Kevin McKernan
speaker
709 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 5 Dec
Kevin McKernan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Many of the people in the field will be like, yeah, it's too pure. Who came up with this drug? Epidiolex is from GW Pharma. So they've since been bought by a Japanese company. I'm forgetting its name. But it took them a long time to get that through.
And, of course, the expense of running all the clinical trials and building that business out means when their final product comes out, it's usually five times the price of a CBD oil you can get at a dispensary. Right. So they end up being faced with getting a drug through an expensive process only to turn around and find out there's already a generic out there that's going to mimic it.
And the only thing they can do is beg the FDA to go and threaten these dispensaries by saying you can't have any medical language or treatment guidelines on your products. That's why you won't see things written on cannabis products saying this is good for headaches or what have you. You're not supposed to list any kind of – um, medical quality, if you will, uh, on, on the label of these products.
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. So, um, Where do we start? My background is a BS in biology from Emory University, and I learned how to do radioactive sequencing when I was there, which I thought was a trick I'd never use again in my life.
And it turned out shortly after I did maybe a nine or 10-month stint at a company doing pharmaceutical marketing, I decided I want to get back to the bench and luckily got into the Human Genome Project up in Cambridge at MIT. my resume ended up on Trevor Hawkins desk from two different people at once. Um, for some bizarre reason, he hired me.
And, um, the guys who hired me a year later who were running that group were also MIT grads. And there's this thing in MIT that if you're still at MIT a year, if you graduate, you're kind of still in your mom's basement. Uh, and so they decided they had to leave and they left the reins to me. And I started running the research and development program there.
Um, as that scaled up and raced against Craig mentor and, uh, So, we built a really vast DNA sequencing pipeline at the Whitehead, and through the course of that, we discovered various new ways of isolating DNA, patented those, and as the Human Genome Project came to close, a bunch of pharmaceutical companies started asking, like, how do we license this stuff?
We need to import this stuff into our facilities. We spun out a company in called. And what was the purpose of the human genome?
All right. So, yeah, I'll back up on that. So we wanted the whole. It was really this is an important history, actually, that you cover. I'm glad you asked. So the goal back then in the dream and how it was sold to the American public.
it was really um ironically through francis collins who we'll probably get to later and the pitch there was we want to go to personalized medicine we want to sequence everyone's genome figure out their differences and and drug them accordingly instead of this let's build one drug test it on 10 000 people and and send it across the entire globe and hope it works right the idea was no we're going to get more precision about this we're going to actually when you have cancer sequence your genome and then sequence the the genome of your tumor which will be different in most cases
and see if we can find druggable differences that will kill the tumor and not kill the patient. And some of those started to occur in that timeframe. There was one drug called Orissa that was specific to, it failed as a drug until they discovered, I think it was Dan Haber up at MGH that did this and Matthew Myerson, Dana Farber.
They discovered that if you took that drug and actually looked at people's EGFR receptors, there was like a 15 base pair insert, a deletion inside that gene that if you had it, the drug worked. And if you didn't, it did not work. So the drug failed on population-wide. But if you isolated the people and sequenced them first, you had remarkable success rates with the drug.
So it rescued a drug just by knowing the genetics of the population to put it on.
So that was really the whole goal of the Human Genome Project was to do that a thousand times over and do that in every disease is can we target these drugs so that we're not sloppily – you know, blanketing the population with drugs that we test on small populations and they blow up on us when we hit, you know, different, different, um, haplogroups or different populations out there.
If you want to compare it to cannabis plants were completely inbred and should be walking backwards. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, maybe there's a million variants maybe between, uh, any given individual, uh, So it's like a variant for every thousand or something? Yeah, it's a fair number.
Now that we have better sequencers, some would argue maybe it's more like one in every 500 if you include some of these insertions and deletions and longer structural variations that we couldn't see very well back then with the technology we had that initially did the Human Genome Project.
But 20 years on, as we are now, we now have completely different technology to survey genomes that are remarkable compared to what we had before. And we can see much more variation now than we could then. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah, we're not at the level of cannabis plants, all right? Right, right. Cannabis plants are their own beast.
The polymorphism rate is – that's a good question.
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