Mendelspod Podcast

Last week we attended the 2015 Rejuvenation Biotechnology Conference where we heard about the latest developments in aging research. We were fortunate enough to sit down with two of the major figures in the field of aging research, Aubrey de Grey, CSO of the SENS Research Foundation and Brian Kennedy, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Brian and Aubrey have gone about their work in different ways but say that their approaches are now converging as the momentum behind aging research increases.

We're back in the office after a fabulous vacation, and ready to have some fun. It's Friday, and time for Gene and Tonic. Yes, we celebrate the news this week that women have their own sex pill. And we make our best guesses as to why the FDA's drug approval rate is up in the stratosphere.

Nathan Pearson, formerly a genome scientist at Ingenuity and Knome, has been doing public outreach for genomics at the New York Genome Center for about a year now. In today’s interview, Nathan says he always wanted to be able to speak directly to the larger public about the great science he’s been involved in.

We recently interviewed cancer researcher Tim Triche from Children's Hospital Los Angeles. Tim had two main points: First, microarrays are still a very valuable tool for research and for the clinic. Second, there are perhaps more answers for cancer research to be found in the non-coding portion of the genome than in the genes. Here, we've compiled Tim's comments on the staying power of arrays.

Major outbreaks of deadly viruses, such as the recent spread of Ebola in Northern Africa, are nothing new on planet earth. What is new is the technology that we are using to identify, track, and contain such plagues.

Emmanuel Vincent is the founder of Climate Feedback, a project which includes a new tool for scientists to comment directly on climate science news. The tool is a plugin which can be downloaded for free and gives a viewer real time access to the feedback of scientists on a particular online article.

Matt Might came knocking on the door of genomic medicine out of pure necessity. After a four year diagnostic odyssey that led them to Duke University, Matt and his wife, Cristina, finally found out through exome sequencing that their son, Bertrand, was suffering from a rare disease known as NGLY1 deficiency. That was three years ago.

Last year, pharma giant Roche went on a buying spree, picking up one company after another. In December, when it was announced they had bought out Bina Technologies, many of us were playing catch up. Who is Bina, and how do they fit in the overall bioinformatics space?

In the second part of our interview with Tim Triche, Director of the Personalized Medicine Center at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Tim says that micro arrays are still a vital technology for today’s cancer researcher. Making use of both next-gen sequencing and arrays for his research, Tim confirms that arrays still have advantages in the clinic as well, such as quicker turn around time.  Tim also weighs in on some ongoing questions about whether poor biospecimen quality is hampering research efforts and whether genomic medicine is paying off for patients. 

Listen to Tim Triche from Children's Hospital Los Angeles for very long and you’ll get excited again about cancer research. I couldn’t stop listening. Which is why his interview is being published in two parts. Now sure, like other guests we’ve had on the show, Tim calls this the “absolute golden age of biomedical research.” But Tim has a unique story. He has been, and is still - though less so now, he says - an outlier in cancer genomics. Whereas most cancer researchers talk about genes, Tim is more interested in non-coding RNA.

When science journalist Ivan Oransky co-founded Retraction Watch, a blog with the express purpose of making scientific retractions more public, he didn’t think he would be posting much. “Adam Marcus, my co-founder, was quoted as saying, ‘yeah, we figured we’d post periodically, our mothers would read it, they’d be very happy, nobody would read it other than them.’ Obviously that hasn’t been the case,” says Oransky in this first of a series of podcasts on scientific integrity.

What a week for Americans . . . What a week for genomics! The Supreme Court rulings that Americans can keep their Obamacare and can all get married - no matter what state they live in - added the final good news to a week of genomics festivities around the country. But it's not all positive news this week. The New York Times featured a diagnostics company under review by Medicare for fraud. Allegedly, the New Orleans based Renaissance Rx has been paying doctors to sign up patients for a huge trial of genomic based tests, even when the patients didn't qualify.

 Art Caplan is a prodigious writer on the topic of medical ethics. How prodigious? How about thirty-two books and over 700 peer reviewed papers on ethical conundrums ranging from organ donation to end of life care.

The international BIO convention is all about seduction.  All fifty states sent representatives to Philly this week to make the case that their state was the best for biotech. Seventy countries were there touting their awesome awesomeness.   Does all this seduction really work? A new class of drugs for cardiovascular disease was reviewed recently at the FDA.  Will they become blockbusters like Pfizer’s Lipitor?  

Before Bobby Sebra became the Director of Technology Development at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt Sinai in New York he worked at Pacific Biosciences, helping to develop their single molecule, long read (SMRT) sequencing technology.

It’s a week of finding out again what we already knew. First that a nobel laureate can also be a total ***hole. And second that creative people really are crazy. It’s also been a week for going into the future. This week Team Mendelspod attended IndieBio’s Demo Day. Twelve, mostly very young, founder/geeks pitched their new ideas for making the world a better place to a room of investors in downtown San Francisco. We saw some amazing technology, but the real question seems to be, how will they sell these new synthetic biology products?!?.

Gene and Tonic for June 5, 2015 What does genomics have to do with a hippie rock music event?  A few things.  Find out in today’s humorous preview of the Festival of Genomics, happening later this month in Boston.   Yes, there are the sports genes everyone knows about.  But what about those less studied that might affect your career in sports?  Do you know what is written on the sports page of your genome? And what has Ben Carson considering brain surgery?  Tune in to this week’s wrap of genomics news - it’s another Gene and Tonic from Mendelspod.

Jeremy Koenig is a molecular biologist and an athlete. His interest in both led him to found a new direct-to-consumer genetic testing company called Athletigen.

If you haven’t already, check out the inaugural Festival of Genomics being held in Boston later this month.

Gene and Tonic: May 29, 2015 Did you hear?  The Age of Genomics has come to an end.   According to science journalist, David Dobbs, after 110 years of studying genomics, we have come up with almost nothing to improve human health, or as Dobbs put it so elegantly, we ain't got  "diddly-squat."   What will all of our geneticist friends do?  They don't want to be known as "diddlly-squaticists."