The Science Pawdcast

Season 5 Episode 24: Global Heat, Cat Disputes, And Bridging Science And Business with Dr. Kavya Sharman

• Jason Zackowski • Season 5 • Episode 24

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Feeling the burn from both the scorching heat outdoors and the blazing tension between your cats? We've got the antidote. This week, we're talking about the global heat wave that's got everyone talking, thanks to that meddlesome El Nino. We're also decoding feline language, so you can tell if it's a fun play-fight or a real feud brewing between your cats. And if you think that's hot, we're about to make you break a sweat with our hilarious heat wave joke.

Get ready to be inspired by our guest, the remarkable Dr. Kavya Sharman, a scientist with a passion for entrepreneurship. We follow her journey from a young science enthusiast to a PhD candidate diving into the depths of nanotechnology and cell disease research. Along the way, she's founded a startup, started a program to connect students with research opportunities, and continues to break new ground.

Wrapping up this exhilarating discussion, we'll take you on a journey through the human body, unmasking the mysteries of staff infections and the promise of multimodal imaging. We'll also discuss the synergy between science and business, and how it's pushing the boundaries in the life sciences sector. And because we love our furry friends, we'll conclude with insights on pet behavior, brain connections, and the importance of inclusion. So, forget the pressing heat outside because we're about to turn up the intellectual thermostat!

For our dedicated Pop-Hack community members, stick around as we share a heartwarming pet story and some fascinating brain facts. This episode isn't just a wild ride; it's a treasure trove of knowledge and discovery that will leave you both enlightened and entertained. So pour yourself a cool drink, sit back, and let's get this show on the road!

Dr. Kavya Sharman's links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/KavyaSharman

Website: https://kavyasharman.com/

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Speaker 2:

Hello science enthusiasts. My name is Jason Zikowski. I'm a high school chemistry teacher and a science communicator, but I'm also the dog dad of Bunsen and Beaker, the science dogs on social media. If you love science and you love pets, you've come to the right place. Put on your lab coat, put on your safety glasses and hold onto your tail. This is the Science Podcast. Hello everybody, welcome back to the Science Podcast. We hope you're happy and healthy out there Now.

Speaker 2:

Speaking of healthy, the podcast is a bit late because this week I got, I think, food poisoning or some kind of like sudden onset flu. I have never been that sick in my life. It was like two days of I don't know. I'll spare you the details, but I was not doing much of anything during those two days besides being sick, and Chris and Adam are gone, so I had to scrape my melted self off the bed to take the dogs out. Sadly, for two days I just didn't have the energy to do more than take them out for business and feed them. But I feel better today and the podcast is out, so let's get into it.

Speaker 2:

In science news, we're going to take a look at the extreme heat that's happening all over North America and what the scientists are leaning towards as the cause. You might be a little interested in that if you've been in some of those really hot temperatures. In pet science, we're going to talk about cats and other cats and how to tell if they're getting along In Ask an Expert. Our awesome guest this week is Dr Kavya Sharman, who is going to be talking to us about a wild way to look at diseases or cells. I am still trying to wrap my head around the conversation and I hope you love it. Okay, we're going to do the bad joke a little bit different. You have to start it, so you're going to say how hot is it? Okay, ready, one, two, three, it's so hot. I saw a chicken laying omelets. Okay, try it again. Okay, say how hot is it? Three, two, one, it's so hot. Even my ice cream is sweating. Okay, now remember, you're not sweating, you're just oozing charisma. All right, I'm with the show because there's no time like science time.

Speaker 2:

This week in science news, let's talk about the dog days of summer and how hot it's been in places in North America and the rest of the world. We've had one or two hot days where we live in Alberta, but it has not been a very warm summer. In fact it's been dry and with weird hail, so we haven't been suffering through some extreme heat like the rest of the world. But you can't compare where you live in one part of the world to what's happening everywhere else, and every time I turn on the news or I look at Twitter, there's always some new heat wave that's just scorching hot and breaking records, and it looks like this month of July will be the hottest month ever recorded on Earth. Now, were there really hot months hundreds of thousands, two and a half million millions of years ago? Probably. In fact, it was probably way hotter in different parts of Earth's past, but there weren't humans walking around, there weren't humans living. And of course, we are here now so we can record the temperature. And just to give you an idea, like I was looking at some of these temperatures and their bananas, a heat wave that was scorching through the United States and Northern Mexico, like Southwest United States, phoenix was 43.3 degrees Celsius, that's 110 Fahrenheit, and that wasn't just one day, that was for nearly an entire month and that suppressed. That beat a record. China has also been facing extreme heat for weeks on end, with temperatures up to 52 degrees Celsius. 52 degrees Celsius like desert temperatures, that's 126 Fahrenheit. This broke their national temperature record, but the highest temperature ever recorded above 40 degrees north latitude. Rome also had some new temperature highs, temperature records being broken all over the place and if you add up all of the temperatures this month, it's going to be the hottest recorded month. So that's where the date is coming from, even though where you live it may not be super hot like where we live. What is causing these extreme temperatures? Is it climate change? Okay, now I'm going to talk about the main thing that's driving the hot temperatures, and climate change is like somebody who's driving the main culprit, and they have their foot on the gas.

Speaker 2:

There's a natural climate phenomenon known as El Nino, and I've spoken before about this and I've talked to you, climate scientist, dr Catherine Heyhoe, about El Nino and La Nina. And they are these Now. During a El Nino, winds blow from east to west across the Pacific. This creates warm water in the western Pacific and cooler water in the eastern Pacific, off the coast of South America. Now, during this event, there is a reversal of those winds and the warm surface waters that were in the western Pacific start to move eastward. This causes the warmer water to spread across the eastern Pacific and that leads to the rise in sea temperatures or surface temperatures sea surface temperatures in those regions. El Nino is what we're experiencing right now. Some of the things you can see, some of the things that happened during El Nino, are increased rainfall, flooding, and but that can also reduce rainfall. In some areas it kind of like steals the rain from one area, and that's what's actually happening in southern Alberta and BC right now. They are experiencing drought like really bad drought.

Speaker 2:

El Nino can alter the path of storms, specifically in the Pacific region. It also contributes to an overall increase in global temperature. This release of warm water and heat into the atmosphere influences weather patterns and then starts to intensify heat waves everywhere. So the main culprit that's causing these record breaking heats is El Nino, and during El Nino things get a little hotter. A way to remember this is like El Nino, oh, like, oh, it's hot. El Nino, like you touch something hot and La Nina is like ah, it's so nice and cool. And during the La Nina it gets cooler. So should it be? Should it be hotter? Yeah, it should be hotter right now because of this oscillation of ocean currents and climate patterns. Now climate change is a factor. Climate change is making all of these naturally occurring heat waves more likely and more severe. The World Weather Attribution Initiative has shown that climate change has increased the probability of heat waves occurring and their intensity.

Speaker 2:

During the summer, it's really hot in places around the world. Like I'm thinking, we were in Las Vegas during the summer and it was like wildly hot, way hotter than we've ever experienced. We went to Mexico, I believe, in the summer. Yeah, we went to Mexico in the summer for my brother's wedding and it was really really hot there. So like it's supposed to be hot in the summer, just like it's supposed to be cold in the winter, depending on where you are, and during the El Nino it's supposed to be hotter than normal.

Speaker 2:

But when heat waves become more frequent due to the warming of the earth from human activities, you start to get the top end of the extremes. Instead of hot days happening five days of the summer, maybe they happen seven or eight, maybe, instead of it being a certain temperature, it's a few degrees hotter. And what's really interesting is there are these jet streams, which are powerful high altitude winds that influence weather patterns, and they are what help cause the formation of heat waves, and climate change could be affecting jet streams. There isn't a consensus yet how climate change affects jet streams. Climate change could make the jet streams more wobbly, which means they could meander. They could make them less wavy, which means they are more of a blob and they hang around. While climate change is loading the dice for these extreme heat waves, the understanding how it affects jet streams are still working on.

Speaker 2:

There's a Simpsons meme that people are using with these heat waves, where Bart is going this is the hottest day of my life and then his dad, homer, responds to him this is the hottest day of your life so far. And it's a throwback to a Simpsons episode where Bart's having a bad day. So are things going to get worse? Yeah, things are going to get worse. All the climate scientists are saying things are going to get worse. They're no bad and they're going to get worse, so don't lose hope. I always say on the science podcast like there's. There are technologies advancing, people are becoming more aware of it. Just humans are stubborn and we have a big reliance on fossil fuels. So I guess if you are in a place where heat waves are common, get ready for them to be more common, and those, those governments, may have to work on mitigation rather than stopping it from occurring. That's science news for this week.

Speaker 2:

This week in pet science, let's talk about households that have more than one cat. Now, don't get your hopes up, we are not getting a second cat. Ginger. Ginger is enough cat for this household. This the reason why I was thinking about this is my father-in-law, gord. He's got a bunch of cats. He lives on the same property of the farm as us and throughout the years we have been collected well, not we, gord, gord, to his credit, has been collecting cats.

Speaker 2:

Now these are the cats that just show up on the farm property. That are strays. They maybe were let out from Red Deer and they've been living rough, or they're escaped from or left nearby farms. They're just, they're strays, and usually during the winter, that's when the cats are okay enough to be scooped up to start to become pets, and I think all of Gord's cats are are strays. The newest cat is called mouse and it was also a stray that wound up on our property and Gord kind of Gord and Adam worked together to tame this thing and it was very happy to have a nice worm house, because most of the cats that are strays. They have a really, really rough time in the winter.

Speaker 2:

Cats that, unfortunately, that have been around the farm that we've saw and been unsuccessful to relocate or to re-home or to capture and turn into a pet, they are not long for this world. It's rough, rough life for an outdoor cat in our very cold winters. Now when I've gone to in the times that I've gone to Gord's house, I remember I'm allergic to cats and none of his cats are on the same cat food that Ginger's on, so I can't stay too long because there's a whole bunch of cats there's like four cats, four or five cats in that house and the cats are range from Ginger, meaning she looks at you and will be very picky and choosy about when it's time to be affectionate to other cats that as soon as they see you they're like oh my God, I am going to sit on your lap, I want everything to do with you. And it got me thinking about just like dogs do cats get along with other cats? And I did some research, looking through some vet recommendations about signs that the cats that you have in your house are friendly with each other, or getting along or not getting along. I ran this by Gord. He's got a little experience and yeah, it seems to check out Okay.

Speaker 2:

So if you've got a couple of cats in your house or you're thinking about adding a second cat and you have, what are some signs that the cats are good friends with each other? Cats will generally sniff noses as a greeting with each other. They may rub their bodies together to deposit their pheromones and that builds up something called a group scent. If cats are sleeping very close to each other or touching each other, that means they're very comfortable and feel safe. They may play together in a non-aggressive manner, and the tail up greeting is a classic greeting that the cats are happy with each other.

Speaker 2:

There are some signs that things are not going well with your cat. Some of them are very obvious, like they straight up hiss or fight each other. But they could be doing some subtle things to show that they are not real happy with each other's presence. One that's a big one is they may avoid the area of the house that the cat they are not getting along with is in and that may be to their detriment. With getting food and water. Occasionally, cats could be very territorial and try to block access to spaces. We see this actually with Ginger. She tries to block Beaker, sometimes very successfully and sometimes not. Occasionally she'll sleep right in the middle of a doorway, so Beaker is trapped within a room. As you've been following us on social media, couch wars is occurring where the one corner of the couch both Beaker and Ginger are fighting over. Bunsen has realized that Ginger has really nothing to do with him. So Ginger ignores Bunsen and Bunsen kind of ignores Ginger. They do their own things.

Speaker 2:

If you are finding that you do have some fighting, some blocking, some hissing, it could be medical. So obviously you could schedule a Veterinarian visit to double check that your cat is doing okay. There's some things you can do to help with this, and that is putting in multiple resource spots for each cat. Every cat probably should have its own water and dish for food and its own litter box. This reduces competition. Each cat should get one-on-one time with you, so there's no jealousy. Obviously, if your cat doesn't want that, that's okay, and try to step in if there looks like there's some violent fighting or blocking. That way you can at least help out that cat temporarily while you work on some solutions. So if you have multiple cats and you're wondering if they're getting along, I hope this section of the Science Podcast helped you out. That's PetScience for this week.

Speaker 2:

Hey, everybody, before we get to the interview section, here's a couple ways you can help the Science Podcast out. Number one if you're on any place that rates podcasts, give us a great rating. Call your friends and share it with people who love science and pets, like teachers. Number two think about signing up as a member of the Paw Pack. It allows you to connect with people who love our show and it's a way to keep the show free. Number three check out our merch store. We have the Bunsen Stuffie 2.0. There's still some beaker stuffies left that they're adorable as well Warm, cuddly clothes and adorable drinkware. The link is in the show notes. Now on to the interview. It's time for Ask an Expert on the Science Podcast, and I have Dr Kavya Sharman, the founder and CEO of Phase Capital. Kavya, how are you doing today?

Speaker 3:

I'm doing great, Jason. How are you?

Speaker 2:

I'm very excited to talk to you Before we get into the whole thing. Where are you in the world? Where are you calling into the show from?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, I'm from Nashville, tennessee, today.

Speaker 2:

Oh okay, Live there lots moved around Music. Thing.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely so. I actually grew up in Arkansas and was in India before that, but I've been in Nashville about 11 years now. Okay, I have heard that Nashville is quite the touristy place that you wouldn't think would be cool to go to, but is Honestly, I think a friend of mine was downtown recently and she and her husband made a bet for how many bachelorette parties they would see. I Think her husband said oh 10, and she was like maybe 30. She counted 64 in an hour.

Speaker 2:

Oh, my goodness. Well, that's not something I need to go to Nashville for, but I mean, that's pro, tip everybody from the dock. That's a game you can play I Dock. Could you explain a little bit about your education? We'd love to know a little bit more about your training in science.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, sure, I mean to start at the very beginning. I you know, I, when I was a kid, I carried around a book that was my like favorite toy for some reason, and I think it was a discovery channel book, one of those. Remember, when you were a while ago this was maybe 10 years ago, longer than that, but there was the one with the white rooms and there was maybe a museum with those moving windows and there was a giraffe that like poked its head in oh, yes, I remember that.

Speaker 3:

I think it was discovery channel, but I had a book from that for some reason. So I was a set, you know, five years old. I would carry around that book and so I think I I always was interested, gravitated towards that and Then some. So along those lines that I was seven years old I decided I was gonna be a radiologist.

Speaker 2:

Okay, and that's seven. Seven priorities straight doc. That's incredible.

Speaker 3:

I was a planner, but no, since that was kind of the plan, kind of going into medicine. And then I realized throughout the years, just getting into research, getting behind the bench, pipetting and such that the sense of discovery was far more exciting than operating and that's kind of where I jumped into the sciences. So, like back in high school, I was doing some science projects. I had the chance to go to the Arkansas math school for mathematics, sciences in the arts, and that was truly like a life-changing opportunity, just because I was living in an old residential. It was a residential college, it used to be a former hospital.

Speaker 3:

I was on the psychiatric floor, the former psychiatric floor, and I think I'm pretty sure there was somebody up there with me. But it was a really great time and Because we were so close with, you know, the teachers and the scientists and our you know our friends there, we just got to really immerse ourselves in the sciences and so I really enjoyed that, did a little bit of like scientific projects. Our senior thesis project, for instance, I was working on some chemical and physical properties of silver nanoparticles which, as a high school student, I mean this was unheard of and I was. I was loving every minute of it.

Speaker 1:

Mmm.

Speaker 3:

And so from there I came to school at Vanderbilt University Back in 2012 and that was really my first semester. I decided I really wanted to jump into some sort of research and I just remember in high school my professor actually who's a microbiology professor he said nanotechnology is a future and I was like, okay, sounds good. I took his word for it. So when I came to Vanderbilt I started looking for some research opportunities and I connected with this professor, todd Giorgio, and he was building nanoparticles for drug delivery.

Speaker 2:

Oh cool.

Speaker 3:

Right. And so I just, you know, jumped in, was like, hey, can I shadow some of your students and you know See what what's going on and help. And that became a three and a half year collaboration with him in his lab. Wow, and it was incredible. So we, when I joined the lab, we were doing, um, like delivering SIRNA with nanoparticles to treat breast cancer, and I really enjoyed that work.

Speaker 3:

And then I, you know, decided to major in neuroscience and they said, well, then you have to join a neuroscience lab. And I said, well, I love what I'm doing right now, I love the nanotechnology side. And they said, sorry, you have to join in a neuroscience lab. And so I decided to basically spearhead my own project, where we then took those nanoparticles and, instead of loading them up with SIRNA, we loaded them up with CRISPR. Oh, wow, and and this was CRISPR had just come out. It was wild, and I think this was like I feel like a theme in my story has just been like right place at the right time. And so CRISPR came out and I said, okay, how do we deliver CRISPR with these nanoparticles into glial blastoma cells, which is a terrible, terrible brain cancer exactly, and it was, yeah, so in the faculty that I work with.

Speaker 3:

He was a neurologist and he was studying that in addition to his work at the VA as a neurologist, and so that was the project. So I worked on that for about a year and a half. It was really challenging and we found out CRISPR at the time had a very low efficiency rate in terms of actually affecting the genetic Sequencing of those glial blastomas, but we made a lot of progress and that was a lot of fun for me. And so around, yeah, around that time was when I decided, okay, how do we like, how do I kind of proceed next? And so during that time I also started it as fun, not a fund, a Program to help students like me find research opportunities, because I got really lucky, but a lot of my friends, you know, we're struggling to find those opportunities and so a friend of mine partnered up with me and started that, and that was kind of where the entrepreneurial side of me started and we can talk more about that later if, if you're curious, but Really enjoyed that intersection of like business and science from from that time onwards.

Speaker 3:

And so, yeah, that was kind of the the beginning, and then I ended up leaving Academia, went to work for the informatics department of Vanderbilt for a little while, then jumped into a startup where I was still doing some neuroscience and then around then decided to come back for a PhD because I really wanted to learn how To code. I dabbled a little bit at the startup I was working at and then realized I really wanted a foundation. So my PhD was complete opposite of my undergrad work Complete opposite. Yeah, I was sitting behind.

Speaker 2:

Trajectory, like when, when you were little, with that look, that discovery book is that you know you were, it's a your radiologist Thing didn't pan out. But if you went back and told yourself, hey, this is what I'm gonna be doing, would your younger Kavya like understand what you were talking about? Or they'd be like go away for your future lady.

Speaker 3:

Probably the second one, to be honest, for two reasons, I think. One when I was a child, I was far more certain about my path than I am now. Hmm and also because a lot of the things that I'm working on right now didn't exist back then.

Speaker 2:

Oh, that's true, Like you were on the cutting edge of technology. On the cutting edge of technology and like coding now is crazy, different than decades ago. We too exactly yeah. Well, that's fascinating. Thank you for sharing your educational journey. It gives us a nice little snapshot about what's going on with you. Can I ask you a quick question about some of your research with staff? I Was wondering if you could explain that just a little bit before we get into your coding stuff.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, for sure. So that actually goes hand-in-hand with the coding, just because that's the approach that I took to studying it. But basically, yeah. So the thing with staff infections, you know we Don't understand them well on a three-dimensional scale. So, for instance, when you know somebody gets infected with staff at a hospital or something, it goes through their body, through their bloodstream and typically lands on an organ and begins to develop into this growth that we call an abscess, you and yeah, exactly, and what ends up happening is, you know the. It ends up looking like almost a small community, like a city, if you will. So you've got on the out of the staff.

Speaker 3:

Yeah okay. Yeah, like so, if you think about it, for all of my work was Studying staff and kidneys. But if you think about it you know You've got the staff Infections sitting on top of a kidney or somewhere inside the kidney and on the outer edge. You've got this like the warriors, right they're. They're in fact actively infecting the host tissue and they're fighting off the host immune response. But then at the center of the infection is a totally different landscape, because that war zone doesn't need to be happening at the center.

Speaker 1:

Hmm.

Speaker 3:

And so what we're, what we try to do with our research, was understand what those differences were between the center of the abscess, towards the edges of the abscess, and what types of Activities were happening, whether they were more on the metac, the metabolic side of things, kind of alluding to that war zone, or whether it was more about the staff infecting the kidney versus others, like the host and you know, kind of fighting against the, the staff. And the idea is that, you know, as we continue to develop therapeutics, we want to target more than just the exterior of the infection. We want to get to the center of the infection and truly get at the root of it, and to do that we want to disrupt a lot of those cellular pathways, and to do that we need to understand what those pathways are.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so it's More proactive than reactive. Am I on the right track?

Speaker 3:

I would say so. Yeah, If we can understand exactly how these stuff abscesses are growing and progressing and how they're staying so long within the body, then we can start to develop more therapeutics around that and get towards things like antibiotic resistance, for example.

Speaker 2:

Antibiotic resistance staff is not a great thing.

Speaker 3:

Yes, a friend of mine's daughter was just in the hospital from that and poor thing was going through it.

Speaker 2:

Oh my God, that's awful. I'm sorry to hear that. Well, that was going to be. My thing is like I have a tiny bit of microbiology training in my undergrad, so I have kind of this idea of what staff is. Could you like? Where do you get a staff infection from, just kind of like broad strokes for people that are listening.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so staff on its own. I mean, it's a pretty common bacteria. It's found fairly routinely, but typically what ends up happening in most scenarios is people are in the hospital and they end up having a lot of open wounds or maybe that you know. That's typically where those staff infections enter the body Because they are already some type of antibiotic resistant bacteria. They're stronger and more proliferative. They have a higher tendency to grow into the body. So that's typically where people will pick up those infections. Or if you know people who have open wounds let's say you're hiking or something you skin your knee and just happen to pick up some bacteria that's typically where this would happen.

Speaker 2:

Unlucky your opportunity. It sounds like.

Speaker 3:

Exactly.

Speaker 2:

Okay, Okay Now. So that's your research into staff. This leads us into what you've been doing with multimodal imaging. I hope I'm getting the timeline right.

Speaker 3:

Water.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I cannot even. I don't even know how to lead this question, doc. I don't know what multimodal imaging is. I would be fascinated if you could talk to us about it.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely.

Speaker 2:

I don't know.

Speaker 3:

Honestly, that was me when I got into this. I was like what on earth is multimodal? But honestly, it comes down like there's different types of modes of getting imaging data, and so all multimodal imaging is when we integrate different types of imaging modalities and use one to inform the other, or use multiple of these and overlay them to get to new information, and I can talk more about that.

Speaker 2:

I would love to. I got an idea now, but I think I needed just a little bit more information. To ask a follow-up question.

Speaker 3:

Sounds good. So basically I'll take a step back and say the lab that I joined, dr Richard Caprioli, at Vanderbilt. He pioneered this technology called imaging mass spectrometry. I don't know if you're familiar.

Speaker 1:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, so, and basically that involves, you know, we'll take a section of tissues, say the kidney, take a slice of that freeze it, put it on a glass slide and then hit it with a laser, and what that does is to it picks up a very small portion of the tissue and sends it up through the mass spectrometer, which then gives us an idea for what all of the different molecules in that specific part of the tissue look like.

Speaker 3:

And so what we end up doing is doing gathering those measurements in a grid, like pattern, across the entire tissue. And so now what we have is basically information about the molecular profile from each of those portions of the tissue, which we'll call pixels. Just like a you know camera has takes a picture, you have pixels same kind of concept. And so then, for example, if there's a specific molecule that you're interested in and you know what the mass spectra for that looks like, you can then go in and basically generate an intensity based image and say like, let's say you're looking for glucose, then you would go in and basically get an understanding of using the intensity levels across the entire image, you can see exactly where the glucose is localizing on the tissue.

Speaker 2:

And would that be useful for like cancer, because some cancers use an abnormal amount of glucose? Am I on the right track?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely yeah, it's, yeah, it's incredible, and you can look at anything from glucose to like small molecules, larger molecules. So this, this has been used in drug discovery. If maybe you're interested in seeing you know, when you give a drug to a mouse or a patient or something, where does it go in the body?

Speaker 3:

And how much? Yeah, so that's kind of the main. So that's one of the imaging modalities that we use, and so what I was interested in is okay, so now we have this information about, say, the kidney, but it's, it's unorganized. We know each pixel and we know what's in each pixel, but we don't really have a sense like, oh, this part of the tissue is infected and this part is not infected.

Speaker 3:

But what we can do now is go to another imaging modality, like microscopy, and get information using targeted approaches such as like fluorescently tagged antibodies that would bind to a specific protein that we would be interested in. Now for my work, we were able to use a lot of those targeted approaches to basically label the image and say you know, this is the part that has the area that we're interested in and this is the part that is just background. And then what we can do is use computational methods to segment the images using the microscopy and then project those, like now we have X and Y coordinates basically that are saying this is the area that we're interested in, and then use those X and Y coordinates to then project onto the imaging mass spectrometry images and say, okay, now that we know the areas that we're interested in. How do those molecular profiles differ?

Speaker 1:

Hmm.

Speaker 3:

Does that kind of track so far?

Speaker 2:

It tracks. Yeah, it's like you're using multiple detectives together in a police department to find out what's going on.

Speaker 3:

Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 1:

Hmm.

Speaker 3:

So you have multiple police detectives with multiple skill sets, right? One person is really good at details and the other one's a geography expert.

Speaker 2:

And then you got the blood guy with his strings everywhere, like Dexter.

Speaker 3:

That's right. Normally that was me and pulling out my hairs and doing the computational work. Oh no.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so big picture question with this multimodal stuff. What's the end game of that? Does that make diagnosis faster? Does it make treatment easier? What's the end game of being able to like harness the power of this?

Speaker 3:

All of the above.

Speaker 2:

Oh, sweet Okay.

Speaker 3:

So the cool thing with imaging mass spectrometry is that you get so much information about, like, all of the molecules that are present there right, you get a full profile, and the cool thing with microscopy is that you get a lot of spatial information. The thing with the imaging mass spectrometry, though, is because of the way that the data are gathered, the resolution is slightly low, so it's a fuzzier image, and so now, when you combine those, you can do things like sharpen the fuzzier image using the microscopy you can then start to look at, get down to, like, single cell resolution. You can also do things like, like I mentioned earlier, tracking drugs, right. So if, for example, if we were to treat the staff infection in the kidney and then get those slices and take a look at it, now we can see, okay, where did that drug end up, and was that drug process? And maybe part of the drug was to break up a specific protein. Where is that protein? Where did it end up landing?

Speaker 2:

You could probably find, did it even do its job?

Speaker 3:

Exactly, exactly.

Speaker 2:

Okay, can I? All right, just, I have a million follow up questions now because I've got the idea of it. When you say an image, is it like an image that you, like, you see with your eyes? Are we talking like code and charts and data, like image that somebody with training like yourself would need to read?

Speaker 3:

It is a true image.

Speaker 2:

What no yes?

Speaker 3:

Exactly.

Speaker 2:

Could you, could you send me as long as it's not like the, you know, the, the men in black aren't going to come after me could you send me an image of what you're talking about, cause that would be wild. I would love we could use that in promotion. In promotion of the episode.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, absolutely, I can send you that right along, thank you.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, okay, so that's bananas, because, um you, I think you you. One more follow up question. You need somebody like you or an expert that knows how to run the thing and then, once that image is made, is that easier for like a less, like a more generalist medical person to kind of figure out what's going on? Am I on the right track or not? So much.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely so. That's actually kind of the bulk. The bulk of my, of the second half of my thesis really was how do we make this easier to visualize and and make it easier for professionals to interact with the data? And so one of the things that I developed was this approach called contour mapping. So you've seen, I'm sure, like the, the topographical lines, when you're looking at a map of, like a volcano for instance, right, the closer the lines are, the more steep the volcano would be, or mountains or whatever you want to call. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3:

So, similarly, we wanted to use that approach and use it to map the molecular um. Different like what am I looking for? Molecular distributions across the tissue. And the idea then is to now take the imaging mass spectrometry image, which is normally a heat map and image um, and I'll share that with you and then convert that to these topographical maps and then overlay that onto the microscopy images. So now, if you're a pathologist or a physician or somebody out in the real world, you can overlay both of those pieces of information and now understand a little bit more about the molecular differences that are happening on this specific tissue.

Speaker 2:

Oh my God. So you got the. You got the microscopy thing, which is like a true image. You've got the peaks and valleys, which gives you an idea of abundances. And then you have the heat map for like the area. Right, Am I on the right track? And all of that kind of gets smushed together into a super image.

Speaker 3:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

Oh my God, that's crazy.

Speaker 3:

Isn't that wild.

Speaker 3:

You're, you're like a sorcerer, you're like a wizard, and it felt like it some days because we're zooming in and out of the kidney and we're saying, okay, like these are all the molecules that we're looking at, this is what's changing, and the cool thing was you could actually see the, the shape of the infection and start to see okay, this is, the infection is progressing more rapidly on this side, on the right side, for example, when it is on the left side. Why is that? Maybe there's access to more blood vessels, there's more oxygen in that space. I mean, now we're starting to ask these questions that normally we wouldn't have been able to, to get a hold of.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it'd be like treat it with antibiotics and hope for the best.

Speaker 3:

Exactly.

Speaker 2:

Good, my mind is blown into a million pieces and that's like a question coming up that I have to ask you. Okay, very cool, doc. Thank you for sharing that. Now before we move. Before we move on, I thought I would touch base with you About your new venture. I introduced you as the founder and CEO of phase Capital. What the hell is that? Can you tell us about that?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely so. It's interesting because you are one of the first people that I'm telling about this and We've scooped everybody.

Speaker 2:

You really did.

Speaker 3:

Could I get a voice recording at that's like whenever I share it? That'd be great. No, I'm kidding. So basically, the idea like where I've been sitting for the last you know five ish years has been at this intersection of business and science, and what I've been really fascinated with is, you know, scientists are so good at what they do, they're the experts in their fields. Typically, they're the first ones in the world to understand something new or come up with a new finding, and On the other side of the coin, you have folks in business that know how to scale and build businesses and what I've been trying to do is bring those worlds together and Build those bridges.

Speaker 3:

And you know, basically, if we can bring together the experts from both fields, we can start making really exciting progress within the this. You know therapeutics and diagnostics, biotech, all of that and it's interesting because the field is also responding in a similar way. If you look at a lot of the companies that have emerged recently in the life sciences spaces, a lot of the founders are the scientists themselves.

Speaker 2:

They just had the right skill set, like yourself, to put the two together.

Speaker 3:

Exactly, and it's also becoming more and more accessible. With, you know, the software developments, the AI, all the things that we're seeing, it's becoming more and more frictionless to Build out these companies and really make some good progress. So that's kind of where I've been sitting for a while now. So, through phase capital, my goal is to help biotech companies, one phase at a time, haha, I.

Speaker 2:

Get it, yes, sorry, oh no, it was on the wrong slide. I have missed my chance. I miss my chance. Keep going.

Speaker 3:

That's too funny. Um, yeah, so that that's kind of the goal of phase capital. So we're starting off with some, you know, but basic consulting, so helping companies in the biotech space that might need anything from Basics like how how do you convey your extreme science to investors? That's one of the biggest challenges that I've seen and it's difficult, right. I mean, on the investor side of things, they want to see things like traction metrics, what is your, what are the multiples that you would be bringing in, and on the scientist side of things, it's typically this is the next big thing. This is exactly the problem that we're solving, and so bringing those two worlds together and bridging that gap. Those are the kinds of things that phase capital will be addressing and Also just trying.

Speaker 3:

My biggest thing has always been Like community. So the other thing through phase capital that I really want to do is just bring people together, and I think there's a lot of power in the emergent properties of complex systems and Just you know you put really cool people together in a room, exciting things happen you are you?

Speaker 2:

if you're on the cover of Forbes in like six years, I wouldn't be surprised. Oh my gosh, it's freaking cool.

Speaker 2:

Because everything you're saying makes total sense from our little, our little world of the Bunsen and beaker stuff right because I, before I started this podcast, and before Bunsen and beaker was a thing I was a good, your friendly neighborhood science teacher, right? Oh, I love teaching science. I had no idea about business, I was awful at it and there's a big learning curve. It's not something I'm great at so I can imagine. On something way more important, to like multimodal imaging and bringing scientists that they're like Eureka, how did how do I get this to the market? Kind of thing. Some scientists just don't have that skill set. They need help.

Speaker 3:

That's so accurate and the cool thing is they want this. A lot of my friends, the people that I've ended up working with. This is something they're interested in. So, as a kind of before phase capital happened, there was a there is a biotech investment fund that I started with two other students while getting my PhD, called S phase bio fund, and the whole goal of that was to educate biomedical scientists in, educate in evaluating biotech companies and understanding how to make those investments, and so we'd meet once a month and we would have a team of four to five students come in, identify a specific area Maybe it was vaccines, cartes, some sort of therapeutic and then understand what the companies are in those space and then further understand what companies are Undervalued by Wall Street, because Wall Street just doesn't understand the science maybe and those companies are price lower than they should be.

Speaker 3:

And just in doing that exercise I mean I was thinking we would have maybe five or ten people our first year we had 22 partners that bought into the fund and it was just incredible I mean the conversations that we had, this, this notion of you know Going from one field to another, like the way that you bridge that gap between science teacher to Incredible businessman, I mean that's, that's the kind of jump fry, but but like it you know, we sell t-shirts and we have stuffies.

Speaker 3:

Your business man, absolutely. So, yeah, that's, that's kind of my, my bread and butter and kind of where my fire comes from sweet Ha, I am just fascinated by this conversation, doc.

Speaker 2:

Thank you for sharing a little bit about this venture. We have some standard questions on the science podcast that we asked our guests in there. They're kind of more fun and furry and friendly ones. The first one is could you share a pet story from your life with us?

Speaker 3:

Oh, yes, so I have. All my family has a Doberman. Sweetest girl in the world.

Speaker 3:

Oh cool and Love her and we had a cat and the cat ruled the house and there was no. It was never more evident. It's there's this one memory that I have that is in my brain. It was, you know, we were there's a two-story house, the cat and dog were outside having a great time and the cat was always. His name Was tiger, appropriate? Yeah, he would love chasing Gypsy, our dog all the time, and I mean I need you to imagine like he's a very small cat. She's a 90 pound Doberman.

Speaker 3:

Okay and there was this moment where I don't remember what was happening. I think we were giving her too much attention and he got jealous. He chased her around the house, up the Up the stairs, from downstairs up all the way inside, and she ran straight to her little bed and Sat down. And he just stood there by the front door sitting down, just looking at her.

Speaker 3:

And it was just the most incredible Visual that I've ever seen and like that was just my favorite interaction of the two of them. They loved each other, they still played in everything, but he just always had this reminder you know, I this is my house.

Speaker 2:

I'm the boss, you just live here, kind of thing exactly yeah. What was what happened when tiger caught Gypsy? Was there like was there fur flying or Gypsy just didn't you know, want to get caught?

Speaker 3:

No, she just didn't. She never wanted to get caught. We also had chickens at the time and the chickens would chase her and you know it was like it was not unusual To look out the window and you see Gypsy running in the front like four chickens chasing after her like Benny Hill, you know. She yeah, she was just as sweet as she is the sweetest girl, and still very much a chicken, more so than the ones we raised.

Speaker 2:

Well, that's a sweet story. Thanks for sharing that with us, doc. So this is, this is I, was I, you know, and listening to you. We're a little start again in listening to you. This question is when we ask our guests and depending on how it goes, I'm like, oh my Does, does our guests have anything left in the tank to blow our minds? And this question is the super fact, that something that you know, that when you share with people, kind of blows their mind a bit. I was wondering if you, you have a super fact for us that is left over from your amazing chat so far.

Speaker 3:

Let me do my best. My favorite super fact is that the human brain has more connections than that. There are stars in the universe and I didn't believe it until I saw the math and, basically, each neuron. You know we have over a hundred billion neurons, similar to the number of stars in the in this Milky Way alone not the whole galaxy or not the whole universe and Each of those neurons on average has about seven thousand connections. So when you do the math, the number of connections in the brain is close to seven hundred trillion. That's how much like your, your brain is like connecting and speaking and there's electrical firing happening in there. The complexity is just mind-blowing.

Speaker 2:

I don't know how anybody understands the brain. It's like so wild. You know there's this field. We're talking because our brains are doing crap in the background, like it's. So if you think about it for too long you're going to go crazy.

Speaker 3:

Isn't that wild.

Speaker 2:

And there's a field called connectomics.

Speaker 3:

I'm sorry.

Speaker 2:

I don't like thinking about it. It gives me goosebumps.

Speaker 3:

It is wild. Yeah, there's a field called connectomics that I started to look into and they're trying to map the connections based on, like the electrical firings. And you start to look at some of those images and it's incredible Like how are we, how are we able to walk around with so much happening constantly? I have no idea.

Speaker 2:

Hmm, Well, I have met some people and you know seen what people tweet. I'd imagine there's not as much going on there as other people, so Touche. Well, thanks for the super fact, doc. We end our conversation getting to know a little bit more about our guests with hobbies or causes that they're passionate about and, doc, you wanted to talk a little bit about bringing voices that maybe aren't the traditional voices in coding or in tech to the forefront. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 3:

Absolutely so somehow, I don't know how, but I've gotten in, I keep getting into these rooms including like in my lab, whom I love, and within the venture capital entrepreneurial space and I walk into these rooms and I am the only one in the room that looks like me. And my, my biggest thing is you know, how do we bring more people like that to the room? Cause sometimes I'll walk in and I feel intimidated. I mean, all eyes are on me and I think I don't really know what I'm talking about. And the biggest thing that I've noticed is that it when I go out, let's say, I invite other people who look like me, I find out the woman in science or another person of color, and bring them in and we start having a conversation. A lot of the seemingly, you know, like I don't really know what I'm saying, the imposter syndrome, those kinds of things, those melt away very quickly and I've been trying to figure out why. What is it? What's the issue? What's the friction there? And I think a lot of it is just like the way that we historically communicate in a lot of these, you know, meetings, communities, et cetera, is very uniform, and so a lot of people, you know, feel excluded or feel like I don't really know what I'm talking about. That imposter syndrome kind of kicks in when, in reality, we just need to start changing a little bit more of the language and making that more accessible.

Speaker 3:

And I'll give you a very, very brief example. But I was speaking with a postdoc. She was somewhere at one of the big universities, ivy leagues, and she was saying you know, I really want to get into data science. How do I do that? I want to break into data science. Do I do a Coursera or something? And I was like okay, like yeah, let's talk about that. Sorry to ask you questions. And before you know it, she was telling me that. Oh yeah, by the way, I ran like an RNA seek analysis in R the other day. Or I built out this small you know small script to do this analysis on genomic screen. That I ran and I said you're doing the data analysis right now. You are a data scientist.

Speaker 2:

You're already. You're already the expert.

Speaker 3:

Exactly and, as I said, that, her shoulders dropped, her confidence visibly increased and she was like you're right. And that moment is something that I want to replicate again and again, and again, because I think people people aren't aware that they already have the skills they need. It's just either buried or misnamed or overlooked.

Speaker 2:

Or they're, or they're intimidated, Like they're. They take that first step and it's a bad experience because of who they are and what they look like compared to everybody else in the room.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 3:

Yes, and nothing is more terrifying than you do. You open your mouth and you try to say something, and somebody is like no, that's not how we say it. Or oh, that's weird. And instantly your confidence is shattered, right, right.

Speaker 2:

And I'm sure you inspire others around you equally. So thank you for doing that work for people that maybe just need the a little bit of extra. The little bit of extra, oomph.

Speaker 3:

I appreciate that. Thank you.

Speaker 2:

Well, we're. We're at the end of our chat doc, and the first thing is can people find you on social media? Do you have a place people could go to follow you and see what you're up to?

Speaker 3:

Absolutely so. I'm on Twitter. In LinkedIn I have a website, so if anybody wants to reach out and just say hello, drop me a line. That's usually the easiest way to find me. Okay, I can share all that with you.

Speaker 2:

All right, perfect, and, and as we always do, everybody knows who listens to the show. The show notes has links to a cup at least two of the guests stuff, so I'll make sure there's a link to Twitter and your website. I'm sure your website, if I remember, has all of your other links embedded somewhere in it, maybe no?

Speaker 3:

Yes, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

Okay, okay, perfect, perfect. Well, kavya from me to you, thank you for being a guest on the Science Podcast today. This was wow, I am. My brain is melted, and that's ironic because we've been talking about the brain, I so appreciate it.

Speaker 3:

Thank you, Jason. I really appreciate it. It's been an honor to be on here with you.

Speaker 2:

We are proud to have Bark and Beyond Supplycom now as an official sponsor of the Science Podcast. Bark and Beyond Supplycom is a small, family owned company that started off making joint supplements for dogs, but now they sell toys and treats and a whole bunch of other goodies. Skip the big box stores and check out the amazing deals and awesome stuff at Bark and Beyond Supplycom. You'll see a link in our show notes and use the coupon code Bunsen B-U-N-S-E-N for 10% off at BarkandBeyondSupplycom. Click the link. Skip the big box stores. How about the little guy?

Speaker 2:

That's it for this week's show. No family section, because Adam and Chris are still touring the East Coast and making me jealous with all of their photos. Well, I hold down the fort with the dogs and the cat at home. All right. Thanks for listening today and special thanks to our guest, dr Kavya Sharman. What amazing conversation that was. We'd also like to thank the top members of our community, the Pop-Hack. Without their support, we wouldn't be able to do what we do. One of the perks of being a top member is you get your name shouted out on the podcast. Take it away, chris.

Speaker 1:

Alicia Stanley the Heard, wendy Diane Mason and Luke Linda, sherry, tracy Halberg, carol MacDonald, Helen Chin, elizabeth Bougiois, peggy McKeel, mary LaMagna-Reiter, holly Birch, sandy Brimer, brenda Clark, andrew Lynn, mary Ann McNally, catherine G, jordan, tracy Domingu, diane Allen, julie Smith, terry Adam Shelly Smiths, jennifer Smathers, laura Stephenson, tracy Linebaugh, courtney Proven Fun, lisa Breanne Haas, bianca Hyde, debbie Anderson, anne Eucida, donna Craig, amy C, susan Wagner, kathy Zerker, liz Button and Ben Rathart.

Speaker 2:

For science, empathy and cuteness.