Finding Genius Podcast

Andrew Koutnik, biomedical researcher, discusses cancer cachexia, wasting in general, the impact of inflammation within the body, and various other issues. Koutnik is a seasoned researcher. His notable and extensive work studying nutrition and metabolism and their combined impact on health, disease, and even performance has generated much interest in the scientific medical community. He is actively involved in biomedical research with the Metabolic Medicine Lab at University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine. Koutnik provides an overview of cancer cachexia, which he describes as a multi-factorial, dynamic, systemic wasting syndrome. And surprisingly, Koutnik states that in spite of its long history, the condition currently has no standard of care. Cancer cachexia is often characterized by a loss of skeletal muscle mass, sometimes with fat loss, that cannot be completely reversed by conventional and standard nutritional support and can result in progressive and significant functional impairment. Koutnik explains anabolic signals and synthetic responses as well as inflammatory responses. As he states, inflammatory signals may be inhibiting the synthesis response in the muscle. Koutnik explains, by citing specific examples, the ways in which atrophy is initiated, and why it occurs. And with up to 20% of cancer patients dying of this disease, it's clear that advanced research is needed ongoing. The biomedical research expert discusses the process of fasting and how it affects the body. And he provides information on past research and recorded studies on ketone bodies. Koutnik explains why adipose tissue is not always used first as an energy source during fasting. He states that in a normal, healthy response to a fasting scenario or carbohydrate restriction, adipose tissue, over time, becomes a preferential fuel. He explains that while fat is a very important fuel that we also need to use intermediary metabolites. Simply defined, metabolites are the intermediate products of specific metabolic reactions that are catalyzed by select enzymes that naturally occur within the cells. Koutnik goes into detail on inflammation issues that relate to atrophy, as it is an underlying current in many of these cases though it may not always be rapid. He talks about his theories on how the body sees and understands subtle information it is receiving regarding atrophy issues. And ultimately, he states that from a physiological perspective the body will always do whatever it can to survive. Koutnik continues his discussion on ketones. He cites various studies that provided new and significant information on ketones and specifically, exogenous esters. He explains how antioxidant responses are related to ketone presence. He states that much of the work in this area has been implemented in rodent-based studies, and now the desire is to try to translate these studies to the human scenario, and more research is needed to understand the compatibility with previous studies.

In this informative podcast, biomedical research expert, Andrew Koutnik, discusses nutrition as it relates to type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Koutnik has dedicated his life to the study of the many biological factors that impact disease and their implications regarding treatment. His body of work has often focused on nutrition and metabolism as they relate to disease and general health. A significant amount of Koutnik's biomedical research has been conducted at the Metabolic Medicine Lab at the University of South Florida. Koutnik provides an overview of the differences between type 1 and type 2 diabetes. He states that type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease and the current thought is that an inappropriate immune response targets specific cells in the pancreas that produce and/or secrete insulin (beta cells). And because the immune system response has targeted them inappropriately, they are seen as foreign, thus the body may produce antibodies against them or attack them. There can sometimes be a rapid change and ultimately the body may no longer be able to manage glucose levels. Therefore insulin and glucose must be managed by the patient/doctor, as the body is negligent in its normal duties in this regard. Koutnik explains that type 2 diabetes is generally described as insulin resistance, where you have the ability to produce insulin but the body is resistant to the insulin that is present. Koutnik discusses the relative blood sugar levels in diabetics and various treatment protocols for both types of diabetes from the traditional to new emerging concepts. He details dietary issues for diabetics and how that relates to their insulin and treatment, with a special analysis of ketones and an explanation of ketoacidosis. Ketoacidosis is a complication of type 1 diabetes mellitus that can certainly be life threatening, a condition that results from dangerously high levels of ketones and blood sugar. Koutnik provides a granular overview of the many processes that the body goes through touching on details of elevated blood sugar, carbohydrates, molecules, proteins/amino acids, lipid molecules and more. Delving deeper into other related issues, Koutnik talks about the relationship between sleep and glucose control. He explains how stress, caffeine, time of day, etc. can influence insulin sensitivity. Koutnik details the many beneficial factors of regular exercise and how it directly impacts the effectiveness of insulin. However, he stresses that with type 1 diabetes there are numerous variables that influence insulin sensitivity. Additionally, the biomedical researcher provides an analysis of nutritional guidelines for diabetics. He talks about the effects of protein and explains the kinetics of protein. He expounds upon the benefits of a low carbohydrate diet and cites his own personal success after making the shift to low carb. He underscores the importance of glycemic management and its great impact on the quality of life. He talks about the positive feeling that someone can get when they finally feel that they are taking control of their diabetes through diet, and succeeding! And while taking certain foods, foods we might love, out of the diet completely can be difficult, ultimately the healthy feeling that you achieve is worth the sacrifice.

For nearly a decade now, Adrienne Scheck, Ph.D. has focused her research on the effect of ketones and the ketogenic diet on brain tumors. As the author of Cancer and the Ketogenic Diet, senior research scientist at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at Phoenix Children's Research Institute, research associate professor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, adjunct professor at Arizona State University, and associate investigator in the cancer biology program at the University of Arizona, she brings an impressive amount of experience and knowledge to the discussion today. Her research on the effect of ketones on cancerous tumors began in collaboration with Dr. John Roe, a clinician, scientist, and expert in the field who at the time had only applied the use to ketones to the treatment of epilepsy. When they studied the effects of adding ketones to an aggressive brain cancer cell line, the results were surprisingly positive: significant enhancement of the effectiveness of chemotherapy. This opened the door to many other questions yet to be investigated, such as the role of ketones as epigenetic modifiers, the confirmation of DNA within cells and how it dictates susceptibility to damage, whether or not cancer cells can use ketones as an energy source, phenotypic differences between different types of tumors, and the coming advances in technology that will lead to better data and analyses in this area. Press play for all the details and search for Adrienne Scheck online to stay up to date with her latest research.

Over the last 20 years, there have been about 150 failed attempts to get different Alzheimer's drugs on the market. Why? Sometimes it's because the drugs showed toxicity in clinical trials, and other times it's because study subjects simply weren't responding to the drugs. When the clinical target and endpoint of a clinical study is not met, the drug simply won't move forward. But what if there are unseen variables at play that are pointing to the inefficacy of otherwise efficacious drugs? What if drugs which actually do hold great potential to treat Alzheimer's are being rejected simply because the trials themselves aren't being run properly, or because the right patients aren't being enrolled? As the CEO and founder of Vivid Genomics, these are the kinds of questions Julie Collens and her team are investigating. "There are lots of reasons why drugs can fail aside from them not working," says Collens, as she explains how different stages and forms of Alzheimer's can affect how a patient responds to certain drugs, as well as cognitive impairment from vitamin B deficiency, vascular dementia, or having recently suffered a stroke. Their goal is to develop and implement genetic-based tests to identify forms of variation in the disease of Alzheimer's that are known to exist, and thereby help pharmaceutical companies run better clinical trials, perform better analyses, and get more drugs approved. Collens describes in detail the four prototypes Vivid Genomics has already developed, how they are utilizing information from genome-wide association studies in combination with the data they're collecting to identify predictive effects on disease, and the general challenges presented by the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer's disease. Learn more by visiting vividgenomics.com and reach out via email at julie@vividgenomics.com.

"Democratizing access to good design is absolutely core to our mission of helping people make the world more beautiful…there are millions and millions of people out there who would like to have better design in their environments, but they can't afford an interior designer, and for all of those people, Lexset will be a go-to," says Leslie Oliver Karpas, co-founder of Lexset AI, a company that has built and applied an AI visual recognition system from 3D models of objects to the world of interior design. The team at Lexset has created a synthetic data generation engine of about 80,000 different objects of furniture imaged from thousands of different angles and in different lighting conditions in order to maximize the system's ability to recognize those objects when presented with a photo or real-world space. The system is even able to distinguish between different styles of furniture (e.g. modernist vs. industrial) and materials (e.g. wood, stone, fabric). One of the use cases of this technology is a plug-in for furniture company websites through which images of what you'd like a space in your home to look like could be uploaded, scanned by Lexset AI, and compared to the products offered by that furniture company. Karpas offers an exciting and intriguing glimpse into what the future of interior design might look like, explaining in depth how their technology works, the positive effect of good design on people's well-being, the objective versus subjective aspects of interior design, and use cases unrelated to interior design involving robotics. Tune in for all the details and visit https://www.lexset.ai/ to learn more.

Erica Ramos is the director and head of clinical and product development at Geisinger, an innovative health service organization covering about 1.5 million patients throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and encompassing 13 hospital campuses, two research centers, and the Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine. Ramos joins the podcast to discuss the MyCode program, a research effort that began as a Geisinger biobank in 2007 and has since become a collaboration with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals to perform whole exome sequencing on the samples collected. They very quickly realized the potential impact of the genomic information they were gathering—information with immediate medical relevancy, such as that related to hereditary breast cancer, hereditary colon cancer, irregular heart conditions, and familial high cholesterol. As a result, the MyCode protocol was changed in 2015 to include a return of results to patient participants for a defined set of conditions. Of the 92,000 samples they've sequenced, the team at MyCode has returned about 1,050 results to participants. Today, they are looking at how people respond to the information they receive, how the information is delivered, how chatbots could be used in the delivery of results to patients, and how to make genetics and genomics more accessible by primary care physicians. To hear the full conversation and learn what's on the horizon, tune in and visit geisinger.org/precision-health/mycode.

You probably didn't realize that you're likely wearing a material that can serve as the foundation of biomaterials used for a variety of functions, including drug delivery, tissue regeneration, and in vitro disease modelling. That's right, Jeannine Coburn, PhD is an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute who is altering silk fibroin—a material found in most articles of clothing—to create unique properties that could have a number of biomedical applications. In addition to silk fibroin, Dr. Coburn and her team are working with chondroitin sulfate and bacteria and plant-derived cellulose for testing methods of tissue regeneration and studying disease processes that occur in the body. One of the main focuses of Dr. Coburn's lab is on intratumoral drug delivery—the delivery of drugs locally inside cancerous tumors rather than systemically as conventionally done today. In order to do this, they are considering different drug delivery modifications that will allow the drugs to act more or less with the material in which they are enclosed, thereby allowing for control over the rate at which the drugs are released into tumors. In this way, the drug delivery system would mimic that of conventional practices while minimizing the many negative effects of chemotherapy on the body's organs. Dr. Coburn discusses the main challenge of this pursuit—namely the problem of rejection by the body. In other words, how can they prevent the body from encapsulating and attacking the drug that it identifies as a foreign body? Answering this question leads to an informative and intriguing conversation about the body's mechanism of immune response, inflammatory responses, and how cancer cells shut off their immune recognition and how that can be modelled in vitro for the study of immunotherapy drugs used to treat cancer. Interested in learning more? Tune in for the full conversation and don't hesitate to contact Dr. Coburn directly by email at jmcoburn@wpi.edu.

It might not be the first thing you associate with pulmonology, but the study of the lungs actually has quite a bit to do with the study of sleep. Dr. Seema Khosla didn't really make this association either until she slowly began learning about the importance of sleep and the critical role it plays in our health. "It was something that I never really thought about when I was a resident," she recalls, mentioning a time when she thought going days without sleep and pushing through it was more like wearing a badge of honor than engaging in a dangerous and detrimental way of living. She now serves as the medical director of the North Dakota Center for Sleep, where she sees patients who are suffering from a variety of sleep conditions ranging from insomnia, to narcolepsy, to sleep apnea, to REM sleep behavior disorder—a disorder that causes people to act out their dreams. She discusses pulmonary-related sleep issues, including poorly-controlled asthma, emphysema, and other chronic medical conditions that can cause insomnia and fragmented sleep. She provides a glimpse into the fascinating world of sleep studies, where real-time changes in oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the blood are correlated with real-time brain wave changes, indicating disruption from certain sleep stages. Dr. Khosla also touches more broadly on how people's attitude toward sleep seems to be changing for the better, effective options for the treatment of sleep apnea that do not involve CPAP machines, and why so many people are initially resistant to the idea of seeking help from sleep doctors. Lastly, she discusses her takeaway from a recent conversation she had with a Fitbit representative regarding plans to further implement sleep tracking technology in their products. Tune in for all the details and get in contact by calling 701-356-3000

"Research has shown that traditional approaches in security just aren't working," says Dan Schoenbaum, citing large security breaches with British Airways and Target as just a couple of examples. Despite having large, sophisticated security programs, many companies simply aren't able to prevent people from stealing their data or leveraging their websites and accessing customers' credit card information. It's an approach that's been taken for the past 25 years, and according to Schoenbaum, it's the wrong one. When Schoenbaum discovered Risk IQ, he discovered an entirely different approach to the problem of internet security—one that focuses on what's outside of the firewall, where the majority of attacks originate. "The heart and core of what we do is data science," he explains. The team at Risk IQ spends their days reviewing billions of web pages, social media platforms, and mobile applications, scanning for the illegitimate ones among the legitimate. As the COO and President of Risk IQ, Schoenbaum joins the podcast to discuss the details of all this and more, including the path that led him to Risk IQ, the ins and outs of what they offer, the changing landscape of cyber security and cyber-attacks, and what's to come. Press play to hear the full conversation and visit https://www.riskiq.com/ to learn more.

Dr. Wei-Shin Lai, family physician, and husband Jason Wolfe, a video game developer, discuss their interesting and organic journey as sleep improvement entrepreneurs born out of necessity. They detail the process of how their company, SleepPhones (sleepphones.com) came to be, and discuss the many benefits of their soft, sleeping aid. Confronting her own problem of getting to sleep efficiently, especially after late night work, Dr. Lai explains how she sought a better solution. She often used meditative music for relaxation but found that headphones were clumsy and awkward, and ear buds were just plain uncomfortable. As necessity is the mother of invention, Dr. Lai set out to create her own. After creating the first successful working prototype of her soft, sleeping aid, she enlisted the partnership of her husband as they soldered and sewed the first 500 units right on their kitchen table. And spreading her good fortune, Dr. Lai began to provide this sleeping solution to many of her patients who suffered from bad sleep or insomnia and were regularly taking sleeping pills to assist them with sleep. Lai and Wolfe discuss the technology behind their product. And after eleven years in business, they have continued to advance and improve their product. As they state, many people find that the SleepPhones headband is more comfortable than competitors' products, even the much bigger companies with large revenue. One of the additional benefits to their product is that it is designed to sit over the ear making them supremely comfortable even for those who sleep on their side. Their super soft headband is made of their specialized SheepCloud™ fabrics, and contains very thin, padded removable speakers in which users can play any auditory preference, from music, to audiobooks, meditations, white noise, or anything else that an individual finds relaxing and helps them to fall asleep. Dr. Lai talks about the various testimonials they have received from people who have now been able to end their use of sleeping pills. People have stated that the sleeping headphones have even saved marriages, helping people get their sleep when sharing beds with partners who snore, etc. Wolfe discusses some of the content providers they have worked with, and he hints about the new initiative they have developed internally that utilizes AI and machine learning to discover what sound technologies are the most effective for various applications. And Lai and Wolfe discuss the many fabrics that they offer in their products, that vary for user preferences, environments, and differing climates.