Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show

59:33

Cancer Rehabilitation: Life Beyond Treatment | Dr....

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/10/07

Send us Fan Mail Cancer treatment can save a patient's life - but what happens when the treatment itself leaves them struggling with pain, fatigue, weakness, limited mobility, or other lasting physical effects? Cancer rehabilitation is changing how we think about recovery, helping patients prepare for treatment, maintain their function, and regain their independence. Cancer treatment has made remarkable advances, dramatically improving survival and expanding treatment options for millions of...

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43:10

Can AI Solve Biology If It Can't Access The Data? |...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/10/06

Send us Fan Mail We have some of the most powerful AI systems in history - but what if one of the biggest obstacles to using AI to solve biology isn't the algorithms? What if it's the data? There are enormous amounts of biological data sitting inside pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies and research institutions. The problem is that much of it is proprietary - and the organizations that spent millions generating it have little incentive to simply give it away. What if there's a way f...

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39:50

A New Way to Image the Breast - Using Sound | Dr....

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/10/02

Send us Fan Mail What if we could look inside the breast without X-rays, without compression, and without injecting a contrast agent - and instead use sound to create a three-dimensional map of the tissue? Dr. Raluca Dinu, Ph.D. is Chief Executive Officer of QT Imaging ( https://www.qtimaging.com/ ), a medical technology company developing quantitative, three-dimensional breast imaging using transmission and reflection ultrasound. Dr. Dinu brings a particularly interesting background to thi...

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55:07

The Caregiving Crisis - And How Technology Could...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/10/01

Send us Fan Mail There are tens of millions of Americans quietly caring for a parent, spouse, child or loved one - often while trying to maintain a career and a normal life. Yet much of that work is essentially invisible to our healthcare system, our economy and even our data infrastructure. Richard Lui ( https://richardlui.com/ ) is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, author, entrepreneur, and nationally recognized caregiving advocate whose work sits at the intersection of media, techno...

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33:46

Can Robots Understand Us? From Physical AI to Social...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/28

Send us Fan Mail A robot can see you. It can recognize you. It can track where you're moving. But can it understand what you're trying to do? Because humans don't simply move through the world - we constantly interpret one another's intentions, expectations, emotions and behavior. And as AI-powered robots move from factories into restaurants, hospitals, hotels, stores and eventually our homes, that may be one of the hardest problems they have to solve: Can a machine actually understand ...

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44:58

What Does AI Actually See? The Next Generation Of...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/28

Send us Fan Mail Your face can now be turned into a mathematical representation, searched against enormous databases, and potentially matched in fractions of a second. But what happens when AI moves beyond recognizing your face - and starts understanding everything happening around you? B. Scott Swann is CEO of ROC ( https://roc.ai/ ), formerly known as Rank One Computing, a company developing AI-powered biometric identity, video analytics and Vision AI technologies. Scott brings a particul...

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53:37

Can We Cure PBC? Inside the Race to Stop an...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/23

Send us Fan Mail Imagine being exhausted all the time, dealing with an itch that can become unbearable, and worrying about progressive liver damage - yet having everyone around you tell you that you look perfectly healthy. That's the reality for many people living with Primary Biliary Cholangitis, or PBC. But here's the fascinating question: if PBC is fundamentally an autoimmune disease, can we eventually do more than treat the consequences - can we actually teach the immune system to stop at...

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33:17

AI Is Leaving the Screen - Enter the Age of Embodied...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/23

Send us Fan Mail Imagine walking into a major hotel or casino and discovering that the building already has a workforce you barely notice. Robots are cleaning floors, navigating around people, responding to changing conditions and reporting back on what they've accomplished. Now imagine those robots aren't operating independently - they're being coordinated by an AI system that can manage an entire fleet of machines. That is the idea behind MBody AI ( https://mbody.ai/ ) - and it raises a ...

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31:20

The Next Generation Of Breast Cancer Research -...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/22

Send us Fan Mail We've made extraordinary progress against breast cancer - better screening, targeted therapies, immunotherapy, antibody-drug conjugates and increasingly sophisticated molecular profiling. But one uncomfortable question remains: Why haven't all women benefited equally from that progress? Today we're going inside that question with two physician-scientists from City of Hope ( https://www.cityofhope.org/ ) whose careers sit at the intersection of breast cancer biology, clinic...

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44:16

Can AI Turn Medical Images Into Biomarkers? | Dr....

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/18

Send us Fan Mail We normally think of a CT scan as a picture that a doctor looks at. But what if that picture is actually an enormous dataset containing thousands of quantitative measurements about what's happening inside your body? And what if AI could extract information from those images that humans simply can't measure by looking at them? Today we're going to explore how that could change not only how we diagnose disease, but how we develop new drugs. Dr. Susan Wood, Ph.D. ( https://vida...

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49:49

Can Nature's Complexity Make Better Medicines? The...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/18

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the biggest assumptions in modern drug development is wrong? For decades, we've tried to find the one molecule responsible for a medicine's effects, purify it, manufacture it and throw away everything else. But what if, in some cases, the complexity is actually the medicine? Today we're exploring a very different approach to drug development - one that takes complex botanical mixtures and tries to turn them into reproducible, FDA-approved pharmaceuticals. J...

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42:59

Can We REPROGRAM The Immune System To Fight Cancer? |...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/18

Send us Fan Mail What if the problem isn't that your immune system can't see the cancer - but that the cancer has effectively reprogrammed the immune cells around it? Faron Pharmaceuticals is pursuing a very different strategy: using an antibody called bexmarilimab to target Clever-1 on macrophages and potentially change an immunosuppressive tumor environment into one that can support an anti-cancer immune response. Today we're going inside that strategy - and asking what the clinical evide...

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53:08

AI Is Learning How To Understand Surgery | Dr. Daniel...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/17

Send us Fan Mail For centuries, surgeons have learned by watching other surgeons. But what happens when we can record virtually every movement, every instrument, every decision - and then have AI analyze millions of operations? Could we create a new “language of surgery”? Could AI become a surgical copilot? And as brain-computer interfaces begin generating entirely new forms of neurological data, who ultimately owns the data generated by the human brain? Dr. Daniel Donoho, MD is a pediatric...

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37:38

Can We Detect Lyme Disease Earlier? | Dr. Joseph...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/17

Send us Fan Mail What if you could have an infection, already be experiencing symptoms, and yet the diagnostic test could still tell you that you're negative? That's one of the central challenges of Lyme disease - and today we're going inside the biology and technology behind the race to detect it earlier. Dr. Joseph J. Burrascano Jr., M.D., is a physician and longtime researcher who has spent more than three decades focused on Lyme disease and other tick-borne infections. A graduate of NYU...

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63:58

Could Electromagnetic Energy Change Brain Aging? |...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/16

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the most unconventional ideas in Alzheimer's research began with scientists asking a completely different question: Can the radio-frequency radiation from cell phones damage the brain? Instead of finding that it harmed cognition, researchers stumbled upon something they didn't expect - mice actually appeared to perform better on cognitive tests. That surprising observation eventually led to a wearable device designed to deliver radio-frequency energy directly t...

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31:06

Can We Engineer Better Sleep? | Thermoregulation,...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/16

Send us Fan Mail We spend roughly a third of our lives in bed. But what if the sheets, pajamas and bedding surrounding your body aren't just making you comfortable - what if they're actually affecting your physiology and your sleep? Today we're going to explore a surprisingly important question: can what we wear - and what we sleep on - actually change the quality of our sleep? Lara Smith is Founder and CEO of LUSOMÉ ( https://lusome.com/ ), an award-winning technical luxury brand that deve...

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57:01

How To Make Your Voice Heard In Government | Jennice...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/12

Send us Fan Mail What if you could take 25 years of experience navigating the halls of Congress - and turn that knowledge into a toolkit that anyone could use? My guest today spent decades on the inside of government, including serving as Chief of Staff to Congressman Luis Gutiérrez. But after Hurricane Maria, she came to a very different realization: maybe ordinary citizens don't need to have access to power - they need to understand how to use the power they already have. So can civic po...

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50:03

Reinventing Drug Manufacturing: Can Yeast Fix...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/12

Send us Fan Mail What if one of the answers to America's drug-shortage problem isn't another pharmaceutical factory - but a genetically engineered yeast cell? For centuries, we've gone to nature to get many of our most valuable medicines - growing poppies, harvesting plants, extracting molecules and building global supply chains around them. But what if we could take the biological instructions that make those molecules and put them into a microorganism? That's the idea behind Antheia - an...

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39:05

Can We Make CAR-T Cells Inside The Body? | Dr. Luke...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/11

Send us Fan Mail CAR-T therapy can be extraordinarily powerful against cancer - but there's a catch. We currently have to take a patient's T cells out of their body, genetically engineer them in a laboratory, manufacture billions of cells, and then put them back. But what if we could skip the factory entirely - and genetically program the T cells inside the patient's body? Dr. Luke Russell, Ph.D. is President of Vyriad ( https://vyriad.com/ ), a biotechnology company developing viral therapi...

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36:03

Why End-of-Life Care Is So Difficult - And How to...

Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show ·

2026/09/11

Send us Fan Mail We like to think that modern healthcare gives patients more control than ever before. But what if having more choices doesn't actually mean having more control? And what if, at the end of life, the healthcare system can quietly steer you toward choices you never intended to make? Today we're going to tackle a subject that most of us would rather not think about — until we're suddenly forced to. We all like to believe that when the end of life comes, we will be able to make ...

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