gene therapy

Is aging a disease that can be cured? Neil deGrasse Tyson and cohosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly discover the field of epigenetics, the Information Theory of Aging, and curing blindness for mice with Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, David Sinclair.

NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: 
https://startalkmedia.com/show/is-aging-a-disease-epigenetics-with-david-sinclair/

Thanks to our Patrons Jason L, Daniel Holzmann, Anne P Vance, Unknown, Myles G Blanton, Paul A. Straus, and Gregory Dees for supporting us this week.

Are rare diseases themselves rare? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice learn about the science of gene therapy and how it can treat and potentially cure rare diseases with Gaurav Shah, CEO, Rocket Pharma.

NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: 
https://startalkmedia.com/show/unlocking-gene-therapy-with-gaurav-shah/

Thanks to our Patrons Ernesto Rodriguez, James Lewandowski, Juan Cornejo, Shane, Hayden Christensen, jacob vine, and Calina Lungu for supporting us this week.

Could we eliminate the number one cause of death? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Chuck Nice and Gary O’Reilly go to medical school to learn about heart health, the impacts of COVID, and the cardiovascular disease epidemic with physician Dr. Lipi Roy.

NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: 
https://startalkmedia.com/show/beating-time-dodging-the-number-one-killer-with-dr-lipi-roy/

Thanks to our Patrons Kaleda Davis, Saúl Franco, Jake Egli, Josh Rolstad, Roxanne Landin, jamie brutnell, and Bailey Manasco for supporting us this week.

Photo Credit: Nephron, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 target=_blank>CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In this episode of the a16z Podcast, we take a deep dive into the world of drug development—specifically "undruggable drugs": a category of protein, protein family or even piece of RNA that’s so difficult to target that many researchers don’t even want to touch it. 

Jay Bradner, President of the Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research, shares with a16z General Partners Jorge Conde and Vijay Pande, and a16z's Hanne Tidnam, all the new tools, technologies and breakthroughs which are causing the science of therapeutics to explode in some of these areas where it's been incredibly difficult (even impossible) in the past. From molecular glues to cell and gene therapies, Bradner shares the behind-the-scenes science stories of what it really takes to make a new drug that shatters the category of an "undruggable" target. 

with @OzAzamTmunity1, @JorgeCondeBio, and @omnivorousread

CAR T therapy, the groundbreaking new medicines that uses engineered T-cells to attack cancer, has been so effective in childhood leukemias that we believe it may actually be a potential cure. But this isn't just one new medicine, it's an entirely new therapeutic tool—and a total paradigm shift from most traditional medicines we've seen before.

Tmunity CEO Usman "Oz" Azam was previously the head of Cell and Gene Therapies at Novartis, in many ways the first CAR T company and the team brought us blood cancer CAR T-cell therapy Kymriah—the first cell-based gene therapy to be approved in the US. In this conversation, Azam discusses with a16z's general partner Jorge Conde and Hanne Tidnam what CAR T therapy really is and how it all works. The conversation begins with the “patient and cell journey” of this treatment and how this medicine is developed, manufactured, delivered to patients; why exactly it's so different traditional medicines; what it will take to make these new medicines work on more kinds of cancer, scale to more patients, and cost less; and finally, what company building lessons can be learned from building the first CAR T company of its kind from the ground up.

This episode was recorded at the annual a16z Summit.