Amazing Things Podcast

Precision medicine will be available to everyone because of Tissue Chips. Hear the fascinating story of the most important technology you have never heard of before. In this episode of the Amazing Things Podcast, brought to you by United For Medical Research, we take you inside the Tissue Chip program - an NCATS collaboration with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and FDA to support the development of bioengineered devices to improve the process of predicting whether drugs will be safe or toxic in humans. 

The Ebola virus is a terrifying, rapidly fatal and until just recently untreatable disease with a mortality rate between 25% and 90%. In this episode of the Amazing Things Podcast, we take you inside the scientific discovery and the public-private partnership that turned the tide on Ebola and helped prepare America for the novel coronavirus. Featuring Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Neil Stahl, Ph.D. of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

The importance of strong, sustainable annual funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is known to states with major biomedical R&D hubs like California, Massachusetts, North Carolina and Texas. In these states there is a clear link between the NIH-funded research that occurs there and the state’s economy and job creation. But what about states where such a link might be less apparent? What is the impact in states that tend to be more rural than urban and that aren’t among the top recipients of NIH research funding?

A discussion with National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins covering the new All of Us Research program, NIH’s work to combat the opioid epidemic, and advances like gene editing and cancer immunotherapy that are changing how we treat disease.

Amazing Things Podcast: Newsmaker Edition. U.S. Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri is responsible for delivery four consecutive years of increased federal funding for biomedical research to the National Institutes of Health. Sen. Blunt, Chairman of the Senate Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee, speaks candidly to Amazing Things about the promise of precision medicine and the bipartisan support behind funding America's investment in biomedical research.

Amazing Things Podcast: Newsmaker Edition.Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole is a dedicated leader in the fight in Washington D.C. for sustained increases in federal funding for biomedical research through the National Institutes of Health. U.S. Rep. Cole, Chairman of the House Labor-HHS Appropriations Subcommittee, speaks candidly to Amazing Things about the promise of medical innovation, the scourge of disease and the critical importance of America's investment in biomedical research.

Hear the story of the first gene therapy approved in the United States to target a disease caused by mutations in a specific gene. In this case, the RPE65 gene, which affects vision. For Dr. Jean Bennett, the physician scientist behind this medical breakthrough, being able to change the prognosis for people who are blind or losing their vision — and to see the profound impact that this has on their life — has been a career well spent.

A special live episode of UMR's Amazing Things Podcast broadcast from Capitol Hill in Washington D.C., on Wednesday, November 15, 2017. Host Adam Belmar is joined by four NIH-funded scientists: Dr. Ed Damiano of Boston University, Dr. Natalia Trayanova of Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Vadim Backman of Northwestern University and Dr. Li-Heui Tsai of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The program includes remarks from U.S. Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan and U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho.

The statistics on Alzheimer’s disease are daunting. More than five million Americans are living with the disease and by 2050 this number could be as high as 16 million. Dr. Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, and her team of researchers have discovered that LED lights, flickering at a specific frequency, substantially reduce the beta amyloid plaques seen in Alzheimer’s disease, in the visual cortex of mice. Their work was published in the journal Nature in December 2016. If this finding bears out in humans, it is a game-changer.

More than 350,000 people each year will experience an out of hospital cardiac arrest. Cardiac arrest is an extremely dangerous circumstance that requires immediate treatment. In cardiac arrest, death results when the heart suddenly stops working properly. This may be caused by abnormal, or irregular, heart rhythms (called arrhythmias). Since prior heart attack, or myocardia infarction, is a major risk factor for arrhythmia, these patients are prime candidates for surgically implanted defibrillators, which monitor heart rhythm and deliver an electric shock if needed to keep the heart beating regularly.The current tools for assessing whether a patient is likely to actually suffer an arrhythmia and therefore bene t most from the defibrillator (which carries its own risks) are not highly predictive. Dr. Natalia Trayanova, the Murray B. Sachs Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, and a team of researchers are working to change this. They have developed a computational model for predicting which heart patients are at greatest risk for arrhythmia. Called VARP, for virtual arrhythmia risk predictor, Dr. Trayanova’s virtual heart uses MRI and other patient-specific cardiac data to create a personalized geometrical model of the heart. The model incorporates not just the wall of the heart, but also all the structural remodeling that occurs after a heart attack. That computer model, coupled with mathematical equations that express the dynamics of the human cells of the heart, is then stressed in a variety of different ways and locations to see if a patient is at risk for sudden cardiac death due to arrhythmia.

More than 460,000 Americans have end stage renal disease. While transplant of a human kidney is the best treatment for kidney failure, there simply aren’t enough donor kidneys to go around, leaving the vast majority of these patients tied to dialysis machines for the rest of their lives.Every day 13 people die waiting for a kidney. Vanderbilt University Medical Center nephrologist and associate professor of medicine Dr. William H. Fissell IV and his colleague Dr. Shuvo Roy at the University of California, San Francisco have spent the better part of two decades working on a technology solution to this problem of supply and demand. And now, in 2016, they are closing in on what he calls the “Holy Grail” for people with kidney disease: An implantable artificial kidney.

Thousands of diseases are rooted in our genes, occurring when something goes wrong during cell multiplication and causes a mutation in the gene’s DNA sequence. This is why researchers the world over heralded the 2012 revelation of the CRISPR-Cas9 system, a groundbreaking tool for editing faulty genes. CRISPR-Cas9 allows scientists with relative ease and precision to snip out a segment of mutated or damaged DNA, correcting genes that are disease-causing and opening the door to potential treatments for diseases where there currently are none. Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is one of those diseases, and Dr. Amy Wagers of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute is leading an effort to use edited stem cells to treat Duchenne.

What if you could detect cancer at its earliest stages – before there are any symptoms that would send you to a doctor? What if such a diagnostic tool existed and it was low-cost, minimally invasive and easy to use? The impact would be huge.Northwestern University professor of bioengineering and biophotonics Vadim Backman is closing in on this goal. By the end of 2017 he expects that the first of a series of cancer pre-screening tests will be available for use by physicians.

For the 1.25 million American adults and children with type 1 diabetes, managing blood-sugar levels is a 24/7 affair that involves sticking their fingers many times a day and either manually injecting insulin as needed or wearing an insulin pump.Blood glucose management is an inexact science, with levels too high or too low having dangerous consequences. Even a small overdose of insulin can be deadly. Boston University Professor Ed Damiano’s involvement with type 1 diabetes began in May 2000 on a highly personal note when his son David was diagnosed at just 11-months old.

In 2016, nearly 1.7 million people in the United States alone will be diagnosed with cancer. For many of these people, treatment will involve surgery to remove the cancer.However, because it’s very difficult for the naked eye to distinguish between normal tissue and cancerous tissue, standard protocol requires doctors to remove the tumor as well as some surrounding tissue. If this tissue is found to contain cancer cells, which can happen in as high as 40 percent of cases, the patient often faces a second round of surgery. Samuel Achilefu and his research team at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a simple, but powerful solution that might significantly improve these odds. Their cancer goggles, used with a special imaging dye also developed by Achilefu, illuminate cancer cells and it easier for surgeons to remove all of the cancer the first time around.

America’s investment in medical research through the National Institutes of Health is making amazing things possible, from the development of the first universal early cancer screening test to the creation of a bio-artificial kidney, a bionic pancreas, and a system to allow surgeons to see cancerous tissue in real time during surgery. These and more of the latest advancements in medical science are the products of intense long-term research and development. These innovations represent the life’s work of the world’s keenest scientific minds. And, the critical element shared by all of them: the robust and sustained funding from the NIH. Subscribe to the Amazing Things Podcast, and join us on an in-depth exploration of the research-driven medical discoveries poised to change the world.