Mendelspod Podcast

By 2050, there will be 9 billion people on the planet. What will they eat? This is the question that led Rod Wing, Director of the Arizona Genomics Institute, into the field of plant genomics. What has been accomplished so far in the mission to come up with some super green crops?  And how does Rod see anti-GMO sentiment and the recent trend toward gluten free diets factoring in? 

A very unique biotechnology event took place this week. BEINGS 2015, or the Biotech and the Ethical Imagination Global Summit, was held at The Tabernacle, a former church turned concert hall in Atlanta, Georgia. The venue was not the only unusual thing for a summit about science. Speakers at the meeting included a well known linguist, a famous Canadian novelist, and Catholic rector along with professors of bioethics, law, and, of course, biology.

If you followed the news from the recent show of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR), no doubt you heard about the exciting potential of liquid biopsies. These new blood-based tests, made possible by better tools and analysis techniques, offer a non-invasive way of understanding various cancers. Traditionally, with non-hematological cancers, solid tumor biopsies are obtained through surgical recession or an invasive needle.

  In a keynote talk this week for the online Genetics and Genomics conference, computational biology whiz, John Quackenbush, listed some pretty wild correlations found by a Harvard Business School student when he mixed some large data sets.  For example, U.S. spending on science, space, and technology corresponds directly with suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation.  We never would have guessed it without the help of big data.

Just as biomedical research is experiencing a surge of translation into clinical application, so too must the stories of this research and its impact in the lives of patients be translated to a larger audience.

The New Republic argued in a pice entitled, "The Decline of Pseudoscience," this week that now that the so called "natural" living industry has gone mainstream, "it's days are numbered."  Surely Oprah's dumping of Dr. Oz backs this up.   But other events this week show a different story.

Janitors have had a terribly busy time this week cleaning up all those jaws that were dropped on floors of research labs everywhere around the country. Have you heard about this latest sexism scandal? Two female co-authors of a scientific paper submitted their work to PLOS -- you know, the open access journal.   You won’t believe what they heard back from the lone peer reviewer.  They were told to go find “one or two male biologists” to be co-authors on the paper to increase its chances of being published.

Pharma companies have always had their chief medical officers (CMOs). Now, as the diagnostics industry grows, many kinds of life science companies are filling this important position as well. Sequencing tool makers, direct-to-consumer firms, bioinformatics companies—they’re all appointing CMOs.

An Old New DTC Co. on the Move Let’s start with a bit of trivia.  What company has resorted to selling genetic ancestry testing online direct to consumers?  Hint:  the company is located in the San Francisco Bay area, has banked more than 800,000 samples from customers all over the world, and is slowly transforming itself into major biomedical player. That’s right.  You got it.  It’s Ancestry.com.   

When President Bill Clinton stood with Francis Collins and Craig Venter in 2001 to announce the sequencing of the genome, the genome wasn’t really done.

Actually there was no news this week.  It turns out the whole industry took the week off to watch the stunning Ken Burns documentary on cancer.   No, that’s not true.  We did find some news.   How about this?  The Affordable Care Act turned five this past week.  Happy Birthday, ObamaCare!  So we thought we’d share some important numbers about the ACA: 11.7 million:   the number of Americans who have signed up for 2015 coverage. 46%:   the increase in enrollment from 2014 to 2015.

Will tech companies like Google and Apple be good at life science applications? We pursue this question today with Dale Yuzuki, the avid life science blogger, scientist, and now a marketing manager at Thermo Fisher. (See his recent blog, The Core Competency of Google Is Not Life Sciences.)

We were off last week, so there’s plenty to talk about.

The future of diagnostics is in the hands of those taking care of the biospecimen samples says, Andy Brooks our final guest in the series, Improving Biospecimen Standards. Andy is the Chief Operating Officer at Rutgers University Cell and DNA Repository, or RUCDR.

More than with any other major disease, the understanding and treatment of cancer is being transformed by genomics. And these are early days. John McPherson has been involved in sequencing since the original Human Genome Project. He now directs the Genome Technologies Program at the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. John chaired a panel on cancer genomics at the recent AGBT, or Advances in Genome Biology and Technology conference, and shares his thoughts on this year's meeting.

Friday March 13th It’s Friday already and time for Gene and Tonic, our wrap of the week’s headlines. On Monday, Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, announced that the iWatch is indeed a reality. The iWatch has all the wearable techies and mobile health folks doing somersaults. But it was what happened afterward that was so interesting. Did you hear about this?

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing has had a bumpy ride. Back in 2010, Pathway Genomics and Walgreens made a deal to sell DTC genetic tests in thousands of Walgreens drugstores. Within 48 hours of the deal being announced, it collapsed. The FDA sent a letter to Pathway basically asking them what the hell they were doing. Walgreens quickly elected to put the kibosh on the partnership.

Go about anywhere in the life science industry, and you’ll run into someone who once worked at Affymetrix. Since the founding of Affymetrix and the development of what’s come to be known simply as the Affy chip, the company’s history has been intertwined with that of biotech and the genomics revolution. But what has become of the company today?

Join Theral for a quick wrap-up of the week's biotech news: The biggest news this week has been the flow of stories coming from last week’s AGBT conference held in Florida. This is the annual all out party for the all out darling of our industry, the sequencing space. Like a debutante ball, it’s where anybody who’s anybody comes out and does their curtsy to society.

Keira Havens is the co-founder of Revolution Bioengineering, and this week the company launched a crowd funding campaign (see video below) to produce flowers that can change colors. And what is the revolution? “We want to change the world,” says Keira. “We really want to make a difference in the way people think about biotechnology. For a long time it’s been the realm of large companies and behind-the-scenes labs, and we want to make it a part of folks' everyday lives.”