Mendelspod Podcast

The future of genomics has arrived in Abu Dhabi.
On today’s show, Dr. Mohamed Alameri of the UAE Department of Health and Albarah El-Khani of M42 describe one of the most ambitious precision medicine efforts underway anywhere in the world: the Emirati Genome Program, which has already sequenced more than 900,000 genomes and is rapidly integrating that data into everyday healthcare.
The UAE program is not only a large sequencing effort and database—soon to be made available for research anywhere—but a coordinated national strategy built on prevention, diagnosis, and long-term population health. Particularly striking is the UAE’s focus on inherited and autosomal recessive diseases, which occur at significantly higher prevalence in the region than in many Western populations. Rather than treating genomics as an isolated research exercise, the program has pushed aggressively into premarital screening, newborn genomic screening, pharmacogenomics, hereditary cancer risk assessment, and rare disease diagnosis.
“We truly believe in the philosophy of ‘sequence once, analyze for life,’” says El-Khani. “Imagine a society where every individual from birth holds a whole genome sequence throughout their life. How powerful is that tool at every intersection of public health, clinical care, and screening?”
The scale of the project is already yielding discoveries difficult to achieve elsewhere. According to Alameri, roughly 12% of the variants identified in the Emirati population are not represented in existing global databases, underscoring just how underrepresented Middle Eastern populations remain in genomics research. In some cases, variants previously considered pathogenic in European populations appear to behave differently in Emirati patients, opening entirely new biological questions.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the program is the degree to which genomics has been operationalized across the healthcare system. The UAE has invested heavily in physician education and public engagement to move genomics from bench to bedside. Our guests describe a healthcare ecosystem where genomic reports, pharmacogenomic guidance, and hereditary risk assessments are increasingly available directly within clinical workflows.
“The vision was not sequencing everyone for its own sake,” says Dr. Alameri. “It was to build a national asset that could support more predictive, preventative, personalized healthcare for our population and for future generations.”
There is always hype in genomics, as with other emerging technologies. But the UAE effort is already very comprehensive and clinically grounded. This is genomics functioning as healthcare infrastructure in real time.


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On today’s show, Dr. Ryan Flynn of Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital takes us into a newly emerging layer of biology: the architecture of the cell surface itself. Flynn first gained attention for the discovery of glycoRNA — RNA molecules displayed on the outside of cells — a finding that challenged the traditional picture of the cell surface as a world composed primarily of proteins and glycans. RNA has long been understood mainly as a carrier of genetic information (messenger RNA), but Flynn’s work has show that it has other functions critical to basic processes in the cell.
As we’ve been hearing on the program, biology has largely been a science of inventory. Throughout today’s conversation, Flynn argues that molecular organization itself may be a fundamental biological variable. Not simply whether a molecule exists, but where it exists, what it is adjacent to. Using technologies such as Pixelgen’s Proximity Network Assay, his lab is beginning to map the “cell surface architecture,” or the arrangement of proteins, glycans, and nucleic acids that together govern signaling and cellular behavior.
The implications stretch across biology. Flynn describes early evidence that extracellular RNA can tune classical signaling pathways such as VEGF-mediated angiogenesis by physically modulating how growth factors engage receptors on endothelial cells. Remove the RNA, and growth factor binding changes dramatically. Rather than acting as a simple on/off switch, the RNA appears to function as a finely tuned regulatory layer controlling signaling strength.
In cancer, where cell-surface signaling drives growth, invasion, and immune escape, looking at the organization of the cell surface may determine whether therapies can physically access their targets. Flynn points to bispecific antibodies and T-cell engagers as examples of drugs whose function already depends on proximity and molecular arrangement, even if work in biology has not fully measured those variables before.


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For decades, biology has been driven by the powerful notion that if we could sequence enough genomes, transcriptomes, epigenomes, then we could finally explain the cell. On today’s show, Gary Schroth, the Chief Scientific Officer at Cellanome, argues that something essential was still missing.
Schroth spent nearly two decades at Illumina helping build the sequencing revolution. He has now joined Cellanome to pursue an expanded vision of biology that connects transcriptomics with live-cell imaging. Our conversation centers around two newly released preprints describing the company’s platform and its application to CRISPR screening, where imaging and transcriptomic data are explicitly linked in the very same cells.
“What we show in a few examples in both papers,” Schroth explains, “is that it’s the combination of transcriptome information and imaging information that really gives us the complete story of what that cell is doing.”
That idea—linking what researchers literally see under the microscope with the molecular state of the exact same cell—emerges as the core concept of the interview. Rather than treating imaging and transcriptomics as separate measurements, Cellanome brings them together in a longitudinal workflow where cells can be observed alive over time and then profiled at the transcriptomic level.
“Sequencing has certainly taught us a lot about cells and sort of the parts list inside cells,” he says. “But it doesn’t really explain biology.”
Will this be the next phase of post-genomic biology where the field moves beyond static snapshots toward directly observing cellular function as it unfolds?


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Today on the show, we’re discussing a new study just presented at ASCO 2026 that could change how chemotherapy decisions are made for a large group of breast cancer patients.
During ASCO we spoke with Phil Febbo, Chief Scientific and Medical Officer at Veracyte, and John Leite, the company’s Chief Commercial Officer, looking at the results from the OPTIMA study, a large prospective trial involving roughly 4,500 patients with clinically high-risk ER-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. The study found that about two-thirds of these patients could safely avoid chemotherapy when treatment decisions were guided by the Prosigna test.
“What the Optima study shows definitively is that those women with low Prosigna score do not benefit from chemotherapy,” Febbo explains. “They get all the side effects… without any benefit.”
The data generated favorable attention at ASCO. The study produced prospective level 1A evidence, the highest standard for predictive testing, and addressed one of the central problems in breast cancer care: determining which patients actually benefit from chemotherapy and which patients may be exposed to toxic treatment unnecessarily.
Our show also looks at the broader evolution of molecular diagnostics in oncology. Prosigna runs on whole transcriptome sequencing, creating opportunities not only for current clinical decision-making, but also for future translational research into tumor biology and treatment response.
“We need the full complement of the transcriptome to understand what is the faulty circuitry and how do we shut it off therapeutically,” Leite says.
Veracyte has moved quickly from clinical validation to rollout. The company already has the assay prepared for U.S. launch immediately following the ASCO presentation. If only it worked out this way every time. It’s the kind of direct through-line between biology, clinical evidence, and improvement of human life that molecular diagnostics companies strive for each year.
Note: For more in-depth discussion on the OPTIMA study and the launch of Prosigna, sign up for an upcoming webinar at GenomeWeb here.


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For years, precision oncology has largely been discussed through the lens of breakthrough drugs. But there’s another story running underneath modern cancer care: the quiet rise of companion diagnostics. These tests are increasingly deciding who receives those therapies in the first place. In many cases, the real bottleneck is no longer discovering a drug target. It’s building a reliable system for identifying the right patient at the right moment in the disease. That challenge sits at the center of this conversation with Rita Shaknovich, Chief Medical Officer for Life Sciences and Diagnostis, and Karina Kulangara, Associate Vice President of R&D in Companion Diagnostics at Agilent Technologies.
Agilent has always had a major role in this field. Rita and Karina explain how companion diagnostics evolved from the original Herceptin test into a vision for a much broader ecosystem spanning pathology, automation, regulation, and global clinical deployment.
We dive into Agilent’s recent FDA approval expanding PD-L1 IHC 22C3 PharmDx into ovarian cancer, a development both guests describe as particularly meaningful given the historically poor outcomes associated with the disease. As Rita puts it: “Precision medicine is based fundamentally on scientific truth . . . it brought real results for patients. It brings better survival for patients, fewer side effects from the medication.”
Karina offers one of the clearest explanations we’ve heard for why immunohistochemistry or IHC has endured so long in modern oncology. “It’s the ability to detect protein biomarker in the spatial context of the tissue,” she explains, emphasizing that location and cellular context can fundamentally shape how therapies work.
What emerges is a picture of precision oncology that is becoming less exotic and more routine. We’re talking not just new drugs, but an entire clinical and technological infrastructure which is designed to match therapies to biology more effectively and over time.


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