Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show

Ira Pastor

Interviews and Discussions With Fascinating People Who are Creating A Better Tomorrow For All Of Us - Host - Ira S. Pastor

  1. 6h ago

    FROM CHEMICAL EXPOSURE TO DISEASE: The Science of the Human Exposome | Dr. Heather Whitehead, Dr. Kristin Isaacs And Dr. John Wambaugh - Chemical Insights, UL Research Institutes

    Send us Fan Mail For decades we've heard that our DNA determines our health, but scientists are increasingly realizing that's only part of the story. Every day, from before we're born until the day we die, we're exposed to thousands of chemicals, pollutants, particles, microbes, foods, medications, consumer products, building materials, and environmental factors that continuously interact with our biology. Scientists now refer to this lifetime collection of exposures as the human exposome, and many believe it may ultimately become as important as the Human Genome Project in understanding why we develop cancer, Alzheimer's disease, autoimmune disorders, infertility, asthma, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and countless other chronic illnesses. But measuring something as vast as every exposure throughout a lifetime sounds almost impossible. Today we're joined by three scientists from UL Research Institutes ( https://ul.org/ ) helping make that possible. Dr. Heather Whitehead, Ph.D. ( https://chemicalinsights.ul.org/our-people/heather-whitehead-phd/ ) is an analytical chemist developing cutting-edge methods to detect both known and previously unknown environmental contaminants, including PFAS and emerging chemicals. Dr. Kristin Isaacs, Ph.D. ( https://chemicalinsights.ul.org/our-people/kristin-isaacs-phd/ ) is one of the world's leading computational exposure scientists, building mathematical models that predict how people encounter complex mixtures of chemicals across their daily lives. Dr. John Wambaugh, Ph.D. ( https://chemicalinsights.ul.org/our-people/john-wambaugh-phd/ ) is a physicist and computational toxicologist whose work helps determine what actually happens once those chemicals enter the human body, transforming massive datasets into meaningful predictions about health. Together, we'll explore one of the biggest frontiers in environmental health - how understanding the exposome could fundamentally change medicine, public health, and even how each of us lives our daily lives. UL Research Institutes is a leading independent safety science organization with global reach, pursuing and applying science-driven knowledge to meet their mission of working for a safer world. #HumanExposome #Exposome #EnvironmentalHealth #ExposureScience #PFAS #Toxicology #Chemistry #PublicHealth #PrecisionMedicine #PreventiveMedicine #HumanHealth #EnvironmentalScience #ComputationalToxicology #Pharmacokinetics #AI #Science #Biotechnology #FutureOfMedicine #Healthcare #DiseasePrevention Support the show

  2. 11h ago

    Inside the Race to Transform Military Mental Health | Iris Shtein - CEO, Mentaily

    Send us Fan Mail There aren't enough mental-health professionals to assess everyone who needs help - and the people who need help most may sometimes be the least willing to ask for it. Now an Israeli AI platform called LIV is trying to change both sides of that equation: using an empathetic AI conversation to identify PTSD and other mental-health risks, triage patients, and give clinicians a structured picture before they ever enter the room. Iris Shtein is Co-Founder and CEO of Mentaily ( https://mentaily.com/ ), an Israeli health-tech company developing AI-powered tools for mental-health assessment and clinical decision support. Iris comes to this problem from a remarkably multidisciplinary background. She is a registered nurse who served in the Israel Defense Forces, including as Deputy Head of Medicine for the Southern Command, before moving into healthcare innovation and digital health at Sheba Medical Center. At Sheba's ARC Innovation Center, she led telemedicine and remote-care initiatives and later strategic partnerships. It was there that Iris became involved in the development of LIV, an AI-powered platform designed to conduct conversational psychiatric intake and triage, generate structured clinical summaries, help assess diagnosis and severity, and identify situations that may require more urgent clinical attention. LIV was developed with Sheba and technology partners including Microsoft, and Sheba says the platform has subsequently received approval from Israel's Ministry of Health as an AI-based psychiatric triage system. Today, Mentaily is taking LIV beyond the Israeli healthcare system, including work involving military and security populations and a collaboration with Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and the Henry M. Jackson Foundation focused on PTSD assessment. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MentalHealth #PTSD #PostTraumaticStressDisorder #MilitaryMentalHealth #Veterans #VeteranHealth #MentalHealthAwareness #Psychiatry #DigitalHealth #HealthTech #MedTech #HealthcareAI #GenerativeAI #AIHealthcare #MentalHealthTech #Trauma #PTSDTreatment #MilitaryMedicine #VeteransHealth #PsychologicalHealth #HealthcareInnovation #FutureOfHealthcare #IsraeliInnovation #WalterReed #ShebaMedicalCenter #Mentaily #LIV Support the show

  3. 1d ago

    THE NUCLEAR RENAISSANCE: Where Will America Get the Uranium? | Corey Dias - CEO, Anfield Energy

    Send us Fan Mail The United States wants more nuclear power. AI companies want enormous amounts of electricity. And policymakers want greater energy independence. But there's a surprisingly basic question underneath all three ambitions: where are we going to get the uranium? Corey Dias is Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Director of Anfield Energy ( https://anfieldenergy.com/ ), a company focused on developing uranium and vanadium resources in the United States. At the center of Anfield's strategy is the Shootaring Canyon Mill in Utah, which the company describes as one of only three licensed, permitted and constructed conventional uranium mills in the United States. Anfield is pursuing a hub-and-spoke model in which uranium and vanadium from multiple nearby mining projects can be processed through this centralized facility. Corey brings an interesting perspective to the business. Before co-founding and leading Anfield, he spent roughly two decades in capital markets, including institutional equity research at CIBC, equity research and institutional sales roles in Toronto, and a stint as a Vice President at Fortress Investment Group, where he was involved with a $400 million investment portfolio. He also worked in management consulting in Stockholm. Today, we're going to talk about the nuclear fuel supply chain, why uranium milling is such an important piece of that puzzle, how a hub-and-spoke model could accelerate domestic production, and what it will take to responsibly bring legacy uranium infrastructure back into operation. #NuclearEnergy #NuclearPower #Uranium #NuclearRenaissance #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #DataCenters #Energy #EnergySecurity #CleanEnergy #NuclearFuel #UraniumMining #NuclearIndustry #EnergyTransition #GridEnergy #Vanadium #EnergyStorage #AdvancedReactors #SMR #SmallModularReactors #ClimateTechnology #CleanTechnology #EnergyInnovation #AnfieldEnergy #CoreyDias #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities Support the show

  4. 1d ago

    Can We Reinvent Meat? The Science That Could Change What We Eat | Bruce Friedrich - Founder and President, Good Food Institute

    Send us Fan Mail The world produces and consumes roughly 374 million metric tons of meat every year. But what if we could produce the same thing people love about meat - without raising the animal? Today we're asking whether biotechnology could fundamentally reinvent one of humanity's oldest industries. Bruce Friedrich ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Friedrich ) is Founder and President of the Good Food Institute ( https://gfi.org/ ), a global nonprofit network of science think tanks working to accelerate innovation in plant-based and cultivated meat. GFI now has more than 240 full-time team members around the world, with scientists making up the plurality of its team. Bruce's journey to food innovation is anything but conventional. He grew up in Oklahoma surrounded by cattle ranches and oil wells, spent six years running a homeless shelter and soup kitchen in Washington, D.C., taught in inner-city Baltimore through Teach For America - where he was named his school's Teacher of the Year - and later earned a law degree from Georgetown, graduating magna cum laude. Bruce went on to spend more than a decade working in animal welfare and public policy before founding the Good Food Institute in 2016. His basic insight was that trying to persuade billions of people simply to stop eating meat was unlikely to work. What if, instead, science could produce the meat people love - same taste, texture and functionality - without requiring animals? That idea is the subject of Bruce's fascinating new book, Meat: How the Next Agricultural Revolution Will Transform Humanity’s Favorite Food - and Our Future ( https://meatbook.org/ ). The book argues that alternative proteins could become much more than an environmental or animal-welfare story. Bruce makes the case that they could have implications for global hunger, climate change, deforestation, antimicrobial resistance, pandemic prevention, food security, national security, economic competitiveness, and even the future of agriculture itself. And importantly, Bruce isn't arguing that everyone needs to become vegetarian or vegan. As he puts it, the book is about meat “at the macro level” - how meat is made and how it can be made better. Bruce is also a TED Fellow and Y Combinator alum, and his TED talk has been viewed more than 2.5 million times and translated into 30 languages. His writing has appeared in publications including The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, Nature, and Wired, and he has appeared on programs and podcasts including PBS NewsHour, TED Radio Hour, The Ezra Klein Show, and Making Sense. #Meat #FutureOfFood #AlternativeProtein #CultivatedMeat #PlantBasedMeat #FoodTechnology #FoodScience #Biotechnology #SyntheticBiology #Agriculture #FoodSecurity #ClimateChange #Sustainability #Protein #AnimalAgriculture #CultivatedMeat #FoodInnovation #GoodFoodInstitute #BruceFriedrich #Science #Technology #Innovation #FutureOfFood #ClimateTech #GlobalFoodSystem Support the show

  5. 3d ago

    CMV - The Virus Lurking Inside Us That Can Threaten Transplant Patients | Dr. Neil Inhaber, MD - Head, Marketed Products and Neuroscience, Global Medical Affairs, Takeda

    Send us Fan Mail Every year, hundreds of thousands of people around the world receive life-saving organ transplants - new hearts, kidneys, lungs, and livers that offer patients a second chance at life. But transplantation is only the beginning of the journey. Because preventing organ rejection requires suppressing the immune system, transplant recipients become vulnerable to infections that most healthy people never even notice. One of the most important - and least understood - is cytomegalovirus, or CMV. More than half of adults worldwide carry this virus, often for life, without ever knowing it. Yet in patients who have undergone organ transplantation, CMV can reactivate and become one of the leading infectious complications, threatening not only a patient's health, but also the long-term success of the transplanted organ itself. Fortunately, advances in virology, immunology, and antiviral drug development are opening new possibilities for managing this complex disease. My guest today is Dr. Neil Inhaber, MD - Head, Marketed Products and Neuroscience, Global Medical Affairs at Takeda ( https://www.takeda.com/ ). Dr. Inhaber is a physician specializing in pulmonary and critical care medicine whose career uniquely bridges frontline patient care with the development of innovative therapies. Over the past three decades, he has held senior medical leadership positions at Takeda, Shire, Boston Scientific, Baxter, Novartis, and other leading healthcare organizations, guiding clinical development, global medical strategy, and life-cycle management across rare diseases, respiratory medicine, immunology, oncology, and transplantation. Today, he helps shape Takeda's global medical strategy for some of medicine's most challenging diseases, working closely with clinicians, researchers, and regulatory agencies around the world. Today we'll discuss why cytomegalovirus remains one of the greatest infectious threats facing organ transplant recipients, what we've learned from the latest research presented at the American Transplant Congress, how new antiviral therapies are changing the treatment landscape for patients with resistant or refractory CMV, and where the future of transplant medicine and infectious disease management is headed next. Important Episode Link -  LIVTENCITY® (maribavir) for Healthcare Professionals https://www.livtencity.com/ #CMV #Cytomegalovirus #OrganTransplant #TransplantMedicine #Transplantation #Immunology #Virology #InfectiousDisease #Antiviral #DrugResistance #RareDisease #Biotechnology #Biotech #Pharmaceuticals #DrugDevelopment #PrecisionMedicine #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareInnovation #LifeSciences #MedicalResearch #AmericanTransplantCongress #ATC2026 #Maribavir #Takeda #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities Support the show

  6. 4d ago

    The New Era Of SMA - From Gene Therapy to Living Without Limits | Dr. Tracey Dawson , Ph.D. - Senior Vice President and U.S. Therapeutic Area Head of Neuroscience, Novartis

    Send us Fan Mail Spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) has undergone one of the most remarkable transformations in modern medicine. A disease that once carried devastating consequences, particularly in its most severe forms, can now be treated with therapies designed to dramatically alter its course - especially when treatment begins early. But medical progress creates a fascinating new question. What happens when you don't just change the disease - you change what's possible for the person living with it? Because today's SMA community includes children treated before symptoms emerge, young adults who have grown up in this new treatment era, and adults who have lived with SMA for decades and carry the consequences of disease that occurred before these therapies existed. And that's where our conversation today gets particularly interesting. Because the next challenge may not simply be developing better medicines. It may be helping people take full advantage of the lives those medicines make possible. My guest is Dr. Tracey Dawson, Ph.D., Senior Vice President and U.S. Therapeutic Area Head of Neuroscience at Novartis ( https://www.novartis.com/ ).  Dr. Dawson brings more than 25 years of experience across neuroscience, rare diseases, biotechnology and pharmaceutical leadership - and today we're going to talk about the changing face of SMA, the evolution of the SMAshing My Limits initiative ( https://www.smashingmylimits.com/ ), and why Novartis is now turning its attention to something that might seem very different from drug development: helping people with SMA actually get out into the world. #SMA #SpinalMuscularAtrophy #SMAAwareness #SMAshingMyLimits #GeneTherapy #GeneTherapyRevolution #Neuroscience #RareDisease #RareDiseases #NeuromuscularDisease #Biotechnology #Biotech #Pharma #LifeSciences #PatientAdvocacy #AccessibleTravel #DisabilityInclusion #MedicalInnovation #HealthcareInnovation #Novartis #SMAResearch #FutureOfMedicine #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities Support the show

  7. Aug 28

    Can a Virus Turn Cancer Against Itself? The Next Era of Cancer Immunotherapy | Jared Kelly - Chief Executive Officer, Oncolytics Biotech

    Send us Fan Mail What if one of the biggest problems in cancer isn't that we don't have enough drugs to kill cancer cells - it's that the immune system sometimes can't see the cancer in the first place? There's a fascinating new strategy trying to change that: using a virus to make tumors more visible to the immune system. Today we're going to explore a fascinating and potentially transformative area of cancer medicine: oncolytic immunotherapy - using viruses or other immune-stimulating mechanisms to turn tumors from immunologically "cold" environments into tumors that the immune system can actually recognize and attack. Jared Kelly is the Chief Executive Officer and a Director of Oncolytics Biotech ( https://oncolyticsbiotech.com/ ), a company developing pelareorep, an investigational, intravenously delivered double-stranded RNA immunotherapy designed to activate the immune system and remodel the tumor microenvironment. Unlike many targeted cancer therapies that depend upon finding a particular mutation or surface antigen, pelareorep is designed to exploit a different vulnerability - using double-stranded RNA to trigger an inflammatory response, generate and activate tumor-reactive immune cells, and help those cells penetrate the tumor. The company's goal is ultimately to make the tumor more receptive to multiple other therapies. And Jared brings a rather unusual perspective to this story.  He's not a traditional biotech CEO who came up exclusively through drug discovery. He's an attorney and corporate strategist who spent years advising public companies and biotech companies on capital markets, M&A and corporate transactions before moving into biotech leadership. Previously at Ambrx, Jared served as Senior Vice President, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary and played a central role in the company's transformation, financing, licensing activities and eventual $2 billion acquisition by Johnson & Johnson. He subsequently became CEO of Oncolytics in June 2025. Today we're going to talk about the science of oncolytic immunotherapy, why the field may finally be reaching an inflection point, how pelareorep works, why the tumor microenvironment is so important, and perhaps most importantly - whether oncolytic immunotherapy could become the next major platform technology in oncology, in the same way that antibody-drug conjugates have rapidly moved from niche technology to mainstream cancer treatment. #Cancer #CancerResearch #CancerTreatment #CancerImmunotherapy #Immunotherapy #Oncology #OncolyticVirus #OncolyticViruses #Pelareorep #OncolyticsBiotech #Biotech #Biotechnology #DrugDevelopment #Pharma #PrecisionMedicine #TumorMicroenvironment #ImmunoOncology #KRAS #KRASCancer #ClinicalTrials #CancerScience #MedicalResearch #HealthcareInnovation #Science #Innovation #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities #PPP Support the show

  8. Aug 28

    From Old Drug to New Medicine: The Science of Repurposing Ibudilast | Dr. David Crean, Ph.D. - Chief Business Officer, MediciNova

    Send us Fan Mail In biotech, discovering a drug is only half the battle. You have to understand the science, raise the capital, design the right clinical trials and convince the world that your hypothesis is worth pursuing. Today I'm joined by someone who has spent more than three decades at the intersection of science, medicine, business, and capital markets. Dr. David Crean, Ph.D. is the Chief Business Officer of MediciNova ( https://medicinova.com/ ), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing small-molecule therapies for neurodegenerative, inflammatory, fibrotic and other difficult-to-treat diseases.  At MediciNova, Dr. Crean leads corporate development, partnering, investor relations and capital-markets strategy, and he has played a central role in communicating the company's scientific and strategic vision to investors and the broader life-sciences community. And Dr. Crean brings a pretty unusual perspective to that job.  He's not simply a business executive who entered biotech from the financial world. He holds a Ph.D. in Biophysics, began his career doing biomedical research, spent years involved in drug development and portfolio management, and then moved into corporate development and strategic transactions. At Allergan, Dr. Crean spent more than a decade working across neurology, medical aesthetics, dermatology, ophthalmology and other therapeutic areas, ultimately negotiating and closing more than 30 strategic transactions involving acquisitions, licensing, partnerships and equity investments. Since then, Dr. Crean has advised more than 250 life-science and healthcare companies and been involved in more than 50 transactions representing more than a billion dollars in aggregate value. But what is particularly fascinating about Dr. Crean's career is that he's repeatedly occupied the space between science and capital - helping scientists and entrepreneurs translate great science into something that can actually be financed, developed, partnered, commercialized and delivered to patients. And that brings us to MediciNova. The company's lead program is MN-166, or ibudilast, an orally available small molecule with anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties that is being developed across several neurological diseases, including ALS, progressive multiple sclerosis and degenerative cervical myelopathy, with additional investigations in areas including glioblastoma, Long COVID and chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy. The ALS program is especially interesting because MediciNova has now completed enrollment in its Phase 2b/3 COMBAT-ALS study, while a separate NIH-supported expanded-access study, SEANOBI-ALS, reached its target enrollment of 200 patients this summer. And Dr. Crean has another fascinating project underway: his forthcoming book, Dual Fluency: How Life Sciences Leaders Master the Language of Science and Capital ( https://dual-fluency.com/ ), which explores the idea that leaders in biotech need to be fluent in both the language of scientific discovery and the language of investors, partners and business. So today we're going to talk about ALS and the science behind MediciNova - but also about something much bigger: What does it actually take to turn scientific potential into a successful medicine and a successful company? #ALS #AmyotrophicLateralSclerosis #Ibudilast #MediciNova #NeurodegenerativeDisease #Neuroscience #Neuroinflammation #Microglia #DrugRepurposing #Biotechnology #Biotech #Pharmaceuticals #DrugDevelopment #ClinicalTrials #Neurology #MotorNeurons #BrainHealth #MedicalResearch #Science #Innovation #LifeSciences #Healthcare #Pharma #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities Support the show

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Interviews and Discussions With Fascinating People Who are Creating A Better Tomorrow For All Of Us - Host - Ira S. Pastor

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