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Afternoon Pint
Immunologist Jeanette Boudreau Shares How Their Lab Fights Cancer Back
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Cancer research can feel like a distant world of microscopes and jargon, but the stakes are painfully everyday: can we help people live longer, feel better, and suffer less while they’re in treatment? We’re joined by Halifax-based immunology PhD Jeanette Boudreau from Dalhousie University to unpack what’s changing right now in cancer immunotherapy, especially in blood cancers, and why “hope” is starting to look a lot like hard evidence.
We talk about the invisible costs of cancer care in Canada, from travel and missed work to the way treatment can take over family life. Jeanette explains why quality of life needs to sit beside overall survival when we judge success, and how patient partners are pushing labs to solve real problems instead of chasing shiny headlines. Then we get into the science: how cancer is a rogue version of our own cells, why that makes it hard for the immune system to spot, and how therapies like CAR T cell treatment can re-arm immune cells to hunt cancer for years.
From there, we zoom out to the future: building advanced therapies closer to home with new cell-processing tech, using AI and data science for precision medicine, and creating tumour “avatars” to test options before exposing a patient to toxic side effects. We also tackle prevention and risk, including smoking, UV, alcohol, and radon exposure, plus why diverse blood donation matters for biobanks, transplant matching, and cancer research that works for everybody.
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Meet The Immunotherapy Researcher
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_00Chairs. Chairs. Welcome to the afternoon pine. I'm Mike Dovin. I am Matt Conrad. And who's with us today? Uh my name is Jeanette Boudreau. Thanks for having me. Jeanette, welcome to the show. Doctor. So you're a blood doctor? Is that a blood doctor? Is that how you say it? It sounds like you're making your vampire.
SPEAKER_03So a blood doctor is a real thing, but I'm not a blood doctor. Oh. I'm an immunogy doctor.
SPEAKER_00Oh, sorry.
SPEAKER_03And more specifically, now that's all right. I have a doctorate. I am not a medical doctor.
SPEAKER_00Not a medical doctor.
SPEAKER_03But PhD is the original doctor. The medical doctor stole that from us.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Cool.
SPEAKER_03So so what do you do? So I run a research lab at Dalhousie and I run Cancer Research Institute across Atlantic Canada, where we knit together all the research expertise we have in cancer across the Atlantic provinces. But more specifically in my lab, we're trying to figure out ways to leverage people's immune systems as therapy for cancer. And where that works really well is actually in blood cancer. So I'm sort of a blood doctor by default because it seems to be where things are working.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So no, yeah, you focus on like immunotherapy, natural killer, NK cells, ovarian cancer, precision medicine. Like it's a pretty wide breadth of what you do in this lab and using AI and data science to improve cancer treatment. Your lab is working towards less toxic, more personalized cancer therapies that can realistically function within Canada's public health care system. Is that an accurate, an accurate description? That sounds pretty good, but you forgot the pancreatic cancer part. Sorry.
SPEAKER_01I did my absolute don't forget those guys. Those guys need it. Shout out to pancreasists. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I actually got to go and visit the lab. Cool. And it felt like something out of a movie. Yeah. It was pretty crazy. In fact, we actually kind of well, I mean, like, it looks like every movie lab, like every like scientific movie lab that you've ever seen in a movie. And we even joked on the tour that's like, what villain's origin story will start here because it looks like something like that. In a blood lab, a lot of them. The Morpheus movie took place in a blood lab. Like I'm sh the the Hulk will probably start there. Like I who knows, right?
SPEAKER_03Like Spider-Man and all the villains have PhDs. Dr. Octavius, yeah, exactly. Drives you nuts. But the difference is we turn the lights on, right? If you watch CSI and stuff, it's always blue light in there.
SPEAKER_01That's right. They always got the light. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yes, yeah, it is pretty it's bright in there. So yeah, I got to look at like some cancer cells and stuff like that. It was under a microscope, it was pretty awesome. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the thing, you know honestly, out of all the cool things that happened in that lab, the thing that stuck out the most when I when I left was the enthusiasm of everybody.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I got a great team.
SPEAKER_01It's insane that you know these folks like you you think like, okay, I'm working with cancer and trying to fight cancer, trying to come up with cures to cancer and all this stuff. You think like that could be a little bit like in some days not super happy days, but the team was like very happy to have us there and so enthusiastic about talking about what they're doing. It's awesome. Like, really, that's the thing that left that I left with the best. Like they that stuck with me.
SPEAKER_03Oh, that's awesome because it's actually it's when when people come to visit that we get charged up too, right? Because you can get stuck in the day-to-day. Yeah, you know, somebody recently described it as just the the slow and stubborn work of getting the work done, right? It's it's not we don't have these breakthroughs, nobody's yelling Eureka and running around the lab or anything like this. But when we have people coming in and we're telling them those stories, we start to kind of understand like we actually are making a difference, right? And and even if that difference is just hope right now, we're hoping to turn that hope into something real. And I think we are, yeah. Which is I mean, that is exciting. And yeah, cancer sucks. Cancer absolutely sucks.
SPEAKER_00I'm sure almost everybody listening has had somebody, you know, affected by cancer, either themselves or somebody else.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
The Hidden Toll Of Cancer Care
SPEAKER_00You know, and there's and like I mean, billions spent on on cancer, right? Most most of us still don't even understand really what cancer is. Right. Like I think on a high level, we just get it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and I think we don't always understand that you know somebody's diagnosed with cancer and they go through treatment, but how intense and terrible that actually is, right? How long the chemotherapy goes on, how toxic it is, both you know, physically toxic, but also financially toxic and toxic to your relationships and your work and your ambition and your energy, right? Like you have to be able to do better.
SPEAKER_00Did you lose anyone first hand to cancer like you young in life? Is that some way, maybe some way inspired this?
SPEAKER_03Or you know what? I think everybody has, but I don't have one of those origin stories of you know, a really, really close loss. But I have so many stories of people that have gone through this. And even in the lab now we're working with these patient partners, and these are people living with and beyond cancer who come and share their lived experience with us, and they tell us, you know, this is what it was like, and we meet their family members and we meet the people that help take care of them, and we, you know, look at them and try to tell them this is how we're doing better for you. But they bring to that, like they're part of the team too, right? So they bring to that all of these questions that quite often actually lead us into different ways of thinking, right? So, you know, we mentioned financial toxicity, right? So some of these treatments are so expensive. You've got people in a Canadian public healthcare system running GoFundMe campaigns so that they can afford to pursue treatment, right? 100%.
SPEAKER_00So And it doesn't make sense probably to the person on the outside. I always thought of that because you know, you look at it and you're like, why are they doing the fundraising thing? Like, you know, well, that doesn't Canadian healthcare cover all that stuff?
SPEAKER_03But no, like it'll cover your your drugs, yeah, but it's not gonna cover the time you didn't spend at work, the gas money to drive down from Cape Breton, whatever it is that you need to do, right?
SPEAKER_01This is that that that's what I think people don't really realize. That's the kind of invisible cost. Yeah, our healthcare will pay for your treatment, but where you get that treatment and how you you the things you miss during that treatment is not covered.
SPEAKER_03And ultimately, what do you decide? Do you decide to pursue treatment or do you decide to pursue other options and avenues? But it's it's more than that, right? It's not just whether you live or die. And so often in cancer we think, you know, overall survival, how long did people stay alive? But we don't spend a lot of time thinking about quality of life. But if you ask a patient, they said, well, if I had to choose between two therapies, I choose the one that keeps me feeling well and having dinner with my family and stuff like this, right? It's it's not actually the dying part. That's yeah, you know, I mean, that's obviously part of it, but it's the the suffering that you undergo for, you know, sometimes years afterward, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and and and I mean, you know, it's changed a little. There are people now living with cancer and thriving in some in some instances where, you know, a terminal cancer that you know there's certainly an expiry date for them, but their quality of life isn't isn't just horrifying.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely. And I want to go back to blood cancers for a second because that you know used to be a place where some people were cured, but a lot of people weren't. And you you could hit the end of therapy without there being
CAR T Cells And Real Progress
SPEAKER_03something new that the doctor can offer, right?
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_03But that landscape is changing quite a bit, and you got to see some of this when you were in the lab, right?
SPEAKER_00So so how are we making progress? What's changing?
SPEAKER_03Well, so I love immunotherapy. So I'm gonna talk about immunotherapies, but there's all kinds of other interesting drugs and small molecule inhibitors and stuff that are coming up.
SPEAKER_01But they got some new tech that I got to see. That was cool. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. So what we're trying to do is figure out ways to use the immune system to get rid of the cancer. And this is like not new age, this isn't science fiction. In all of us, people actually get tumors all the time, or would be tumors, and their immune system take care of it. You never know that you have a tumor. Right. Or they get radiation therapy for their tumor, and the immune system gets recruited and they kind of do the secondary work of it. So, me and a lot of other people are just asking, like, what's happening and how can I boost that up, right? So you saw the CAR T cell lab, right? Which is where we're taking CAR T cells or T cells out of a human, using viruses to engineer new bits and pieces on them, like adding extra weapons onto these T cells that direct them toward things that are only expressed on the cancer or that are expressed on cells that you could do without. And then we fire them back into the patient, and that can control their disease. So you've got people, right now, I think the record is about 14 years on from a terminal diagnosis, and the cells are still circulating in this girl's body. We have a birthday party for her every year.
SPEAKER_00Um, isn't that cool? Yeah. So you literally almost activated almost like little tiny weapons in her body to fight off the virus.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and just like you would with like a vaccine against the flu or whatever, these cells can circulate through and hunt out any hiding out cancer cells. So if the cancer tries to come back, the immune system's just sitting there waiting to take it down again, right?
SPEAKER_00And where where do you start start with this? Do you start on animals? How do you kind of like get these types of results?
SPEAKER_03So we start even before animals, right? So we are super fortunate. We work with Canadian blood services and people who donate blood just for regular transfusion the same way anybody would. And when they donate blood, they're asked if they're okay with their cells being used for research. So you can't transplant the immune cells from
Blood Donations Power The Research
SPEAKER_03one person blindly into another person. That would cause all kinds of problems. So CBS actually takes those out. And normally they would throw them away, but for for us, they're gold. So we retrieve these things from the blood bank. We're vampire stuff, right?
SPEAKER_00Now this is getting science fiction now. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03And we take them to the lab. I don't know if they were there, but there's, you know, blood stuff all over the place. Just bloody stuff everywhere. And and and we study them because now we have like a sample of all the different immune systems of people that donated blood in Atlantic Canada, right? So we can get a sense of like how do they behave and what if we push them this way and can we have it?
SPEAKER_00How widely different is one immune system to the next? So widely different. Really?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, have you you've had these examples, right, where the cold rips around your household and one person doesn't get it.
SPEAKER_00I make fun of him all the time because he's like, I'm immune to everything, and I'm like sick. And I give him a hard time about it, and I I'm more tenderly, I'll pick up a cold if it was happening across the street, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. So my yeah, my wife was kind of giving me kind of shit over on the weekend here because we went for a hike, and both my wife and my son had ticks on them when we left the hike. This guy, zero. And she's like, I don't understand it, you never get sick. I've been with my wife for almost fifty almost sixteen years, and she's like, she's not ever seen me sick. And she was like, If you get blood, if you don't get s you don't get sick, you'll find gamma rays. But and she was like, and the ticks weren't you had no ticks on you. Yeah. She's like, what is wrong with you? Maybe they just don't like my blood. Maybe viruses don't like my blood or a moment.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, except one day he's gonna get infected with something wild.
SPEAKER_01Oh, it's gonna be like a leprosy or something, right? It's gonna be something big.
SPEAKER_03Well, and it's funny you say that because like people have these, but in the cells I like, the natural killer cells, they have all these like influences where you say, like, if you have this combination and this kind of NK cells, then you won't convert to AIDS if you get HIV infected.
SPEAKER_01Or so there's people who can't get AIDS, basically.
SPEAKER_03There are people who are resistant. I won't say that they can't get AIDS, but there are people that are more resistant than others, right?
SPEAKER_01Okay, interesting.
SPEAKER_03There's other people that are highly sensitive, but they always come at a cost, right? So we don't always know the other side of the coin. But there's some con combos that'll say, you know, yeah, but you know, if you get pregnant, you're gonna have a high birth weight baby or a low birth weight baby. And so it permeates like infection and disease and cancer, but also pregnancy. So you start to kind of get a sense of how evolution over time has favored diversifying the immune system, yeah. And it makes sense, right? Because if now suddenly some new virus comes to town, at least it doesn't wipe out your whole population. Right. Right. But what if we could like leverage that and say, well, if your NK cells are good anti-cancer cells, I want more of those. Right. And then you start putting those into the patients whose NK cells maybe aren't doing as good a job.
SPEAKER_00So your efforts are to reprogram the immune system from to a certain degree, yeah?
SPEAKER_03Yeah. It's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_01And she was saying something was really interesting, is we were talking about how different like ethnic groups and stuff like that, and how you don't really have enough samples of that, and how like this is something. So if anyone's listening, you know, if you're not just you know, a white dude, go out and like give blood so that you can like do work on it, basically, because there's a lot of like of these kind of like sub-Nova Scotian cultures. Sorry, are you saying mostly it's we mostly just have white dude blood? We have a lot of white dude blood. We have a lot of white dude blood, yeah. It's it's it kind of reflects society. Yeah, but it it's one of those things where it's like they they just it I mean, and you'll explain it better than I will, but we we need a more diverse blood pool. We need a more diverse blood pool to kind of check, and like they were saying like how like you know, isolated towns and stuff like that. We were laughing about how like you know same people breeding over and over again to become bright problems and things like that. But yeah, like explain that because that was fascinating.
SPEAKER_03Now you're doing a great job.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_03Well, so it's it's an interesting thing, right? Because you want to kind of create things that work in everybody, but so far you're right. Like, we got a lot of white dude blood. And that's not just me, that's like in the world. If you think about the places that have done research and the types of people, I mean, honestly, a lot of studies are done on university students because they're willing to donate blood to studies and they're nearby, right?
SPEAKER_00Get a few bucks for some beer on the weekend, right? Precisely, right?
SPEAKER_03And so, but it biases the population, so you don't actually know. And this is actually true in you know, people who have bone marrow transplants, right? So if you look at the bone marrow registries, people who are sort of from one ethnic lineage or overrepresented, but people of mixed race, people of minority populations are not as represented in these biobanks, right? So if now you have a person with cancer who fits into one of those demographics, screening the biobanks might not be as successful. We don't know as much. And we're trying to apply medicine, grandly, but we haven't necessarily sort of studied those populations.
SPEAKER_00So you're making assumptions that you know are and the immunity system is something that lived their life in South Africa versus here, and the DNA that's evolved over time in that region is just to hear different, right? The environmental tolerances.
SPEAKER_01And the blood can be very different. Like, I don't think people quite realize that, like, you know, we know that like African Canadian or African American like men have a higher probability of getting diet type 2 diabetes or diabetes, right? And it's like those and that's all blood stuff. So it's like we need to learn more and study more blood samples of people we not may not have enough samples of.
SPEAKER_03Right, and and in general, and I mean I'm immune-centric about everything, but there's loads of things that contribute to all of these sort of things.
SPEAKER_00So I'd like to get back to the human side of you, Jeanette. Like University of Waterloo. So this is where you started your university career. What were you studying at the time and what were your ambitions before you got into this field?
From Jazz Trumpet To Cancer Lab
SPEAKER_03So a long, long time ago when I was in high school, I had to make the difficult decision of whether I wanted to be a scientist or a musician.
SPEAKER_00Okay. What instrument were we playing as a musician?
SPEAKER_03At this point, I was big into the trumpet. I played in a jazz band and the piano. I had taken piano lessons forever, and then I could play a bunch of other stuff.
SPEAKER_00I failed at both of those instruments in life, so so congratulations. Try them both. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03My whole plan was I was gonna write scores for movies. Like to this day, I thoroughly appreciate a good musical score. Nice. Anyway, so there's a co-op program in my high school. I'm old enough that I went to grade 13. Okay, okay in Ontario. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_03Which left you with a bunch of extra time at the end of high school to just take the normal grade year.
SPEAKER_00I know. I know.
SPEAKER_03So you're kind of like done with high school and whatever. But anyway, there was this co-op program. And you could go to the University of Waterloo, take a university course, and do a co-op program in something. So I went to my advisor and I said, I don't know, music or science. And she's like, okay. So they parachute me into this lab that studied the immune response to exercise and stress, which is pretty cool, right? I fell in love with science and I was like, okay, cool. Music shall henceforth be a hobby. I'm gonna do this science thing for a while. And then I just like refused to leave. So I did the co-op thing, I went to Waterloo, I did summer studentship stuff, I did volunteer things, I did a thesis, and after five years or so, there was this woman whose lab I was like, you know, crouching in, said, Okay, it's it's time for you to go learn from somebody else. So at this point, you know, you sort of realize the immune system is really, really powerful. We don't know anything about it, but what if we could like start pointing this at cancer? And this is like 2005 or something, right?
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_03So this idea was relatively new. It wasn't, it wasn't quite like out there with I don't know, conspiracy theory medicine, I suppose. But um, but it was relatively nascent. So I went to grad school, I went to McMaster, and we worked in this lab where I was trying to activate the immune system against cancer, but I was trying to teach it. There's these cells called dendritic cells that signal to other immune cells. So I was trying to train it by training the DCs. And I thought I was activating T cells, I was not activating T cells, but this is where we started in mice, right? But I was my mice weren't getting cancer in my treatment groups, and it turned out it was the natural killer cells that was doing all the heavy lifting. And I thought, this is really cool. I have no idea what this means for human health. So I then went and worked for a bone marrow transplanter because, in the context of bone marrow transplant in humans who are different from mice, you can watch the whole immune system redevelop after it gets reset, right? Because for a patient with blood cancer, we wipe out their blood cells and then we re-transplant them with stem cells from a healthy person and they grow back, right? And so you could ask all kinds of questions about how the immune system develops and how do these natural killer cells work in people. And there's this neat thing that happens where depending on the configuration of the donor cells that you have, patients become more or less likely to relapse. And we only figure this out after the fact, right? But it was kind of like this experiment that it did itself, and we just kind of observed it as it happened. So I I finished that up and came back to Canada. I'm Canadian. And uh in my lab now kind of marries all of those concepts is you know, how do we change the immune system? How do we train it? How do we figure out what it means for a person, and then how do we like point it at cancer?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm gonna replay this episode for more science fiction movie ideas. Natural killer cells. Like that just sounds like a really good, uh, good super mo uh movie come out in the future. That's so cool.
SPEAKER_01But you know what though, that's the thing, though, is like in kind of having the next generation being inspired by this to kind of get into science and things. Like, I know I have a four and a half year old.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I have conversations with him all the time, but like, you know, do you want to be a scientist, right? I'm like, I hope he is. And I'm like, dude, be a scientist. Because he's he listens to like Spider-Man and Iron Man, and these guys are scientists, and uh, you know, it's one of those things where it's like these they they look up to these superheroes so much, and it's like they're you know, it's Iron Man's superpowers the fact that he's a scientist, yeah, right? Like that's really his only superpower.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. And I think you come up in the field, and had I not been dropped into that lab, who knows what would have happened to me, right? But I think you know, you realize you like science, so you think about becoming a doctor or a dentist or a vet, like these things that you can see, and there's nothing wrong with that. Like it's never presented to you as like a you can be a scientist, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03But you got to meet some of the students that are in my lab, and they're these phenomenal humans who likewise, you know, were fortunate enough to find their way to me.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And they're passionate about what they do, right? Because
Why Cancer Is Hard To Spot
SPEAKER_03we get to come and sort of ask questions and we play around all day, right?
SPEAKER_00How how would you say, or how would you think that cancer is like an intelligent enemy in terms of how it how it evolves and how it changes itself in terms of making it hard to fight?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so you know, a virus or bacteria or parasite, whatever infects you is entirely different from you, right? So the immune system sort of goes, that's not me.
SPEAKER_00And it's not a piece of it. Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_03But a cancer is the opposite. A cancer is your own cell that has gone off the rails, right?
SPEAKER_01So rogue cell.
SPEAKER_03It's a yeah, so it hides out because it looks an awful lot like yourself, right? So it actually takes quite a lot. Not to mention that it's indolent, right? It just sort of happens and it's slow and whatever. Like, you know, if you get a bacterial infection, it probably came with something inflammatory, you probably stepped on a nail or whatever.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_03And so your immune system's kind of already on high alert, whereas these other cancers, they just sort of one day something goes wrong in their replication and they, you know, sort of accumulate these mutations, and they just grow up really slowly. So it's like this enemy that grows up from inside quietly.
SPEAKER_00It's like Nicolas Cage movies. So I mean, there's a bunch of great movies there, and then all of a sudden one day one out of the gate was really super weird, and you're like, that doesn't seem like the Nicolas Cage I know. No, that is 100% the Nicola Cage, you know. It's him, but it's a lot, it's it's more unhinged, there's something wrong with it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, those are Nick Cage movies. It's the good ones that you're kind of like, huh?
SPEAKER_00That comes from he still makes great movies. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, how optimistic are you now? I mean, in terms of I know that's such a like I have a question, but like how optimistic are you today with with the technology at hand?
SPEAKER_03Very?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Uh and I mean I think the the thing to really kind of press into is like there's not one cure for cancer, right? You're gonna use thousands, right?
SPEAKER_01That's the the the conspiracy is people think like, why not cure cancer? Like there's the you know, the there's a cure for cancer, they just don't want you to know it or whatever. Must be the most frustrating thing you come across.
SPEAKER_03I'm not in on the secret if that's true.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. Because it's like there's a thousand different types of cancers. Right.
SPEAKER_03So it's like and they're as different as the people that they grow up in, right? Because they all kind of came from their own background.
SPEAKER_00So again, back to that kind of the person or that that that imposter syndrome that's growing inside of you, right? Yeah. You know, and every person and every like we talked about earlier, every immune or all that stuff, we're also unique in that way of how we're immune to different things. It's like a snowflake.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's like a snowflake, but a really, really ugly, horrible one. But I, you know, I will say that since I started this whole thing in, you know, whenever it was that I started grad school, we've literally, we, the global we, have literally cured cancers, some cancers, right? There are cancers that used to be fatal, that are not fatal, that have, you know, five-year survival rates in the high 90s and stuff like this, right? So wow. We haven't done it for everything yet. There's lots of cancers that we haven't done it yet for. But I'm really optimistic because as I see these kind of slowly start to fall. And that's just, you know, from the immune lens, but there's other, there's chemists and physicists and stuff that are doing all kinds of also really neat stuff, and they're flipping the script on what you know patients used to have to hear, right? Which was all too often get your affairs in order.
SPEAKER_00I mean, you're one lab at a Halifax, respectfully, right? You know, uh I I mean, how is all the data that You do and all the research and work you do kind of collaborated on like a wider scale with all the other scientists around the world and stuff.
SPEAKER_03In a bunch of ways. Yeah. So we all talk to each other.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
SPEAKER_03Most of us are pretty collaborative. I know most of the Canadian immunologists, and I know the Canadian folks that are studying ovarian cancer and pancreas cancer and some of the other ones. And so you get to know really soon, sort of, who can do things when you hit the limitations of what you can do. So I'm good at natural killer cells, I'm pretty good at immunology. And then it starts to kind of fall off a little bit. So you came to my lab, you met my colleague Mahmoud Al-Saway, right? Who's a he's a hematologist who actually does treat patients.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I can't treat patients, I'm not a physician. I need people to help me out, right? So we talk to each other and we present at conferences and stuff, but then we also publish our results and we put these out there in the public domain and say, this is not only what I've concluded, but like these are the experiments that I did. Here's the data.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_03You can analyze it yourself, but this is what I think this means, right?
SPEAKER_01Is he he's kind of really like your your connection to the patient.
SPEAKER_03Yes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Yeah. And I can't do the superhero analogy, but he's the he's the guy that actually does the stuff. He's he's the voidwanderer.
SPEAKER_01Or yeah, or something. Yeah, I guess he's like uh yeah, just the I guess the guy. He's uh you're like Zordon and he's the Power Ranger.
SPEAKER_03I don't know what any of that means because I'm far too cool, but yes. You didn't watch Power Rangers?
unknownUh no.
SPEAKER_01No, I guess not. Alright. No.
SPEAKER_03I was trying to think of who the Spider-Man or the Iron Man connection is.
SPEAKER_01Well, okay, I can I can you're the Splinter and he's the Ninja Turtle. There you go. Okay. Yeah, maybe there's that. Splinter's like the wise ninja. Yeah. Yeah, he like teaches them, trains them. He goes up to the thing.
SPEAKER_03But then he he comes back and he tells me, he reports on those fights, and he says, hey, here's how this went, or this is what we need to do next, or you know, so and he's really like a tangible part of that, but probably representative of the entire ecosystem. And we all kind of talk to each other.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Spider webs.
SPEAKER_01Spider webs, there you go. The yeah, and I mean that I guess that's the really thing is like if you were to break down, like there's this guy I I follow on uh on uh Instagram that says uh that he explains things to people like they have CTE. So let's explain to people like they have CTE what exactly cancer is, so that way we can understand like you know what it is that we're trying to cure. That's cool.
SPEAKER_00So you have to tell me what CTE is first. The concussion. Oh okay. Yeah. Uh so he was watching a roast the other night. Was that what you got from that roast?
SPEAKER_01No, no, I follow a guy on Instagram. He's a football he's a football player, okay, and he does these reels where he's he explains like scientific or nutrition things based, and he says, I'll explain this to you like we have CT, and he's like, This good. This badge. Okay, cheapers.
SPEAKER_00All right, now I get it.
SPEAKER_03Oh, I don't know if I can go that yeah. Okay, so yeah, we already did that.
SPEAKER_00Cancer Nicholas Cage. Cancer bad. Good.
SPEAKER_03Uh no, so so uh cancer is a cell that has accumulated enough changes that it no longer responds properly to the signals that should stop it from growing. So we have cells in our body die all the time. They turn over all the time, we're making new blood all the time, we're making new whatever all the time. And normally that goes really well. But sometimes we sustain these mutations in our DNA. And if you sustain enough mutations in enough cells over enough time, they stop paying attention to the signals that say stop and go. Okay. And when you start going too much, you get, you know, a solid tumor where it chokes off a normal function, it sucks up all the nutrients, it keeps the tissue from functioning, it interrupts blood flow.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_03In the case of blood cancers, instead of having sort of a normal distribution of blood, you get that crowded out by cells that not only shouldn't be there and there's too many of them, but they also don't function properly. So now you're kind of knocking out components of the immune system, you're changing the properties of the blood. It's so it's I mean, in a nutshell, it's a cell that has lost normal growth control and starts to interrupt normal function.
SPEAKER_00Right. Would that work for the CTE guy? Probably. Okay, maybe I don't know.
SPEAKER_01I I understood it. I don't have CTE, so whatever. But yeah, it's okay. So and the uh essentially just kind of and then once it as it grows, it sh shuts down organs. That's essentially how you die, essentially, right? It's end up strangling. I know brain tumors is a lot of that because they have tentacles and I know I know my grandfather passed away from a brain tumor and it was basically inoperable because of the tentacles that wrap around the brain. Yep. You would have had to cut out half his brain kind of thing, basically, in order for to get it out.
SPEAKER_03Right. It turns out you need that stuff.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Right.
SPEAKER_03And as you know, right, as cancers grow, we talk about it spreading, right? And so that you'll have the original site, and if you're lucky enough to find it at that point, the surgeon will cut it out and hopefully you're okay, right? But if it started to spread throughout the body, like how do you how do you cut that out, right? So we use things like chemotherapy, which are supposed to stop the cells from growing, but they're toxic because they just they stop those cells from growing, but they also stop a bunch of other cells from growing. You're poisoning yourself. You're poisoning yourself, right? So there's lots of ways to make cancer stop growing. The trick is to keep the person alive. Yes.
SPEAKER_00It's segue there. Like we're poisoning ourselves right now with some delicious beer, right? And and uh but but but in the news a lot recently, like uh more so than I'd ever seen it before, has been the re-emergence of the information about alcohol and how it's connected to cancer. Yeah, and the recent recommendations to go down to one to two drinks a week. Yeah. I mean, you know, from your laboratory, from what you
Mutations Alcohol Smoking And Radon
SPEAKER_00see from an immunology perspective, could you even see things like that?
SPEAKER_03Or could you could you say that that's science from your So I read the paper as someone who drinks beer because I was actually quite interested in the paper. Uh so we don't study alcohol, we don't look for alcohol. Ostensibly, I could go see if there's any of it in the blood, but I don't go look.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03But you're right, you know, it's not it's not no drinks, but it's not excessive drinking. Like the the science does actually seem pretty sound that you shouldn't drink you know too much, but there's also lots of other things you shouldn't do, right? So smoking's real bad for you. News flash, I don't know if you guys know that. Heard about that one, yeah. Smoking's bad. UV light without sunscreen, also pretty bad. And these are all things that just, you know, they cause more of those mutations, right? So most of the time we repair the mutations, most of the time it's perfectly fine, but you don't want to accelerate the rate of accumulating those mutations.
SPEAKER_00Do you know if there's one that's particularly bad for blood cancer?
SPEAKER_03Oh, there's a bunch. Okay, like what? Well, so there's these things called translocations that happen in blood where like the chromosome, so the pieces of the DNA literally break and then reattach themselves in the wrong way. And that's a big one. There's a gene called APL that comes up a lot in leukemia. And and then there's this gene called P P53, which you probably heard of. You read anything about cancer mutations. And P53 has the opposite sort of role. So most of these are what we would call oncogenes. So they turn on something that should be left off or should be controlled, and they kind of chronically gas pedal it. But P53 is this thing, it's the guardian of the genome, is what its moniker is. And its job is to go and tell cells to go quietly die if they've accumulated too many DNA mutations, right? And so it's like this sort of it takes you takes you out of the population if you shouldn't be there. But if you mutate it so it doesn't work anymore, then when you accumulate those mutations, you keep them. Because there's nothing protecting you, right? And so some of those, you know, are in blood cancers exclusively, and some of them are everywhere. And then there's other ones that you've heard of, like the BRCA genes, which we find in all kinds of solid tumors. They're famous in breast cancers, but they're actually present in a lot of cancers.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_03There's another one called KRAS, which is like a big deal in the lung cancers and colorectals and and pancreas. And they all but they all kind of have the same boiled-down functions. They either push the cell to grow faster or they take the breaks off of something that should be taken the breaks off.
SPEAKER_00Are there any foods or dietary things that you've ever kind of associated with blood cancer that you could think of?
SPEAKER_03I mean, radiation is real bad. Radiation radiation for one egg. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, there goes my radiation eggs in the morning.
SPEAKER_03Sorry. I mean, you'd have to be exposed to it took away a bit. But like folks that work in like, you know, radiation plants or pilots who fly airplanes and have higher radiation exposures have higher risks of things like blood cancers. Yeah. And then there's some stuff that we're just born with, right? What about radon?
SPEAKER_00I mean, that's another company.
SPEAKER_03Well, radon's another bad one. That one's bad around here.
SPEAKER_00Radon radon's particularly bad in Nova Scotia. Yeah. And uh and I mean, you know, if you can put put a radon detector in your house, you might be a little bit surprised by the results no matter where you live. Yes.
SPEAKER_03And I would encourage everyone to do that because it can change, right? From one house to your next door neighbor.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah. And there's ways you can really mitigate it effectively, too. And I'm not, I'm not on on, you know, we're not getting paid by anybody, but you know, if the sponsor wants to jump in here, give me a call. But you know, I I do think it's uh I do I do think that's uh something that people get don't all often look at or explore, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Old homes and stuff. Like it's crazy. I got I got a chance to be part of a government radon testing thing. Okay. Um where I got to simultaneously because the way that they set it up is I got to look at the radon for like 43 or 60 houses simultaneously. Okay. And so many of them had eye radon. Like I don't know where they live, but there must have been dudes with three eyes in the neighborhood. Yeah. Because like sorry, this is a bad joke. But but you know, like there was some uh crazy amounts of radon like like in this concentrated area, and I couldn't believe it. But like you like you just said, one house, none. Next house, like in the red, up to a ridiculous degree.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and like you say, you can you can mitigate it, right? So it's worth doing the test. Um yeah. There's actually it'd be a great podcast episode for you. There's a team of people that are working on that right here in Nova Scotia on radon uranium and small small particulate matal, like you'd get from like forest fire type debris and its role on cancer, but specifically focused out of DAL.
SPEAKER_00And uranium would be again another blood cancer, radiation, right? And I mean um that's a hot topic right now. Yeah, well, yeah, like what about like things like uranium mining, right? Because we see how that dust travels. If you ever look at those YouTube videos, it's pretty yeah, it's pretty scary, right? Like because it can go if you're mining radon here, there's this gigantic, almost like dome that the uranium can travel through particles in the air that you wouldn't even see or smell or know it's there.
SPEAKER_03Right, yeah.
SPEAKER_00But you could feel the effects of it. Years later.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. Brutal. When it's late, too late. That kind of thing, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Fun stuff.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. Wow. I feel so uplifted right now.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01The okay, so the where's the future? Because I mean, we we let's let's move to something way more happy. Oh, okay. Because you guys were really enthusiastic about some of the technology that you're bringing in. You had one, what was the name of that machine that we get to witness?
SPEAKER_03Its official name is the Prodigy, but we named it the Thinker.
SPEAKER_01Yes, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So cool. What is it? Yeah, I mean, you can explain, but what as a layman, it was a thing
The Prodigy Machine Comes East
SPEAKER_01that looked like a sewing machine with a bunch of tubes like and knobs that literally look like a a commercial sewing machine. Yeah. But that that those tubes and knobs basically were able to like separate cells and pull them into different separate like bags and wave. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. So that's essentially what it is, right? So we take the cells out of a a per a person, a patient or a donor, and we hang them. They just look like a bag of blood, like you would get from Canadian blood services, right? More blood. And it runs through this machine and it's programmed to turn valves on and off and let certain things through and other things not. It goes through a magnet that we pull different types of cells apart, and then we can add different things to change the cells. So we in that particular setup that you saw, we're using a virus to introduce the new weapons into the T cells.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_03Incubate the whole thing. Uh, sometimes we need to take samples out to make sure things are working the way we want them to be, that you know, we haven't inadvertently contaminated it or done something we shouldn't have done. And then after about 12 days, on the other end comes out this product in a bag that looks like an IV bag. You take it back to the hospital and into the patient it goes, right?
SPEAKER_00Wow. So the whole thing is to you on the most brilliant audio description I think I've ever heard of this podcast about the machine. I thought that was great. I was I was a surprise. I was like, wow, that was brilliantly said.
SPEAKER_01Good job. Yeah, thanks. Yeah. I well, I I was I was just very engaged. So sewing machine with tubes. I was like, I'm not sure. I've not heard that. I say it looks like some guy created it in his garage, but it does kind of, but yeah, but it but it this is the thing is everyone thinks like you know, when they when they think of high-tech stuff, you think like, you know, I don't know, Star Trek or something, like and it's like this big technology with these big computers. It looked so analog, yeah, that I was like shocked at first of all the sticker price and and what it can do. Yeah, yeah. It's crazy. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean, it sounds like something out of a Willy Wonka movie, right? That can actually manage and actually Dr. Sue or Dr. Sue. That's what it means.
SPEAKER_03It's also very brightly colored, and yeah, yeah. It looks like it's fun.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Incredible.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01So yeah, so you guys have like there's lots this machine is like kind of helping you guys kind of lead the way in a lot of ways and giving you some hope, right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. So the first one around, I think it's the first one on this side of the country, east of Montreal.
SPEAKER_02Oh wow.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and so it's it's allowing us to kind of recreate these therapies. So right now for a patient that needs this kind of therapy, we have to expatriate their cells, and they're actually going all the way to California and then coming back here for their treatment, which is you know, not great. Um so it's gonna let us do that here, but it's also letting us develop a whole train of clinical trials that we're gonna be able to do right here in Nova Scotia.
SPEAKER_02Amazing.
SPEAKER_03And and you know, I kind of said before, every cancer is different, and there's thousands of cures for cancer, so to speak. So we've got a lineup of things that we want to test and move into clinical trials, and now we can do that right here with you know the technology that we have. So I mean I think that's brilliant. That's pretty optimistic.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, now and when we talked, just talked about analog, like how does it matter with this new AI technology must must allow you to to some degree to explore multiple theories simultaneously? Is that accurate or not accurate?
SPEAKER_03So, I mean, not with that technology, because you kind of have to know what you're doing, but with the AI, absolutely, right? So a person is as different as their cancer, their cancer keeps changing as it grows throughout the body, and I'm trying to decide what the right way to program their immune system is. Not to mention that there's all these other things, right? So we talked about the negative stuff before, but we
AI Precision And Tumour Avatars
SPEAKER_03didn't talk about all the positives, right? So people can mitigate cancer risk by having a good, healthy diet, by exercising, you know, by staying in shape, by sleeping well, by not be stressing, like you know, there's there's lots of things they can sort of change, right? So a person who is really healthy and really able to like tolerate treatment and stuff might be better suited for a different treatment than somebody who is, you know, maybe not as well, right?
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_03But what if we could plug all of those pieces in to a computer program and then also add, you know, what does this, what are these patients' goals of care, what's available to them wherever they are in the world, what does their cancer look like, and then say, tell me what I should be doing, right? Of the therapies that exist, can I choose?
SPEAKER_00Right. Right?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and so that's exactly what we're trying to do. So I talked about natural killer cells, but I didn't tell you how cool they are.
SPEAKER_00So well they sound like the cool thing. They don't have a cool name. Yeah, every time you say it, I think of the Ice Cube Natural Born Killers album that came out in 90. I I was a big hip-hop guy. It gets a lot of press in our field.
SPEAKER_01But uh yeah, they're just trying to give face uh cancer that face that like Ice Cube has. That would be awesome. I mean, could we do that?
SPEAKER_03I haven't thought about that. I'll put that yeah. So anyway, so they're think of them as like little Swiss Army knives, and they've got all these different tools that you can pull out, and you can use them in combination, and that's what makes them different from you to you to all the other people. So the question becomes like, how do I configure my Swiss Army knife for this person's cancer, right? And there's about 50 different things I measure times every combination that they can have, and then you can turn the dials up and down on it.
SPEAKER_00It's like unlimited episodes of house. Yeah. You know, right? Every time a new problem and a new solution, it's so brilliant.
SPEAKER_03I got a new thing, right? So you you put all this stuff into the AI, and then you also put all the stuff about the NK cells into the AI, and you say, What should I do for this patient, right? And so we're trying to build a model of you know what of the existing therapies would be best, but what should I prioritize developing next? And that's the AI part, but my favorite part is the complementary part, and that's the avatars that we're building. So for patients, we try to take their tumors out, right, with surgery or by taking blood samples or whatever. We bring those over to the lab and then we study them. So I can ask questions like, I have five different chemotherapies. Which one does this cancer respond better to, right? You can't do that to a patient.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But you can do that in an experiment, and then you can take all that data and plug it back into the AI. So we're hoping over time to be able to actually learn. Oh, yeah. Wow. Right. What are the what are the patterns and how do we make this more precise?
SPEAKER_00It gives you a whole field of brains that you never had before. Exactly.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah. And then you go back to the Swiss Army knife thing and you say, okay, well, that could be an overwhelming, your list of answers might be an overwhelming list of answers. How are you ever actually going to deliver on that? It's a Swiss Army knife, right? So it's actually not that complicated.
SPEAKER_00In the medical field or in your field, how much I mean, we had a terminology we use of what was it called? AI. Gosh, what were they saying? AI in the insurance industry, Matt, having gosh, episodes or they would call it hallucinations. Hallucinations. Hallucinations, I'm sorry. So it's I'll reframe that. AI hallucinations. Is that something that uh you fear in your field? Sure. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Have you ever seen any examples of that happening where they might have provided the wrong information?
SPEAKER_03So not yet, but we're still brand new to this. So we're still working it up. But yeah, I've certainly seen AI hallucinate. But you can you can set the boundaries on these things, right? So we're not plugging this into Chat GPT, we're building this for purpose, right? And I think AI, especially the public AIs, you ask them a question, and the first thing it'll do is tell you how brilliant you are for thinking up such a wonderful, insightful question, right? You can turn that off. And you can sort of say, I only want you to tell me the truth. Like I my ego's fine, thank you.
SPEAKER_00Never, never.
SPEAKER_03But you're right, it is kind of about getting that right. You know, how much do we trust it, how much do we not trust it? And and I think the the you know, human in the loop, so to speak, technology is not going away anytime soon. Yes. Because the you still need the physician to sort of say that's a really stupid idea, and here's the five reasons you didn't think of that we shouldn't do that kind of thing. So, you know, we're not yet at the point where we would be informing patient care at all. But we're trying to build that prototype so that that's you ask me what I think is happening in the future, that's what I think is happening in the future.
SPEAKER_00Another crazy question.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Blood cancer in the future or cancer in general in the future, do you think this is something that's just going to be an increasingly larger problem for everyone? Or do you think cancer in general might go away over over over time?
SPEAKER_03I don't think it's going away, but I think we can turn it into a chronic disease.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Okay.
SPEAKER_03So sometimes it goes away. That's great. That that's that's the goal, absolutely.
Making Cancer A Managed Disease
SPEAKER_03But there's all these cancers, blood cancer is one of them, where the patient is at risk for their cancer coming back, right? So this is true of like the sort of you know, leukemias and the famous blood cancers, but also of multiple myeloma, which is another blood cancer. It's a cancer of the bone marrow. And what happens for these patients almost always is they respond to treatment, they're okay for a few years, their cancer comes back, they respond to treatment, and this is like the story for the rest of their lives, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And until they get really sick, you know, it's it's managed pretty well. But what if we could turn it into a disease where it's probably not gonna come back? Right. Right? And so now it's just a how do we monitor, how do we screen, how do we know when it's coming back? And I think we're gonna get there. I don't think we're gonna see, like, it's a hard question, right? Are we gonna see more? Maybe, because we're getting better and better at detecting it, right? So it's always been there, we just couldn't find it. And we're getting better at technologies where we can take a blood sample and start to appraise whether or not a person has it.
SPEAKER_00The sooner you find it, the better the result.
SPEAKER_03The sooner you have it, the better the result, right? And you know, cancer runs in families, right? So we're finding more and more of these mutations that we can say, you know, let's let's look out for this mutation. And if you happen to be a carrier, let's keep an eye on you, you know, and stuff. So I think you're gonna see the number of diagnosed cases going up, but I don't think that's gonna be because more people are getting cancer, right? And then there's all these people that have cancer, but they die of something else. So you never counted them, but they had a tumor the whole time.
SPEAKER_00Right. Right now, I I listen to a lot of bro podcasts, so so this is gonna be a bro kind of question too, because I've also recently got into like this intermittent fasting thing. And and and and and and and Matt, you have as as well, where you know, and I've attempted this intermittent fasting thing. It's told uh you know that there's a there's a raid after so many hours where you actually start to get rid of damaged cells in your
Food Fibre Obesity And Fasting
SPEAKER_00body. Is this a play possibly towards resolving cancers in any way if you're getting rid of all those damaged cells before they have an attach the ability to attach something acid to it?
SPEAKER_03So I don't know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I can I can tell you people are actively looking at it. Yeah, and this question of like whether what you eat and when you eat is a big one, right? There are links to your circadian rhythm, so like when it's light and when it's dark, and if you break that, so people who work at night and stuff, there are links to that, and there's links to what and how and how much you eat. So, I mean, probably, but I can't cite a scientific study that says that that's true.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03But uh but I'm just curious, yeah.
SPEAKER_01No, I'm I'm I'm always like I'm always so back and forth on like the whole like food you eat and things, because on one hand, we have a crowd of people that are like eat raw, eat. Like the natural things, like let's eat things that people ate a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago, and I'm just kind of like, those people lived to 27.
SPEAKER_03So, like, and then they died of a broken leg, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's like so. It makes sense, I guess, to try to eat more natural, eat less processed, because like I guess there's chemicals used in processing and all that. And I'm on one hand, I'm kind of like, Yeah, okay, maybe. But then I'm on the other flip side of things, I'm going like, we live longer than ever before. So I'm like, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00I don't know. Well that that that that is going the other way now for the first time in human history. Not in Canada, it is in the United States. I thought it was going down to Canada.
SPEAKER_01No, sure, but it's it's go in the United States for sure. I saw something. It is their life expectancy, they they compared it because uh obviously there's some political stuff associated with this, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the political stuff, obviously, in the United States they've seen it the average age go down, but in many places in Europe and Canada, it's not. Really?
SPEAKER_00Okay, I I heard the uh opposite of that, but that that's just interesting.
SPEAKER_01I mean, I could be wrong, but by all means, like like ask ask anything, do your research. But I did see something recently that they talked about that. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03And and I mean there's beyond cancer, right? There's loads of reasons to be healthy, right? So tons of processed food and dense calories are just gonna make you overweight and then you're prone to a whole bunch of other things.
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_03But obesity is a risk factor for cancer. Okay. So controlling your diet controls your obesity, even if it's not direct. But evidence does support it being sort of a direct thing, right? So more fiber changes the microbes that live in your gut, changes the way you respond to things, changes the way you respond to therapy. Oh, yeah. Including immune therapies.
SPEAKER_00Have been pointed, like such as processed meats, have been directly linked to cancer. Right, right. Right.
SPEAKER_03And our our you know, rates of colorectal cancer in relatively young people, so like under 50, where they would be screened by like uh fit tests, we're seeing more and more diagnosis of these, and it's not totally proven link yet, but the thinking is that it's more processed foods and it's a poorer diet and lower fiber and and stuff that's leading to this kind of thing. So I can't think of a good reason to not eat healthy. So do good point.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and the other thing is when they say processed foods, it's like things like you know, pepperoni and salami have been around for thousands of years, and now they're saying like nope, not good for you.
SPEAKER_00I'm just kind of like maybe no, no, like I mean, unfortunately, and you're talking to Pepperoni's number two fan here. If you're a number one fan, I'm with I'm with you, but I know. I love shout out to Brothers Pepperoni, another sponsor we'd love to have. Uh, but uh but honestly God, no, I love pepperoni and love love uh the salamis and and but unfortunately, very bad for me.
SPEAKER_01Well, I know that's that's like it's it's it's funny, but like cured meat was something that like people have been doing for thousands of years because obviously that's how it would not make you immediately sick. But that also die right away.
SPEAKER_00Smoking was really great until like the 60s, like you know, like you know, I I smoked in my lifetime, and I I mean, but you know, eventually the science came out that that's probably not a smart thing for me to keep doing right, no form of smoking. And uh and and uh I mean, you know, of course we we hate it when the things we love get get kind of victim, you know what I mean? But whatever. Like I'm I'm mad that you know you get more than two beers a week is bad. I'm really sad about that.
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna maintain the fact that if you're not like you know relaxing with a drink, that you're probably gonna die earlier because you're gonna be not fun.
SPEAKER_03But I I think you make an important point there, right? Like it's everything in moderation. And by the way, we're all gonna die of something eventually. Right. So, no, I mean obviously don't go crazy, but like I think everything in moderation is okay.
SPEAKER_00Well they're hundreds, grab a shot of whiskey every night, and they're they're doing just fine. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like, you know, so it is moderation's okay, and don't overindulge.
SPEAKER_03Except for smoking, just don't smoke.
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, there's there's no no nothing from that. Yeah, kind of.
SPEAKER_00Don't eat a trailer park, boys level of pepperoni will be. Yeah, don't do that. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh so kind of actually looking at diets and things like that, do you have you guys is it any on your radar at all to look at like blue zones or like the the like the high con uh concentration of uh centenarians and find out why they're living so long and like why they're not getting sick and so uh yeah, not on mine, but on other people's, yeah.
SPEAKER_03And they just have they have these freakishly good immune systems. Like people have looked and they do, right? So there's kind of this natural kind of decline that happens in most of us, somewhere around 30, where your immune system starts functioning less and less well, right? You also see there's an uptick, you know, sort of above that age and like autoimmune diseases, and it's when you start developing these chronic illnesses, right? But in centenarians, that doesn't happen. Like they take blood samples from them and they've got the blood system of a 30-year-old or something. And I mean like and I don't know if we know why yet, but like it there definitely is that connection that they're you know, I don't know, they're superhuman.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it's crazy. And it's like but it's always like areas like like Sardinia is like one of the highest concentrated like blue zones in the world. And I mean they drink every day, by the way, just FYI. But it's like it's it's one of those things where it's just like they uh yeah, they they live like the average age is like a hundred, like but they also share a gene pool. Right, right, fair. There you go.
SPEAKER_00So if there's something genetic that's helping them out there, so maybe a tremendous sense of community, and like there's so many different factors, it's almost endless, right? When you look at that, so is it even diet at all, or is it the fact that they have communities that supported themselves and each other so well, and they do that exercise and they get out and they they they they literally travel every day, yeah. They don't drive vehicles, right? Yeah, you know, so it's a lot of walking, that's true.
SPEAKER_01A lot of walking, a lot of fish. That's true.
SPEAKER_00If you talk to any like if you boil down health, it's it it comes down to sleep, nutrition, exercise, and walking is like the number one exercise, right? Number two is is resistance training, but walking's huge, yeah, right? Like walking's so huge.
SPEAKER_01Was it Rock Hudson? I think he said he uh he was in such incredible shape and he didn't work out a day in his life, he just walked everywhere and never and always took the stairs. Yeah. There you go.
SPEAKER_03It's relatively simple. Yeah. So I don't know how to put that in a pill form though. No, I don't think that yeah.
SPEAKER_00So let's get back to medicine. And we didn't really did we talk about medicine much, or not really, I guess. I mean we talked about research, but medicine, I guess. Where do you think the future of medicine's going for for I know that's a really question. Yeah, but uh, I mean, where do you think the future of medicine's headed with the type of research that you're doing now? And with uh and what what you know the human
Where Medicine Heads Next
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. I I think it's going into uh an increasingly precise place, and I choose that word very carefully. So the other word that gets thrown around is personalized, and I don't mean personalized. Meaning I think that there's gonna be more precision with with the way people are treated, right? So it not too long ago was the case that it would sort of say, okay, well, you know, you have rheumatoid arthritis, so we're gonna treat you with this drug, then this drug, then this drug, then this drug, and we're, you know, hopefully we find one that works for you. The studies that are coming out now are saying things more like if they have this particular configuration or this presentation or this test positive, give them this drug. And and instead of being go A, B, C, D, they're going, you're a D, you're a C, you're an A, and putting them into those places, right?
SPEAKER_02Right.
SPEAKER_03And sometimes those are informed by tests, sometimes those are informed by genetics, sometimes they're informed by some marker that we can measure. But if you get the right treatment right the first time, even if it's a more expensive treatment than the first one, you save money, right? Because that person returns to function sooner. You don't waste all the time and effort and health while you're trying to figure out what the right thing is, and then all the secondary effects. And so because we're getting better and better at understanding the subsets of these things that we used to think were one disease, and it's not just cancer, it's all the cancers and all the other diseases, right? We're getting the answer right more and more, and I think that's the future, right?
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_03The chemists out there are making these small molecule inhibitors, they call them. So they'll say, This is your genetic mutation, and this is how it's mucked up a protein. But look, I made this little chemical that I can put in your body to fix and repair and get it back. And we're starting to see the earliest examples of gene therapy, which I think is just so cool, right? So we've been doing this in the lab for a long time where you can correct things that are broken in the genome.
SPEAKER_00I think that's so cool.
SPEAKER_03And we're doing it people now, right? You know, for sickle cell disease, is one of the things that we're gonna do.
SPEAKER_00Oh, but I can pronounce all the all the all the words I'm reading. Imagine that. A little gene therapy line. No, no, okay.
SPEAKER_01Guys, I'm so sorry, but I feel like there might be a band starts at seven. Oh, at seven, okay. So we got warming up, but we should get to ten questions. Before we get to ten questions. Uh you go to the last question because I go one too. Go for we'll go first. Okay, I'll go for it. And this is just a this is the science fiction question. Do you ever think that we'll be able to achieve immortality? Whoa.
SPEAKER_00That should be in the 10 questions. That's like a 10 question.
SPEAKER_01It is a 10 question, but you know.
SPEAKER_00Our 10 questions are usually.
SPEAKER_03Do you think we should?
SPEAKER_01100%, yes.
SPEAKER_03Really? Okay.
SPEAKER_01Do you think so? So that's what I think we should. And I'll tell you why.
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_01Because I think we need to expand and start looking elsewhere. I think the only way we can do proper space exploration is having people that can live forever.
SPEAKER_03So is it only available to a subset of us?
SPEAKER_01No, I think we can all do it, but eventually you may have to move up.
SPEAKER_03Okay, anyway. It's a I mean it's a deeply philosophical question. Do I think we will? No. Not in these mortal coils that we wear, but I do think we could probably figure out how to move consciousness into another body. How's that?
SPEAKER_01That for sure, I think that'll happen for sure. But you don't think we can regenerate? All right, cool.
SPEAKER_03I mean, dude, I don't know.
SPEAKER_00But you're a lot smarter than I am, so that's like a 10 questions preview because the 10 questions are usually kind of kind of a little out there inside the box.
SPEAKER_03I like that. That was great.
SPEAKER_00No, yeah. So we'll get back into them. Here's my last question before we get to 10 questions. So, what do you hope people listening to this show today get out of this, or what would you want to say about your work, your research that you think is valuable? What's your kind of PSA?
SPEAKER_03That there's justifiable hope in this field. Cancer sucks, but we like we see it, we know. Yeah, and we're we're getting there.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. Awesome words. Okay, let's get into 10 questions. Yeah, you kick them off, man. All right. Did you did you hear the 10 questions before? Like on the show. Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_01And just before we get into that, thank you to the Quinz Arm. We're here right now. I know they're warming up for some music. They have some music tonight, but thank you to the Queens Arm for hope hosting us. We have some really great beers here, so let's get into these 10 questions.
SPEAKER_02So, question number one.
SPEAKER_01If aliens arrive tomorrow and asked humanities top scientists like yourself one question What should
Ten Questions And Final Advice
SPEAKER_01we hope they don't ask us?
SPEAKER_03It's something like, how do you treat each other?
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah, fair enough. That's true. That's good. Question number two. Question two. What's a weird pee what's a weird people assume? I must have written this question funny. Um's this weird or strange thing that people assume about your work in cancer research.
SPEAKER_03Oh, that we've cured cancer a long time ago and we're keeping it a secret. If I had a cure for cancer, do you know what I could do with that?
SPEAKER_00Oh, I know, I mean.
SPEAKER_01Sell it for trillions. Yeah. I put it on TMU and help people out. Okay. Uh you just deleted the question, dude. Oh, really? Yeah, hit the back button. Thank you. All right. If you could instantly cure one disease forever besides cancer, which would you choose?
SPEAKER_03Alzheimer's is pretty awful.
SPEAKER_01Oh, true. True. That's very true. Yeah, that's pretty awful. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Okay. What scientific breakthrough do you think will completely blow ordinaries ordinary people's minds if they understood it properly? So back to people that are really removed or a couple steps removed from your universe. What would blow their minds if they understood it? Quantum physics. You understand quantum physics?
SPEAKER_03I mean, I sort of understand quantum physics. Does anyone really understand quantum physics?
SPEAKER_01I'm happy to read it, but honestly, I'm like, sure. I watch endless YouTube and then just fall asleep.
SPEAKER_00It just put pacifies me.
SPEAKER_03So I I got myself to the point where I can actually understand how time can bend. Okay. And that blew my mind. And I don't, I think I only superficially understand that, but like the fact that everything is so fluid, right? Like it's not, you know, mass is actually energy and time is not real.
SPEAKER_01It's not linear. Time is a construct. Yeah. Alright, question number five. If your immune system had a personality, what kind of person would it be?
SPEAKER_03Specifically mine? Uh you can answer generally or you.
SPEAKER_00Specifically yours, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Mine is like some sort of angry gnome. Um but in the best way.
SPEAKER_01Angry gnome. You're like grumpy smurf or something?
SPEAKER_03I yeah. Like when it goes, it goes. But in the best way? I don't know. Sorry, I don't know.
SPEAKER_01You can you can direct your grudge and you can direct your spite and anger at cancer. Yes. There you go.
SPEAKER_00Question number six, how do you get stuff done? Okay. Give us one of your irrational fears despite being a scientist.
SPEAKER_03Oh God. That I've been wrong the whole time.
SPEAKER_00Oh.
SPEAKER_03That you know, there's something fundamental I think is true that just isn't.
SPEAKER_00It's like the foundation of everything you know.
SPEAKER_03Yes, that the whole world will come crumbling down and I will be revealed as an imposter.
SPEAKER_00That's like thinking about your thinking brain, which I heard was really a really intelligent thing that a lot of the population doesn't do. It's like, what if I was wrong with everything I thought? A lot of people don't ever consider that.
SPEAKER_02Right, right.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It means you're smart.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Good.
SPEAKER_01It also means you're not a narcissist. Question number seven. If you had unlimited funding for one crazy research idea, what would you try?
SPEAKER_03Besides what I get to do every single day? Yeah. Oh. Oh god, I don't have a good answer for that. I have the best job.
SPEAKER_00It's awesome. Nothing wrong with that.
SPEAKER_03Just do more of what I'm doing. And then, oh, you know what I would do? I would actually hire my favorite NKologists and cancer scientists and immunologists to all come together. Like, what was the group called that like invented radar? You know what I'm talking about, right?
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_03Right? So like they brought all of these incredible scientists from like World War II era together in Tuxedo Park, New York. And this like rich banker guy put them all up in a house and just said, like, you guys just work together.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I would do that.
SPEAKER_00Kind of create your own little renaissance era area of just geniuses.
SPEAKER_03I'm gonna think of a better answer for that tomorrow, but that sounds pretty awesome.
SPEAKER_01I mean, you didn't say eugenics, so I mean, you know, you we know you're not gonna be an evil origin story, so I hope not. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Question number eight overdue. Sure, yeah. What's uh what's something society treats as healthy that probably isn't?
SPEAKER_03So overworking?
SPEAKER_00Oh, love that. Yeah, yeah. I'm not a victim there.
SPEAKER_01Question number nine. If you could have dinner with one scientist, philosopher, or historical figure, who would it be and why?
SPEAKER_03Leonardo da Vinci.
SPEAKER_01Pretty smart, dude.
SPEAKER_03Because I think I would never run out of things to talk about with him. That guy was like I think that guy was crazy.
SPEAKER_00I love him. Sure, I had his illustration book at home where like every page is like a different invention. Like, how insane is that?
SPEAKER_03So I don't think he was crazy, but I think he probably felt crazy because like imagine being that smart. Like, there's nobody else around that gets you, right? And you're like, I know all of these things to be true. And also I'm a real good painter. Um you know, but like keep up everyone else.
SPEAKER_00Wouldn't it be scary because of the same thing about like Kanye West, like a few years from now? We were like, he was a genius, he was so ahead of his time. I don't think there's much risk to that.
SPEAKER_01He he he went downhill in his last in his final act because he has some he has some sketchy stuff he thinks.
SPEAKER_00Pretty terrible, but yeah, yeah. But like, you know, in his time, yeah, music-wise, he was he was he was a really good musician until he kind of went south. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Be like Einstein would be like you know what people suck, yeah, that's true.
SPEAKER_00Einstein Einstein never really went there, did he?
SPEAKER_02No, he didn't. Question number 10, over to you.
SPEAKER_00What when you're older and looking back on your life, what do you hope mattered most about the work that you do?
SPEAKER_03I I think the oh, wow. I mean, I hope I cure cancer. So, I mean, with as much like humility as I can say that, I really do hope that's true. But um, yeah, but I think more than that, not more than that, I mean curing cancer is pretty much.
SPEAKER_01That's a pretty epic thing to do, yeah.
SPEAKER_03I think realistically, I'm gonna keep trying. But the people that I work with, especially the young people that I work with and the folks that I'm training, and the capacity and knowledge and talent that I'm helping to develop, I think that's a pretty good legacy to leave behind. Like I am just one character in their stories, but they are all amazing humans that are gonna go on to do amazing things, hopefully somewhere around here. It's beautiful. And I think that's great.
SPEAKER_01Cool. Last call stay here. So last call, we asked everybody the same kind of question. So, what is one piece of advice that you were given in your life that you would like to give to us?
SPEAKER_03I think it's learn as much as you can, which was something I I learned from my grandmother who, you know, got to go to part of high school or something, you know, and and I remember she told me that, and my mother told me that in turn, and I actually come from a long line of very strong women.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03But my grandmothers never really got much education, right? But they impressed upon us the importance of learning as much as we had the opportunity to learn, and I think that like that runs deep, right?
SPEAKER_01So education doesn't always mean like learning either, like or vice versa.
SPEAKER_03No, no, but you you can right learn as much as you can from anybody who's willing to teach you anything, right? And and I take that through in my life the the Ted Lassoism that I love is be curious, not judgmental, right? So if you go into an opportunity to learn something, assuming that you already know it or it's not useful to learn, you're not getting anything out of that, right? Yeah, but there's so much in this world to learn from everybody. So I think that's that's my advice for you.
SPEAKER_00That's awesome. It's advice. Yeah, it was all I've learned things today, and it's been awesome meeting you. Uh cheers to you. Cheers to you, cheers. Please come back when you've cured cancer. We'll be waiting. Okay, hopefully we'll be still making the show. Okay. And uh uh we're we're rooting for you. Yeah, and and uh yeah, this was lovely. So thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
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