Taste, Tumors, T-cells, and Tech: A Night of Bold Discoveries

You probably know that babies move in the womb, but did you know that this movement is essential for their skeletal development?! If babies experience fetal akinesia, meaning they don’t move in the womb, they can be born with impaired bone growth, multiple joint contractures, and congenital scoliosis. We can treat fetal akinesia patients using surgeries, bracing, and physical therapy; however, these strategies cannot fully reverse the deleterious skeletal deformities. This talk will explore how maternal exercise can be used to proactively prevent fetuses from becoming fetal akinesia patients.

Head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNSCCs) are cancers with low survival rates. New therapeutics are crucial to improving outcomes. The oral cavity’s main function is taste perception. Bitter taste receptors, which detect flavors like coffee and kale, share a structure with GPCRs involved in cancer progression. Activating these receptors with bitter compounds kills HNSCC cells via calcium signaling. Excitingly, some bitter agonists, like lidocaine and diphenhydramine, are FDA-approved, showing high translational potential.

Cancer treatments have come a long way, significantly improving patient outcomes. One breakthrough is CAR T-cell therapy, a highly personalized treatment in which doctors use the patient's own immune cells, genetically modify them in the lab to redirect them to target the patient’s tumor. While effective, this therapy is complex and expensive. Looking ahead, new technologies like mRNA lipid nanoparticles, used for the COVID vaccines, could make CAR T-cell therapy more affordable and accessible to everyone. This innovation could revolutionize cancer care, bringing hope to more people worldwide.

Over the past half-decade, artificial intelligence, and specifically large language models have burst into our lives. These technologies can help us write faster, code better, drive safer, and detect diseases with greater sensitivity. However, they also lie, steal intellectual property, spread misinformation at a vast scale, produce nonconsensual images, and plot to remove safeties placed on them. This talk will put these rapidly evolving technologies into context and provide suggestions for their safe and effective use.