Mendelspod Podcast

5:05

Deeper into Genomics: Google DeepMind’s Ziga Avsec...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/09/29

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.comIs biology headed back into the genome?While much of biology has been expanding outward into single cells, spatial biology and ever more biological context, Žiga Avsec and his team at Google DeepMind are making the case that there is still an enormous amount to learn by going deeper into DNA itself.Their new AlphaGenome Atlas uses AlphaGenome to predict the molecular effects of every possible single letter change in the

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22:34

Mass Spec Comes to the Routine Core Lab: Don Mason of...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/09/22

Mass spectrometry has been one of the most powerful technologies in clinical testing for decades. So why is it still largely confined to specialty labs?Don Mason has spent more than 25 years in clinical mass spectrometry. Now Senior Marketing Manager for Mass Spectrometry at Roche Diagnostics, he says the technology’s strength has also been its weakness: “Part of its power and part of its challenges are linked.” Mass spec is extraordinarily sensitive, selective and flexible, but traditionally

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5:50

Jennifer Dionne Wants to Read the Whole Proteome...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/09/17

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.comJennifer Dionne, Stanford physicist and co-founder of Pumpkinseed, joins us to talk about a radically different way of reading proteins. Pumpkinseed’s deSIPHR technology combines nanophotonics with Raman spectroscopy to detect the molecular vibrations of individual amino acids. The goal is de novo protein sequencing that can read not only the 20 canonical amino acids, but potentially the enormous alphabet created by

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6:08

Katie Maloney, Partner at DeciBio Consulting, Sees an...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/09/15

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.comDigital technology has been promising to transform pathology for years. But the last year looks different. Roche paid roughly $1 billion for PathAI. Tempus acquired Paige. Other deals are adding to a sudden wave of consolidation. And AstraZeneca is developing a computational pathology algorithm for TROP2 that could become a companion diagnostic used to determine which patients receive a drug. DeciBio partner Katie

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5:32

It’s One of the Greatest Success Stories of Molecular...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/09/11

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.comIt was the heady days of the CRISPR revolution and of the gene therapy Casgevy. And when longtime genomics editor and author Kevin Davies went looking for a book that told the story of sickle cell disease and could not find one, he was perplexed and then inspired.A few years later, the result is Curved Air, a biography of sickle cell anemia that traces one of the most remarkable arcs in modern biology. Davies begins

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5:49

Elias Sayour on the Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/09/10

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.comAfter being pursued for more than 150 years, cancer vaccines may finally be having their moment.The recent positive Phase III results from Moderna and Merck offer what today’s guest Dr. Elias Sayour calls the first “bona fide evidence” that a therapeutic personalized cancer vaccine can work. For Sayour, a pediatric oncologist and cancer researcher at the University of Florida, the result is not the culmination of the

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37:25

What Single Cell Sequencing Revealed About Pulmonary...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/09/08

Single cell sequencing has given researchers extraordinary new maps of human biology. For Nick Banovich of TGen, the burning question is how to turn those maps into something that matters for patients.Banovich has spent much of his career studying pulmonary fibrosis, and single cell sequencing has changed the field’s understanding of the disease. Instead of looking at an average signal from diseased lung tissue, researchers can now separate molecular changes from changes in the populations of cells

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31:37

The Quest to Measure Protein Function with Polly...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/09/03

Stanford physicist and bioengineer Polly Fordyce has a big vision. She’s attempting to measure protein function at the scale at which we learned to measure DNA. We can sequence proteins. We can increasingly predict their structures. But we still have a surprisingly difficult time measuring what proteins actually do.Fordyce wants to change that. Her lab is developing ways to measure protein folding, binding, kinetics and function at a massive scale, using the quantitative language of physics. Her

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31:04

Doubling Down on Long Reads: New CEO of PacBio, Mark...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/09/01

Mark Van Oene has just taken over as CEO of Pacific Biosciences, and Mendelspod is his first interview in the new job. He began his career as a scientist studying cystic fibrosis genetics at Toronto’s SickKids, then spent fifteen years at Illumina, rising from its first sales rep in Canada to Chief Commercial Officer. He joined PacBio in 2021 as COO and has spent the past five years helping build the product portfolio he now inherits as CEO.He joins us today with a clear message: PacBio is

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4:53

Serge Saxonov on What’s Next for 10x Genomics

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/08/27

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com10x Genomics has been remarkably good at figuring out where biology is going next.In this wide-ranging conversation, co-founder and CEO Serge Saxonov explains why. Despite decades of genomics, “we still understand very little biology.” For 10x, the way forward has been to build better tools for measuring it and to work backward from the biological questions rather than forward from a particular technology.That philosophy

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5:29

“You Cannot Discover What You Cannot Make”: Lee...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/08/20

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.comThose of us in biology tend to think that chemistry is rather straight forward. But today’s guest says there’s quite an art to synthesizing a molecule.A few years ago, Lee Cronin, a chemistry professor at the University of Glasgow joined Mendelspod for a sprawling conversation about the origin of life, alien biology, assembly theory, and his conviction that chemistry could become programmable. Now Cronin is back, and

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47:28

All of Us Comes of Age. And So Does Its Funding: Josh...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/08/18

Welcome to the second episode of Mendelspod’s 16th season. We’re grateful to everyone who has followed the show over the years, and we have a terrific lineup ahead as we continue asking some bigger questions about where biology and medicine are going.Few projects embody those ambitions quite like the NIH All of Us Research Program. The latest release includes data from more than 747,000 participants, 535,000 whole genomes, 480,000 electronic health records, and—for the first time—long-read

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41:01

Season Opener: Is Biology Having Its Newtonian...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/08/13

Welcome to Mendelspod’s 16th season!It’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this for just over 15 years, following first and foremost the people reshaping biology and medicine. But also the technologies and ideas. Our original vision was to feature the “people behind the headlines” and you’ll see that what we continue to do in this first show of the new season. A sincere thank you to everyone who has listened, watched, subscribed, sponsored, recommended guests, shared a show, told your friends,

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32:55

From the Archives: Erdinc Sezgin and the Physics of...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/08/06

On Mendelspod, we’re always searching for scientists who are looking at biology in new ways. Sometimes that means a new technology. Sometimes it means asking entirely different questions. Erdinc Sezgin is bringing the tools of physics to biology.Sezgin is a group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, where he heads the Membrane Biophysics Group. His research focuses on one of the most familiar yet least understood structures in biology: the cell membrane.In this

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23:57

From the Archives: How Cellanome Is Changing the Way...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/07/30

One of the biggest technology shifts we saw in biology over the past year came from the young company, Cellanome. Instead of relying only on static single-cell snapshots, the Cellanome platform enables longitudinal observation of live cells.In this conversation, Pier Federico Gherardini, VP of Computational Biology at Cellanome, joins Matthew Spitzer of UCSF, whose lab is putting the Cellanome platform to work in cancer immunology.The new CellCage technology allows researchers to follow individual

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29:01

Agilent and Oxford Nanopore Discuss Bringing Long...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/07/09

Acute leukemia patients often wait days or even weeks for the full battery of molecular tests needed to guide treatment decisions. Dr. Parth Shah from Dartmouth believes long read sequencing can dramatically shorten that timeline. In this episode, Shah joins Agilent's Rita Shaknovich and Oxford Nanopore's Claire Attwooll to discuss some details of how long reads are beginning to move from research applications into routine clinical testing.Along the way, we explore the role of targeted enrichment,

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4:00

Liquid Biopsy for the Tumor Microenvironment: with...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/06/30

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.comWe’ve become remarkably good at reading cancer cells. Spatial biology enabled us to read them in context. Today we discuss a new Nature study suggesting that the tumor microenvironment—the immune cells, stromal cells, and surrounding biology that often determines whether a therapy succeeds or fails—can be measured from a simple blood draw, or liquid biopsy. To do that we’re joined by Dr. Vincent Miller, an oncologist

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4:59

Can Liquid Biopsy Transform Chronic Disease? Hamed...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/06/25

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.comFor the past decade, liquid biopsy has largely been defined by oncology. Tumors shed DNA carrying mutations and epigenetic changes which allows researchers to detect cancer and monitor response. With this physicians are increasingly able to guide treatment. But chronic diseases are different. There is no tumor. Biological signals are subtle and quite d…

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46:26

The UAE’s Big Bet on Genomic Medicine with Mohamed...

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/06/23

The future of genomics has arrived in Abu Dhabi.On today’s show, Dr. Mohamed Alameri of the UAE Department of Health and Albarah El-Khani of M42 describe one of the most ambitious precision medicine efforts underway anywhere in the world: the Emirati Genome Program, which has already sequenced more than 900,000 genomes and is rapidly integrating that data into everyday healthcare.The UAE program is not only a large sequencing effort and database—soon to be made available for research anywhere—but a

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41:11

Ryan Flynn of Harvard on Non-Coding RNA

Mendelspod Podcast ·

2026/06/18

On today’s show, Dr. Ryan Flynn of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital takes us into a newly emerging layer of biology: the architecture of the cell surface itself. Flynn first gained attention for the discovery of glycoRNA — RNA molecules displayed on the outside of cells — a finding that challenged the traditional picture of the cell surface as a world composed primarily of proteins and glycans. RNA has long been understood mainly as a carrier of genetic information (messenger

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