Dr. Tim Cernak

How can I get a molecule across the blood-brain barrier?

You enter sea turtles and it's like, oh, we got to worry about brain toxicity.

Yes, it definitely is.

Yes, it is.

But I love the way that it flexes our thinking.

Like the cancer that we're looking at in sea turtles, we've noticed a couple pathways that are upregulated in it that are prevalent in human cancers, but no one's really looked at them.

And so, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the biology is alien in some ways.

Like I talked about sea turtles don't have a blood brain barrier, but it still is the principles that we learn from this research directly apply to human medicine.

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a giving back component here, right?

I mean, also, like, you know, some of the poisonous frogs that we've been looking at are the progenitors of our latest pain medicines that, you know, there's a new non-opioid pain medicine program.

that's just come out that we really couldn't understand how that new medicine would have worked without some understanding of the poisons that were coming from frogs.

I mean, it's just so clear the natural world has given us so many of our medicines.

How could we look away from nature when she's, you know, not feeling so well today?

It's been my great pleasure, Flora.

Thank you.