6 Burst results for "Jim Allison"
The Readout Loud
"jim allison" Discussed on The Readout Loud
"Been sort of an uptick in Some of the respiratory pathogens that infect little kids that were rising rates you know in in may and june if you're talking strictly about influenza you're right the rates last year almost non existent. I mean one child died in the united states from flew in the twenty. Twenty one Flu season which is just extraordinary You know often. It's somewhere between one hundred thirty in two hundred children a year who died from flu in the us But you know going forward. It's not clear if if this coming season will be a severe flu season. Normally the northern hemisphere watches the southern hemisphere to see what's happening there to try to gauge What might be coming at us and it flew is still transmitting at extremely low rates in the southern hemisphere. Where it is now you know winter and would normally beef flu season so you know it. It could be that this coming. Winter won't be the big bad flu season that people are expecting. It may take a little bit longer for flew to rebound but people are worried that there will be a bad flu season coming in the not too distant future. Well how an ito as at mentioned at the top we look to you as a barometer. For how worried we should be until. I'm wondering if you don't mind if i ask you personally. How are you like going out into the world. these days Are you still wearing a mask inside. You eat endorse at restaurants. Are you comfortable seeing colleagues working at your desk in are these fears around delta making you Reconsider any of the sort of more freedoms you might have taken Before we start worrying. Helen and i are having dinner next week. Chalice insider outside. I think it's going to be inside. Yes i didn't In a restaurant indoors over the weekend and it was the first time that i had I'm not wearing a mask when i'm on my bike or walking around. I do put them on when i go into stores. It's kind of more of a courtesy thing you know. I'm not feeling like super anxious at this point of it'll be interesting to see we're going back into the office starting next week It'll be great to see everybody but it'd be weird to look for. I look for sure. I'm thinking about making banana bread but You know asked me that question. In september when things start to get cooler and we see what happened over the summer with rates. And let's see what i answer them and our listeners should know that helen is amazing. So i look forward to eating that next week. When i see you see you you coming in debut. I had planned on it. And then i realized that it's next week and i didn't get my act together so soon though could be great to see you allen. Thanks for your time once again. Thanks for having me wanted to interrupt the podcast for one moment. Let listeners know about a very cool staff event. That is coming up soon. It's called the breakthrough science summit and as its name implies. We will be exploring breakthroughs in technology and procedures that have remade. The world health and medicine with our keynote speakers will take you inside these innovations examining how developed adopted and paid for. Also take a look at the breakthroughs at having it hit the market but have the potential to redefine health and medicine in the years to come. The list of speakers is long and distinguished but among them. Are jim allison. The nobel prize winning immunologist and godfather of cancer immunotherapy francis collins director of the nih and catherine jansen the pfizer vaccine scientists. Who helped of course create its covert nineteen vaccine. This is a virtual event running over two days next week july thirteenth and fourteenth listeners of this podcast can get a discount on registration. Go to stat. News dot com slash summit and use discount code p od all lower case. We've talked a lot about how the cove nineteen pandemic has led to unprecedented investor interest in biotech but the world of digital health fueled by a boom in virtual care has arguably fared better with previously obscure companies reaching billion dollar valuations through a breathless series of deals this week stat rounded up some of the most intriguing digital health transactions of the first half of twenty twenty one and joining us to discuss a few them is health tech correspondent. Mario aguilar mario. Welcome back to the podcast. It's script to be back. So one of the big trends to share has been technology targeting mental health We've seen massive amounts of money flowing into companies like lira. Health modern health and ginger. So mario what exactly do these firms do and halloween know whether they're worth their valuations. Were you're right that these firms have raised gigantic sums liras put together two rounds totaling nearly four hundred million at evaluation of nearly five billion modern health ginger beside over one billion fine rounds i mean what investors see here is a potentially huge market That needs a service that they can't get fundamentally. There's a shortage of supply therapists and a excessive demand for what they offer So the companies that can figure out how to use tech to increase the reach of the therapists are potentially winners so nearly the market. We talked about talks face heads face which were consumer facing apps the former sort of connects to a therapist via chat and maybe via video or audio The ladder is like meditation and other exercises. Now what we're seeing now is sort of evolution of those kinds of products lira. Modern health those products target employers who want to provide health benefits to their employees. And if you want to move. The needle in the role of healthcare quickly import benefits. Plans are very good way to do it up until now you know. Companies have commonly offered employee assistance plans which are basically a phone number that you call trying to get helper counseling. And i don't wanna say that they are worthless but in my personal experience. They're their substandard. So with these companies do is basically offer a better pe- as to whether these companies are worth the money ender huge valuations. I mean i think in talking to investors. It's really clear that there's gonna be a couple of huge winners in the space. There's just too much opportunity. But there's also like a lot of complexity in the market so like companies target all sorts of different buyers right health plans..
WNYC 93.9 FM
"jim allison" Discussed on WNYC 93.9 FM
"Important to me. It's nice to understand the problems of a working scientist. That is correct. You grew up in Greensboro? Yes. Yes, True North Carolina, You seem to have no Southern accent. What's that about? So I can do one if needed first off. Secondly, I did my residency and fellowship in Boston. You say the word y'all on rounds Exactly One time brown. Stop. Everyone makes fun of you for 20 minutes and then rounds resume again. So yeah, that beats it out of you pretty quickly. You're one of the few people who's had experience as a researcher on entrepreneur, the head of a large research institution in charge of grants and head of the regulator for drugs and medical devices. Having worked in all those areas. How do you see things differently than someone less polymath IQ than that? The thing that has become very clear to me that it's a nuanced and hard message to tell, But there's this pace of progress in cancer research. There's really exceptional Like no other period in my life may be like no other period and biomedical research for any disease, But it's hard to talk about because it's so Hedorah genius. Could focus on any specific area and say, Why is progress slow here there but an aggregate? What's happening is really amazing. You know, when I was at the FDA about 30% of the business in terms of new approvals for devices and drugs was cancer related. It's really remarkable. Yeah. For the past three decades or so. The death rate from all cancers in the U. S has declined roughly 30% in 2018 alone, the most recent year for which we have data. The decline was 2.4%. That is the biggest single year decline ever recorded. This is all good news. But it's also a long, long way from the Nixon era, hope that cancer was about to be cured within five years. There are, however, something's hidden in the cancer data that makes that 30% decline even more impressive. For one. The survival rate for younger cancer patients has improved dramatically. And one reason so many older people are still dying from cancer is that they're not dying from cardiovascular disease is thanks to a huge drop in mortality there. In other words, many people who in previous generations would have died from heart disease are now living long enough to die instead from cancer. But you know, as I said, it's uneven. There are certainly cancers where we're making a lot less progress. Okay, where is less progress being made from 2012 to 2016 death rates for women decreased for 13 of the 20 most common cancers, including lung, breast and colorectal, but increased for five types, including cancer of the uterus and liver. Men Over that same period, Death rates decreased for 10 of the 19 most common cancers, but increased for six, including liver and non melanoma, skin cancer. A lot of those day to go toe 2016, which precedes a lot of the widespread use of immuno oncology drugs, So you know as good as those data are, they don't include a lot of the new therapies that we've developed. Immuno oncology, harnessing the body's own immune system to treat cancer. This has a long history. In the 19 seventies, for instance, there was a lot of enthusiasm about naturally occurring proteins called interference. Was gonna you know, Jack up your immune system to fight cancer. And this was going to be this universal cure for cancer. And it was really a failure. It didn't work And because of that experience and other experiments like that. The cancer research community. Medical oncologists like me became very skeptical of the idea that the immune system could treat cancer. In fact, skeptical is probably not strong enough. We thought a lot of these people work in the music and we're literally crazy. You know, he was thought they were harming patients and irresponsible and so it was really a vilified field. For many years, and but a few great scientists persevered and start identify ways to coach the immune system into fighting cancer. This is hardly the first time in medical history that the supposedly crazy people turned out to be brilliant fact it happens all the time in medicine. In 2016. The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine went to two researchers Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo for immunotherapy research. And then those therapy started the work. And so that's really become a successful and very important way to treat cancer that most in the field myself included were very skeptical of in the early days. Let's talk about lung cancer for second Still the most fatal cancer but decreasing Yes, I guess you could look at it from either side that there has been progress. Or you could say, Wow, it's still killing a lot of people. Yeah, So the first thing you say is even today after a lot of progress against lung cancer that reflects various advances. It still kills more people than breast, prostate and colon combined in the United States every year, so it's a highly lethal malignancy, where we definitely need to make additional dances and also one of the major things that shaped lung cancer is the use of cigarettes and tobacco. And so tobacco control over the last few decades is starting to have some success. And then on top of that, we have some interesting new developments. So we have these drugs called kindness inhibitors that target specific subsets of lung cancer. Maybe 15 or 20% of lung cancer, United States or targeted by these pills, they're quite effective and not very toxic. And then we've also had the introduction of immunotherapy. So these checkpoint inhibitors that air Quite active against an even larger fraction of lung cancer have produced some really marvelous responses. And so now we're seeing a lung cancer mortality declined at the fastest rate in the history.
KQED Radio
"jim allison" Discussed on KQED Radio
"With him, as he said at the time. It's very important to me. It's nice to understand the problems of a working sign. Just that is correct. You grew up in Greensboro. Yes. Yes, True North Carolina, You seem to have no Southern accent. What's that about? So I can do one if needed first off. Secondly, I did my residency and fellowship in Boston. You say the word y'all on rounds Exactly One time ground stop. Everyone makes fun of you for 20 minutes and then rounds resume again. So yeah, that beats it out of you pretty quickly. You're one of the few people who's had experience as a researcher on entrepreneur, the head of a large research institution in charge of grants and head of the regulator for drugs and medical devices. Having worked in all those areas. How do you see things differently than someone less polymath IQ than that? The thing that has become very clear to me that it's a nuanced and hard message to tell, But there's this pace of progress in cancer research. There's really exceptional Like no other period in my life may be like no other period in biomedical research for any disease, but it's hard to talk about because it's so head or genius. Could focus on any specific area and say, Why is progress slow here or there, but an aggregate? What's happening is really amazing. You know, when I was at the FDA about 30% of the business in terms of new approvals for devices and drugs was cancer related. It's really remarkable. Over the past three decades or so. The death rate from all cancers in the U. S has declined roughly 30% in 2018 alone, the most recent year for which we have data that decline was 2.4%. That is the biggest single year decline ever recorded. This is all good news. But it's also a long, long way from the Nixon era, hope that cancer was about to be cured within five years. There are, however, something's hidden in the cancer data that makes that 30% decline even more impressive. For one. The survival rate for younger cancer patients has improved dramatically. And one reason so many older people are still dying from cancer is that they're not dying from cardiovascular disease is thanks to a huge drop in mortality there. In other words, many people who in previous generations would have died from heart disease are now living long enough to die instead from cancer. But you know, as I said, it's uneven. There are certainly cancers where we're making a lot less progress. Okay, where is less progress being made from 2012 to 2016 death rates for women decreased for 13 of the 20 most common cancers, including lung, breast and colorectal, but increased for five types, including cancer of the uterus and liver. Men Over that same period, Death rates decreased for 10 of the 19 most common cancers, but increased for six, including liver and non melanoma, skin cancer. A lot of those day to go toe 2016, which precedes a lot of the widespread use of immuno oncology drugs, So you know as good as those data are, they don't include a lot of the new therapies that we've developed. Immuno oncology, harnessing the body's own immune system to treat cancer. This has a long history. In the 19 seventies, for instance, there was a lot of enthusiasm about naturally occurring proteins called interference. Was gonna you know, Jack up your immune system to fight cancer. And this was going to be this universal cure for cancer. And it was really a failure. It didn't work And because of that experience and other experiments like that. The cancer research community. Medical oncologists like me became very skeptical of the idea that the immune system could treat cancer. In fact, skeptical is probably not strong enough. We thought a lot of these people working amuses and we're literally crazy. You know, he was thought they were harming patients and irresponsible And so it was really a vilified field. For many years, and but a few great scientists persevered and start identify ways to coach the immune system into fighting cancer. This is hardly the first time in medical history that the supposedly crazy people turned out to be brilliant fact it happens all the time in medicine. In 2016. The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine went to two researchers Jim Allison and Tasuku Honjo for immunotherapy research. And then those therapy started the work. And so that's really become a successful and very important way to treat cancer that most in the field myself included were very skeptical of in the early days. Let's talk about lung cancer for seconds. Still the most fatal cancer but decreasing. Yes, I guess you could look at it from either side that there has been progress. Or you could say, Wow, it's still killing a lot of people. Yeah, So the first thing you say is even today after a lot of progress against lung cancer that reflects various advances. It still kills more people than breast, prostate and colon combined in the United States every year, so it's a highly lethal malignancy, where we definitely need to make additional advances and also one of the major things that shaped lung cancer is the use of cigarettes and tobacco. And so tobacco control over the last few decades is starting to have some success. And then on top of that, we have some interesting new developments. So we have these drugs called kindness inhibitors that target specific subsets of lung cancer. Maybe 15 or 20% of one cancer, United States or targeted by these pills, they're quite effective and not very toxic. And then we've also had the introduction Immunotherapy. So these checkpoint inhibitors that air Quite active against an even larger fraction of lung cancer have produced a really marvelous responses. And so now we're seeing a lung cancer mortality declined at the fastest rate in the history that we've kept statistics about lung.
Sci-Fi Talk Indie Film
"jim allison" Discussed on Sci-Fi Talk Indie Film
"Really understand what it is. We were doing you kind of have to write a whole bunch of stuff that doesn't work and throw it away. You know that is a great guy and a very talented writer. And he was a great collaborator. Oh that's great. Yes sometimes you kind of have to a journey sometimes leads you or do you need to go. Even though you don't use throw away some of the stuff you used on the way but that's the main thing is to get there so let's that and you did and you did. Thank you bake really. I think what also resonated with me is And also good disea- david niki from stargate in there too but as a principal. They're both parents are arguing in the his office. And they're arguing about You know what's best for For william and he rightly says that's a decision he has to make and i think that's important because we all do that are sometimes our parents kind of have their idea of what they wanna see and some parents are more forceful on that than others but basically it comes down to a person's decision and i thought the film touched on that very nicely to thank you Something we've done a few screenings preview screenings recently in a bunch of people come up to me afterwards and said thank you for making a movie about standardized testing. I didn't think that that's in there to You know he says his cognitive pattern is different. You know he. It's not a question of intelligence. He he just thinks differently And advice the all kinds of people in All kinds of people in our society now wise was everything. Shot pretty much in the same area or did you have to travel a bit. Well everything was shot in the vancouver area so You know around vancouver and a beautiful beautiful place And had a diversity of location types. You know we shot some material on the campus of university of british columbia. And that's a an amazing spot and then the island that the mom takes into It's called bowen island. It's right there. Take a ferry. There you know the salary was in a a nice Beautiful metaphor for her trying to seclude him from society and all of that Yes great location. Yeah dan cooper going to be. I'll be there next week. Oh cool i. I also saw him. Being on the boat also ferryboat was also him kind of kim. Breaking away a little bit. Yeah like every young man must you know he he wants yeah exactly way in the world and he wants to make a connection wants to connect with people who like we all do. Yeah yep absolutely no some wonderful themes in this movie that really stands out to really neat film and i certainly hope it gets a lot of attention because it deserves it. it's it's really a first class. What's up for you next well. I have a producing partner on this movie. Bill haney or producer In has just directed a an amazing documentary. Movie called breakthrough. Which is about a cancer researcher named jim allison created the first immuno oncology drugs and just won the nobel prize. So that's an amazing project product. That's out there now I i have a documentary film project. That i'm just starting developing ideas for another feature super excited to.
Bay Curious
Everything You Wanted to Know About Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART)
"I bring you in here because we wanna do effectively like a art special. We get a ton of questions about Bart and you are as far as I'm concerned. The expert in my life. Oh okay well. I'm flattered to hear that. How long have you been covering transit and paying attention to what Barnabas well you know. I've paid attention to what bar does since the mid seventy S.. That's when I moved here and I started taking Bart right then. I think my first Bart ride was nineteen seventy-three. I went to a warriors game when the system was no more than in a year old. What was your first impression. When I came out here. Fart was sort of this rumor. It had gotten national coverage right because they were doing all this crazy he stuff. They were going to go eighty miles an hour. The was much faster than the commute trains went in Chicago. It seems space age and The shape of the cars configuration of the cars that was different from anything I had seen so yeah. It was a cool experience and the other thing was it. was you know it was kind of cheap. Listen there was a time when the short hop rides were twenty five cents. Actually that was just in downtown Oakland in downtown San Francisco although a quarter got a lot further in nineteen seventy three than it does today. I mean things are really different. I mean listen. The other thing about this system was it was not heavily used in the past ten years. Here's the ridership just skyrocketed when the economy came back after the great recession. And that's really one of the chief reasons we've had such a crisis of crowding. Well I think that kind of tease us up to a couple of questions that we got from listeners So this first one comes from mark and he wants to know in. Its nearly fifty years of existence. Why has taken so long to extend into Santa Clara County and only nominally portrait into San Mateo County and never expanded into any any of the North Bay counties. Well there's a complicated history to that but I mean the simple version is that Bay Area Counties had the choice of opting into Bart art in the early sixties and some opted out Santa Clara and San Mateo opted out. There was some talk about a going up to the North Bay going to Marin that history is even more complicated there were engineering studies at showed it was feasible to put a track below the roadway on the Golden Gate Bridge and get the trains over. There were three engineering studies. That found that was fine. One sponsored by the Golden Gate Bridge district did not support that idea but that was on the table and when San Mateo County opted out the backers of Bart then no longer thought that the Marin idea would be feasible so they sort of pulled back on that and in the meantime you know the Golden Gate Bridge district never really liked the idea because back then Bart would have been competition for the service they were offering so far has only gone into Santa Clara and San Mateo detail in recent history because the people in those counties decided they wanted barred. Well I WANNA go back to the early days of the the beginning of Bart. We've got a question from listener. Who wants to know. How did they build the underwater tunnels for Bart. So this is one of the great epochs of the Bart Construction Story It took years and years to design the system that they used and the tube was built in sections they would build the sections in pieces that were longer within a football field and then when they were done with all that work they would tow the section of the tube out into the bay and then they would lower the tube which was sealed both ends down to its location which was of course very precisely marked and divers would join join the sections of Tube together one at a time so that joining the meant they were being welded together and bolted and the to was resting in a shallow trench that had been dug before the sections were brought out? So it took about three years of actual construction auction to get that all together. And that's the Tube we have today the other thing the other aspect I find fascinating is that you know you're actually going down. Pretty pretty steeply sides of the bay where you start up on the Oakland. And you're you're above ground say fifty feet and then you you the plunge under the bay this thing is a one hundred and thirty feet below the bay and then you have to come up on the San Francisco side to connect to the tunnel at Embarcadero cricket hero. The experiences a writer is pretty flat. You kinda feel you're just going straight across. Oh that's right. There are a couple of places where you actually change elevation under the water and It doesn't really feel like you're going up or down but that's exactly what you're doing. Let's get to our next question now. I WANNA go down into the Bart Stations. A couple parts ten questions. So this comes from Brad Meier. I've noticed that they're empty. Newsstands at some stations. What is the history. And why are they closed. And they could provide jobs to vendors in income to Bart. I'm asking because other transit systems around the country have newsstands open in their stations. So we came down to Bart's Montgomery Street station to answer Brad's question and standing looking at where one of these kiosks ask stood. Listen to deal with those kiosks was it was mainly an outlet for the chronicle and examiner the to San Francisco. Newspapers both are still in existence. They used to have a joint operating agreement and so vendors deal both of them. The Kiosk were actually very limited in size so not really amenable to the much bigger business. But the main thing that's happened is the newspapers Don't circulate by selling on the street anymore. Selling and Transit Stations Asians and that's due to the Internet and its do smartphones where people are carrying that information with them instead of having a paper medium in terms arms of whether these could be re purposed for another kind of business. Well maybe but again they're small A bit smaller. You're perhaps in the ones that you see in New York and Chicago and some other cities but the other thing is those kiosks generally sell other kinds of goods so food and Barton generally inside the station's discourages consuming food. We know that from a very recent famous incident where somebody was detained cited for eating breakfast sandwich at the Pleasant Hill station. Those are the main considerations and why these kiosks just aren't going going thing anymore but there is one sort of cool thing about this kiosk if you actually walk over to where used to stand here at the eastern end of the Montgomery Street concourse. Here's an audio effect. If you stand exactly where the kiosk was. Here's kind of an echo chamber here and is right for experimentation enjoy writing and now we have to go catcher train all right well. Let's get to our next question. I'm Jay Quigley and I live even Oakland at West Oakland Bart Station. Their ads right next to the third rail. How on Earth did they change those out without getting electrocuted. I asked this question because every time I look at the third rail I get terrified. Well you know the third rail is something you don't WanNa touch under any circumstances it's very high voltage and Instant death or at least extremely serious injury if you do come into contact with it so what they do is You Know Bart is shut down for a part of every day. Trains really stop running around one. Am and then. There's a window of time between one and four in the morning when a lot of maintenance activity takes place they shut down the third rail. I was told by Jim. Allison at Bart that they call it laying down a blanket. Meaning you know making that area like as if you're covering the rail with a blanket to make it safe they're not physically doing that and then Once the rails are de energized than the workers can work safely there
Investor's Edge
Houston scientist Jim Allison awarded Nobel Prize for Medicine
"American ensuring the Nobel prize for medicine USA radio networks, Chris Barnes has more on the story to scientists run from the US and one from Japan are the winners of the Nobel prize for medicine, the Nobel Institute in Stockholm announcing the Jim Allison and to sue Honjo were honoured for their discoveries leading to new approaches and using the immune system to battle cancer. Allison is a professor at the university of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in