PODCAST · science
Mendelspod Podcast
by Theral Timpson
Offering a front row seat to the Century of Biology, veteran podcast host Theral Timpson interviews the who's who in genomics and genomic medicine. www.mendelspod.com
Episodes
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How Roswell Park Is Rethinking Molecular Testing for Blood Cancers with Sean Glenn
Sometimes the best evidence that a new medical technology is working is simply that doctors start depending on it. For years, the promise of molecular medicine has been that better genomic information would lead to better patient care. At Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, Vice Chair of...
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Building a Single Cell Atlas of the Poplar Tree with Robin Buell and Anita Giabardo
Plant biology too is benefiting from single cell resolution. Unlike animals, plants cannot move away from environmental stress. They have evolved tremendous biological complexity to stay rooted in one place. Their genomes are complex too, with repeated genome duplications producing families of...
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Three Illumina 5-Base Grant Contest Winners Share Cancer Research Insights from Combining Epigenetics and Genetics
What new insights can we learn about cancer when researchers are able to look at the genome and the methylome together? Recently, Illumina launched its 5-base for Cancer Research Grant Contest to explore that question. Today, the three winners join us on Mendelspod with three very different...
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Ten Years Ago Mike Joyner Was Skeptical of Precision Medicine. What Does He Say Today?
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com A recent New York Times article highlighted a remarkable study showing that exercise can help keep colon cancer in remission. After eight years, 90 percent of patients in a structured exercise program were still…
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Deeper into the Genome: Google DeepMind’s Ziga Avsec on the New AlphaGenome Atlas
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Is 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...
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Mass Spec Comes to the Routine Core Lab: Don Mason of Roche on a New Era in Clinical Testing
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…
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Jennifer Dionne Wants to Read the Whole Proteome Using Nanophotonics, i.e. Raman Spectroscopy
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Jennifer 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...
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Katie Maloney, Partner at DeciBio Consulting, Sees an Inflection Point for Digital and Computational Pathology
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Digital 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...
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It’s One of the Greatest Success Stories of Molecular Medicine. Genomics Historian Kevin Davies on His Latest Book about Casgevy and Sickle Cell Disease
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com It 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…
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Elias Sayour on the Cancer Vaccine Breakthrough
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com After 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...
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What Single Cell Sequencing Revealed About Pulmonary Fibrosis with Nick Banovich, TGen
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…
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The Quest to Measure Protein Function with Polly Fordyce, Stanford
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...
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Doubling Down on Long Reads: New CEO of PacBio, Mark Van Oene
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…
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Serge Saxonov on What’s Next for 10x Genomics
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com 10x 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...
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“You Cannot Discover What You Cannot Make”: Lee Cronin on Programming Chemistry
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com Those 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...
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All of Us Comes of Age. And So Does Its Funding: Josh Denny on the Next Phase of Precision Medicine
There are very few genomics projects with the level of ambition of 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 sequencing, proteomics,...
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Season Opener: Is Biology Having Its Newtonian Moment? with Rob Phillips, Caltech
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...
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From the Archives: Erdinc Sezgin and the Physics of Living Cells
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…
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From the Archives: How Cellanome Is Changing the Way We Study Cell Function with Matthew Spitzer and Pier Federico Gherardini
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...
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Agilent and Oxford Nanopore Discuss Bringing Long Reads to the Clinic with a Customer
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...
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Liquid Biopsy for the Tumor Microenvironment: with Vince Miller and Mirna Jarosz
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com We’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…
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Can Liquid Biopsy Transform Chronic Disease? Hamed Amini and Soheil Damangir of Hepta
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com For 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...
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The UAE’s Big Bet on Genomic Medicine with Mohamed Alameri and Albarah El-Khani
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...
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Ryan Flynn of Harvard on Non-Coding RNA
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...
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Gary Schroth on Connecting Cellular Behavior to the Transcriptome
For decades, biology has been driven by the powerful notion that if we could sequence enough genomes, transcriptomes, epigenomes, then we could finally explain the cell. On today’s show, Gary Schroth, the Chief Scientific Officer at Cellanome, argues that something essential was still missing....
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Two-Thirds of High-Risk Breast Cancer Patients May Avoid Chemotherapy According to Veracyte Data Presented at ASCO
Today on the show, we’re discussing a new study just presented at ASCO 2026 that could change how chemotherapy decisions are made for a large group of breast cancer patients. During ASCO we spoke with Phil Febbo, Chief Scientific and Medical Officer at Veracyte, and John Leite, the company’s…
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Building the Diagnostic Layer of Modern Cancer Care with Rita Shaknovich and Karina Kulangara of Agilent
For years, precision oncology has largely been discussed through the lens of breakthrough drugs. But there’s another story running underneath modern cancer care: the quiet rise of companion diagnostics. These tests are increasingly deciding who receives those therapies in the first place. In many...
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Mapping the Multi-Omic Era with Eric Green of Illumina
Dr. Eric Green returns to Mendelspod in a new role: Chief Medical Officer of Illumina. After more than three decades at the National Human Genome Research Institute, where he helped guide genomics from research initiatives to clinical reality, he now joins one of the industry’s most influential...
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Inside Proteomics at Thermo Fisher with Yan Zhang
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com For years, proteomics was described as the missing layer of biology. Why missing? Because measuring proteins at scale turned out to be vastly harder than sequencing DNA. That may finally be changing. In today’s…
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Separating Epigenetic Signals Improves Early Cancer Detection with Rob Osborne, Biomodal
We’ve gotten very good at reading DNA. We’re just beginning to understand how to read its state. On today’s show, Rob Osborne, Senior Vice President of R&D at Biomodal, discusses new evidence that separating two epigenetic marks—5-methylcytosine and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine—can improve early…
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Digital Controls for Cancer Drug Trials? Irina Babina, Concr
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com On today’s show, a fascinating discussion about digital twins for medical research— leading to the 64 million dollar question of how much of the current AI wave in healthcare may eventually prove real. Drawing on her...
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Solexa Co-Inventor Shankar Balasubramanian on Six-Base Sequencing and What's Next in Genomics
An inventor of Solexa sequencing by synthesis has a new idea. On today’s show, Sir Shankar Balasubramanian revisits the accidental origins of Solexa sequencing, born not from a sequencing project at all, but from curiosity-driven experiments watching DNA polymerase at work. What followed helped...
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The Next Frontier in Biology: Physics? Erdinc Sezgin of the Karolinska Institute
There’s a famous line attributed to Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics: “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” It’s still provocative. But it’s unfair to biology. Long before today’s omics era, biologists were uncovering causality everywhere from evolution and natural...
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The Case for a 6-Base Genome with Peter Fromen, CEO of Biomodal
You’ve heard of 5-base genomics. How about 6-base? It turns out that separating 5-methylcytosine (mC) and 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (hmC) is pretty important. Peter Fromen has had a front-row seat to the evolution of sequencing, from the rise of high-throughput genomics at Illumina to long-read...
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The Eligible But Under-Tested: Genomic Medicine in 2026 with Damon Hostin, Illumina
What is the value of someone’s genome over their life? Is a genome today what it was 10 years ago? How does the adoption of genomic testing compare to other areas in medicine, such as imaging or electronic health records? Today we take a pretty comprehensive look at genomic testing in practice…
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Spatial Transcriptomics Is Changing How We Do Biology: Fei Chen, The Broad Institute
Fei Chen of the Broad Institute describes the original problem simply: genomics gave us powerful inventories of gene expression, while microscopy gave us structure—yet the two lived in separate worlds. “You could either have your structure or you could have gene expression, but you couldn’t have...
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Beyond GLP-1: Why Peptides Are Back at the Center of Drug Discovery with Charlie Johannes and Tomi Sawyer
Peptides are having a moment. But beneath the market excitement and the GLP-1 headlines, something more interesting is going on. A field that for years seemed technically promising but perpetually constrained is becoming wide open. To see into that open terrain, we’re joined by Charlie Johannes,...
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From the Archives: Inventor Mark Kokoris Debuts Roche’s New SBX Sequencer
It was the biggest story in sequencing last year: Mark Kokoris, head of SBX sequencing at Roche and inventor of the technology, joins Mendelspod to talk about how Sequencing by Expansion (SBX) works and why it may redefine the limits of genomics. * 0:00 A long journey inspired by PCR * 7:20 What…
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Why Do Some Animals Live Ten Times Longer? Pursuing the Science of Aging with Steve Austad
Why do some animals live ten times longer than others? That question opens today’s interview with Steve Austad, Distinguished Professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and one of the leading thinkers in the biology of aging. It quickly becomes clear why he’s been such an important…
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MRD Testing: From Residual Disease to Real Decisions with Chris Hourigan and Gary Pestano
Molecular residual disease, or MRD, has been part of oncology’s vocabulary for decades. But knowing something is there and being able to measure it precisely are two very different things. In today’s show, we explore how MRD testing moved from a long-standing clinical suspicion to one of the most...
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Early vs Late Recurrence: How Multimodal AI Is Changing Breast Cancer Prognosis with George Sledge, Caris Life Sciences
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com For two decades, tests like Oncotype DX have helped oncologists decide which early-stage breast cancer patients should receive chemotherapy. But those tools were designed mainly to predict early recurrence, leaving...
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The Dark Genome with Author Sudhakaran Prabakaran
We began this podcast back around the time the ENCODE project announced that much of the genome was biochemically active. The big science project was undoing the tidy idea of “junk DNA,” and not without controversy. But activity is not the same as purpose. On today’s show, we move past the…
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Illumina's New Mapped Read Technology Provides Insights into Rare Disease: Stephen Kingsmore, Olivia Kim-McManus and Ali Crawford
“We have been talking now for 15, 20 years about the diagnostic odyssey. That shouldn’t exist anymore. The new odyssey is the therapeutic odyssey.” That’s Stephen Kingsmore, president and CEO of Rady Children’s Hospital (he just announced his retirement), explaining the impact of a new genome...
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CareDx’s Second Act with CEO John Hanna
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com CareDx is a company on the move. For years, they have been a bellwether in molecular diagnostics. Their early bet on gene expression testing in transplant medicine, their bruising fight over Medicare coverage, and...
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Inside GP2: Building a Global Genetic Map of Parkinson’s with Andrew Singleton and Ignacio Mata
Large-scale genomics is back — and this time, it’s global by design. In this episode of Mendelspod, we return to the kind of ambitious, shared genomics project that helped define the field a decade ago. The Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2) has now genotyped more than 100,000 participants...
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A Simple Sponge, a Big Shift in Cell Therapy with Yev Brudno, UNC
What if the hardest part of scaling cell therapy turned out to be a materials problem not a biological one—and the solution looked like a sponge? On today’s show, Theral speaks with Yev Brudno, Associate Professor in the School of Pharmacy and also the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the...
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How Cellanome Is Changing the Way We Study Cell Function with Matthew Spitzer and Pier Federico Gherardini
For today’s show, we return to discussing the exciting new Cellanome platform. Joining Theral are Pier Federico Gherardini, VP of Computational Biology at Cellanome, and Matthew Spitzer, Associate Professor at University of California, San Francisco, whose lab is using Cellanome’s CellCage...
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From Hereditary Risk to Residual Disease: Natera’s Integrated Vision for Precision Oncology with Adam ElNaggar, MD
Half of oncologists in the U.S. are now ordering MRD testing, according to Adam ElNaggar, MD of Natera — but the other half, he says, “are still figuring out how to use it, or that it even exists.” In this episode, we talk with ElNaggar about the rapid rise of ctDNA-based monitoring and how it’s...
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The Rise of Geroscience with Alan Landay and Tom Blackwell, UTMB
Aging may be the last great frontier of precision medicine—not a single disease, but the slow re-patterning of immunity, metabolism, and resilience that determines how well and how long we live. In this wide-ranging and genuinely mind-bending conversation, Alan Landay and Tom Blackwell make a...
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Unlocking the RNA Revolution: How Self-Replicating RNA Could Transform Vaccines and Therapeutics with Andrew Geall, Replicate Bioscience
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mendelspod.com The RNA revolution didn’t end with COVID. It’s only just beginning. Today Theral is joined by Andrew Geall, co-founder and Chief Development Officer of Replicate Bioscience, to explore why self-replicating RNA may...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Mendelspod Podcast have?
Mendelspod Podcast currently has 574 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Mendelspod Podcast about?
Offering a front row seat to the Century of Biology, veteran podcast host Theral Timpson interviews the who's who in genomics and genomic medicine. www.mendelspod.com
How often does Mendelspod Podcast release new episodes?
Mendelspod Podcast releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 574 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to Mendelspod Podcast?
You can listen to Mendelspod Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Mendelspod Podcast?
Mendelspod Podcast is created and hosted by Theral Timpson.
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