Stay ConnectedPodcast interviews with genius-level (top .1%) practitioners, scientists, researchers, clinicians and professionals in Cancer, 3D Bio Printing, CRISPR-CAS9, Ketogenic Diets, the Microbiome, Extracellular Vesicles, and more.
Subscribe today for the latest medical, health and bioscience insights from geniuses in their field(s).
Copyright: © Richard Jacobs
It's hard to mimic the pancreas, despite the stellar treatment technology available to type 1 diabetics. Researchers like Juan Domínguez-Bendala are working hard on a cure for type 1 diabetes pathogenesis and, simultaneously, for even more hands-off treatment options. Listen and learn
Juan Domínguez-Bendala is Director of Stem Cell Development Research and an associate professor of surgery at the Diabetes Research Institute at the University of Miami's Miller School of Medicine. The primary goal of his researcher is to cure type 1 diabetes, and he addresses these efforts as well as exciting steps forward in a transplant therapy. The auto-immune cause of the disease means a cure must address two issues: immune modulation and regeneration of beta cells, which produce insulin. Therefore, advanced therapies also must address these two issues, but in a less permanent way. He describes some roads different researchers have taken to get as close as possible to curative hypotheses and how the therapies takes advantage of those findings.
Unlike beta cells in type 2 diabetes, type 1 patients have had their beta cells attacked and killed by their immune system. His lab is using induced pluripotent stems cells, where they are taken from skin, reprogrammed to go back in time, and then redifferentiated into, in this case, beta cells. They then put these cells into a protective case about the size of a credit card and implant just below the skin. Patients would ideally only need to return every 6 months for a new implantation. They are also working on a way to induce cell growth inside a patient's body by introducing a medicine that would cause beta cell regeneration naturally. They've identified a protein in our blood that makes beta stem cells proliferate, giving rise to new beta cells. Listen in for exciting leaps ahead for better type 1 diabetes treatment and the careful approach toward a final cure.
For more, see the Diabetes Research Institute. Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
What a week! You hit your best times for each run. But the following week, it's as if you are jogging with weights tied to your ankles. What's going on? Well, hormones and functions can have an impact in your physiology down to cell hydration. Dr. Beth Westie explains more in this discussion on hormone balance and health and fitness tie-ins. Listen and learn
Dr. Beth Westie is a chiropractor, author, and speaker and hosts the Female Health Solution Podcast. Years ago, she suffered painful ovarian cysts that would burst monthly and reform. When she sought help in an emergency room from pain, the prescription of birth control and Vicodin didn't sit well with her. She got to work, researching and calling on her own training to figure out what she could do for a your-hormones-are-off diagnosis. Her background in eastern medicine helped and she eventually understood that women experience several different body types over their lives. She says she started "eating for my hormones," and that made all the difference.
She explains that her hormone levels were too high and her body wasn't processing them out of her system in a healthy way. Different monthly hormonal phases effect physiology and metabolism, even causing basal body temp change. Both estrogen and progesterone have very different effects. For example, one's basal body temperature is higher when progesterone levels increase post-ovulation. It helps to match the tone of one's food to one's basal body temp. During the estrogen phase, when the basal temp is lower, it works well to eat cooling foods. For the progesterone phase, it's beneficial to eat warming foods like beef, ginger, or cinnamon. But this is just the type of the iceberg. She goes through numerous other effects and how to work with and support the body's efforts. She even addresses the propensity of the medical field to leave women out of research, sequestering ailments to female-only labels that didn't receive proper investigation.
For more about her, see her website: drbethwestie.com. Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
Nerve injury types have multiple causes, from physical trauma to diseases like multiple sclerosis and other neurodegenerative disorders. Nerve damage repair has been an elusive science, but Dr. Silver shares an exciting therapy on the verge of phase one clinical trials. Listen and learn
Dr. Jerry Silver is a co-inventor and scientific advisor at NervGen Pharma as well as professor of neurosciences at Case Western Reserve University's School of Medicine. He's won numerous awards, including the Christopher Reeve-Irvine Research Medal. Currently, he's performing a focused group of experiments with NervGen's regenerative peptide as a means toward spinal cord injury treatment. Much of his current work stems from a long-ago research question: how do nerves make decisions to grow in some places but not others? In turns out that the presence of chondroitin sulfate proteoglycan is in abundance at those stopping points. Significantly, developing scare tissue in injured nerve tissue is also full of proteoglycans: it was confirmed that those molecules block nerve regeneration.
Dr. Silver catches listeners up with facts about neurodegenerative diseases well as other classical nerve injury repair experiments. He describes flaws in different approaches to inhibit the presence of those proteoglycans, such as injecting directly in the spinal cord. As Dr. Silver says, "wouldn't it be better if you didn't have to touch the spinal cord at all?" This question lead to his peptide work at NervGen. In 2009, his lab and John Flanagan's group in Harvard discovered the first receptor that nerves make that allows them to interact with proteoglycans and stick them in place. This sigma receptor became the target of his work, and they've developed a peptide that blocks that receptor, allowing for "sprouting" to take place in a robust way. His lab continues to work with this exciting step forward in nerve damage repair.
See nervgen.com for more. Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
The excitement of space travel can obscure the dangers, and radiation exposure is one such forgotten factor. Sarah Baatout is a radiobiologist who helps protect astronauts in space and minimize space radiation effects on the human body. Listen and learn
Sarah Baatout is the head of the radiobiology unit at the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre (SCK•CEN). She investigates the impact of ionizing radiation on health through radiobiology and radiation protection. She works to maximize benefits that radiation can offer in cancer treatments and improve radiotherapy safety. In addition, she does research to better predict the risks of exposure for space travel and to astronauts in the space station.
As we go about our daily activities on earth, our atmosphere and magnetic field protects us from radiation exposure. But Sarah Baatout focuses on the cases where that changes, from those needing radiation treatments to space station inhabitants. Furthermore, there are several different types of radiation in space that must be accounted for. Conversely, there are several different ways to protect the body, or radiation protectors, to stop the damage induced by cosmic radiation. Her work includes boosting the way cells repair DNA damage as well as understanding how sensitivity to damage varies across different people. She's also developing pharmaceuticals to make radiation exposure much less dangerous by protecting healthy cells and improving the radiation to target cancer more specifically.
For more about her work, see the SCK•CEN website. Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
Dr. Fareeha Al Siddiq shares exciting advancements in remote cardiac monitoring in this episode on cardiac health care. Listen and learn
Dr. Fareeha Al Siddiq is a top medical expert at Biotricity and explains how their technology works and improves treatment for the number one health concern in the U.S., heart disease. Its near real-time monitoring component means that if a wearer has a cardiac event or has something life-threatening occur, their physician is notified immediately. Their medical team can then get a head start on treatment for the patient and can reach out if there's an immediate concern that needs addressing.
The pandemic has helped them see gaps in the system as far as accessibility—less populated areas have been underserved regarding cardiac health assessments. They make sure any location with cell phone receptivity can receive and use their product. In fact, the blue tooth device is about the size of a cell phone and backs up the data through multiple connections to the cloud. Physicians say the biggest benefit for them is getting a jump start on diagnosis and treatment. They can recall the patient sooner, change their dosage and medication sooner, and seek other needed treatments in better time.
For more about this technology, see biotricity.com. Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
A must-listen for anyone touched by thyroid cancer, this conversation offers not only accessible information, it takes an interesting turn. We learn that the endocrinologist Ruchi Gaba and Richard both have experienced papillary thyroid carcinoma diagnoses and treatment. This lends the discussion a clinical and personal perspective that makes the information delivery even more helpful.
Listen and learn
Ruchi Gaba is an assistant professor of medicine in the endocrinology division at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. She's also the medical director for their Thyroid and Parathyroid Center, which addresses thyroid cancers and multiple endocrinal neoplasia. They're a world class medical center that develops very individualized plans for every patient;
Dr. Gaba's inspiration for the center came after her own experience with a thyroid cancer diagnosis left her keenly aware of the need for specialists who know exactly what to look for. She gives listeners a stellar line up of the basics, from discussing the four types of cancer and special issues and treatments for each.
"Surgery is the main modality for any type of thyroid cancer," she says. For the most common type of thyroid cancer, papillary, radioactive iodine is usually a follow up treatment, designed to kill microscopic cancer cells left behind after thyroid cancer surgery. She explains that some patients become iodine avid, which means the thyroid has less tendency to pick up the iodine. However, clinicians are now able to treat these patients with a new therapy that addresses this, enabling the thyroid to pick up the iodine again. Another "game changer" treatment she describes involves gene therapy, where they can now target cells with the particular gene mutation driving the cancer and kill those cells.
She and Richard each discuss their own personal experiences and address reoccurrence rates for thyroid papillary cancer as well as its growth habit. Listen in for a meaningful conversation about this growing health concern.
For more, see her web page at Baylor: bcm.edu/people-search/ruchi-gaba-21640.
Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
What do cancer cells want? That's one of Perry Marshall's central questions as he takes listeners through how our traditional view of cancer might hinder advancements in treatment. Listen and learn
Perry Marshall is a well-known top marketing consultant for online systems. The author of Evolution 2.0, he and Richard have shared an interest in a new understanding of evolution as well as how we think about cancer. This interview is first in a series on cancer that will become a part of Richard's upcoming book on the subject. Through his extensive research and past interviews, Richard's identified three players in the medical field: the researcher, the clinician, and the individual who's been affected on a personal level and does their own intensive research with that perspective. Perry stands in this last position and has spent years researching and creating symposiums about evolution and cancer.
He shares his particular view on how cancer starts and by what ecology it spreads through cancer evolution and the immune system response. Cancer begins when a cell or group of cells or tissue gets overly stressed and hits a primal evolutionary reset button. It wakes up in a primitive state and is no longer aware of its identity as part of the human host. Rather it proceeds for its own protection and survival. This means it functions in a flight-or-fight mode, and Perry feels that much of our current cancer therapy treatment only exacerbates that mode. Instead, perhaps researchers should approach cancer by asking how to get these cells out that emergency survival mode. It's also important to consider how we stop the reset button being hit in the first place. Listen in to this interesting treatise on how we can improve our very conception of cancer therapy treatment.
For more, see cancerevolution.org. Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
A metabolic pathway study on an ocean floor compound led marine scientist Veronika Kivenson straight to our gut. When she found evidence that a genetic code expansion utilized for metabolism in an ocean sediment compound also appears in the human gut, she knew she needed to understand this pathway better. Listen and learn
Veronika Kivenson recently received her Ph.D. in Marine Science from UC Santa Barbara and is now working on a post doc at Oregon State University. She studies microorganism and how they react with their surroundings, especially their metabolism, and what they consume and produce. While studying marine sediment, she came across an interesting connection with gut metabolism. An amino acid that converts from a stop codon in order to metabolize trimethylamine appears in both places. Furthermore, trimethylamine is listed in the negative column in animal-based diet pros and cons.
Animal-based foods are a major source of trimethylamine. In our liver, it becomes trimethylamine-N-oxide, or TMAO, which causes plaque, an element of cardiovascular disease symptoms. But if a pathway in the gut can prevent that formation of TMAO, that's significant. Veronika Kivenson is looking at the potential beneficial role in the genetic code expansion pathway that consumes and prevents TMA from becoming TMAO, or part of plaque formation. What's really interesting is that this consuming bacteria is also associated with meat consumption. The Bilophila genus bacteria, through genetic code expansion, prevents the formation of the harmful TMAO. Studies on these pathways could lead to probiotic therapies to address cardiovascular disease. Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
The tangle of online social media sights provided one researcher with a new direction for studying the physics of systems. He and multi-disciplinary colleagues have applied complex systems and data science to the dynamics of online group trends, trying to uncover better ways for engaging with information.
Listen and learn
Neil Johnson is a professor of physics at George Washington University. He's spent his career studying the surprising things that happen when you combine objects. For example, he describes all the ways water molecules can have huge impacts under different conditions just by putting them together: ice skating, the titanic wreck, bubbles emitting from boiling. "When something is collected," he says, "things happen that you would never predict."
While his early studies involved excitons, which are collections of positive and negative particles, he migrated to other collections and eventually to data science real-world applications. He researched the formation of online extremism as seen by Isis communities combining and separating, like gears and wheels, impacting each other in various ways, which became a type of crime network analysis.
But he and his colleagues are working on possibly the most complex and hard-to-pin-down collection yet: social media groupings that form opinions on platforms like Facebook. They're taking on these data science real-time projects from a physicist's perspective of force and reaction. What are the tipping forces? How do sudden shifts evolve?
The competition between three essential forces interests them: each individual's internal compass, some external field like news sources, and local interactions with other objects within one's community such as neighbors. "You can't win any misinformation battle without a map of the battlefield," he adds. By understanding how forces exert pressures and having a map with the dynamics better evaluated, our information sharing methods and means can hopefully improve.
For more information, see physics.columbian.gwu.edu/neil-johnson.
Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
"Necessity is the birthplace of all creativity," says Ashok Gupta. He describes how his own chronic fatigue experience lead to the life-changing practices he now teaches others. He's dedicated his time to supporting people with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME) and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) and similar issues like fibromyalgia treatment.
Listen in as he explains
Speaker, filmmaker, and health practitioner Ashok Gupta is Program Clinic Director with The Gupta Program. As an undergraduate at Cambridge University, he suffered a stomach bug that spiraled him into ME/CFS. It was "like a brick wall in front of him," he says, surrounded by professionals telling him there was nothing he could do to feel better and improve.
After some research, he understood that there is an array of modern chronic conditions that are misunderstood, and mainstream medicine doesn't offer reliable solutions. He brought his research together and formed his own treatment program. Twenty years later and healthy, he's made it his work to effectively help others with ME/CFS and other similar issues like fibromyalgia exercises, chemical and mold sensitives, and MCAS.
His program addresses what they call NICS: Neuro (has its birthplace in nervous system), Immune (aspects of immune system over-triggered), Conditioned (learnt action in brain as defensive response), and Syndrome (each patient has unique collection of symptoms). He likens the brain conditioning response in these modern illnesses to PTSD. An initial illness causes an over-reaction of the amygdala and this over-reaction is then triggered in other circumstances, activating the nervous and immune system.
Their therapy involves teaching the brain that the body is no longer threatened, breaking the vicious cycle of the physiological response and reinforcements. Their main brain training technique is a seven-step technique with additional supporting methods. Lucky listeners can get a glimpse of his method as he takes listeners through a sample exercise called the "4S Technique." Listen in for peaceful and encouraging chronic illness motivation.
For more about his program, see guptaprogram.com.
Available on Apple Podcasts: apple.co/2Os0myK
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
