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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
So if you want to look for chromosomal abnormalities in a child, amniocentesis, they probably don't even do it anymore. I mean amniocentesis, they used to literally have to put a needle into the mother's womb to look and get cells and look for chromosomes and see if there's any trisomies, right? Like trisomy 21 is predictive of – Down syndrome.
Well, mothers who are over 40, they often ask for an amnio because there's a higher risk of this. Way higher risk, right? And some people have it perhaps a little bit more in their family and they want to do amnios. One in 400 is crazy, but it's all we had back then.
But since then, they've been able to leverage this fact that the sequencers are so cheap that you can sequence the entire mother's genome right out of her bloodstream and 3% of that DNA is going to be the child's. And you can figure out whether this trisomy 21 or any other chromosomal abnormalities just from doing what's called non-invasive prenatal testing, NIPT.
A bunch of companies sprouted out and are very successful doing that now. And it's all based on being able to sequence these fragments of DNA that are circulating.
Oh, yeah. You can easily – I mean there's probably – I'm sure you can probably do that with ultrasound as well at a certain stage. But if you had to get in there before ultrasound could see it, you would see it in the DNA.
And I mean the fascinating thing about that whole field is that not only does DNA circulate from the child but so do erythrocytes and other particular cells that stay in the mother. Like mothers have some number of cells in their brain from the child's that they've born before that stick around that you can detect decades later.
So it's a, yeah, it's a fascinating field of like, you know, what does that mean? And what does that, what does that bring to the mother? And you know, the, the, the bonding that could be going on there and what's what's the communication and meaning or what's the purpose of that, I suppose, biologically. Yeah.
Yeah. So, so this is to fill in a bit of a small gap there in my history is after what was exciting about sequencing all of these tumors is that I was hopeful that we see personalized medicine, but of course the FDA has, has a pretty, you saw what they did to 23andMe, right? 23andMe at one point had great genetic tools that people could learn about their genomes online.
And, and the FDA came in and said, no more of that. You can really, I wasn't aware of this. Yeah, a long time ago, they were accusing them of practicing medicine. And so now they could only report – 23andMe could only report on like a couple medical conditions when before their chips used to be able to tell you all types of information from Alzheimer's to breast cancer risk to –
And the FDA significantly narrowed how much medical content that they could have in the interpretation of that data. So I got a little frustrated with that. And I was kind of in the rat race of startup building these sequencers and decided I was going to get out and just start doing something completely different, sequencing cannabis genomes.
And I got put onto that path because these cancer centers were doing a great job of differentiating tumors from their patient, but they were still picking from gross drugs like cisplatin and all these toxic drugs. They're trying to thread the needle of killing the tumor in the patient better with genetics, but they'd still pull out poison to target.
And that's when I've learned from many cancer patients and some friends of mine that were going through these struggles as well that these cannabinoids are published to be antineoplastic. What the hell? Why? What does that mean? They shrink tumors.
So you might be familiar with them helping with people's nausea and their appetite and sleep, which are all really important aspects of dealing with cancer. But very few people know the fact that there's reams of literature on them being antineoplastic and shrinking various tumors.
No, it's very important how you ingest it. Like most of these people are taking oils because they last longer in the body when you take them orally. Okay. But there are times – There's droplets on your tongue. Yeah. There are cases where you do have to vaporize it or smoke it because you can't keep food down. So putting an oil – An oral drug in comes right back up. So there's a place for both.
But that kind of put me into this a bit more of a, I'd say, anti-authoritarian scientist is that I was a little tired. Decentralized. Yes. This is when I started learning about Bitcoin. This is when I started learning about how the medical system is too centralized. They're not allowing us to use these new technologies to segregate the population into ways that are more intelligently treated.
Everything kind of gets centralized to the FDA. And even the concept of sequencing these tumors and drugging them independently was very controversial with the FDA. They wanted to go through 510K. So how would you go about doing this today if you wanted to do it? There are companies now that have kind of gone through the process with the FDA now that it's been decades.
But that's the problem is it took decades. So like, you know, Foundation Medicine, I think has they probably have a 510K by now. or using at least more FDA-approved tests, if you will. But they can sequence your tumors and give you a profile. I've used this with my father, actually. We profiled him at Foundation Medicine and at Johns Hopkins. to track his, you know, the progress of his tumor.
But I went down a rabbit hole there again. But just how did this get to the vaccine is that that put me into the cannabis space. And I've been since sequencing cannabis genomes to try to inputting their genomes public so that we can get all these genomes out of the patent tickets that exist on the Human Genome Project.
The Human Genome Project ended up with like over 4,000 patents on it for various genes. So like 20% of the genes in the human genome ended up being patented. And that made it so that people like Foundation Medicine had a really hard time sequencing kids' genomes to deploy these tools because it was a patent ticket trying to go through and sequence these things.
Well, what we did, knowing the experience we had on the Human Genome Project, and I'd spent a part of my career running a clinical diagnostic lab sequencing epilepsy kids and mitochondrial disease patients and autism kids as well. And we ran into the same problems.
Showing 321–340 of 709 · page 17 of 36
← Previous
Next →