Cancer recurrence is often deadlier than the original disease, especially when it spreads undetected. Yet for survivors, post-treatment monitoring can be a financial, emotional and mental burden—relying on costly, invasive tests with no guarantees. 

But what if detecting cancer was as simple as a blood test? 

In this episode, Dr Debleena Ray, the founder of the biotech startup 2Strands Biosciences and a former Duke-NUS post-doctoral fellow, shares how she’s bridging research and entrepreneurship to develop cutting-edge, blood-based tests that will revolutionise cancer monitoring.   

What’s inside this episode: 

• The story behind 2Strands Biosciences and Ray’s vision for the future of cancer detection 
• How her love for science began—and what fuels her passion 
• The leap from academia to entrepreneurship—and the lessons learned 
• Her advice for aspiring scientist-entrepreneurs looking to make an impact 

Episode credits: 

Hosted by: Brandon Raeburn, Media & Content Specialist 

Produced by: Sean Firoz, Helmy bin Sa’at and Nicole Lim 

To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In Episode 12 of MEDICUS – the podcast, we sit down with immunologist Rukie de Alwis from Duke-NUS’ Centre for Outbreak Preparedness, and virologist Erik Karlsson from the Institute Pasteur in Cambodia, to discuss the threat of bird flu, in particular H5N1, to Southeast Asia.

While many headlines talk about the outbreak of H5N1 in cows, a variant of the virus has been circulating in Southeast Asia for quite some time. That virus may not infect cows, but it has on occasion jumped into humans with devastating effects. And what might happen if the two meet? is anyone’s guess.

We discuss how H5N1 is impacting countries in Southeast Asia, why we need to keep an eye on the variant spreading in cows and what is being done—and what should be done—to tackle pandemic influenzas like H5N1. And amid all the talk about influenza, we also find out what keeps our guests awake at night.

For more stories from Duke-NUS, why not check out our magazine, MEDICUS: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

This show was produced by Norfaezah Abdullah, Senior executive, and Nicole Lim, Senior editor at Duke-NUS.

To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In Episode 11 of MEDICUS – the podcast, we sit down with Devanand Anantham, who leads the new SingHealth Duke-NUS Medical Humanities Institute, to take stock of how far medicine has come, the potential of AI and why it is high time we reframe our conversations about health. 

Take for example Mrs Tan. The retiree likes nothing more than to spend hours tending to her garden, but recently her knee has been giving her a lot of pain, robbing her of the joy and serenity she enjoyed so much while gardening. To fix her knee pain, a knee replacement surgery is the best intervention. It will alleviate the pain. But will it give her the range of motion required to squat comfortably as she pulls out weeds and turns the soil?

To connect holistically with people about their wellbeing means to think about more than  just their physical health, Anantham argues. And that's where our humanity comes in, where we draw on our shared understanding of the world and what is important to us. No multiple choice questionnaire analysed by AI can—at this point—divine what we truly want as most of the time what we want is pain and discomfort alleviated, but what we need is to be able to bend our knees fully and enjoy the time we have.

Show notes:

Music from: Jay Varton (via iStock.com Epidemic Sound library)

Produced by: Nicole Lim, Senior editor at Duke-NUS

For more stories in this issue of MEDICUS, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus/2024-issue-2  

To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In Episode 10 of MEDICUS – the podcast, we went on a search for a scientist who has woven fitness into his work and family life routine so well that it looks effortless to find out how he does it. With January over, we’re already one month into the New Year, so the pressure to maintain any new or continuing fitness commitment is steadily growing. So, we sat down with Sven Petersen, a principal research scientist with the Laboratory for Translational and Molecular Imaging at Duke-NUS, who talked about his relationship with exercise and how it saved him during one of his darkest times.

He also tells us how having a young family has helped him gain a more flexible view of his priorities—without foregoing his much-needed workout fix—and just before we let him go, we put this volunteer fitness coach on the spot with a few quick-fire questions to help inspire anyone along their fitness journey. Spoiler alert: running comes up more than once! 

Show notes:

Music from: Bird Creek (via YouTube Studio Audio Library)

Produced by: Nicole Lim, Senior editor at Duke-NUS

For more stories in this issue of MEDICUS, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus/2024-issue1 

To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In Episode 9 of MEDICUS – the podcast, we’re talking to two scientists about what makes for a perfect collaboration. In modern translational science, new breakthroughs more often that are the product of a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration. And these collaborations are at their most successful when it is not just the expertise that is complementary but when the people within the team gel well. So, in this episode, two researchers who worked on a project that could make a significant impact on the lives of patients with chronic myeloid leukaemia, tell us how in this project, everything—even a pandemic lockdown—helped turn this into the perfect collaboration.

[to insert player]

Sharing their story are:

·       Dr Vaidehi Krishnan, a principal research scientist with Duke-NUS Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Programme and member of the Ong Sin Tiong laboratory focusing on understanding the basic pathophysiology of human malignancies in order to improve the management and treatment of patients with cancer; and 

·       Dr Florian Schmidt, then a bioinformatician and post-doctoral fellow with the Laboratory of Systems Biology and Data Analytics at the Genome Institute of Singapore, and now a senior computational biologist at ImmunoScape

Show notes:

Music from: Silent Partner (via YouTube Studio Audio Library)

Produced by: Nicole Lim, Senior Editor

For more stories in this issue of MEDICUS, and others, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In the latest episode of MEDICUS – the Podcast, three scientists talk about what art brings to their lives, how the two interplay for them, and whether they really are two sides of the same coin.

In the history of science, Leonardo da Vinci stands out as a giant who mastered both art and science. But there are many more scientists—past and present—who draw on the two, seemingly unrelated, disciplines to help them create something new or express their understanding of the world around us. Albert Einstein painted. Biochemist Linda Long translates protein structures into music. Rock band Queen's guitarist Brian May is a published astrophysicist, while astrophysicist Fiorella Terenzi is best known for converting recordings of radio waves from distant galaxies into music.

Joining us for this jamming session on music, art and science are:

• Associate Professor Liu Nan from the Centre for Quantitative Medicine and the Health Services and Systems Research Programme, who gleans inspiration from scenes in Singapore, and his favourite painting is a bird’s eye view of the Singapore harbour
• Professor Thomas Coffman, Dean of Duke-NUS and Blast Crisis band member, who eventually chose a career in science over music but enjoys the very different dynamics of the two
• Ms Madeline Kwek, a research assistant from Professor Wang Linfa’s lab, who thrives on collaborating whether that’s with colleagues in the lab and fellow musicians in creating new rhythms and sounds 

Show credits:

Music by: 

·       Madeline Kwek on the asalato

·       Excerpts of Autocool written and performed by Blast Crisis // Studio recording – Durham, North Carolina

Produced by:

·       Nicole Lim, Senior Editor

To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In this episode of MEDICUS – the Podcast, we meet two scientists to go fishing. But instead of heading out to sea to cast their lines, their “ocean” is a small tube in which they fish for specific genetic sequences that mark the ends of our chromosomes. Much like the plastic caps at the end of shoelaces, the sequences they hunt for, called telomeres, make sure that our genetic assembly instructions don’t unravel as our cells replicate.

Today, we know that these caps not only hold us together at the genetic seams, but that they erode with time and therefore play a vital role in ageing—their length is an indication of how many times our cells have replicated, and by extension how old we are biologically. But even though we’ve known about these caps for forty years, using them to help us live longer or at least healthier for longer has been an elusive goal.

Joining us on the show to talk about telomeres and their own latest research are:

•  Li Shang, an associate professor with the Cancer and Stem Cell Biology Programme at Duke-NUS; and
• Javier Koh, a Duke-NUS PhD graduate and research fellow in Li’s lab

To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

As part of this issue of MEDICUS’ wider focus on how the environment affects health, the MEDICUS team is taking a deeper look into what’s going on when the body perceives things from the environment as a threat. We’re, of course, talking about allergies. And joining us on this episode are:

• Our special, preteen guest co-host Juno Young, who had a million questions about allergies
• And immunologist Ashley St John, an associate professor at Duke-NUS who leads the laboratory of immunity and immune pathology

 This episode was produced by Nicole Lim, senior editor at Duke-NUS for MEDICUS.

To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

“Only sleep when dead.” That’s the rationale that tribes of people, from party animals to early morning exercise devotees, have used to explain their sleep habits. But we may be putting more at stake than we realise when we regularly cut our Zs short because sleep is not just a black hole of downtime. Most adults need about seven to nine hours of sleep a night for optimal performance and health—six if you are among those who really don’t need much shut eye. 

So, in this episode of MEDICUS – the Podcast, we explore the science behind good sleep, what goes on when we are sleeping and the hidden cost of cutting corners. 

 We also get some handy tips and strategies to help improve our sleep routine and deal with jetlag. 

 We’re discussing all this with:

 -        Associate Professor Joshua Gooley, who leads the chronobiology and sleep lab at Duke-NUS

-        Ms Hana Yabuki, a research assistant in Gooley’s lab who sometimes sacrifices her sleep to study the state we spend a third of our lives in

Liked this episode? Check out our other ones, in which we explore topics including how to die a good death, what mosquitoes have to teach us when it comes to finding effective vaccines and treatments for diseases like dengue and Zika or how we can stay a step ahead of the next deadly virus outbreak. And so much more!

To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In this episode, we venture into a veritable mosquito haven—the Duke-NUS insectary, where healthy mosquitoes are grown to help researchers shed light on how new vaccines and even treatments impact the dengue virus when the virus is inside the mosquito. 

We also find out which common insect repellents work and which ones will leave you scratching countless bites.

Joining us in this episode:

-        Dr Milly Choy, Senior Research Fellow, Duke-NUS Emerging Infectious Diseases Programme and head of the insectary core facility at Duke-NUS

-        Ms Menchie Manuel, Laboratory Technologist at the insectary at Duke-NUS

To never miss another podcast, subscribe MEDICUS: https://www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus/subscribe 

To listen to all our previous episodes, go to: https://medicus.buzzsprout.com 

 And to read about what else the folks at Duke-NUS are up to, go to: https://www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In this episode of MEDICUS - the Podcast, we talk about the conversation that we dread having the most, one of society’s biggest taboos: death.

Joining us on this episode are:

Professor Eric Finkelstein, the executive director of the Lien Centre for Palliative Care at Duke-NUS. The Centre’s twin mission focuses on research and education to improve end-of-life care. Beyond publishing research papers on end-of-life care, the Centre’s research faculty ensure that the findings are communicated to the wider community. They also test interventions from medical decision aids to health education strategies so that they can quickly become common practice.

At the same time, the education team, led by Dr Alethea Yee, provides end-of-life care education to a range of health professionals, from pharmacists and nurses to social workers, who are often the ones in touch with those who need palliative care. The Centre aims to train as many individuals as possible to ensure that every patient has access to end-of-life care.

Clinical Professor Lalit Krishna, a senior consultant with the Division of Supportive and Palliative Care at the National Cancer Centre Singapore. He is also a clinical professor at Duke-NUS and teaches medical students how to have difficult conversations. His office is decorated by T-Rex and Raptor, his two boys, and acts as a charging station that empowers him to be there for his patients at their most vulnerable moments.

As well as Duke-NUS medical students, Ms Cheong Jie Qi, Mr Kok Chun Yen and Ms Lim Chu Hsien.

The music in this episode is "Anastasia" (composed by Ailbhe McDonagh for grade-3-level piano) as performed by Juno Young.

Poetry featured in this episode is "Gone from my Sight" by Henry van Dyke and "First Fig" by Edna St Vincent Millay, recited by Juno and Finn Young.

To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

Scientists from Duke-NUS and the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID) found that 2003 SARS survivors who have been vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine produced highly potent functional antibodies that are capable of neutralising not only all known SARS-CoV-2.

To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus

In this episode of MEDICUS – the Podcast, we hear from three intrepid virus hunters from Duke-NUS Medical School who travel around the region to study what viruses lurk in bats and small mammals and could just possibly become the next pandemic.  You can also read more about their work in MEDICUS 2021 Issue 4.

Subscribe to MEDICUS to never miss another podcast and read our award-winning stories at www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus   

Credits:
Additional sounds from: Jim Rogalski https://www.jimrogalski.com/
Music from: Blue Dot Sessions (Track: Fifteenth Street) https://app.sessions.blue/ 
Cover photo courtesy of: Sophie Borthwick

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To discover more scientific insights and personal stories from Singapore with impact on the world, go to: www.duke-nus.edu.sg/medicus