Pacific Biosciences has introduced a new method for detecting DNA methylation simultaneously with DNA sequencing. They are calling it 5-base sequencing.

Today on the program, Jonas Korlach, PacBio’s Chief Scientific Officer, and Tomi Pastinen, the Director of the Genomic Medicine Center at Children’s Mercy Research Institute in Kansas City join us to describe the new breakthrough and connect it to clinical possibilities.

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Alec Ford is passionate about his message. No wonder. There's an astounding fact in cancer medicine that is little known and could make a big difference. More cancer patients are dying from infections than they are from their cancers. And Alec's company has the technology to do something about it.

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One of the underrated but true successes of precision medicine has been pharmacogenomics. Beginning in the ’90s with the approval of the drug Herceptin for HER2 positive breast cancer, tailoring drugs to genotype has been one of the less controversial areas of our field and will only continue to build on the early promise of sequencing the human genome.

Today we talk Michelle Whirl-Carrillo, Director of PharmGKB, a one-stop go-to for pharmacogenomics data that has been funded by the NIH since 2000.

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In 1998, in a now-famous paper, molecular biologist Dennis Lo showed that cell-free fetal DNA is present in high concentrations in maternal plasma and serum. The finding has led to an explosive science based on cell free DNA and an industry that we all know as non-invasive prenatal testing. But more and more this science is making itself known in other disease areas, such as cancer, as well.

Specifically, ctDNA is offering higher resolution in cancer treatment.

Today we talk with John Nelson, Senior Principal Scientist at GE Research and veteran in the field of DNA synthesis. On January 7th, 2020, two weeks before the first cases of the coronavirus were reported in the U.S, John and a team of scientists and engineers proposed a new project to DARPA called NOW, or Nucelic Acids on Demand Worldwide. The goal of the project, now fully underway, is to deliver DNA-based vaccines anywhere in the world in three days.

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“I’ve seen a lot of revolutions. Now we’re at the beginning of spatial biology, and I think it has the chance to transform life science similar to next gen sequencing, but even more. It’s going to have more ramifications that spread through more disciplines than any of the revolutions I’ve seen in a while.”

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Are we now entering the age of proteomics the way we did with genomics thirty years ago?

We were told we should talk to today’s guest by four people in one week. He’s Omid Farokhzad, CEO and Founder of Seer Inc. When we did, we understood why.

Seer offers its customers the chance to “see the proteome in a way that’s never been possible before.” So what does that mean?

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"There's an entire field of fragmentomics with a whole lot of people working on it. The DNA which is shed into the bloodstream has a certain length. The length of ctDNA is shorter than cfDNA, and depending on where the cancer cell is located, the fragment size and pattern is different. So you can actually deduce information about the tissue of origin from the fragment length and pattern. And that's just the beginning."

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The DNA synthesis space is seeing some real creativity and disruption this past year. One newcomer, in particular, is shaking things up.

Sylvain Gariel is the co-founder and chief operating officer of DNA Script, who has recently launched the world’s first benchtop enzymatic DNA synthesizer. In today's show, Sylvain, co-inventor of the new system, tells how he met his co-inventors at a French gas company and came to invent a whole new way of writing DNA.

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Even though Brian McKelligon calls himself a rookie CEO, he comes to the top position at Akoya Biosciences with a veteran’s resume. His path to one of spatial biology’s hottest companies in 2022 worked him up the ranks of some of the top names in life science tools: Affymetrix, Ingenuity, Ion Torrent, and 10X Genomics. Last year Brian led Akoya through an IPO and this year the company has launched a new integrated product line called the Phenocycler-Fusion which they are calling the fastest single-cell spatial biology system on the market.

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