Unraveled

Unraveled

Unraveled is a podcast produced by Dana-Farber that explores the mysteries of the science of cancer. Veteran broadcaster Ken Shulman digs into the cutting-edge science that is transforming cancer research and providing hope for scientists and cancer patients.

Season 2, Episode 6: Big Data, AI, and Cancer Research

As our universe of knowledge expands, sometimes incrementally and more often, exponentially, its new dimensions create new challenges. The more we know, the better our tools are, the more choices we have. And that's great, but it's hard to distill mountains of patient data, clinical trials, therapies, discoveries, and a boatload of externalities.

Duration: 27:51 Publish Date: 05/17/2023

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Season 2, Episode 5: With a Little Help From My Friends: Combination Immunotherapy

If there is such a thing as a holy grail in cancer research, a secret spell or golden ring that can ward off any and all forms of the disease, it probably lives somewhere in the realm of immunotherapy.

Duration: 32:04 Publish Date: 05/12/2023

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Season 2, Episode 4: Making it Personal: Targeted Cancer Therapies

By the early 2000s, researchers at Dana-Farber and elsewhere knew that a certain protein appeared in many tumors taken from lung cancer patients. Based on that data, doctors started treating those patients with a drug that inhibited that protein.

Duration: 30:24 Publish Date: 04/05/2023

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Season 2, Episode 3: Stop the Division: CDK-4/6 Inhibitors and the Cell Cycle

Cancer is often a problem of cell division; cancer cells keep doubling and doubling, faster and faster.

Duration: 26:23 Publish Date: 04/05/2023

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Season 2, Episode 2: Thalidomide and its Second Act in Multiple Myeloma

Momentum isn't always one way. And it's not always constant. Sometimes it shoves you sideways, sometimes it stops you in your tracks. And sometimes only sometimes, it drives you to write one of the most astonishing second acts in all of medicine. That's the story of thalidomide.

Duration: 28:27 Publish Date: 02/23/2023

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Season 2, Episode 1: BCL-2 Inhibitors: Driving Cells to Destruction

The story begins decades ago with a man named Stanley Korsmeyer, who led the molecular oncology program at Dana-Farber from 1998 until his death in 2005. He discovered that B cell cancers like CLL over-produced a protein called Bcl-2, and interfered with apoptosis, or programmed cell death. But how that went from an interesting discovery to a game-

Duration: 30:12 Publish Date: 02/08/2023

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Season 1, Episode 6: Dana-Farber in the Time of COVID

A beauty… that in some cases becomes tragic. It's not the way most people would describe a virus. In the simplest of terms, a virus is a snippet of genetic code. It can't reproduce on its own. In order to replicate, it needs to infect and hijack a living cell.

Duration: 29:37 Publish Date: 10/15/2021

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Season 1, Episode 5: Turning Science Fiction into Fact

It's always fun to think about the future. Flying cars. Cities in the clouds. Colonies on Venus and Mars. OK, we didn't end up living like the Jetsons.

Duration: 30:15 Publish Date: 09/29/2021

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Season 1, Episode 4: The Blueprints of Your Cells

There are approximately 20,000 genes in the human genome. 20,000 packets that house the blueprints for every human cell. And every cell contains a complete copy of that genome.

Duration: 30:23 Publish Date: 09/14/2021

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Season 1, Episode 3: A Culture of Mentorship

What do cancer researchers and 15th century Florentine masters have in common? For one, a culture of mentorship. Both come of age in a culture where knowledge is transmitted from master to pupil. In this episode, we take a closer look at that culture and the crucial role mentorship plays at Dana-Farber, with Nobel laureate Dr. William Kaelin.

Duration: 30:58 Publish Date: 09/14/2021

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Season 1, Episode 2: Behind the Science of the 2019 Nobel Prize

It’s hard to overstate just how important oxygen is to life on earth. Almost every living thing on the planet needs it to convert fuel into energy.

Duration: 28:32 Publish Date: 08/13/2021

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Season 1, Episode 1: The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing

The parable of the wolf in sheep’s clothing tale reminds us that things aren’t always as they seem, that bad guys can dress up as good guys to do their bad guy things.

Duration: 32:33 Publish Date: 08/13/2021

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