Podcasts

Tara Haella, independent science/health journalist, joins the show to discuss her reporting on vaccine hesitancy long before the pandemic (the “trenches of the mommy wars”), how this previous work aligns with today’s COVID vaccine hesitancy, and how cognitive bias plays a substantial part in our individual feelings toward vaccines.

Chris Arnade, long-time writer and author of “Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America,” joins the show to discuss his recent experience walking America and how his views on politics and the COVID-19 response have changed as a result.

Chadi hosts a truly inspiring pediatrician, author, philanthropist, humanitarian, and self-described “healer”: Noha Baz.

Chadi welcomes two experienced medical writers, Marielle Fares and Tom Lang, to explain what “medical writing” entails and who the intended audience is, the difference between regulatory and medical education writing as well as patient education and scientific publications, how medical projects come in and what types of instructions and materials medical writers are given, the ins-and-outs of the revision process, what it means when medical writers are listed in the acknowledgments of published clinical research, and many more points of interest.

Naveen Pemmaraju, MD, department of leukemia, University of Texas MD Anderson Center, joins the show to discuss how researchers approach the investigation of rare diseases.

Chadi welcomes back Bishal Gyawali, MD, PhD, Queen’s University Cancer Research Institute (Canada), to the show to discuss the history of the FDA’s accelerated approval regulatory pathway, how it is sometimes abused, how low-level surrogate endpoints are being used for approval, what happens (and what should happen) when confirmatory trials do not confirm clinical benefit for drugs approved through this pathway, how conflicts of interest may impact some regulatory decisions, and so much more.

Continuing his ASH Annual Meeting coverage, Chadi invites Matt Maurer, MS, principal biostatistician, Mayo Clinic, and Alan Skarbnik, MD, director of the lymphoma and CLL program, Novant Health (Charlotte, NC), to review the three prominent CAR-T studies in relapsed/refractory DLBCL presented at the meeting.

Chadi invites a trio of lymphoma experts to weigh the importance of the POLARIX trial – which was presented at the ASH Annual Meeting and looked at frontline therapy for patients with DLBCL. Matthew Matasar, MD, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, co-authored publication of the POLARIX study “Polatuzumab Vedotin in Previously Untreated Diffuse Large B-Cell Lymphoma” in the New England Journal of Medicine and defends its results with guests Liz Brem, MD, UC Irvine, and Daniel Landsburg, MD, University of Pennsylvania.