Season 2, Episode 6: Big Data, AI, and Cancer Research
As our universe of knowledge expands, sometimes incrementally and more often, exponentially, its new dimensions create new challenges. The more we know, the better our tools are, the more choices we have. And that's great, but it's hard to distill mountains of patient data, clinical trials, therapies, discoveries, and a boatload of externalities.
Duration: 27:51 Publish Date: 05/17/2023
Season 2, Episode 5: With a Little Help From My Friends: Combination Immunotherapy
If there is such a thing as a holy grail in cancer research, a secret spell or golden ring that can ward off any and all forms of the disease, it probably lives somewhere in the realm of immunotherapy.
Duration: 32:04 Publish Date: 05/12/2023
Season 2, Episode 4: Making it Personal: Targeted Cancer Therapies
By the early 2000s, researchers at Dana-Farber and elsewhere knew that a certain protein appeared in many tumors taken from lung cancer patients. Based on that data, doctors started treating those patients with a drug that inhibited that protein.
Duration: 30:24 Publish Date: 04/05/2023
Season 2, Episode 3: Stop the Division: CDK-4/6 Inhibitors and the Cell Cycle
Cancer is often a problem of cell division; cancer cells keep doubling and doubling, faster and faster.
Duration: 26:23 Publish Date: 04/05/2023
Season 2, Episode 2: Thalidomide and its Second Act in Multiple Myeloma
Momentum isn't always one way. And it's not always constant. Sometimes it shoves you sideways, sometimes it stops you in your tracks. And sometimes only sometimes, it drives you to write one of the most astonishing second acts in all of medicine. That's the story of thalidomide.
Duration: 28:27 Publish Date: 02/23/2023
Season 2, Episode 1: BCL-2 Inhibitors: Driving Cells to Destruction
The story begins decades ago with a man named Stanley Korsmeyer, who led the molecular oncology program at Dana-Farber from 1998 until his death in 2005. He discovered that B cell cancers like CLL over-produced a protein called Bcl-2, and interfered with apoptosis, or programmed cell death. But how that went from an interesting discovery to a game-
Duration: 30:12 Publish Date: 02/08/2023
Season 1, Episode 6: Dana-Farber in the Time of COVID
A beauty… that in some cases becomes tragic. It's not the way most people would describe a virus. In the simplest of terms, a virus is a snippet of genetic code. It can't reproduce on its own. In order to replicate, it needs to infect and hijack a living cell.
Duration: 29:37 Publish Date: 10/15/2021
Season 1, Episode 5: Turning Science Fiction into Fact
It's always fun to think about the future. Flying cars. Cities in the clouds. Colonies on Venus and Mars. OK, we didn't end up living like the Jetsons.
Duration: 30:15 Publish Date: 09/29/2021
Season 1, Episode 4: The Blueprints of Your Cells
There are approximately 20,000 genes in the human genome. 20,000 packets that house the blueprints for every human cell. And every cell contains a complete copy of that genome.
Duration: 30:23 Publish Date: 09/14/2021
Season 1, Episode 3: A Culture of Mentorship
What do cancer researchers and 15th century Florentine masters have in common? For one, a culture of mentorship. Both come of age in a culture where knowledge is transmitted from master to pupil. In this episode, we take a closer look at that culture and the crucial role mentorship plays at Dana-Farber, with Nobel laureate Dr. William Kaelin.
Duration: 30:58 Publish Date: 09/14/2021
Season 1, Episode 2: Behind the Science of the 2019 Nobel Prize
It’s hard to overstate just how important oxygen is to life on earth. Almost every living thing on the planet needs it to convert fuel into energy.
Duration: 28:32 Publish Date: 08/13/2021
Season 1, Episode 1: The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing
The parable of the wolf in sheep’s clothing tale reminds us that things aren’t always as they seem, that bad guys can dress up as good guys to do their bad guy things.
Duration: 32:33 Publish Date: 08/13/2021