Raising Health
143 episodes - English - Latest episode: 2 days ago - ★★★★★ - 134 ratingsA myriad of AI, science, and technology experts explore the real challenges and enormous opportunities facing entrepreneurs who are building the future of health. Raising Health, a podcast by a16z Bio + Health and hosted by Kris Tatiossian and Olivia Webb, dives deep into the heart of biotechnology and healthcare innovation. Join veteran company builders, operators, and investors Vijay Pande, Julie Yoo, Vineeta Agarwala, and Jorge Conde, along with distinguished guests like Mark Cuban, Greg Verdine, Fei-Fei Li, and Suchi Saria, as they explore the intricacies of these technological advancements and how they can be built and effectively delivered. Together, we can rewrite the script. Welcome to Raising Health.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Reengineering Healthcare and Medicine with Technology with Vineeta Agarwala
May 04, 2023 06:00 - 47 minutes - 44.4 MBThis is a crossover episode with The Bioverge Podcast, hosted by Neil Littman. Neil is joined by Vineeta Agarwala, general partner at a16z Bio + Health. Together, they chat about Vineeta's dual role as a clinician and investor, the adoption curve of digital therapeutics, how Vineeta thinks about platforms and a modular, engineering-driven approach to biotech, and much more.
Bio x American Dynamism with Katherine Boyle and David Ulevitch
April 27, 2023 13:00 - 34 minutes - 32.7 MBToday’s episode is with a16z’s American Dynamism team: Katherine Boyle and David Ulevitch. Katherine is a general partner focused on national security, aerospace and defense, public safety, housing, education, and industrials. David is a general partner focused on companies promoting American dynamism, as well as enterprise and SaaS companies. They are joined by a16z Bio + Health general partner Vijay Pande, and editorial lead Olivia Webb. Together, we talk about the idea behind American Dy...
Shaping Channel Partnerships with Sean Duffy
April 20, 2023 13:00 - 23 minutes - 22.4 MBToday’s episode is with Sean Duffy, cofounder and CEO of Omada Health. He is joined by a16z Bio + Health general partner Julie Yoo and investment partner Jay Rughani. Together, they talk about Sean’s three rules of partnerships, how Omada plans for large-scale implementation, and how Sean thinks about structuring the economic model of the partnership. This episode was recorded as part of our research into our forthcoming Go to Market Playbook, focused on channel partnerships. Stay tuned for...
Strategizing Channel Partnerships with Florian Otto
April 19, 2023 13:00 - 27 minutes - 25.5 MBThis week, we’re releasing two episodes about all things channel partnerships. Today’s episode is with Florian Otto, cofounder and CEO of Cedar. He is joined by a16z Bio + Health general partner Julie Yoo. In today’s episode, Florian and Julie talk about how Cedar began engaging with channel partners, what happens when things go wrong, and how the Cedar team is structured to implement and nurture these partnerships. This episode was recorded as part of our research into our forthcoming Go...
AI and Actionable Insights for Drug Development with Daphne Koller
April 13, 2023 13:00 - 45 minutes - 42.2 MBIn this episode, Daphne Koller, founder and CEO of insitro—as well as the co-founder of Coursera, a MacArthur Award winner, and a former professor in the department of computer science at Stanford University—chats with a16z Bio + Health founding partner Vijay Pande. Together, they talk about Daphne’s career journey, how Daphne thinks about the last few decades of progress in AI, and how insitro leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to explore biology through new models of ...
Journal Club: Remodeling oncogenic transcriptomes with Ben Cravatt and Gene Yeo
April 06, 2023 13:00 - 46 minutes - 42.9 MBToday marks the reboot of our journal club series, so you can look forward to seeing these episodes as part of our regular feed. This episode is a scientific deep dive on recent research published by Ben Cravatt, Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute and co-founder of a diverse suite of chemoproteomic companies such as Vividion and Belharra Therapeutics, and Gene Yeo, Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Dieg...
Journal Club: Remodeling Oncogenic Transcriptomes with Ben Cravatt and Gene Yeo
April 06, 2023 13:00 - 46 minutes - 42.9 MBToday marks the reboot of our journal club series, so you can look forward to seeing these episodes as part of our regular feed. This episode is a scientific deep dive on recent research published by Ben Cravatt, Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute and co-founder of a diverse suite of chemoproteomic companies such as Vividion and Belharra Therapeutics, and Gene Yeo, Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Dieg...
Health System Partnerships with Tommy Ibrahim
March 30, 2023 13:00 - 29 minutes - 27.7 MBIn this episode, a16z Bio + Health general partner Julie Yoo chats with Bassett Healthcare Network president and CEO Tommy Ibrahim. Together, they talk about Tommy's journey from practicing physician to health system leader, the challenges facing rural healthcare today, and how Tommy thinks about partnering and integrating with digital health entrepreneurs as a hospital executive.
From the Archives: The Art & Science of Biology's Future with Jennifer Doudna
March 23, 2023 15:17 - 29 minutes - 27.4 MBIn this episode from the archives, originally published in February 2021, Jennifer Doudna, who won the 2020 Nobel Prize for the co-discovery of CRISPR-Cas9 with Emmanuelle Charpentier, chats with Vijay Pande, general partner at a16z Bio + Health. Together, they discuss the future of biology, whether discovery itself can be engineered and industrialized, and how biology can shape our future.
The Power of a Platform Company with Josh Mandel-Brehm
March 16, 2023 13:00 - 32 minutes - 29.7 MBIn this episode, Jorge Conde, general partner at a16z Bio + Health, talks with Josh Mandel-Brehm, founding CEO of CAMP4. Together, they talk about how CAMP4 focuses on regulatory RNA (and what that means), how Josh thinks about platform companies, and what he’s learned as the founding CEO of the company.
Culture and Company Building with Sam Corcos
March 09, 2023 14:00 - 32 minutes - 29.7 MBIn today's episode, Sam Corcos, CEO and cofounder of Levels Health, chats with Vijay Pande, general partner at a16z Bio + Health, about how Sam cofounded Levels, how to decide who becomes CEO if you have multiple cofounders, Levels’ approach to company culture and meetings, and how Sam thinks about the complicated world of healthcare regulations. Additional reading: Levels' public investor updates, as mentioned by Sam in the episode
Payments & Payors: Fintech's Role with Kurt Adams
March 02, 2023 14:00 - 35 minutes - 32.4 MBIn this episode, Kurt Adams, CEO of Optum Financial, chats with Daisy Wolf, investment partner for a16z Bio + Health, and Marc Andrusko, investment partner for a16z focused on fintech, about Optum Financial, how consumers might interact with fintech while seeking care or participating in healthy behaviors, and what a fintech-integrated version of the healthcare experience could look like. Additional reading from us: Payvidors, Unbundled: Opportunities in Healthcare Fintech Healthtech x Fi...
American Optimism with Joe Lonsdale
February 23, 2023 14:00 - 39 minutes - 36 MBIn this episode, Joe Lonsdale, founder and managing partner at 8VC, joins Vijay Pande, founding partner of a16z Bio + Health, and Olivia Webb, editorial lead. Together, we talk about what factors lead to innovation vs stagnation, monopoly power in healthcare, and policy ideas to incentivize change, growth, and dynamism.
Going to Market in Healthcare: B2C2B
February 16, 2023 14:00 - 35 minutes - 32.1 MBIn this episode, Julie Yoo, general partner, and Jay Rughani, investment partner at a16z Bio + Health, talk to Kate Ryder, founder and CEO of Maven; Amanda Rees, cofounder and CEO of Bold Health; and Bill Porter, VP and GM, International, of Butterfly Network, about their B2C2B go-to-market motion. This episode was originally recorded in late 2021, but it's still really relevant to builders, especially those exploring the B2C2B go-to-market motion. We talked about B2C2B in-depth in the seco...
Advancing the Field of Immunotherapeutics
February 09, 2023 14:00 - 24 minutes - 22.8 MBIn this episode, Kevin Parker, cofounder and CEO of Cartography Biosciences, joins Jorge Conde, general partner at a16z Bio + Health, and Olivia Webb, editorial lead, to discuss immuno-oncology, current challenges in drug targeting, and the mechanisms Cartography and others are using to advance the field of immunotherapeutics. This episode dives deep into the science behind immuno-oncology — but you don't necessarily have to be a scientist to follow along. You'll never look at a smoothie t...
Healthspan, Lifespan, and the Biology of Aging
January 26, 2023 14:00 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MBIn this episode, Kristen Fortney, cofounder and CEO of BioAge, joins Vijay Pande, founding partner of a16z Bio + Health, and Olivia Webb, editorial lead, to discuss the biology of aging, how she started a company, and some fun things — like how long a hypothetical venture capitalist can expect to live. Additional reading: Greg Egan, whose writing inspired Kristen, has a list of his books on his website
Payors and Providers Post-Pandemic
January 20, 2023 13:00 - 28 minutes - 26 MBIn this episode, Paul Keckley, the managing editor of the Keckley Report and a health policy expert, joins Julie Yoo, general partner at a16z, and Olivia Webb, editorial lead at a16z. Together, they talk about how payors and providers are reacting to changing tailwinds, how employers are demanding more in today's market, the opportunities and challenges for startups in a consolidated industry, and what the next few years of health policy might bring. Additional reading: The Keckley Rep...
Using AI to Take Bio Farther
January 11, 2023 14:00 - 33 minutes - 30.6 MBJakob Uszkoreit and Vijay Pande discuss all things AI — from Jakob's time at Google Brain, to how humans (and computers) process language, to Inceptive’s belief in the promise of RNA, and how Jakob believes we’re entering inflection point territory. You can also find a full transcript of this episode on our website. Additional reading: Attention is All You Need A Decomposable Attention Model for Natural Language Inference
Expert AI as a Healthcare Superpower
January 09, 2023 16:00 - 56 minutes - 52.1 MBThe last few months have seen dramatic—almost magical—applications of expert generative AI released to the public. (One of those applications, incidentally, was in editing the sound mix of this episode.) But what does this mean for healthcare and bio? Vijay Pande, founding partner of a16z Bio + Health, and Marc Andreessen, cofounder of a16z, sat down for a wide-ranging discussion on AI as an additive superpower…for healthcare as well as screenplays, music, and more. You can also watch the ...
Cultivated Meat: Challenges, Opportunities, Future
December 15, 2022 11:00 - 24 minutes - 22.3 MBFrom initial inspiration in a sci-fi novel to the current state of “designing biology” in cultivated meat, SCiFi Foods cofounder and CEO Joshua March chats with Bio + Health general partner Vijay Pande and editorial lead Olivia Webb about company building, developing and iterating in biology, and what the future of cultivated meat could be.
AI is Here. Now What?
December 01, 2022 11:00 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MBAI is here...so why isn't it in every clinic? Eric Topol talks with a16z Bio + Health general partners Vijay Pande and Vineeta Agarwala and editorial lead Olivia Webb about what's taking so long, where AI can help patients and providers the most, what needs to happen to speed up adoption, and whether data or policy is more likely to be an obstacle. Eric has written extensively about AI in healthcare, including in his most recent book Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make He...
Regulatory Trends in Telehealth
November 17, 2022 11:00 - 26 minutes - 23.9 MBPerhaps no area of healthcare has undergone such a rapid shift as telehealth during the Covid pandemic. But as the world emerges from the public health emergency, it's an open question what will happen with the regulatory aspects of telehealth. Daisy Wolf, deal partner at a16z Bio + Health, talked to Sarah Thomas, general counsel at Sameday Health, about asynchronous telehealth, working with regulators, how counsel thinks about inducements, and more.
Demystifying DC: Opportunities for Collaboration
November 08, 2022 11:00 - 17 minutes - 16 MBIn this episode, a16z Bio+Health general partner Vineeta Agarwala spoke with Bobby Franklin, the president and CEO of the National Venture Capital Association, about whether healthcare can be a bipartisan topic, how regulation can potentially enable care models at scale, and the opportunities for collaboration between DC and startups.
The Consolidated Drug Channel and Cash-Pay Drugs
November 03, 2022 10:00 - 36 minutes - 33.3 MBWhat’s up with the drug channel? Julie Yoo, a general partner at a16z Bio+Health, joins Adam Fein, the CEO of Drug Channels Institute, and Olivia Webb, the editorial lead for a16z Bio+Health, to discuss this question. We talk about PBMs, the 340B drug program, some of the startups working within and around the primary drug channel, and whether there’s room for entrepreneurs to build in such a consolidated space. For additional reading, see some of Adam’s work on his blog, Drug Channels: ht...
Bio x Games: Is a Fun, Therapeutic Game Possible?
October 20, 2022 10:00 - 33 minutes - 30.4 MBCan a game be both fun and therapeutic? Vijay Pande, the first employee at Naughty Dog Software and a current Bio+Health general partner at a16z, joins Jon Lai, a Games general partner, and Olivia Webb, the editorial lead for Bio+Health at a16z, to discuss this question. We talk about what constitutes a game, how games and bio can intersect, and what we called the “healthy dessert” problem — the challenge of building a game that’s both fun and therapeutic. Additional reading discussed durin...
Carolyn Bertozzi and Degrading Drugs for Problematic Proteins
October 06, 2022 13:00 - 24 minutes - 22.1 MBIn Bio Eats World's Journal Club episodes, we discuss groundbreaking research articles, why they matter, what new opportunities they present, and how to take these findings from paper to practice. In this episode, Stanford Professor Carolyn Bertozzi and former Bio Eats World host Lauren Richardson discuss the article "Lysosome-targeting chimaeras for degradation of extracellular proteins" by Steven M. Banik, Kayvon Pedram, Simon Wisnovsky, Green Ahn, Nicholas M. Riley & Carolyn R. Bertozzi, ...
Deploying AI Platforms to Identify Sepsis
July 21, 2022 16:00 - 27 minutes - 25.1 MBOn this episode, we discuss three recent papers out in Nature Medicine this week, all examining the deployment of Bayesian Health's AI platform in a clinical setting: Two prospective studies focused on clinician adoption and patient outcomes, and one interview-based study focused on clinical experiences with Bayesian’s AI platform, TREWS. First, we get into detail about the design and results of the prospective studies, then we talk about TREWS in context with other clinical decision suppo...
Discovery, Translation, and the State of Bio Today
August 18, 2021 13:00 - 33 minutes - 30.3 MBOn this episode, we are taking a pulse-check on the state of the intersection between biology, healthcare, and technology with two scientists that sit at another intersection, that of academia and industry: Alexander Marson and Patrick Hsu, who are professors at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley, respectively, who both use cutting edge gene editing technology to create next generation therapies, and are prolific biotech founders. Patrick also recently co-wrote an article on Fast Grants, one o...
Engineering an Epigenome Editor
July 22, 2021 21:09 - 31 minutes - 29 MBOn today’s episode we are discussing the results and implications of a recent study that describes the creation of a new set of tools to turn off or on any region in the genome with high specificity. Host Lauren Richardson and a16z general partner Vijay Pande are joined by the senior author of the article, “Genome-wide programmable transcriptional memory by CRISPR-based epigenome editing”, Jonathan Weissman, Professor of Biology at the Whitehead Institute at MIT. Jonathan talks about how the...
Evolving Embodied Intelligence
June 30, 2021 10:00 - 31 minutes - 29 MBOn today’s episode, we are making the full arc from the theoretical and borderline philosophical to the applied. Let’s start with the theory: embodied intelligence posits that the body, or the physical form, plays an active and significant role in shaping an agent's mind and cognitive capacities. For example, human intelligence is not just the function of our brain, but a combination of our brain, our body, and the environment in which we exist. But when it comes to designing artificial inte...
Building Digital Health's Github
June 22, 2021 10:00 - 30 minutes - 28.2 MBToday’s episode is all about the history and future of infusing tech into healthcare with the goals of improving outcomes and lowering costs, and features one of the leading voices in this field, Jonathan Bush. Jonathan, aka JB, started his career in healthcare as an ambulance driver and army medic, and then met Todd Park, another Bio Eats World guest, while at Booz Allen. Together they founded Athena Women’s Health Clinic, which evolved from a clinic specializing in maternity care to one of...
The Genetic Testing (R)Evolution
June 15, 2021 10:00 - 31 minutes - 29 MBGenetic testing is on the cusp of a major revolution, which has the potential to shift not just how we understand our risk for disease, but how we practice healthcare. In the clinic today, genetic testing is used only in cases where we know that mutations have big impact on physiology (BRCA mutations in breast cancer, for example). But our knowledge of how our genetics influences our risk for disease has evolved, and we now know that many (tens of thousands to even millions) small changes in...
The Problem with Urgent Care
June 08, 2021 10:00 - 23 minutes - 15.9 MBWhen it comes to healthcare, the topic of how expensive it is and what we can do to lower costs is always top of mind. One area with particularly steep costs is the emergency department. These are hospital departments that can take care of pretty much anything from a cut to a car wreck. But going to an emergency department for something as simple as a cut can result in a high bill for both the patient and the insurer. This is where the urgent care center comes in. Urgent care centers are wal...
Viral Genomes from A to Z
June 01, 2021 10:00 - 21 minutes - 19.6 MBIf there is one rule in biology, it is that there is an exception to every rule. This includes even the basic biochemistry of DNA, which was once thought to be universal. On this episode, host Lauren Richardson and Judy Savitskaya (a16z bio deal team member and synthetic biology expert), discuss the results and implications three related articles co-published in Science, which all advance our understanding of a very unique kind of DNA. If you open any biology text book, it will say that th...
World’s largest supercomputer v. biology’s toughest problems
May 25, 2021 10:00 - 33 minutes - 30.4 MBThis episode was recorded in March of 2019 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Folding at Home, the distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, and originally aired on The a16z Podcast. Folding at Home is run on millions of devices, is the world’s largest supercomputer, and tackles some of biology’s toughest problems, including COVID-19. Proteins are molecular machines that must first assemble themselves to function. But how does a protein, which is produced as a linear ...
The Trials of Clinical Trials
May 18, 2021 10:00 - 24 minutes - 22.7 MBOn the path from scientific discovery to new drug, the clinical trial is a huge — and critical — hurdle. Clinical trials are themselves experiments, and to make sure that they are doing the best possible job at determining the safety and efficacy of the new drug, we need to be able to do experiments on those experiments. But how do you do that in such a highly regulated space? Host Lauren Richardson talks to James Zou, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Data Science at Stanford University, ...
The New Science of Cell Shape
May 11, 2021 10:00 - 32 minutes - 22.1 MBThey say you should never judge a book by its cover, but can you judge a cell by its shape? On this episode, host Lauren Richardson is joined by Maddison Masaeli (CEO and cofounder of Deepcell), and a16z general partner Vijay Pande (whose lab at Stanford focused on the development of novel computational methods for simulating biology), to discuss what we can learn by characterizing a cell's shape — also known as its morphology. We've long appreciated that morphology can be used to discrimin...
Journal Club: Sleeping Under the Star-Shaped Cells
May 04, 2021 10:00 - 25 minutes - 23.7 MBNeuroscientists have long been trying to determine what happens in the brain during sleep, but to date, they have overlooked a key player: astrocytes. These star-shaped cells were once thought to be the glue that held the brain together, but we are now beginning to appreciate their importance in a variety of brain functions. In this episode, host Lauren Richardson talks to Kira Poskanzer, Assistant Professor at the University of California, San Francisco, about her group's work showing that ...
The Power of Patient-Centric Healthcare
April 27, 2021 10:00 - 35 minutes - 24.6 MBToday we are re-running an episode exploring a question that seems super straightforward, but that on closer examination reveals incredible complexity, and that is "how do we put the patient at the center of the healthcare system?” It almost seems counterintuitive, since aren’t patients always the center of healthcare? But healthcare is a strange industry, in that it is built with the fundamental goal of serving patients, but in many ways, the patient isn’t always the end customer of the sys...
Journal Club: Hunting the Eagle Killer
April 20, 2021 10:00 - 27 minutes - 25.2 MBIn 1994, 29 bald eagles were found dead at DeGray Lake in Arkansas. This mass mortality event kicked off a search for the culprit which has last over 25 years. On this episode of the Bio Eats World Journal Club, host Lauren Richardson talks to Susan B. Wilde of the University of Georgia about her group's work finally identifying the eagle killer, and revealing a complex web of ecosystem dysfunction. Solving this mystery required a fresh point of view, a wide range of techniques and technolog...
Journal Club: Sourcing the Secrets of Climate Adaptation
April 13, 2021 10:00 - 22 minutes - 20.9 MBUnderstanding how plants have adapted to natural climate change over millions of years provides a playbook of evolutionary strategies to help us prepare for and respond to man-made climate change. On this episode, host Lauren Richardson talks to Thomas Juenger, Associate Professor at the University of Texas in Austin and co-senior author of the recent article “Genomic mechanisms of climate adaptation in polyploid bioenergy switchgrass”, published in Nature. They discuss how studying native p...
Evolution: Animals, Aliens, and Ourselves
April 06, 2021 10:00 - 38 minutes - 35.4 MBThe search for and conjecture about alien life has evolved, from science fiction to just plain science. On this episode, host Lauren Richardson talks to Arik Kershenbaum, Ph.D, author of the new book “The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy: What Animals on Earth Reveal about Aliens — and Ourselves”, about what we can conjecture about alien life, based on the laws that govern life on Earth, and the universe at large. The conversation covers big questions like: Does biology have universal propert...
Journal Club: Bioengineering Birth... Again!
March 30, 2021 10:00 - 19 minutes - 17.4 MBToday we are re-running a previous episode of Journal Club — our show where we curate breakthrough research and bridge paper to practice — in light of a recent article published in the journal Nature (see show notes below). In this episode, host Lauren Richardson talks to Professor Anthony Atala from the Wake Forest School of Medicine about his lab’s work creating an engineered uterus that can support live births. This work represents a major milestone in regenerative medicine and could be u...
Solving Medical Mysteries in the World of Rare Disease
March 23, 2021 13:00 - 38 minutes - 35.4 MBIn this conversation, Stanford Professor Euan Ashley—geneticist, cardiologist, author of the new book, The Genome Odyssey, and first co-chair of the Undiagnosed Diseases Network—talks with Bio Eats World host Hanne Winarsky about one of the first places that genomic sequencing began to dramatically impact patients’ lives, and those of their families around them: in rare disease. Rare disease is by definition, well, rare. But collectively, it’s surprisingly common: 1 in 15. In this episode, ...
Journal Club: Taming the Taste for Blood
March 16, 2021 10:00 - 28 minutes - 25.8 MBMosquitoes are the deadliest animals on Earth and for millennia humans have tried to rid themselves of these disease-spreading pests, with shockingly little success. On this episode of the Bio Eats World Journal Club, host Lauren Richardson talks to Leslie Vosshall of Rockefeller University about two articles from her lab investigating the neural and genetic basis of the mosquito's love for us and our blood. The conversation covers how mosquitoes taste blood, the critical differences between...
The Theory of a Thousand Brains
March 12, 2021 18:54 - 39 minutes - 36.3 MBIn this episode, we talk with Jeff Hawkins—an entrepreneur and scientist, known for inventing some of the earliest handheld computers, the Palm and the Treo, who then turned his career to neuroscience and founded the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience in 2002 and Numenta in 2005—about a new theory about how the cells in our brain work to create intelligence. What exactly is happening in the neocortex as our brains process and interpret information and sensory input—like sight, smell...
Journal Club: Restoring a Reflex
March 09, 2021 11:00 - 23 minutes - 22 MBIn a healthy person, your body automatically adjusts blood pressure constantly, and this adjustment is governed by what’s called the baroreflex. However, a spinal cord injury can disrupt this reflex, which has both short term consequences, like passing out, but also long term consequences like an increased risk of heart disease and stroke. On this episode of the Bio Eats World Journal Club, host Lauren Richardson is joined by Dr. Aaron Phillips of the University of Calgary to talk about his ...
Sea Turtle Medicine
March 05, 2021 19:54 - 38 minutes - 35.6 MBSea turtles occupy a very special biological niche in our world. And we still know relatively little about these creatures, one of the very few marine reptiles on the face of the planet. But as population growth and activity on coasts has exploded, so have our encounters with sea turtles... including, unfortunately, those that cause injury and disease. So what advances in technology and healthcare are helping us treat these incredible, 150 million year old animals—and what are we learning ab...
Journal Club: Assembling an Egg
March 02, 2021 11:00 - 23 minutes - 21.9 MBOn this episode of the Bio Eats World Journal Club, we explore the very compelling question of whether we can use our understanding of developmental biology to create oocytes (aka eggs or female gametes) from stem cells in the lab. If possible, this could be on par with the development of in vitro fertilization in terms of extending fertility. But creating an oocyte from a stem cell has some unique and high-stakes challenges. Host Lauren Richardson is joined by a16z general partner Vineeta A...
The Art and Science of Biology's Future
February 26, 2021 15:57 - 29 minutes - 27 MBIn this episode of Bio Eats World, we talk to Dr. Jennifer Doudna—winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for the co-discovery (with Emmanuelle Charpentier) of CRISPR-Cas9—about the art and science of biology. Huge breakthroughs such as Doudna's—which began with the identification of CRISPR in bacteria and was then built into a highly adaptable genome editing platform—are now fueling the evolution of the field. Fundamental knowledge that has largely come from curiosity-driven science has converged wit...