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Translation is the process of turning basic scientific research into therapies that cure disease, new sources of energy that heal the planet, and other things that move the world forward. The Translation Podcast takes a deep dive into scientific advancements with a massive potential to improve society. We talk directly with the people advancing the science with their own hands and minds, and focus on how we can translate the science from the bench to the benefit of all. Initially centered on ...
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Novel Translational Therapeutics With Linda Goodman
50:05
50:05
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Episode Summary: Millions of people die every year from chronic diseases. Traditional drug discovery has failed in identifying solutions to many of these persistent health challenges. Functional genomics is offering a way forward by identifying gene networks and enabling the development of drugs with very specific targets. But, rather than just rel…
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Building the DNA Oracle with Eeshit Vaishnav
55:29
55:29
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55:29
Episode Summary The expression of genes in our genome to produce proteins and non-coding RNAs, the building blocks of life, is critical to enable life and human biology. So, the ability to predict how much of a gene is expressed based on that gene’s regulatory DNA, or promoter sequence, would help us both understand gene expression, regulation, and…
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Demystifying Tech Transfer with Seth Bannon and Ashton Trotman-Grant
42:06
42:06
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42:06
Episode Summary: In this very special episode of Translation, Seth is joined by Ash Trotman-Grant to demystify spinning out from academia. Much of this knowledge has so far only been available to select groups of academics and PhD founders are at a disadvantage – some potentially breakthrough technologies never saw the light of day and didn’t get a…
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Cell Therapies of the Future with Dan Goodman
1:38:24
1:38:24
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1:38:24
Episode Summary Chimeric antigen receptors, or CARs, repurpose the build-in targeting and homing signals of our immune system to direct T cells to find and eliminate cancers. Although CAR-T cells have transformed the care of liquid tumors in the circulating blood, like B cell leukemia and lymphoma, CAR-T therapy has shown limited efficacy against s…
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Episode Summary: DNA is an ideal molecule for storing information in our genomes because it’s stable, programmable, and well understood. The same qualities make DNA a great building block or construction material for nanoscale biomolecular structures that have nothing to do with our genome, like molecular scaffolds created by folding DNA into 2D an…
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Illuminating Biological Context with Josie Kishi
29:07
29:07
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29:07
Episode Summary: Technologies like next-generation sequencing allow us to understand which RNA transcripts and proteins are expressed in biological tissues. However, it’s often equally important to understand how cells or molecules are positioned relative to one another! Whether it be a cell changing its shape, an organelle ramping up a metabolic p…
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Peering Inside the Immune Response for Novel Antibodies with Nima Emami
54:01
54:01
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Episode Summary: Antibodies are one of the greatest tools we have in our therapeutic arsenal and have transformed the way we treat cancer and autoimmunity. But we still largely develop these drugs using guess and check methods, massively slowing down the process. However, our own B cells are constantly making new antibodies against the pathogens an…
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Powering the Biocomputing Revolution with LatchBio
59:56
59:56
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Episode Summary Imagine if every graphics design company built its own version of Photoshop in-house. That’s exactly what’s happening today in biology research. Ten-fold increases in data every two years are forcing every biology team to build out their own, in-house bioinformatics stack to store, clean, pipe, and manage the massive volumes of data…
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Irresistible Cancer Therapies with Nick Goldner
1:03:43
1:03:43
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1:03:43
Episode Summary: Evolution is happening even at the cellular scale. Whether it's a virus, a bacterial pathogen, or a cancer cell, disease-causing agents are responding to the therapies we throw at them, updating their genes and molecular pathways to resist death. As a trained microbiologist, Nick Goldner and his co-founder Chris Bulow spent their y…
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Screening for Enhanced RNA Vaccines with Kathrin Leppek, Gun Woo Byeon, and Hannah Wayment-Steele
49:07
49:07
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49:07
Episode Summary: When COVID-19 hit and society decided to use mRNA vaccines for the first time, many questions remained about whether RNA itself was ready for the challenge. But three scientists at Stanford University who had barely worked with each other before the pandemic realized that RNA’s limitations were merely a design challenge and not an …
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Illuminating Immunity to COVID-19 with Susanna Elledge
36:31
36:31
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Episode Summary: COVID-19 tests have become synonymous with jamming a swab up our nose to find out whether we have an active infection. But as we progress through this pandemic, a test that tells us whether people have antibodies against the virus will be massively important to creating public health initiatives and deciding who to vaccinate next. …
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Episode Summary: Brain machine interfaces untangle the complex web of neurons firing in our brains and relay the underlying meaning to a computer. These devices are being adapted to help patients regain motor control, monitor our mental well being, and may one day even make us more empathetic. State of the art methods to do this have massive trade-…
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Episode Summary: Enzymes that break down other proteins, or proteases, could be used as a powerful therapeutic if they could specifically chew-up disease causing entities. However many proteases are non-specific, breaking any protein in their path, while the specific ones target proteins that would provide no therapeutic benefit. Travis and his col…
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What boosts immune boosters? with Kevin Litchfield
49:06
49:06
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Episode Summary: Novel drugs that boost the immune system to fight cancer have become pharma darlings in the few short years since their approval. These drugs, known as immunotherapies, have so far focused on improving T cell responses and can be used to cure a multitude of different cancer types. Yet more often than not, immunotherapies have no ef…
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Episode Summary: In a single decade, CRISPR has made a dramatic impact on literally every facet of biotechnology. This game-changing system is traditionally programmed to make cuts at very specific parts of the genome, altering the code to cure disease. But a new class of CRISPRs discovered by Leo’s colleagues don’t simply cut DNA -- they integrate…
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What Regulates the Regulatory T cells? with Jessica Cortez
41:05
41:05
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41:05
Whether it's Multiple Sclerosis, Type 1 Diabetes, Lupus, or Crohn's Disease, autoimmunity is a rapidly growing problem that traditional pharmaceuticals have failed to completely cure. While these diseases have very different symptoms, they all have the same root cause -- the body’s immune system is attacking its own healthy organs. Lurking within o…
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Why CAR T Therapies are Such a Headache with Kevin Parker
38:17
38:17
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38:17
Engineered T cells that hunt and kill blood cancers have recently obtained three landmark FDA approvals, forever changing the way we treat this disease. Even with its massive clinical success, these cells come with life-threatening neurotoxicities. But is neurotoxicity a set feature of using T cell therapies or is our engineering accidentally targe…
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Brewing a Life-Saving Drug in Yeast with Prashanth Srinivasan
53:26
53:26
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Small molecules are a pillar of human health, making up a majority of the drugs we have in our healthcare arsenal. Many of these drugs are obtained by utilizing synthetic chemistry to modify the composition of some small molecule found in nature. Derivatives of tropane alkaloids, for example, alleviate neuromuscular disorders and are derived from a…
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A New Era of Antibiotic Discovery with James Martin
36:45
36:45
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Bacteria are rapidly evolving ways to resist antibiotics, causing minor infections to become life-threatening events. Compounding the problem, new antibiotics have been incredibly challenging to develop and pharma is economically disincentivized to invest in finding them. James Martin and his colleagues Joseph Sheehan and Benjamin Bratton took on t…
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Engineering the Immune System to Kill Senescent Cells with Corina Amor Vegas
25:51
25:51
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Hundreds of iterations of immune cells that are engineered to kill cancer have already been designed. Corina reached outside of this box to use the same synthetic biology principles to engineer T cells to attack senescent cells, a cell type that contributes to diseases of aging. Corina walks us through how her engineered T cells know the difference…
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Designing A Better COVID19 Vaccine with Nikolai Eroshenko
38:49
38:49
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Could all the leading COVID19 vaccines have a fatal flaw in their design? A dizzying number of vaccines are being developed to protect society from the dangers of COVID19, each with its own benefits and pitfalls. At HelixNano, Nikolai Eroshenko and his team are designing a special type of vaccine with increased attention to ensuring that this prote…
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Evolving AAVs for Gene Therapy with Pierce Ogden
51:14
51:14
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Powered by synthetic biology, Pierce Ogden makes ALL possible mutations to an adeno-associated virus (AAV) outer shell and rapidly screens them to dissect their attributes. Pierce discusses the technological advances that make this breakthrough screen possible and the novel properties that were discovered. AAVs are rapidly becoming the prefered way…
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Evolving Enzymes to Create Unnatural Compounds with Tina Boville
44:24
44:24
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Commodity molecules are vital ingredients for everything important to our modern world including food, energy, and medicine. However, creating these molecules still largely relies on old processes that suffer from low yield, laborious methods, and unsustainable inputs and byproducts. Tina envisions a world where all molecules are created quickly, e…
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Low-N Protein Engineering with Surge Biswas
29:34
29:34
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Protein engineering has been dominated by two opposing paradigms; directed evolution, a massive screening technique, and rational design, a completely computational approach. Surge has fused these two paradigms by developing a machine learning technique that discovers an optimal protein design by training on a low number of engineered proteins. Her…
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