Unraveled

By Dana-Farber Cancer Institute

What's Unraveled about?

Unraveled is Dana-Farber’s science podcast that explores the mysteries of the science of cancer. Veteran broadcaster Ken Shulman digs into the cutting-edge science that is transforming cancer research, and providing hope for scientists, and for cancer patients.

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Unraveled episodes:

05.17.2023
Season 2 Episode 6: Big Data, AI, and Cancer Research
As our universe of knowledge expands, sometimes incrementally and more often, exponentially, its new dimensions create new challenges. The more we know, the better our tools are, the more choices we have. And that's great, but it's hard to distill...
04.26.2023
Season 2 Episode 5: With a Little Help From My Friends: Combination Immunotherapy
If there is such a thing as a holy grail in cancer research, a secret spell or golden ring that can ward off any and all forms of the disease, it probably lives somewhere in the realm of immunotherapy. A...
04.05.2023
Season 2 Episode 4: Making it Personal: Targeted Cancer Therapies
By the early 2000s, researchers at Dana-Farber and elsewhere knew that a certain protein appeared in many tumors taken from lung cancer patients. Based on that data, doctors started treating those patients with a drug that inhibited that protein. Unfortunately,...
03.15.2023
Season 2 Episode 3: Stop the Division: CDK-4/6 Inhibitors and the Cell Cycle
Cancer is often a problem of cell division; cancer cells keep doubling and doubling, faster and faster. Eventually, they crowd out the healthy cells we need to survive. So researchers proposed a question: Why not stop that land grab? Why not...
02.22.2023
Season 2 Episode 2: Thalidomide and its Second Act in Multiple Myeloma
Momentum isn't always one way. And it's not always constant. Sometimes it shoves you sideways, sometimes it stops you in your tracks. And sometimes only sometimes, it drives you to write one of the most astonishing second acts in all...
02.01.2023
Season 2 Episode 1 BCL-2 Inhibitors: Driving Cells to Destruction
The story begins decades ago with a man named Stanley Korsmeyer, who led the molecular oncology program at Dana-Farber from 1998 until his death in 2005. He discovered that B-cell cancers like CLL over-produced a protein called BCL-2, and interfered...
01.27.2023
Season 2 Trailer
In season 2 of Unraveled, we explore the theme of momentum. The momentum that takes therapies from test bench to bedside, and then back to test bench for fine tuning. The momentum provided by researchers, who defy headwinds and even...
10.04.2021
Episode 6: Dana-Farber in the Time of COVID
A beauty… that in some cases becomes tragic. It’s not the way most people would describe a virus. In the simplest of terms, a virus is a snippet of genetic code. It can’t reproduce on its own. So, in order...
09.20.2021
Episode 5: Turning Science Fiction into Fact
It’s always fun to think about the future. Flying cars. Cities in the clouds. Colonies on Venus and Mars. Ok. So we didn’t end up living like the Jetsons. But a few of those visions did come true. And Judy...
09.06.2021
Episode 4: The Blueprints of Your Cells
There are approximately 20,000 genes in the human genome. 20,000 packets that house the blueprints for every human cell. And every human cell contains a complete copy of that genome. It’s an incredible feat of bio-engineering. But here’s the question....
08.23.2021
Episode 3: The Culture of Mentorship
What do cancer researchers and 15th century Florentine masters have in common? Well for one, a culture of mentorship. Both come of age in a culture where knowledge is transmitted from master to pupil. In this episode, we take a...
08.09.2021
Episode 1: The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
The parable of the wolf in sheep’s clothing tale reminds us that things aren’t always as they seem, that bad guys can dress up as good guys to do their bad guy things. And there’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing...
08.09.2021
Episode 2: Behind the Science of the 2019 Nobel Prize
It’s hard to overstate just how important oxygen is to life on earth. Almost every living thing on the planet needs it to convert fuel into energy. We can’t survive without it. Not even for a handful of minutes. Fortunately,...
07.07.2021
Unraveled Season One Trailer
The complex science of cancer is unraveled in this six-episode series featuring the science behind the 2019 Nobel prize; the disguises cancer cells take on to evade the immune system; turning science fiction into fact with cell therapy; the links...