! A Universal Flu Preventative and Therapy with Jeff Stein, Cidara As another summer winds down, another flu season approaches. Yuuuk. When will we be able to stop living in fear of that crowded plane flight in winter months or waking up congested and wondering . . . dreading, “am I ...
09.03.2019 'The Movement:' John Cumbers Previews the Rapidly Growing SynBioBeta 2019 Synthetic biology is experiencing a second renaissance and the place to be this October 1-3 is at the SynBioBeta conference in San Francisco. For those of you who are going, today’s show is your preview. For those of you who ...
08.13.2019 Anya Prince on Our Current Vulnerability to Genetic Discrimination Some Americans still resist genetic testing for fear they will be discriminated against by insurance companies. Why? in 2008, Congress passed GINA, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, to protect us from insurance companies choosing to include us or not for ...
08.01.2019 Do Long Reads Hold Answers for Alzheimer’s? with Mark Ebbert, Mayo It’s the kind of plot that makes great science. There are genes that have been hiding in plain sight, undetected until now. They’ve gone unseen, that is, by short read sequencing. Today’s guest and his colleagues call them “camouflage genes,” ...
07.25.2019 With Nanopore Sensing Beyond Sequencing, Ontera Takes 'Lab' to the Field We’ve interviewed several CEOs over the years since the Theranos fiasco who avoided any mention of the blighted company whenever the comparison came up. But today’s guest, Murielle Thinard McLane, the CEO of Ontera, jumped at the chance before Theral ...
07.17.2019 Mark Chaisson on Two New Structural Variation Papers If you’re not on the long read sequencing train, you’re not landing in the world of genomics. A new paper out begins, "Structural variants contribute greater diversity at the nucleotide level between two human genomes than another form of genetic ...
07.09.2019 Early Cancer Detection: Is This Company Ahead of Grail? The great promise of liquid biopsy technology is in early cancer detection. That is, it's the great future promise. Right? This past month at the annual cancer conference, ASCO, we heard about one such flagship company announcing just which technology ...
07.01.2019 June 2019 Review with Nathan and Laura: Gene Patents, Grail, Dr. Lynch Nathan and Laura join Theral for our final review show before the summer break. Have you already headed out on vacation? Take us along and stay current with the top stories in genomics. This month it's gene patents (yes, Congress ...
06.25.2019 Should Genomic Screening Be Standard of Care? with Adam Buchanan, Geisinger Those of us watching every shift in the level of adoption of genomic medicine have our eyes closely glued to Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania. Adam Buchanan is the Co-Director of Geisinger’s MyCode Genomic Screening and Counseling program, and today ...
05.31.2019 May 2019 Review with Nathan and Laura: Gene Therapies, DTC Shifts, Gender and Sports Our two reigning champions are back for a month packed with news. It’s Nathan Pearson of Root and Laura Hercher of Sarah Laurence College and Host of The Beagle Has Landed Podcast daring to go where no genomics commentators have ...
05.23.2019 Toward the Human Pan Genome with Adam Phillippy, NHGRI Storylines repeat in genome science every decade or so. The human genome is complete. No. Now it's complete. Or, in the 90's, it was first announced that the first chromosome was sequenced. We have the same story for you today--breaking ...
05.16.2019 Laura Hercher on the DTC Genetic Testing Landscape "DTC is now too big of an arena to put everything in the same bucket.” This was a line from Laura Hercher, one of our monthly commentators a couple shows back. The statement made its way around Twitter, so we ...
05.09.2019 Arcadia Biosciences Pivots to Bring Us Non-GMO, High Fiber GoodWheat and Better Cannabis Today we're joined by Matt Plavan, President of Arcadia Specialty Genomics. The last time we talked with someone from Arcadia Bioscience, a biotech company working on plant genomics in Davis, California, they were confronting GMO regulatory hurdles. Which was a ...
05.02.2019 April 2019 Review with Nathan and Laura: uBiome Raided by FBI, PRS for Obesity, and a Gene Therapy Cure April was a tough month for some genomics companies. The FBI raided the offices of uBiome and two other pioneers in the field failed. Are there broader implications? Nathan and Laura have returned to first give us some facts and ...
04.18.2019 The Era of the Social Genome with Rodrigo Martinez, Veritas Genetics Two years ago Veritas Genetics began offering whole genome sequencing for a thousand dollars. It was a significant milestone—and still is!—not only for what it means about the company providing the genomes but also what it means about the demand ...
04.09.2019 Reassessing Alzheimer’s with Larry Goldstein, UCSD There are drug trial failures. And there are drug trial failures. The recent move by drug giant Biogen to halt their Alzheimer’s drug has not only been a setback for the company—their stock fell precipitously on the news—it’s also been ...
04.04.2019 Family Surprises Care of the Home DNA Test with Brianne Kirkpatrick You order a $99 home DNA test for some holiday pleasure. It’s a bit of fun. Right? Until it turns your life upside down. Which is when you contact a professional.
03.29.2019 March 2019 with Nathan and Laura: Old Envelopes, Wooly Mammoth DNA, and the Night King From recovering DNA on hundred year old envelopes to bringing it to life from 28,000 year old wooly mammoth samples, it's our genomics version of March Madness. Join Theral, Nathan and Laura for another monthly look back over the headlines.
03.21.2019 Single Cell Analysis Shows Important New Detail in Key Clinical Study of AML: Koichi Takahashi, MD Anderson The history of biomedicine goes something like this: A new tool is invented. 2. New tool is used in research labs to generate new data and new hypotheses. There is new science. 3. New tool is used in clinical setting ...
03.06.2019 Science Communication in a Post Fact World with Erik Clausen "That’s fake news!” We hear it all the time. And often it is said about scientific facts, for example, recent studies or evidence of global warming. Or the safeness of vaccines. But has the problem with “fake news” been that ...
03.01.2019 February 2019 Review with Nathan and Laura: Family Surprises, IQ Profiling, and Chinese Surveillance Our two favorite commentators are back for our February 2019 month-in-review show, and to give our own twist to Valentine's Day celebrations we take on the topic of family surprises due to DNA testing. This is a phenomenon taking the ...
02.26.2019 Heretic No Longer? Meet Michael Joyner, Precision Medicine’s Critic-in-Chief In 2016, after President Obama announced the Cancer Moonshot in the State of the Union, a very outspoken physician researcher from the Mayo Clinic penned an open letter to Vice President Biden criticizing the project and proposing the money be ...
02.06.2019 The Internet of Biology Revolution-For Real This Time, with Brett Goldsmith, Cardea Talk to anyone who’s been around diagnostics or blood sampling for long, and they’ll tell you that nanotechnology is nothing new. Today’s guest, Brett Goldsmith, the Chief Technology Officer at Cardea, says he was involved in the nano revolution that ...
02.01.2019 January 2019 Review with Nathan and Laura: Cloning, CRISPRing, DTC, and Paleogenomic Overreach Nathan and Laura are back for the first time this year for a wild trip past cloned CRISPRd monkeys and the first gene drive in mammals. (Just that?) But first we have to deal with our hangover from the end ...
01.28.2019 Cara O'Neill of the Cure Sanfilippo Foundation Tells Her Story You’re a mother, and life is typical. You’re also a pediatrician. Then one day you hear that your daughter is autistic. OK. Then you get the news that, no, it’s not autism but a very rare disease called Sanfilippo Syndrome. ...
01.24.2019 PregSource: The NIH’s Crowdsourcing Project for Pregnancy Data with Caroline Signore There are hundreds of pregnancy apps available. So what is unique about the NIH’s new crowdsourcing project called PregSource? “We think PregSource is different because we offer the security and reliability of having been developed at the NIH with the ...
01.17.2019 Meet Christian, Janos, and the New World of 3D Oncology Today we engage in a rare discussion between a startup founder who is going beyond sequencing and working directly with cancer patient cells in 3D cultures and with one of his customers, the husband of a cancer patient. Meet Christian ...
01.08.2019 Has Computational Modeling for Cancer Genomics "Arrived?" with Shirley Liu, Dana Farber It’s the question of the moment Are we living in the age of AI? Or is it still just hype? When it comes to the latest research in immuno therapy, computational modeling is helping to answer key open questions, such ...
12.27.2018 Amy Harmon of the NYT on Race & Genetics, Women in Science At the end of the year, we like to speak with a journalist who covers genetics about some of their stories.
12.20.2018 CRISPR or Not, You Can't Genetically Enhance Humans, Says Sci-Fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Designer babies. The term means many things to many people. To some it means kids only dressed in Gucci. Some say that by doing pre-implantation genetic screening, we are already living in the age of designer babies. Others have been ...

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