N Equals One

By day, postdoctoral researcher Beata Mierzwa, PhD, studies cellular division. By night, she makes clothing — dresses, pants, shoes, backpacks — covered in colorful dividing cells. In this episode, she talks about her love of both science and art, how her unique designs help get people excited about science, and her new role as an IF/THEN Ambassador for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Learn more about Mierzwa and her projects at https://beatascienceart.com and https://www.ifthenshecan.org/ambassadors.

Lisa Madlensky, PhD, director of the Family Cancer Genetics Program at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health, explains the difference between medical grade DNA tests and consumer genetic analysis like 23andMe. She talks about the nuggets that can be derived from consumer products and what might not apply. She cautions us not to use consumer products to make medical decisions. Instead, if you're concerned about your health risk, talk to a genetic counselor.

As a kid, Alec Calac knew he wanted to be a doctor, following in his father's footsteps — but it wasn't until he started college in another state and left his community behind that he discovered his second passion: advocacy. Now, as a second year MD/PhD student at UC San Diego School of Medicine, Alec spoke with us about his personal experiences and how he fills his "spare" time advocating for more visibility and support for Native Americans in STEM and medical careers.

Susan Hopkins, MD, PhD, is a professor of medicine and radiology working to figure out how the lungs work — and in particular, what happens to the lungs under stress. Following a winding road that brought her from family medicine in a small mountain town in Canada to UC San Diego School of Medicine where she researches the effects of low oxygen and exercise on lung function, Hopkins’ interests all come back to her love of figuring out how things work. She studies high altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), a unique condition that occurs only at high altitudes that causes the lungs to suddenly fill with liquid, and is trying to understand why HAPE is so easily reversible while other similar conditions in the clinic can be so deadly. In this episode, she talks with our intern Noah Lowy about her research and shares some insights into how athletic training and lung function are intertwined. Image: Pixabay

Sunny Smith, MD, is co-medical director of UC San Diego School of Medicine's Student-Run Free Clinic, a popular elective that offers free care for San Diego's underserved and provides a unique hand-on experience for doctors-in-training. One of Smith’s most cherished memories of her 20+ years with the clinic is the time the students crowdsourced funding to help an uninsured man get the prosthetic leg he needed to return to work. One of the best things about the clinic, she says, is the opportunity to be part of patients’ lives for years, getting to know them and their families. The clinic is a featured part of UC San Diego’s new T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion. Learn more at health.ucsd.edu/compassion.

For most of history, scientific and medical studies have tended to involve primarily white people, and mostly white men. We now know those findings don’t always apply to people from different genetic and environmental backgrounds. That’s why the All of Us Research Program’s goal is to accelerate medical discoveries by gathering data on health, habits, family history, genetics and environment from one million or more participants — and particularly participants from historically underrepresented communities. At UC San Diego Health, All of Us is led by Lucila Ohno-Machado, MD, PhD, professor and chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics. In this episode, she talks about the program, what she’s excited about and what’s coming next. Learn more at http://joinallofus.org.

In this episode we talk to Alan Shahtaji, DO, family and sports medicine physician at UC San Diego Health and a team doctor for the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team. We caught up with Shahtaji on the morning before he left to join up with the team and travel with them for the 2019 World Cup in France. He talks about what he does, what he likes about it and what’s challenging about providing medical care abroad for an elite team. He also shares some advice for anyone interested in staying healthy and performing well in soccer, including parents with kids getting into the sport. For more, check out Shahtaji’s video on how to prevent soccer injuries: https://youtu.be/03zwR5sBr1Q

Trey Ideker and Samson Fong teach a course at UC San Diego School of Medicine called Biological Networks and Biomedicine. It’s designed to introduce graduate students to the concept of network biology — living systems as an interconnected whole, instead of individual cells, proteins or genes — and the bioinformatics tools used to study these systems. But instead of giving the class a standard final exam, Ideker and Fong created a competition. The students worked in teams to analyze a database of patient genetic information and identify the genes most closely associated with schizophrenia. The top teams not only came up with a list of known schizophrenia-associated genes, they ran the analysis in under five minutes and outperformed previously published approaches. Learn more: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/04/190424112921.htm

"Tiny ice skaters on your uterus" is how a patient with endometriosis describes the pain she lived with for nine years before being diagnosed. In this episode, Monica Cain shares her personal journey with the debilitating disorder, and Dr. Sanjay Agarwal talks about all things endometriosis, including the first new drug in a decade that is becoming a game changer.

Tamara Strauss, the first patient to enroll in a first-of-its-kind clinical trial at Moores Cancer Center at UC San Diego Health to test a personalized vaccine using her unique cancer mutations to boost an anti-tumor immune response, joins Ezra Cohen, MD, associate director for translational science at Moores Cancer Center, and Stephen Schoenberger, PhD, professor of immunology at the La Jolla Institute for Allergy & Immunology, to talk about hope for a new personalized cancer vaccine. Drs. Cohen and Schoenberger developed a new technology that identifies a patient’s unique targets that can be used to create a vaccine specific to each individual person. The pilot study is enrolling 10 patients with solid tumors as a first step. To learn more about this research visit cancer.ucsd.edu.