Genomics may seem like a field of study with minimal impact on our daily lives. But not for much longer — and certainly not to Dr. Deepak Srivastava, a cardiologist and president of the Gladstone Institutes. Rapid technological advances in this field are starting to surface across health care with significant and promising benefits. “The new world,” says Dr. Srivastava, “is going to be one where, as we identify the known genetic causes, we no longer have to accept that that mutation exists. We finally in medicine have the opportunity to think about curing disease.”

The nonprofit Gladstone Institutes focuses on four key disease areas – the heart, brain (including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s), viral (like HIV and Covid), as well as immunologic disorders. On this episode of Healthy Conversations, Dr. Srivastava tells about advances like reprogramming support cells in the pancreas into new insulin-producing cells for diabetes: “So we can take skin or blood cells from any adult and turn those into cells that behave just like a human embryonic stem cell, which has the property that it can become once again any of our over 200 different cell types in the body.” The future may indeed be here, sooner than you think.    

Learn more
 https://gladstone.org/