Progress, Potential, and Possibilities Podcast / Show

Ira Pastor
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Science
  • Updated Weekly

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

  1. 10h ago

    Can We REVERSE Cancer Drug Resistance? The New Science of Fighting Cancer | Dr. John Yu, MD - Founder and CEO, Kairos Pharma - Professor and Clinical Chief of Neurosurgery, Cedars-Sinai

    Send us Fan Mail Cancer doesn't just sit there while we attack it. It evolves. We give a patient a powerful drug. The tumor shrinks. It looks like we've won. But somewhere inside that tumor may be a small population of cells that figured out how to survive. Those cells can eventually multiply, the cancer returns, and the drug that once worked no longer works. So what if, instead of continually chasing cancer with newer and newer drugs, we could turn off the biological escape routes that allow cancer to become resistant in the first place? Dr. John Yu, MD is the Founder and CEO of Kairos Pharma ( https://kairospharma.com/ ), a clinical-stage oncology company spun out of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center that is developing therapies designed to overcome cancer drug resistance and immune suppression. Dr. Yu is also Professor and Clinical Chief of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai and Director of Surgical Neuro-Oncology ( https://www.cedars-sinai.org/provider/john-yu-2181236.html ). His career sits at a fascinating intersection of neurosurgery, immunology and cancer biology. Dr. Yu earned undergraduate degrees in biology and French from Stanford University, his MD from Harvard Medical School through the Harvard-MIT program, completed his neurosurgery residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, and pursued immunology research at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. Over the course of his career, Dr. Yu has developed eight FDA investigational drugs and holds multiple patents spanning immunotherapy and nanotechnology. At Kairos, that scientific journey has led to a particularly interesting strategy: targeting CD105, also known as endoglin, a protein that appears to become elevated as tumors develop resistance to certain cancer therapies. The company's lead candidate, ENV105, is an antibody designed to inhibit CD105 and potentially re-sensitize resistant tumors to therapies that had stopped working. Kairos is currently evaluating ENV105 in Phase 2 prostate cancer and Phase 1 lung cancer studies. On this episode we talk about one of the great challenges in modern oncology - why cancer becomes resistant, whether that resistance can actually be reversed, and whether we can turn some of our existing cancer drugs back into powerful weapons against the disease. #Cancer #CancerResearch #CancerTreatment #CancerDrugResistance #Oncology #Immunotherapy #PrecisionMedicine #Biotechnology #Biotech #DrugDevelopment #CancerTherapy #ProstateCancer #LungCancer #LungCancerResearch #ProstateCancerResearch #ImmunoOncology #TargetedTherapy #DrugResistance #CancerBiology #CD105 #Endoglin #ENV105 #KairosPharma #JohnYu #MedicalResearch #Pharma #HealthcareInnovation #CancerScience #ClinicalTrials #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities Support the show

  2. 21h ago

    Can AI Help Detect Disease Before Your Pet Gets Sick? | Dr. Ragen McGowan, Ph.D - Director of Global Digital & AI Product Development - Nestlé Purina

    Send us Fan Mail What if your dog or cat could tell you how they're feeling? Today, artificial intelligence may be giving us a new way to listen. By continuously monitoring things like activity, eating, sleep, elimination and other behaviors, AI can begin to establish what's normal for an individual animal - and potentially detect subtle changes that humans would never notice. Dr. Ragen McGowan, Ph.D. is Director of Global Digital & AI Product Development at Nestlé Purina ( https://www.purina.com/pet-experts/rm-pet-expert ). Dr. McGowan has spent more than twenty-five years studying animal behavior and cognition, including research ranging from grizzly bears and laying hens to dogs and cats. She earned her Ph.D. in Applied Ethology from Washington State University before conducting postdoctoral research in Sweden focused on measuring positive emotional states in dogs. Today Dr. McGowan leads Purina's Global Digital and AI Product Development organization, where her team combines artificial intelligence, connected sensors, behavioral science, physiology and nutrition to better understand what pets are experiencing - and ultimately to give pets something they've never truly had before: a voice ( https://www.petivity.com/ ). Dr. McGowan's work spans smart pet technologies, digital biomarkers, predictive AI models capable of detecting disease before clinical symptoms appear, and pioneering research into the gut-brain axis and animal emotional health. Today we'll explore how artificial intelligence is transforming veterinary medicine, how connected devices are changing the future of pet care, and what studying animal cognition may teach us about intelligence, emotion and even ourselves. #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #AnimalBehavior #PetHealth #DigitalPhenotyping #PetTech #IoT #AnimalCognition #VeterinaryMedicine #PredictiveHealth #GutBrainAxis #Petivity #Cats #Dogs #AnimalScience #MachineLearning #PrecisionMedicine #Biotech #Science #Technology #Innovation #FutureOfHealth #PetCare #NestlePurina Support the show

  3. Aug 19

    Is Science Being Hijacked? The Dark Side of Scientific Publishing - Kent Anderson And Joy Moore - Authors, How the Internet Disrupted Science

    Send us Fan Mail What if the biggest threat to scientific integrity isn't bad science - but the system we use to decide what gets called science in the first place? Every year, millions of scientific papers enter the literature. But behind those papers is an increasingly complicated ecosystem of peer review, Open Access, publication fees, citation metrics, academic incentives, paper mills - and now artificial intelligence. And some experts believe we're reaching a point where the scientific literature itself is becoming contaminated with so much questionable material that separating signal from noise is becoming extraordinarily difficult. Joining us today are two people who have spent decades inside the world's scientific publishing ecosystem and who have written a fascinating new book, How the Internet Disrupted Science ( https://www.disruptedscience.com/ ), examining how digital technology, changing business models, artificial intelligence, and perverse incentives have transformed the scientific literature itself. Kent Anderson has spent more than thirty years at the highest levels of scholarly publishing, serving as Publishing Director at the New England Journal of Medicine, Publisher at Science magazine, CEO of the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Director of Journals at the American Academy of Pediatrics, and founder of two of the publishing industry's most influential publications, The Scholarly Kitchen and The Geyser. Joining him is Joy Moore, whose career spans virtually every major corner of scientific publishing - from Nature Publishing Group, Blackwell, Wiley, the American Medical Association, Silverchair, EBSCO and many more - helping shape how scientific knowledge is created, distributed, discovered and trusted in the digital age. Together they argue that the Internet didn't simply change how science is communicated - it fundamentally changed the incentives behind scientific publishing itself, opening the door to paper mills, fake journals, AI-generated research, and a growing crisis of trust. #Science #ScientificResearch #SciencePublishing #ScientificPublishing #PeerReview #OpenAccess #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ScienceCommunication #ResearchIntegrity #ScientificIntegrity #PaperMills #ResearchFraud #AcademicPublishing #PublishOrPerish #Misinformation #FakeScience #ScienceAndTechnology #Innovation #ArtificialIntelligence #FutureOfScience #TrustInScience #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities Support the show

  4. Aug 18

    Your Urine Contains a Fingerprint of Disease. Can AI Read It? | Dejan Nenov - Co-Founder, Luventix

    Send us Fan Mail What if we could take something as simple - and seemingly ordinary - as a urine sample, measure thousands of chemical signals within it, and use artificial intelligence to recognize the metabolic fingerprint of disease? And what if, instead of looking for one specific biomarker, we could train an algorithm to recognize the complex pattern created by an entire disease state? That is the premise behind Luventix ( https://www.luventix.com/ ), a technology company developing AI and machine-learning diagnostic models based on quantitative analysis of urine. Today's guest, Dejan Nenov, comes to this problem from a somewhat unusual direction. He's not a traditional biotech entrepreneur. Dejan is a computer engineer, technology entrepreneur, investor and longtime software executive who has spent more than three decades building companies across fields ranging from telecommunications and cybersecurity to enterprise software, consumer electronics and data architecture. Dejan has been involved with companies that have collectively returned more than $3.5 billion to investors - and he's now turned his attention to one of the most complicated systems imaginable: the human body. At Luventix, the idea is to use gas chromatography to generate a quantitative representation of the metabolic state contained within a urine sample, and then use machine learning to identify patterns associated with disease, treatment response, and potentially treatment-related toxicity. Today on Progress, Potential, and Possibilities, we're going to explore whether the next generation of medical diagnostics may be less about finding a single molecule - and more about teaching machines to recognize the incredibly complex biological patterns hidden in our own chemistry. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #HealthcareAI #MedicalAI #Diagnostics #HealthTech #DigitalHealth #Biotechnology #Biotech #PrecisionMedicine #UrineDiagnostics #DiseaseDetection #MachineLearning #Metabolomics #Biomarkers #MedicalInnovation #FutureOfHealthcare #HealthInnovation #ClinicalDiagnostics #Luventix #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities Support the show

  5. Aug 14

    Beyond The Lab - How Medicines Become Successful Businesses | Jane Gonnerman - Executive Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development, Collegium Pharmaceutical

    Send us Fan Mail We tend to think that a new medicine's journey begins in the laboratory and ends when the FDA approves it. But there's an enormous part of that journey that most people never see: Who decides which medicines a company should acquire? Which ones are worth billions of dollars? How do you turn an approved drug into a successful commercial product - and ultimately get it into the hands of patients? Today we're going behind the scenes of that process. Jane Gonnerman is Executive Vice President of Strategy and Corporate Development at Collegium Pharmaceutical ( https://www.collegiumpharma.com/ ), a leading biopharmaceutical company focused on improving the lives of people living with serious and often misunderstood conditions, where she is helping guide the company's long-term growth strategy and business development initiatives. Before joining Collegium in 2025, Jane served as Senior Vice President of Rare Disease at Amgen following the landmark $28 billion acquisition of Horizon Therapeutics - one of the largest biotechnology acquisitions in recent history. Prior to that, she served as Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief of Staff to Horizon's CEO, playing a central role in the company's corporate strategy, partnerships, acquisitions, and ultimately its successful sale to Amgen. Earlier in her career, Jane spent more than fifteen years at Bain & Company, becoming a Partner in the firm's healthcare practice where she advised many of the world's leading life science organizations on strategy, growth, organizational transformation, and innovation. Jane holds an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business along with dual bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Florida. Today we'll explore what it really takes to build successful biopharmaceutical companies, how commercialization has become as innovative as science itself, and why strategy may ultimately determine which medical breakthroughs change patients' lives. #CollegiumPharmaceutical #JaneGonnerman #PharmaceuticalIndustry #Biotech #Biopharma #Pharma #DrugDevelopment #DrugCommercialization #PharmaInnovation #CorporateStrategy #CorporateDevelopment #BusinessDevelopment #PharmaMergers #HealthcareInnovation #DrugDiscovery #RareDisease #ADHD #PainManagement #DrugDelivery #JORNAYPM #AZSTARYS #XtampzaER #Belbuca #Nucynta #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities Support the show

  6. Aug 11

    The Next Generation of CRISPR Has Arrived | Dr. Trevor Martin, Ph.D. - CEO, Mammoth Biosciences

    Send us Fan Mail Most of us think of medicine as something we take every day - a statin, a blood pressure pill, or perhaps a monthly injection. But what if those lifelong treatments eventually become obsolete? What if one carefully targeted gene edit could dramatically reduce your risk of heart disease for decades?  Dr. Trevor Martin, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Mammoth Biosciences ( https://mammoth.bio/ ), a pioneering biotechnology company developing next-generation CRISPR genome editing technologies for potentially curative medicines. He co-founded the company in 2017 alongside Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR pioneer Dr. Jennifer Doudna and an interdisciplinary team of leading scientists with the goal of building more precise, versatile, and clinically practical gene editing systems. Dr. Martin earned his undergraduate degree in Molecular Biology with honors from Princeton University before completing a Ph.D. in Genetics and Statistics at Stanford University, where his research focused on quantitative genetics, genomics, and computational biology. His scientific background in statistics and genetics has shaped Mammoth's unique approach to developing smaller CRISPR enzymes capable of reaching tissues and diseases that have been difficult to target with first-generation technologies. Under Dr. Martin's leadership, Mammoth has grown into one of the world's leading CRISPR companies, raising more than $465 million, achieving a valuation exceeding $1 billion, and establishing strategic collaborations with companies including Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Bayer, and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals. Today, Mammoth is advancing a pipeline of in vivo gene editing therapies, including programs targeting cardiovascular disease through permanent editing of the APOC3 gene - a potential one-time treatment approach aimed at dramatically reducing triglycerides and long-term cardiovascular risk. Beyond therapeutics, the company's CRISPR platform also extends into diagnostics and genome engineering technologies that may reshape medicine over the coming decades. Dr. Martin has been recognized as an EY Entrepreneur of the Year®, Forbes 30 Under 30, and Fortune 40 Under 40 honoree for his contributions to biotechnology and scientific entrepreneurship. #CRISPR #GeneEditing #TrevorMartin #MammothBiosciences #JenniferDoudna #Biotechnology #GenomeEditing #HeartDisease #Longevity #FutureOfMedicine #PrecisionMedicine #Genetics #DNA #HealthInnovation #MedicalBreakthrough #CardiovascularDisease #SciencePodcast #Biotech #Innovation #ProgressPotentialPossibilities Support the show

  7. Aug 10

    Why the Intelligence Community Is Betting on Biotechnology | Dr. Jessica Dymond, Ph.D. - Vice President of Technology, In-Q-Tel

    Send us Fan Mail The same technologies that could transform medicine, agriculture, and manufacturing could also reshape global security. Understanding the future of biotechnology requires scientists who can bridge discovery, engineering, and responsibility. Today on Progress, Potential, and Possibilities, we’re joined by a true pioneer at the nexus of biotechnology and national security. Dr. Jessica Dymond, Ph.D is the Vice President of Technology at In-Q-Tel ( https://www.iqt.org/ ), a not-for-profit venture fund that invests in companies advancing the strategic priorities of U.S. Intelligence Community, where she provides technical and strategic leadership to accelerate emerging biotechnologies that address some of the most critical challenges to national and global security. Before In-Q-Tel, Dr. Dymond served as Chief Scientist for Physical and Life Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, where she led an interdisciplinary portfolio spanning biological sensing, genomic surveillance, microbiome engineering, and synthetic biology. She founded the Lab’s Biological Sciences group and spearheaded initiatives to anticipate, assess, and mitigate emerging biological threats while strengthening global health security. Formally trained as a synthetic biologist, Dr. Dymond earned her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, completed a postdoctoral fellowship in functional genomics at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and has contributed to groundbreaking research, including the design of synthetic yeast genomes and combinatorial genomic diversity. She also serves on the editorial board of Synthetic Biology from Oxford University Press. Dr. Dymond’s career embodies the bridge between cutting-edge science, technology strategy, and real-world impact - protecting health, security, and society through innovation at the molecular frontier. #SyntheticBiology #Biotechnology #Biosecurity #FutureOfBiology #GenomeEngineering #Genomics #DNA #GeneticEngineering #ArtificialBiology #BiologyRevolution #LifeSciences #FutureTechnology #EmergingTechnologies #ScienceInnovation #Innovation #NationalSecurity #GlobalHealthSecurity #PandemicPreparedness #AIandBiology #Bioengineering #SyntheticGenomics #CRISPR #GeneticTechnology #HealthcareInnovation #ScientificDiscovery #TechnologyTrends #ProgressPotentialAndPossibilities Support the show

  8. Aug 8

    Brilliant Ideas Aren't Enough - Why Scientists Must Learn to Communicate | Nancy Ancowitz - NYU Educator, Career Strategist, Executive Presentation Coach, Author

    Send us Fan Mail We spend billions of dollars each year funding scientific discovery - but what happens if the people making those discoveries can't communicate them? Today we're exploring why communication may be just as important as innovation itself, and why some of the world's brightest scientists never receive the recognition their work deserves. Nancy Ancowitz ( https://www.nancyancowitz.com/ ) is career strategist, executive presentation coach, author, educator, and one of the country's leading experts on helping professionals communicate their expertise with clarity, confidence, and authenticity. Nancy has spent more than two decades teaching communication, presentation skills, and career strategy at New York University ( https://www.sps.nyu.edu/faculty-directory/10734-nancy-h-ancowitz.html ) while coaching everyone from emerging professionals to CEOs on how to translate knowledge into influence.  Nancy is the author of the acclaimed Self-Promotion for Introverts® ( https://www.amazon.com/Self-Promotion-Introverts-Quiet-Guide-Getting-ebook/dp/B00394U8DS?ref_=ast_author_dp&th=1&psc=1 ), recognized by Publishers Weekly as one of the year's best business books, as well as Zoom to Success and Business Writing: Say More With Less. Before launching her coaching practice, Nancy spent twelve years on Wall Street, leading marketing communications for multibillion-dollar businesses as a Vice President at JPMorgan Chase and earlier at Citibank, where she was recognized for innovation in global marketing communications. Along the way, her insights have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Psychology Today, and she has spoken at organizations ranging from the National Institutes of Health to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Today, we're taking Nancy's work in a slightly different direction. Here on Progress, Potential and Possibilities, we spend much of our time with scientists, physicians, engineers, biotech founders, and technology innovators who are developing extraordinary breakthroughs - but often struggle to communicate those breakthroughs beyond their laboratories, companies, and research institutions. In an age where groundbreaking discoveries compete with endless streams of information, social media, and artificial intelligence, is communication becoming just as important as innovation itself? Can brilliant ideas change the world if their creators never learn to tell their story? We explore why communication, authenticity, and thoughtful self-promotion may be some of the most underrated drivers of scientific and technological progress. #ScienceCommunication #STEM #Innovation #Leadership #PublicSpeaking #CommunicationSkills #Scientists #Biotechnology #ArtificialIntelligence #InnovationLeadership #Entrepreneurship #CareerDevelopment #PresentationSkills #PersonalBranding #AuthenticLeadership #ProgressPotentialPossibilities 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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