Health and Medicine (Audio)

Seizures caused by epilepsy can have a dramatic impact on one's quality of life. For Nolan, his seizures cost him everyday independence, including the ability to drive. When he decided to have surgery, he chose awake brain surgery led by Dr. Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at UCSF. During surgery, Nolan speaks and responds as the medical team carefully maps the language regions of his brain — guiding their treatment of him while protecting his ability to communicate. The result opens a path back toward the freedoms Nolan has been missing. [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 41414]

Cognitive resilience depends on how the brain responds to environment, aging, and inflammation. J. Tiago Gonçalves, Ph.D., studies the hippocampus to examine how spatial memory is shaped by factors such as cognitive enrichment, exercise, social interaction, disease, and age. Gonçalves explains how adult neurogenesis and microglia help support the brain’s ability to encode information, and how disruptions in these systems can affect memory. He also shows that aging and systemic inflammation can weaken spatial encoding while still revealing signs of adaptation and recovery over time. By connecting brain plasticity, immune activity, and memory formation, Gonçalves presents a broader view of how cognition changes across the lifespan and how these mechanisms may inform future strategies for addressing cognitive decline Series: "Stem Cell Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Science] [Show ID: 40848]

Alpha Clinics in California accelerate the development of regenerative medicine therapies that use cells and genes to treat serious diseases. Patient advocate Tara Radcliffe Ghiglieri shares lived experience with gene therapy, while Sheldon Morris, M.D., M.P.H., Mehrdad Abedi, M.D., Daniela A. Bota, M.D., Ph.D., Catriona Jamieson, M.D., Ph.D., Michael Lewis, M.D., Mark Walters, M.D., and Leo D. Wang, M.D., Ph.D., describe how Alpha Clinic teams design and deliver clinical trials for a wide range of conditions, including cancer, blood disorders, neurologic disease, osteoarthritis, metabolic disorders, pulmonary arterial hypertension, and Duchenne muscular dystrophy. They highlight how coordinated networks, community partnerships, and genomic tools help expand access, lower financial barriers, and bring promising cell and gene therapies to more patients while carefully tracking safety, effectiveness, and long-term outcomes. Series: "Stem Cell Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 41168]

Off-the-shelf immune cell therapies using engineered T cells represent an important direction in cancer treatment. Lili Yang, Ph.D., at UCLA develops an off-the-shelf platform based on invariant natural killer T (iNKT) cells generated from hematopoietic stem cells, often sourced from cord blood. Yang programs these stem cells with iNKT cell receptors, chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), and genes such as IL-15 to create pure, expandable iNKT products that recognize lipid antigens presented by non polymorphic CD1d molecules. These cells combine multiple killing mechanisms, infiltrate tissues, target tumor cells and immunosuppressive myeloid cells, and show reduced risk of graft versus host disease and cytokine release syndrome in preclinical models. Yang’s group tests this strategy in models of blood cancers and solid tumors, aiming to generate many therapeutic doses from a single donor. Series: "Stem Cell Channel" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 40846]

How fast are you really aging, and what could that mean for brain health? Aladdin H. Shadyab, Ph.D., explores the gap between chronological age and biological age, and why that difference matters for long-term health. Shadyab describes tools that use information from blood to estimate how quickly the body is aging, including approaches that look beyond the body as a whole to consider aging in specific systems. He connects faster biological aging with higher risk for age-related disease and declines in physical and cognitive function, and discusses how blood-based biomarkers may offer earlier signals of processes linked to Alzheimer’s disease. Shadyab also highlights lifestyle and treatment findings that may support healthier aging and longer survival. Series: "Stein Institute for Research on Aging" [Health and Medicine] [Show ID: 41073]